Rainbow Families Action Demands Sutter Health Reverse Course on Ending Gender-Affirming Care for Minors
Nov. 26, 2025
Update: Read ‘It’s Just Cruel’: Bay Area Parents Say Sutter Health Is Set to Halt Trans Youth Care,’ KQED
Parents of transgender youth are expressing profound concern, shock, and outrage after learning that Sutter Health has announced an abrupt end to all gender-affirming care (GAC) for patients under age 19, with no explanation. Cruelly, this decision was communicated to internal Sutter staff on November 20 — Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day meant to honor the lives lost to anti-trans violence. To add insult to injury, this news comes right after the end of open enrollment, trapping families in a system that will no longer care for their children.
According to parents who were alerted about the stoppage, no formal notice, explanation, or clinical justification has been provided by Sutter administration. Even more alarming, those responsible for the care of trans and gender-diverse youth report they have not been given time or protocols to responsibly wind down treatment, despite the significant risks that discontinuity poses to patients’ mental and physical wellbeing.
The stoppage is expected to take effect on or around December 10, giving families mere weeks to understand what is happening and to prepare their children for an unnecessary and destabilizing disruption to essential, evidence-based medical care.
As parents and family members of youth who receive GAC services, we are devastated and fearful. Our children rely on consistent, affirming care to live healthy, stable, hopeful lives. To just end that care, without warning, is unconscionably cruel in its implementation and timing. It is a breach of trust, a violation of medical ethics, and a direct threat to our kids’ mental health and safety.
It is also illegal. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has made it clear to healthcare providers that “California law prohibits healthcare providers and insurers from discriminating or denying healthcare services to a patient for being transgender, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, or intersex, or due to a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.” And medical organizations worldwide — including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the Endocrine Society — support gender-affirming care as lifesaving and medically necessary. Abruptly removing access can heighten anxiety, depression, self-harm risk, and overall distress for transgender youth, who already face disproportionate mental-health challenges due to societal discrimination.
Sutter knows these truths and has, nonetheless, chosen to discontinue care in spite of them. To do this on Trans Day of Remembrance sends a chilling message to our families. Instead of honoring trans lives, Sutter chose that day to harm them.
Rainbow Families Action and our partners demand that Sutter Health reverse course on this decision immediately. We also call on President & CEO Warner Thomas, Chief Physician Executive Todd Smith, and Chief Medical & Quality Officer William Isenberg to provide:
Immediate transparency regarding the rationale and decision-making process behind their plan to discriminatorily end care; and
A public commitment to uphold medically recognized standards of care for transgender and gender diverse youth.
Parents should never have to fight their own medical care organization to protect their children’s health. We refuse to stand by while Sutter pre-emptively bows to political pressure instead of standing up for our kids. California law is clear: Our children deserve stability, respect, and the same medically appropriate care as any other child.