(LifeSiteNews) — A new watchdog report questions whether five prominent hospitals have really abandoned child gender transitions or identity-politics initiatives in the wake of new rules to stop doing so or lose federal funding, given the depth of their activism.

Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has taken multiple executive actions to reverse the Biden administration’s transgender policies, including an order that ends all federal support for “transition” procedures on minors, rescinds or amends all of the Biden health bureaucracy’s past endorsements of underage “transitioning,” and calls for a review of the medical literature on the subject, enforcing all existing restrictions on underage “transitioning,” and taking regulatory action to “end” the practice to the greatest extent possible under current law; and an order to defund any educational system that maintains DEI programs. 

But compliance with those orders is another matter, which is why the conservative group Consumers’ Research has put out a report on “Woke Hospitals,” which have “diverted vital resources away from patients and medical-centered functions to fund and oversee ideological projects involving race, sexuality, and environmentalism.” 

It identifies Cleveland Clinic, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Henry Ford Health, Memorial Hermann Health System, and Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital for their history of work to “transition” gender-confused minors, carry out Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) programs, and/or participate in other forms of left-wing activism unrelated to treating patients.

Cleveland Clinic, for instance, has “Diversity Coordinators,” “Diversity Councils,” and an Office of Diversity & Inclusion that offers “diversity pipeline talent management”; last year, two of its health programs were accused of “prioritiz[ing] different patients and administer[ing] care based on skin color.” It identifies “greening its operating rooms” as a goal, has lobbied against restrictions on transgender procedures, and last December “opened a new facility in Florida designed exclusively for [so-called] LGBTQ patients to receive ‘inclusive’ transgender services.” As of March 2025, it still “transitions” minors, according to the Daily Caller.

Vanderbilt has ostensibly been taking down its DEI websites since President Donald Trump returned to office, but given the extensive nature of DEI’s tendrils in its various programs, Consumers’ Research is unconvinced it has truly changed, citing various websites that appear to still be up, just hidden behind passwords so the outside world cannot corroborate what they really say. Vanderbilt also frames purported “climate care” as a health issue and has a special place of prominence in the “transitioning” world, given the now-famous 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money,” kicking off much of the movement for reform.

Henry Ford Health, meanwhile, has a “DEI agenda [that] is so egregious that a nonprofit legal group filed an official complaint with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in April 2025 calling for an investigation,” according to the report, and it too still commits underage “transitions,” per the aforementioned Caller report.

Memorial Hermann identifies DEI as a major value, though in February 2025 it renamed its Institute for the Advancement of Health Equity as the Institute for Health Access and Engagement, apparently to perpetuate DEI below the radar. “In April 2024, a traveling nurse filed a lawsuit against Memorial Hermann, alleging she was terminated for refusing to assist with a gender-transition surgery due to her religious objections,” the report notes. “According to her lawsuit, the nurse’s refusal violated Memorial Hermann’s DEI policies.”

Johns Hopkins also embraces DEI, to the point of promoting non-health-related books by various proponents of the “systemic racism” view of America, and continues to “transition” minors, although it claims to only do so chemically rather than surgically.

“As outlined in this report, hospitals are taking advantage of their billions of dollars in tax breaks, federal funding, and mandated discount programs to fund frivolous projects outside the scope of patient care,” the report says. “Instead of passing benefits on to patients and lowering costs – as these programs intended, hospitals use these programs to fund political priorities outside of their core mission of providing high-quality care and benefiting their communities.”

A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.

Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “reassignment” procedures fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.

Many oft-ignored detransitioners attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”