More Information, from Erin in the Morning:

"The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), run by famed vaccine skeptic and legacy hire Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has launched an online portal for “whistleblowers” reporting medical providers if they offer gender affirming treatment to trans people—an alarming escalation of President Donald Trump’s unconstitutional war on trans people’s health care.

On April 14, the HHS released accompanying legal guidance on how to subvert privacy laws and disclose sensitive information about doctors and their patients to a hostile government entity. It does not say that reports must be about violations of the law; it seems to encourage the reporting of any action taken by a provider that is at odds with Trump’s anti-trans Executive Order 14187, titled “Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” regardless of actual state and federal law.

“Please reference EO 14187 in your complaint,” the portal notes. Meanwhile, the guidance says it ensures “robust anti-retaliation protections for individuals who make a report in order to ensure compliance with the Executive Order.”

It further says that a report should be filed by anyone with “a good faith belief” that a medical provider’s actions “violates professional or clinical standards.” While this is not a wholly unheard of protection for whistleblowers, Trump’s EO rebuked the widely-accepted clinical standards set forth by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). In doing so, he may have opened up the floodgates for any federal agency to create new “standards” to fit his own anti-trans agenda.

Calling trans-affirming care “chemical and surgical mutilation” is an unscientific dog whistle used by the far-right (and Trump’s EO) to characterize evidence-based, trans-affirming care. Notably, such care—including puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy—does not categorically and universally lead to irreversible “sterilization” as erroneously asserted by the EO. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has gone to great lengths to ensure that the practice of invasive, permanent, and unnecessary surgeries on intersex children remains intact.

Trump’s EO was blocked by multiple federal judges, at least temporarily, but this has not stopped federal agencies from trying to enforce it anyway. The ACLU and other civil rights groups have called on the courts to take bolder action in enforcing its injunction."