But Lady Rainsard, a registered nurse in plastic surgery at Kaiser’s San Francisco campus, said that’s exactly what the health care system is doing.
“Medical providers, not politicians, know what’s best for our patients,” she said in a statement from California Nurses Association, a union representing 25,000 Kaiser nurses. “Right now, we deem it a much greater risk to cave to this kind of government overreach than it is to provide this care to our patients, no matter their age.”
Kaiser medical centers will continue to offer non-surgical care for minors and all gender-affirming care for trans adults.
According to State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, refusing to offer these procedures for young people is a step towards Trump’s goal to eliminate all trans health care.
“It’s important for us not to just cave in to Donald Trump’s bullying,” he told KQED on Wednesday. “It’s hard and it’s scary, but this is how fascists succeed — when institutions start backing down.”
Wiener said the next step for the state’s politicians will be to put pressure on Bonta’s office to enforce California law, which bars hospitals from refusing to provide health care to trans people.
“I don’t want the state to have to fight with Kaiser or with Stanford or with any of our great health systems, but we have to enforce the law,” he said. “California should be a safe place for trans people and LGBTQ people generally, and this is not what should be happening.”
Amy Whelan, a senior staff attorney with the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, said the organization is in close contact with families of patients affected by the Stanford and Los Angeles Children’s Hospital policy changes and working on the issue.
“There are very few patients under 19 who receive surgery, but for those who do, this is very essential health care,” she said.
A recent study from researchers at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health found little to no utilization of gender-affirming surgeries by transgender and gender diverse minors in the U.S., with a rate of two in 100,000 15- to 17-year-olds undergoing gender-affirming breast reduction surgeries in 2019. The study found that 0.1 in 100,000 13- and 14-year-olds received the procedure, and no trans children under 12 did.
Cisgender minors, on the other hand, received surgical gender-affirming care at “substantially” higher rates.
Advocates plan to rally outside Kaiser’s Medical Center at 2425 Geary Blvd. on Friday at 4 p.m.
KQED’s Natalia Navarro contributed to this report.
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