In phone call after call, doctors and nurses from NYU Langone Health delivered the news to the parents: The hospital was no longer providing gender-related care to transgender adolescents. That meant no more prescriptions for hormones or for puberty blockers. Their children needed to find new doctors.<\/p>\n
On the other end of the line, the parents listened in shock, even though they had figured that this day would eventually come. Still, they felt stunned that one of the city\u2019s leading medical institutions had decided to abruptly stop their children\u2019s treatment<\/a>, under pressure from the federal government. In some cases, their children had been patients there for years, ever since they were 10 or 11.<\/p>\n It was only after the phone calls ended that a couple of parents said that they realized they had forgotten to ask an obvious question: What about the device that had been placed in their child\u2019s arm?<\/p>\n The small rod-shaped implant emits puberty-blocking medicine. It was good for about a year. Eventually, it would need to come out, which would require a minor surgical procedure. Who would do that? They would cross that bridge when they got there, two parents recounted in interviews on Wednesday.<\/p>\n The parents said that other concerns about their child\u2019s health were more pressing: Would they be able to find a new doctor for their children? Would that new doctor eventually, like NYU Langone, fold under pressure and stop providing gender related care to adolescents?<\/p>\n But the issue of what to do about the device in their child’s arm underscored how suddenly their relationship with the hospital was being severed.<\/p>\n The call did not come as a complete surprise<\/a>. For more than a year, President Trump has made it clear that he wanted to end gender-related treatments for adolescents who say their gender identity does not align with their sex at birth. Mr. Trump had threatened hospitals that provide such treatments \u2014 including puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgeries \u2014 with a loss of federal funding and had deployed federal agencies to investigate<\/a> pediatric transgender medicine.<\/p>\n NYU Langone is one of more than 20 hospitals and clinics nationwide to receive subpoenas from federal agencies as part of those investigations. In December, the Department of Health and Human Services proposed rules<\/a> that would prevent any federal funding from going to hospitals that provide gender treatments to adolescents \u2014 though such rules are not yet in effect.<\/p>\n Given all this, some parents \u2014 but not all \u2014 had been trying to line up other doctors as a backup, according to interviews on Wednesday with parents of four adolescent transgender patients at NYU Langone. All spoke on the condition of anonymity to shield their child\u2019s privacy.<\/p>\n For years, NYU Langone and some other major hospitals in New York and across the country developed significant programs for transgender youth and promoted them on their websites. Some hospitals are now shutting down those programs. The University of Michigan Health<\/a> and Children\u2019s Hospital Los Angeles<\/a> are among the many health care institutions that have closed clinics for transgender youth or stopped providing puberty blockers and hormone therapies to minors.<\/p>\n Updated\u00a0<\/p>\n Feb. 20, 2026, 7:04 p.m. ET<\/p>\n The call that came Tuesday was both shocking and not shocking at all, said one mother who lives in Queens and who said that her teenage daughter was receiving treatment at NYU Langone. By chance, she said, her daughter had on Monday gone in for a procedure: to receive an implant of the puberty-blocking medicine in her arm. When the mother received a call from NYU Langone on Tuesday, she assumed it was her daughter\u2019s medical team checking up on her \u2014 not dropping her.<\/p>\n The mother had already lined up a doctor outside NYU Langone to continue her daughter\u2019s treatment. That new doctor was Plan B. The family also had a Plan C, she said: move out of the country.<\/p>\n One mother said that her daughter, now 14, had been receiving care at NYU Langone for four years, beginning with counseling and later including puberty blockers and hormone treatment. She said that she was disappointed in NYU Langone for, in her view, capitulating. She noted that the proposed federal rule regarding funding had yet to be implemented. She said that it felt like NYU Langone was \u201cobeying in advance.\u201d<\/p>\n A spokesman for NYU Langone, Steve Ritea, declined to comment beyond the statement he released on Tuesday, which cited \u201cthe current regulatory environment\u201d as among the reasons the hospital had decided to eliminate its program for gender-related care for youth.<\/p>\n \u201cGiven the recent departure of our medical director, coupled with the current regulatory environment, we made the difficult decision to discontinue our Transgender Youth Health Program,\u201d the hospital said. \u201cWe are committed to helping patients in our care manage this change.\u201d<\/p>\n The hospital said that patients could continue to receive mental health care at NYU Langone, as before.<\/p>\n On Wednesday, the parents said that the hospital had sent them a list of endocrinologists and other doctors they should try calling for appointments.<\/p>\n The Trump administration\u2019s efforts to end gender-related treatments for adolescents have largely \u2014 but not entirely \u2014 focused on hospitals and clinics that receive federal funding. In interviews, health care administrators and doctors who treat transgender adolescents have said that they expect many patients to end up continuing treatment with doctors in private practices that are unaffiliated with major hospitals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In phone call after call, doctors and nurses from NYU Langone Health delivered the news to the parents:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":778199,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4316],"tags":[2420,8522,20886,89268,105,89265,4348,99600,2207,8501,226999,227000,18745,1757,16,15,64916],"class_list":["post-778198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-parenting","tag-discrimination","tag-donald-j","tag-federal-aid-us","tag-health","tag-health-and-human-services-department","tag-healthcare","tag-hormones","tag-hospitals","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-university-langone-health","tag-teenagers-and-adolescence","tag-transgender","tag-trump","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-united-states-politics-and-government"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116105737954238610","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=778198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778198\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/778199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=778198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=778198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=778198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}