Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a scathing memorandum giving the Department of Justice (DOJ) several directives aiming to bring an end to the “barbaric practice” of chemically castrating and surgically mutilating children. The directives align under President Donald Trump’s January executive order that withdraws all federal funding for puberty blockers, hormones, or irreversible mutilating surgeries for minors, and directs rigorous enforcement of all laws to protect children from these destructive and life-altering procedures.

AG Bondi began the memo by illustrating how a “radical ideological agenda” has been pushed on the American people to teach children to “deny biological reality.” She stated the agenda has been perpetrated by the Biden administration, the medical community, Hollywood, legacy mass media, children’s books, and public schools. This gender ideology is just “junk science” that steers children to “process adolescent stress and confusion” as “mistaken identity,” and that the only solution is permanent and life-altering chemical and surgical interventions, AG Bondi wrote.

“Tragic and absurd as it is that 1.4 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds now identify as [gender-confused],” wrote AG Bondi. “[T]hat is the predictable result of a coordinated, unchecked ideological attack on America’s children.”

The memo noted how Joe Biden “personally advanced” this ideological agenda by litigating against state-level protections for children, hosting influencers at the White House, and appointing the gender-confused male activist “Rachel” Levine as Assistant Secretary for Health. Under Levine, the Department of Health and Human Services pressured the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (“WPATH”) to eliminate minimum age restrictions for irreversible and mutilating surgeries despite the lack of scientific support for the agenda.

As for the medical community, Bondi noted with its roots in “hard science” that it should have been “well positioned” to safeguard children. However, she wrote, many children and their parents ended up being “betrayed” by a community full of “politically captured profiteers.”

AG Bondi wrote, “These ‘professionals’ have deployed junk science and false claims about the effects of so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ to justify the barbaric practice of surgically and chemically maiming and sterilizing children. Between 2019 and 2023, an estimated 14,000 children received ‘treatment’ for gender dysphoria, with more than 5,700 subjected to life-altering surgeries. The practitioners who provided this so-called ‘care’ profited while their patients were left permanently disfigured, scarred, and sterilized.” 

AG Bondi then put medical practitioners, hospitals, and clinics “on notice” that the DOJ “will not sit idly by” while doctors exploit and mutilate children for ideology and profits. The memo directs the DOJ to do the following:

• Investigate all suspected cases of female genital mutilation (FGM) conducted under the guise of “gender-affirming care.” In the U.S., it is a felony to “perform, attempt to perform, or conspire to perform” FGM on a minor and the crime carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence. The DOJ is also to ensure that victims and their families are able to report violations of this federal law.

• Under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and False Claims Act, the DOJ will “investigate and hold accountable medical providers and pharmaceutical companies who mislead the public about the long-term side effects of chemical and surgical mutilations.”

• The Civil Division’s Consumer Protection Branch will investigate any false claims associated with misbranding regarding the “on- or off-label use” of puberty blockers and sex hormones.

• Under the False Claims Act, the Civil Division’s Fraud Section will investigate false claims submitted to federal health programs for any services related to “radical gender experimentation,” such as prescribing puberty blockers to a child for gender confusion while reporting the prescription as due to early onset puberty, and performing mutilating surgical procedures on minors to remove healthy body parts yet billing them to Medicaid under different reasons.

• To eagerly work with whistleblowers and help private citizens take actions against those who have violated the law and defrauded the government.

• To identify and purge all policies, memoranda, and publications within the DOJ related to the “fundamentally flawed and unreliable” WPATH guidelines.

• To establish a federal and state coalition and partner with state attorneys general to identify leads, share intelligence, and build legal cases against hospitals and medical health practitioners involved with FGM or violating other state-level laws protecting children from medical mutilation.

• To work with the Office of Legislative Affairs to draft legislation creating a right to sue for children and the parents of those children whose healthy body parts have been damaged through chemical and surgical mutilation. The DOJ will also work with the U.S. House and Senate Judiciary Committees to bring the bill to President Trump. 

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “These common sense directives will help protect children from the harmful and often irreversible gender interventions caused by the false gender ideology. They will also help hold accountable those who hurt children in this way. The insanity of this ideology and greed in the medical community has monetized the act of mutilating children and adults into a billion-dollar industry. Through President Trump’s executive order and this memorandum, the federal government can now return to sound science and promote treating these mental health issues with proven psychiatric therapies to heal rather than harm. Now, it is up to the federal and state legislatures to pass laws that protect children from medical mutilation.”