Children’s Hospital Colorado has confirmed that it will no longer perform transgender surgeries on transgender-identifying adults.
The hospital claims doctors never performed transgender surgeries — which can include double mastectomy procedures on healthy breasts and vaginoplasty and penectomy surgeries — on minors. Now, however, these surgeries will be unavailable to those 18 years and older, as well.
Controversial puberty blockers and hormone therapies will still be given to children, said Rachael Fowler, a spokesperson for Children’s Hospital Colorado.
Fowler said in a statement that this decision was made due to “unprecedented referrals,” adding that this was a “difficult decision” for Children’s Hospital Colorado.
Speaking to The Denver Post, however, Fowler suggested the hospital ended trans surgeries due to backlash over the controversial treatments.
“Children’s hospitals across the country have been directly threatened as a result of the gender-affirming care provided in their institutions,” Fowler said. “We have taken steps as an organization to protect the safety of our team members, patients and families.”
The Denver Post noted that Children’s Hospital Colorado has scrubbed numerous “gender-affirming care” references from its website.
Though the state of Colorado has worked to cement transgender surgeries and treatments for minors as a “right,” at least 20 states are working to clamp down on the procedures, citing irreparable harm and lack of true consent.
As highlighted by The Daily Wire, a 21-year-old Texas woman named Soren Aldaco, who no longer identifies as transgender, is suing her doctors in excess of $1 million over transgender medical interventions she received as a teenager that left her irreparably damaged.
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Soren and her lawyer, Ron Miller, are searching for accountability and justice in Soren’s particular case and want to send a message to medical insurers.
“It’s about catching the attention of insurance companies, that they might want to stop insuring this kind of practice,” Miller told The Daily Wire. “And if they stop insuring this kind of practice, practitioners tend to not like to take that risk on themselves, so they stop doing it.”
In the lawsuit, filed in July, Soren claims that medical professionals in Texas were guided by their ideology and irresponsibly facilitated treatments and surgeries that have led to Soren’s “permanent disfigurement” and have caused “profound psychological scarring.”
“What happened to me was preventable,” Soren told The Daily Wire. “I wanna hold my providers accountable for what they did, and I feel very strongly that ideology was prioritized over my long-term mental and physical wellbeing.”
Related: Why Soren Aldaco, 21, Is Suing The Doctors Who Facilitated Her Medical ‘Transition’ As A Teen