President Donald Trump told a campaign crowd in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, that hospitals are now performing "reverse surgery" on transgender patients because he ordered it. No such order exists, and nothing in his administration's actual policies comes close to mandating surgery of any kind.

What Trump actually said

"In fact, hospitals now are doing reverse surgery at my order," Trump told supporters at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center. "They're doing reverse surgery. Nobody ever heard about it." There is no record of any such order, no hospital has announced one, and Trump did not name a hospital, a patient, or a policy behind the claim.

Adrian Shanker, who served as deputy assistant secretary for health policy and senior adviser on LGBTQI+ health equity at the Department of Health and Human Services under the Biden administration, said the confusion illustrates a broader problem.

Trans people deserve access to the care that their bodies need, not the care that President Trump thinks that they need.
Adrian Shanker

"These kinds of decisions really don't have room for politicians in the middle of that conversation," Shanker said, adding that medical choices belong to patients and their providers, not the White House.

A debate stumble turned into a talking point

The rally came days after Graham, appointed to the Senate seat after her brother Lindsey Graham's death in July, badly fumbled a televised debate question about Taiwan and the South China Sea. "I'm just going to be honest here," she said. "I'm not that informed on national security." She also claimed South Carolina has 50 million residents; the actual population is roughly 5.5 million.

Appearing afterward on Fox News, Graham pivoted from her national security gap to transgender athletes, telling viewers South Carolinians care more about "boys in girls' sports" than foreign policy. Trump picked up the thread Friday, calling Democratic opponent Dr. Annie Andrews a "far-left political hack" and accusing her of telling "confused children they're trapped in the wrong body." Andrews, a pediatrician, has said repeatedly she does not support gender-affirming surgery for anyone under 18.

What Trump's actual orders do

Nothing in Trump's record supports the idea that hospitals operate at his direction. His January 2025 executive order on gender-affirming care told federal agencies to withhold funding from institutions providing puberty blockers, hormones, or surgery to people under 19; courts later blocked parts of it. A separate rule from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, set to take effect October 13, ends Medicaid and CHIP payments for gender-affirming care for minors. Both measures restrict care. Neither requires, funds, or even mentions surgical reversal.

Trump's picture of children being routinely operated on also doesn't match the data. A 2024 study in JAMA Network Open, examining insurance claims for nearly 23 million minors, found no gender-affirming surgeries among trans children 12 or younger in 2019, and rates of 0.1 per 100,000 among 13- and 14-year-olds and 2.1 per 100,000 among 15- to 17-year-olds. Of the 85 procedures identified, 82 were chest-related. Major medical groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the Endocrine Society, continue to support individualized, guideline-based gender-affirming care.

Where the confusion may come from

Trump may be blending medical care with legal settlements his Justice Department has extracted from hospital systems. In May, Texas Children's Hospital agreed to pay Texas $10 million, end gender-affirming care for minors, and open what officials called the country's first "restorative care" clinic for people who want to detransition. It also cut ties with five physicians and revoked their hospital privileges. The hospital, which said it had produced more than 5 million documents under investigation, called the deal a matter of institutional survival, not an admission of wrongdoing.

In June, the Cleveland Clinic reached a similar agreement, pledging $2 million toward services, including hormonal care, surgical revision, fertility care, and counseling, for people who received gender-affirming treatment before age 19 and later sought to detransition. The Cleveland Clinic said it already provided that care and framed the deal as a continuation, not a new program. It also agreed to pay $308,000 over billing allegations it denies and to largely stop providing gender-affirming care to minors for 20 years, though Ohio law already restricts that care heavily. Neither settlement orders anyone to undergo surgery; both fund care for patients who ask for it voluntarily.

MQ's Take

Detransition is real, but it is rare and it belongs entirely to the patient. It is not something a president can order into existence, and treating it as a political weapon obscures what actually happens in exam rooms: careful screening, informed consent, and years of deliberation before anyone reaches an operating table. When a candidate flubs a debate question on Taiwan and recovers by inventing a crisis around trans people's bodies, that's not a policy position. It's a distraction, and it works precisely because most listeners will never check the claim against an actual executive order.

Sources: them., The Advocate

Cover photo: Daniel Torok, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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