Feds Target ‘Wolves in White Coats’ Pushing Gender Drugs-Surgeries, While CA Bill Mandates Coverage

Children Failed by Trusted Adults

Eight patients and parents told their stories in the HHS report and accompanying short film HHS. The testimonials, said host Dr. Brian Christine, the assistant secretary for Health and Human Services, “will shine a light into this dark world of deception, medical malpractice, fraud, and stolen innocence.”

Clementine Breen, a 21-year-old UCLA student, was in eighth grade when her parents were asked, in Christine’s words, “Would you rather have a living son or a dead daughter?” She got puberty blockers at 12 at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, testosterone at 13, and a double mastectomy at 14. “I have constant joint pain and bone density loss as well,” she said. “They didn’t explain to me the potential lifelong consequences.” Breen wasn’t looking for a transgender identity. “I started seeing a guidance counselor at my school. She started telling me, ‘You might be suffering from gender dysphoria.’”

Californian Layla Jane had a double mastectomy at 13 at Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco. “The testosterone damaged my liver at 14. I have genital atrophy. I have urinary issues. It’s almost like I am a menopausal woman,” she said. Nobody warned her about the daily nerve pain, or that she would keep milk glands with no way to drain them. “My doctors kind of did whatever they felt like.”

Behind every one of those medical bills is a child told by trusted adults that her own body was the problem. No drug and no scalpel has ever turned a girl into a boy. 

California Led the Way and Now These Cases Are in Court

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles ran the largest pediatric gender clinic in the country. Between 2019 and 2023, California minors underwent 1,359 of these surgeries, nearly four times as many as Oregon, the next state, and one in four nationally. 

HHS has referred the following California medical facilities to the Department of Justice for potential violations of federal law: Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Rady Children’s in San Diego, Stanford’s Lucile Packard, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Kaiser’s Southern California physician group, Kaiser Roseville, Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC), University of California, Irvine, Sharp Rees-Stealy, and Scripps Clinic Medical Group. 

Three California families have already sued. Chloe Cole got puberty blockers, testosterone and a double mastectomy through Kaiser between 13 and 17. She sued in San Joaquin County in 2023. Kaiser tried to force the case into arbitration but lost that dispute on appeal last September. The trial is set for April 5, 2027.

Breen sued Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles in December 2024. A judge threw it out last October because California’s three-year malpractice clock had run. It was not because the allegations were false, but because she filed too late. Her appeal is pending. A third case, Layla Jane against Kaiser, was dismissed in 2024, and the record was sealed.

California hospitals have been backing away from providing transition-related drugs and surgeries to minors for more than a year. Stanford paused surgeries in June 2025. Children’s Hospital Los Angeles closed its clinic a month later, in July, and Kaiser paused as well. Sutter Health ended the procedures last December, and Rady Children’s followed in February of 2026. The Justice Department wanted records on more than 3,000 CHLA transgender patients and dropped that effort in January after a legal challenge. It subpoenaed similar records from Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford in May, and a judge blocked that in July.

Olson-Kennedy ran that CHLA gender clinic for 13 years. She also led a $10 million federally funded study of puberty blockers and then would not publish the results, which showed no improvement in the children’s mental health. She is now president-elect of the American branch of WPATH, which writes the transgender healthcare guidelines for hospitals to follow.

Insurance companies would be accused of discrimination

Neither Governor Gavin Newsom nor Attorney General Rob Bonta has commented on the federal report. Meanwhile, California lawmakers are advancing AB 1876, which would restrict insurers’ ability to deny coverage for many of the procedures now receiving federal scrutiny. It currently sits on the Senate floor awaiting a final vote. 

Assemblymember Dawn Addis authored AB 1876. The bill forbids insurance companies from denying or limiting coverage for puberty blockers, sterilizing hormone therapies (cross-sex hormones), double mastectomies, or other procedures sought “for the purpose of gender transition or other gender-affirming care” if the insurer covers those same procedures for other medical reasons. For example, the bill would bar an insurer from denying a mastectomy solely because it is sought for gender transition if the same procedure is covered for another medical indication, such as breast cancer, even if she is a minor. 

AB 1876 also tells insurers they cannot maintain any blanket policy excluding coverage for all procedures “related to gender transition or other gender-affirming care.” This may be the bill’s most consequential provision because it strips insurers of the ability to exercise independent medical and actuarial judgment on an entire category of contested interventions.

Californian Luke Healy, whose story appears in the federal report, testified against AB 1876 earlier this year. He was 10 when adults he met online began telling him he was really a girl. School counselors agreed. Kaiser therapists agreed. His parents refused to sign off on hormones, so he got them on his own at 18. Yet by age 21, he stopped. 

“I’m here because this bill would have helped further guarantee my destruction,” Healy told the Senate Health Committee. “Older men and women online, both as activists, told me that I was really a girl. They sent me pornographic images, videos, and coached me to dress as a girl. What followed was years of depression, drugs, and alcohol abuse. No mental health provider asked why I believed I was a woman. I said that I was trans, and that was all it took.”

Speak out

Look at the adults failing these minors. School counselors, therapists, surgeons, insurers, medical associations, and politicians all played a part.  Every one of those adults was credentialed and trusted. What stopped Healy’s medical transition while he was a minor was a mother and father exercising the authority God gave them.

Now the federal government is asking hard questions about how these children were treated and how their care was billed. California should be asking those same questions. Instead of making it harder for insurers to question or refuse coverage for these procedures, lawmakers should demand transparency, investigate what happened, and put children’s safety first. Every state should take a hard look at its own practices. Our children deserve nothing less.