The largest hospitals in Connecticut are cutting transgender services. Permanently.

Before Reading,

Transgender youth shed suffocating layers of secrecy on campus grounds. College, for many, is a recess from the fear of being caught. Far away are habits of hiding halter tops, filling shoeboxes with makeup or tucking away binders alongside football gear. Whether home is miles or minutes away, transgender undergraduates move mountains to become themselves for a single semester.

For the fortunate few, our educational institutions provide hormones, counseling, clean needles and bias-free clinicians. If medicine isn’t a human right, surely it is an undoubtable privilege.

Accessible gender affirming care is a lifeline. Our transgender youth are now presented with grave choices: perseverance or suicide.

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The Largest Hospitals In Connecticut Are Cutting Transgender Services. Permanently.

Yale New Haven Hospital and Hartford HealthCare ended their gender affirming care services in late July. Uncertain are figures to how many clients were affected.

“After a thorough assessment of the current environment," said Mark Dantonio, media coordinator for YNHH, "we made the very difficult decision to modify the pediatric gender program to eliminate the medication treatment component of the gender-affirming program.”

“This decision was not made lightly. We are aware of the profound impact that this decision will have on the patients treated in this program, as well as their families.”

Search ynhh.org for ‘pediatric gender services’ and the non-discrimination policy is all that remains. Any information on the former pediatric services exist outside public view.

YNHH and HHC are the largest service providers for hospital care statewide, operating three out of five of the most trafficked inpatient facilities.

Transgender youth attending University of New Haven are hit hard by these changes. Where last spring students had multiple local options for counseling and guidance on transitioning, now the resources are wearing thin. The newly adopted partnerships between UNewHaven and Hartford Healthcare leave more uncertainty to boot.

“That is the market difference between, like, living in a blue state versus a red state,” said Dr. Melanie Walsh, PH.D in Counselor Education and clinical fieldwork coordinator, “where we can't just confidently say, I can send my trans student to CAPS at Mississippi State University and know that they will be safe and cared for in a manner that's equitable, you know, all of those things.”

As recently as 2020, Dr. Walsh published a content analysis in the Journal of LGBTQ Issues in Counseling.

Her collaborative study ‘Rethinking counseling recruitment and outreach for transgender clients’ finds a gap in reports on transgender, nonbinary and gender nonconforming clientele, and Walsh meditates on reasons why.

“My argument in that article was that we do need to be making a more concerted effort to recruit and do community outreach in a way that is not dissimilar to what we do with research participants in letting these communities know that, like, we're here, we're affirming, we're knowledgeable, etcetera” (sic).

“We have that understanding with other minoritized populations or marginalized populations, but that type of understanding had not at least been written about before that article was published.”

Hormones like estrogen and testosterone are schedule III drugs (et. United States Drug Enforcement Agency or DEA), and are difficult to source without the guidance of licensed psychiatrists.

“We know that this happens all the time and people do it safely, but there's also a lot of risk involved with that. Like, are you getting clean-clean hormones, for example? That's my first question.” Dr. W said.

“Are there gonna be fillers, etcetera? Do you know how to administer the drug properly or in a way that's going to be effective?..” “I think who it's hurting most, you know, are going to be our youth because… you're very unlikely to have a parent who's gonna sign off on let's get access hormones from the black market.”

Many public and private institutions are appeasing the federal government by cutting short-lived DEI (Diversity Equity & Inclusion) programs. These services aimed to support women, queer individuals and those with disabilities. Is a legal justification weighed the same as a moral one?

“In Connecticut, we don’t inject politics into private family medical decisions, and we don’t let adults bully our kids. It’s that simple.”

Attorney General William Tong is involved with multiple active lawsuits against the Trump administration over protections for LGBTQIA+ youth and adults.

“In Connecticut, we don’t inject politics into private family medical decisions, and we don’t let adults bully our kids. It’s that simple,” Tong said to press when discussing the amicus brief for PFLAG v. Trump (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays).

Tong, Governor Ned Lamont and Democratic Senator Ceci Maher have expressed their continued support for transgender individuals. The state of Connecticut is among 18 others  fighting these federal decisions in court.

YNHH and HHC are in a better place with their budgets than many other hospitals nationwide. How much pressure is Yale facing from the Trump administration to drop gender reaffirming care? Was this decision forced or voluntary? The answer may lay in the massive national cuts to medicaid.

The OHS (Office of Health Strategy) says out of the 27 hospitals in Connecticut, YNHH and HHC operate 20 (74%). From YNHH’s 2023 annual report, their system served outpatients upwards of 3.6 million. Looking at HHC’s report in the year prior, on emergency and patient services alone, their hospitals serviced 300,000 visitors combined.

Numbers from this HHC report about patient billing also shows medicaid is covering above half, give or take some change, of the costs to care. HHC and YNHH might be pinching pennies as patients who cannot afford copays decide against treatment or travel out of state.

 As a welcome introduction to Horseshoe Magazine’s investigative journalism, we’ll be charting the waves formed by removing gender affirming care from public institutions, the ripples felt by lgbtq+ students, as well as finding answers to burning questions from New Haven’s shaken community. Follow us here for more, and stay up to date on new editions of the Horseshoe Magazine & Charger Bulletin News.