Washington:
The president of the United States, Donald Trump, signed an executive order on Tuesday to restrict gender transition procedures for people under 19, in his last movement aimed at transgender people since he returned to office.
The order comes the week after Trump said in his inauguration speech that his government would only recognize two genres, men and women, connecting to a problem in the heart of the cultural wars of the United States.
“Throughout the country today, medical professionals mutilan and sterilize a growing number of impressionable children,” said the order. “This dangerous trend will be a stain in the history of our nation, and must end.”
Trump’s order said that now it would be the policy of the United States that “I would not finance, sponsor, promote, help or support the so -called” transition “of one child from one sex to another.”
These included what it called “chemical and surgical mutilation”, including puberty blockers, hormones and gender alteration surgery.
He added that the government will now “rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and alterators of life.”
While there is no law throughout the United States against medical treatments that affirm the genre for transgender young people, Trump ordered the end of any federal support for such procedures.
This includes prohibiting funds for gender transitions under the Medicaid health insurance program for poor families, the Medicare scheme used by retirees and under the health insurance of the United States Department of Defense that covers about 2 million of children.
Trump said he would also work with Congress to write legislation to allow children and parents to demand doctors who had carried out gender surgery.
Trump told Davos forum last week that gender surgery “will happen very rarely” under his administration.
Two dozen states led by Republicans have already promulgated laws that restrict medical care for gender transitions for minors.
The judges of the United States Supreme Court faced the issue in December while discussing a Tennessee law that prohibits puberty blockers or hormonal therapy for children under 18.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a feed union).