Says, ‘Children deserve better, and the first step in helping them is to stop funding the harm’
For Immediate Release:
February 18, 2026
For press inquiries only, contact:
Amanda Priest (334) 322-5694
William Califf (334) 604-3230
(Montgomery, Ala) – Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall led a coalition of 24 States in filing a letter with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services urging the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to stop federal funding of sex-change procedures on children. The letter, sent to Secretary Kennedy, issues direct comments on two proposed rules that would restrict federal funding from continuing to subsidize sex-change procedures for minors under Medicare and Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
“Medicaid and Medicare should never have been allowed to use taxpayer dollars to fund radical and dangerous sex-change procedures for children. We support the Trump administration’s proposal to reverse course,” stated Attorney General Marshall. “We know the dangers of these procedures firsthand. Through years of litigation defending Alabama’s law, we uncovered a political and medical scandal involving the leading medical guidelines that recommend using sterilizing hormones and surgeries to ‘treat’ children suffering from gender dysphoria. The guidelines were built on ideology and politics, not science, and have led to untold harm to children and their parents. Children deserve better, and the first step in helping them is to stop funding the harm.”
In the Alabama-led letter, the coalition discusses evidence uncovered in litigation regarding the “Standards of Care 8” (SOC-8) published by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). The letter extensively discusses evidence showing that WPATH used SOC-8 to advance political and legal goals, changed its treatment recommendations based on politics, departed from well-accepted best practices for creating medical guidelines, hindered the publication of systematic evidence reviews appraising the safety and efficacy of sex-change procedures for minors, and even went so far as deeming castration “medically necessary” for males who self-identify as “eunuchs.”
Attorney General Marshall is joined on the letter by the attorneys general of Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
The full letter can be read here.
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