This article is a republication from Rewire News Group. The original release can be found here.
This article mentions suicidal ideation. If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide or mental health please reach out to the Trevor Project a LGBT+ youth hotline Call: 1-866-488-7386 Text: START to 678-678.
The drive from western Wisconsin to see specialists in the Twin Cities and Rochester, Minnesota can be long. In the summer, it means braving sweltering weather and construction zones. In the winter, it means gripping icy roads and navigating unexpected snowstorms. It’s hard to afford. The gas gets expensive.
It’s a hassle. But it’s a hassle that Robin’s mom has been willing to shoulder, because it helps keep her kid alive. Robin, a pseudonym Rewire News Group is using to protect the teen’s identity, is intersex, an umbrella term for those who have naturally-occurring “differences in their sex traits or reproductive anatomy,” according to InterACT, an organization that advocates on behalf of intersex people.
My child “has more of a reason to be confused or experiment with identity,” Robin’s mom told RNG in an interview.
Robin’s medical care has been turned upside down by the federal government’s anti-trans agenda. She’s not the only one.
Since President Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term in January 2025, his administration has escalated its attacks against trans people. Through a series of executive orders and federal regulations, the White House is working to deny trans people health care and erase their identities from the public sphere. The federal policies intended to limit gender-affirming care for trans children are having trickle-down effects on other forms of sex-related hormone care, advocates warn, including for intersex youth like Robin.
Optional surgery with lifelong consequences
Robin is one of an estimated 5 million people in the U.S. who are born intersex. Common intersex variations include androgen insensitivity syndrome, where an individual’s XY chromosomes don’t respond to testosterone and other androgen hormones, and they don’t have ovaries or uteri.
Another is congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which is a dysregulation of the adrenal glands, which sit on top of the kidneys and produce hormones. Turner syndrome, which happens when a person has a partial or full deletion of one of their two X chromosomes, may result in delays in physical development, fertility challenges, and heart problems.
Historically, treatments for intersex conditions have included surgeries on infants and small children to make their genitalia look either stereotypically male or female. These procedures include orchiectomy, or removal of the testes, and vaginal reconstruction. They may also include moving the urethra and the partial removal of the clitoris.
The need to treat intersex conditions varies depending on an individual’s health needs, and the preferences of the patient and their family. But the surgeries, which are often done before the age of 2, are generally not considered medically necessary. The early origins of these procedures stemmed from societal pressure to prevent children from “growing up to be gay or lesbian,” Elizabeth Reis, a professor emeritus at the University of Oregon, wrote in her 2009 book on the history of intersex people.
Decisions about surgical care are frequently made before intersex children can understand their bodies or decide whether they want to change them, said Hannah Edwards of Transforming Families, a nonprofit focused on supporting trans youth.
“Obviously an infant can’t consent,” she said.
These operations can have lifelong impacts, including “infertility, pain, incontinence, loss of sexual sensation, and lifelong mental suffering,” according to the United Nations.
Robin, now a teenager, underwent three surgeries before the first grade. She was diagnosed with another common intersex variation called Klinefelter syndrome, which occurs when an individual has two X chromosomes and a Y chromosome. As a result, some of her physical characteristics were more masculine, and others were more feminine.
Robin’s first surgery was designed to make her genitalia appear more masculine. The second two were to address complications from the first procedure. Today, Robin identifies more as female—something that became clear after Robin underwent surgery. She will need lifelong hormone treatment to align her body with her gender identity.
Ongoing hormone care or surgeries are not uncommon among intersex children. Some who undergo surgery as children require hormone replacement therapy for the rest of their lives, according to Human Rights Watch.
Depending on the hormones intersex youth need, the medical reason for prescribing them, and their sex assigned at birth, treatment may be labeled as gender-affirming care. And even if the treatment itself isn’t considered gender-affirming, it may be carried out by the same providers who care for trans children.
That means intersex people can end up being denied access to health care, despite specific carve outs for surgeries on intersex youth in anti-trans laws.
Gender-affirming care needs
More than 25 states, including Alabama, Arizona, and Texas, have passed laws restricting access to gender-affirming care since 2021, according to KFF, a nonprofit health policy research organization. States including Kansas passed laws in 2025, after Trump signed anti-trans executive orders.
All these laws include carve-outs for treatment of “disorders of sex development,” a term often used to describe intersex characteristics in medical settings. (Many in the community find this term stigmatizing.)
The result is “a patchwork” of laws that leave patients in different parts of the country with vastly different access to care, said Ericka Lorshbough, InterACT’s executive director. That’s “similar to what we have seen in the past when it comes to reproductive rights—but it’s for … hormonal care,” Lorshbourgh added.
“Exceptions in the bans, they’re not preserving people’s access to care,” said Lorshbourgh, who co-authored a report in the journal JAMA Health Forum about carve-outs for intersex patients. “… They are preserving doctors’ ability to perform procedures that a lot of doctors are not relying on.”
Robin’s current care plan involves hormone therapy and puberty blockers while she figures out her next steps. From her home in western Wisconsin, Children’s Minnesota is the closest medical facility that currently provides this kind of care.
Trans rights are enshrined in Minnesota’s state’s Human Rights Act, and providers may legally practice gender-affirming care. Even so, Children’s Minnesota announced a “pause” in gender-affirming care for minors starting Feb. 27, 2026 to comply with Trump administration mandates. It was one of at least 40 health systems that have frozen or closed their programs since 2025.
It was “heartbreaking,” Robin’s mom said, to see “all this support” disappear over night.
“There’s special clinics just for people struggling with gender things. There’s special therapists,” she added. “You’re going to give us all this thing … and then you just drop it and take it away?”
In response, Robin’s care team at Children’s Minnesota offered referrals to providers practicing in Iowa and Illinois. But before Robin and her mom were able to establish care multiple hours from their home, an Oregon judge signaled on March 19, 2026 that he would throw out a Trump administration rule that would block Medicare and Medicaid funding from facilities that provide gender-affirming care.
Children’s Minnesota reinstated its program in April 2026.
‘People are Going to Die’
Not all teens are so lucky.
In Wisconsin, where Robin lives, two major hospitals—Children’s Wisconsin and UW Health in Madison—have stopped providing gender-affirming treatments. And Wisconsin lawmakers on Feb. 11, 2026 passed a bill targeting gender-affirming care for minors.
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers vetoed the legislation on March 31, 2026—Trans Day of Visibility—but the pauses in care continue.
Jax Seeger, community advocacy and engagement director at Outreach Wisconsin, isn’t surprised by the continued freeze.
“Trump and his regime has shown over and over that we can be vetoed, we can be ordered to stop, but we’re not going to stop—and that makes it OK for other higher ups to do the same,” he said.
Seeger said the continued suspension of gender-affirming care programs in the state also reflects a political analysis by hospitals. Wisconsin is a purple state. If it swings Republican in the future, he argued, facilities that continued providing gender-affirming care could risk losing their state funding.
Health care has never been easy for trans, nonbinary, and intersex kids to get. The cost can be prohibitive, finding a specialist is difficult, and discrimination in medical care is common. Now, these children and their families are left scrambling to find gender-affirming care from an ever-shrinking list of providers.
Robin’s mom worries how all this turmoil, coupled with political rhetoric declaring that there are only two genders, and demonizing people born outside that binary, will affect her child’s mental health. Robin has struggled with suicidal ideation revolving around gender identity in the past.
Physician groups argue that under the care of a qualified provider, gender-affirming care can be lifesaving. Research bears that out. A 2025 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that of the intersex and trans people facing the loss of gender-affirming care who were studied, 1 in 3 planned to use DIY hormones. One in 5 anticipated suicidal ideation if denied care.
As more and more hospitals halt or pause their gender-affirming care programs, a rise in suicide among trans teens has been observed across the U.S. This data doesn’t focus on intersex kids, but it alarms Robin’s mom.
“People are going to die,” Robin’s mom said of growing bans on gender-affirming care. And it’s “because the federal government does not recognize, basically, that people like Robin exist.”
