US Catholic Hospitals Perform Gender-Mutilation Surgeries on Children
Leading Catholic hospitals in the United States are performing transgender surgeries on minors, blatantly contradicting Catholic teaching from Rome and from the U.S. Bishops’ Doctrine Committee.
A bombshell investigation conducted by Do No Harm, a secular organization that combats identity politics in medicine, has catalogued the cases of thousands of children subjected to irreversible sex-change interventions in U.S. hospitals between 2019 and 2023.
The stoptheharmdatabase.com includes multiple Catholic hospitals, including Providence Health & Services, the nation’s fourth-largest Catholic health system, according to an analysis by CatholicVote.
The database shows that at least 170 children underwent gender-affirming surgeries and 508 received cross-sex hormone or puberty-blocker prescriptions at Catholic hospitals after being diagnosed with gender dysphoria or gender identity disorder.
Rogues Gallery
Hospitals in the Providence Health & Services chain performed the most transgender surgeries, with Providence Milwaukie Hospital in Milwaukie, Oregon, conducting the procedures on 46 children.
Providence St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, California, performed such surgeries on 18 children. Multiple other Providence hospitals had “relatively large counts of patients receiving cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, or surgeries,” CatholicVote found.
In all, the Providence hospital chain, which owns 51 hospitals across Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Montana, New Mexico, and Texas, performed transgender surgeries on 81 children and prescribed cross-sex hormones or puberty blockers to 113 children.
Hospitals run by other Catholic healthcare providers performing transgender surgeries on minors include St. Anne Hospital in Burien, Washington (8); St. Vincent Regional Medical Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico (7); St. Peter’s Hospital in Albany, New York (6)Ascension SE Wisconsin Hospital—St. Joseph Campus in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (6); and Ascension SE Wisconsin Hospital in Appleton, Wisconsin (6).
The highest number of cross-sex hormonal or puberty-blocker treatments offered to children were from St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise, Idaho (23); St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Bellingham, Washington (21); Ascension Genesys Hospital in Grand Blanc, Michigan (18); Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin, Texas (16); and Ascension Via Christi St. Francis in Wichita, Kansas (14).
Dissenting Ethics
Those hospitals appear to have been influenced by “Catholic Teaching on the Human Person and Gender Dysphoria,” an article published by Catholic ethicist Dr. Peter J. Cataldo on the website of Heath Care Ethics USA, which is run by the Catholic Health Association of the United States.
In the article, Cataldo argues that “within certain parameters, hormonal and surgical treatment for adults with gender dysphoria is not contrary to Catholic teaching.”
“It is important to point out that while an individual’s act of being is as male or female, this does not entail that the soul, per se, is sexed,” Cataldo writes, noting that “the soul by itself does not have the individual materiality of a person’s sex.”
Using Aristotelian categories later developed by St. Thomas Aquinas, the ethicist claims that “sex is not part of the definition of human essence, but being created as male or female is an inseparable accident of the individual existence of a person as a human substance.”
Cataldo distinguishes between “the empirical evidence about physical sex characteristics, the personal sense of gender on the one hand, and God’s creative act of a person on the other,” arguing that “it is not contradictory to claim that a person’s sense of gender can be contrary to the ontological dimension of the creation of that person as male or female.”
“Interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria can be justified by the principle of totality, if, and only if, the services are restricted to secondary sex characteristics,” he states, even though hormonal therapy “can have a sterilizing effect in the long term” since “any sterilizing effect on the primary sex characteristics would be foreseen but unintended.”
Cataldo also cites studies which, according to him, “have shown an undeniable beneficial effect of sex reassignment surgery on postoperative outcomes such as subjective well-being, cosmesis, and sexual function.”
Catholic Teaching
In its “Guidance to Catholic Health Care Institutions on Respecting the Fundamental Order of the Human Body” issued in March 2023, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops explicitly prohibit transgender chemical or surgical interventions in Catholic hospitals.
Since such interventions “do not respect the fundamental order of the human person as an intrinsic unity of body and soul, with a body that is sexually differentiated,” the bishops rule that “Catholic health care services must not perform them.”
Rejecting a dualistic philosophy that underlies the construct of transgenderism, the bishops emphatically declare: “A soul can never be in another body, much less be in the wrong body. This soul only comes into existence together with this body.”
Pope Francis has spoken about an ideology that promotes “a personal identity and emotional intimacy radically separated from the biological difference between male and female,” in which “human identity becomes the choice of the individual, one which can also change over time.”
In his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis addresses the challenge of gender ideology, which promotes “a personal identity and emotional intimacy radically separated from the biological difference between male and female” in which “human identity becomes the choice of the individual, one which can also change over time.”
“Let us not fall into the sin of trying to replace the Creator,” he notes. “We are creatures, and not omnipotent. Creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift.”
Catholics Affirming LGBTQIA+ Ideology
In 2020, Providence Health & Services began its Swedish LGBTQI+ Program, which is housed in the chain’s Office of Health Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. The service offers “health care navigation services for patients seeking gender-affirming care and treatments.”
The provider also links patients to “gender-affirming” primary care clinicians, surgeons, mental health professionals and specialty care clinicians both within Swedish and outside the chain.
In a poster titled “People Matter. Words Matter.,” the Catholic health care chain commits itself to using “safe and inclusive language” providing a vocabulary list of non-offensive terms. Instead of “preferred pronouns,” it urges the use of “pronouns,” explaining: “Do not use ‘preferred’ for pronouns and names since this implies that this is optional or a choice.”
It also asks speakers to “defer to the language folks use to describe themselves, relationships and their identities, by asking what language, labels, terms they use to identify themselves and their relationships.
“In 2024, the Swedish Ballard, Cherry Hill, Edmonds, First Hill, and Issaquah hospital campuses earned the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s ‘LGBTQ+ Healthcare Equality High Performer’ designation as part of the Healthcare Equality Index (HEI),” the provider boasts.
Tommy Valentine, director of CatholicVote’s Catholic Accountability Project, said the group has been investigating the issue for months.
“We’ve actually been hot on Providence’s trail for a while, and now we have hard evidence to show they are violating Catholic teaching and harming children,” he said.
“Under their twisted logic, a trans mutilation surgery like a mastectomy on a teenage girl is permissible because it doesn’t directly affect reproductive organs. No serious Catholic ethicist would agree with that absurd proposition.”
Do No Harm’s database notes the child transgender industry is “a lucrative one” with hospitals submitting more than $100 million in claims for these experimental treatments on children between 2019 and 2023.
More than 13,994 children were given irreversible transgender treatments at U.S. medical facilities during that period, with 5,747 children subjected to sex-change surgical procedures and 8,579 receiving cross-sex hormones or puberty blockers. More than 60,000 prescriptions for these drugs were written for children.
The top three worst offending hospitals were the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Connecticut Children’s Hospital, and Children’s Minnesota Specialty Center.
Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.