On a recent summer morning, Daniel Heumann lounged in his parents’ backyard in Willimantic, looking forward to a family bike ride later in the day.
It's a picture-postcard New England setting: dogs chasing each other in a flower garden, vegetable beds sprawling on the other side and chickens pecking in their coop. And Heumann could be any 20-year-old with his lopsided grin, hands in his pockets as he talks about helping his dad build the large brick firepit.
Except Heumann today is the result of eight years worth of gender-affirming care at Connecticut Children’s, he said, allowing him to be his “authentic self.”
“After I transitioned at 7 and started puberty blockers at 9, when I got my testosterone shots, when I got top surgery, they are all the reason I'm here,” he said. “I would probably have committed suicide [without that care] because I was so uncomfortable and you feel like your body is changing in a way you don't want it to change.”
Earlier this year, an executive order from President Donald Trump said children seeking gender change were being “maimed” by doctors. Soon after, hospitals across the country began shutting down their gender care programs.
Among them, Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago – where Heumann first began transitioning – and Connecticut Children’s in Hartford, where his care continued at the age of 11.
Today a student at the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at the University of Connecticut and a transgender advocate, Heumann is a patient at the gender clinic for adults at UConn Health. But he said he’s worried about other trans kids whose care ended suddenly.
“The people I know that have been relying on Connecticut Children’s to receive their care are terrified, because it's the same way I was when I was younger,” he said. “I mean, this care is what saves kids.”
‘Politically-motivated decisions’
Heather Page’s 11-year-old trans daughter was about to start hormone treatment at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital in New Haven after years of counseling.
“She’s on the brink of puberty … developing an Adam's apple, her bone structure broadening, her voice deepening,” Page said. “We want to offset some of the effects that biological male puberty is going to have, so that way she can continue to live comfortably in her own skin.”
But then Yale shuttered their gender affirmation program, sending the family in a scramble to find a doctor to provide their child care.
Page managed to secure an appointment for her daughter, whom she requested remain anonymous, at Boston Children’s Medical Center – a three-hour drive from Bethel, Connecticut, where she lives.
At Yale, her child’s doctors were all in one location and they communicated with each other over her care, Page said. But now, “we have to piecemeal things [and] that creates a different experience and has different risk associated with that. So I'm very concerned.”
And Boston is out of their insurance network.
Another mother – Melissa Combs in Farmington, Connecticut – is also scrambling to find a provider after Yale stopped prescribing estrogen injections for her 17-year-old trans daughter.
“These decisions made by Yale New Haven Health leadership are politically motivated and people should be concerned about politically-motivated decisions about evidence-based, medically necessary and legally-protected care in Connecticut,” Combs said.
A decision ‘not made lightly’
In July, the U.S. Department of Justice issued subpoenas to providers performing transgender procedures on youth and children. Both Connecticut hospitals shut down their gender affirmation programs for youth and children soon after.
In a statement, Yale said the decision to stop prescribing hormones “was not made lightly,” and that trans patients would continue to receive mental health counseling.
Connecticut Children's said it made the “difficult decision” to unwind its gender care program based on guidance from medical and legal experts.
But doctors providing gender-affirming treatment have, until recently, advocated to continue to be able to provide the care.
Earlier this year, Connecticut lawmakers considered – and ultimately failed to pass – a bill to protect health care providers offering reproductive and gender-affirming health services.
“There are difficult times and the rights of several groups are being eroded across the country, including medical access to gender-affirming care,” Dr. Priya Phulwani of Connecticut Children’s testified in March, in support of the bill.
“This legislation will empower providers such as myself to reach beyond Connecticut via telemedicine to support patients in states where in-person care for hormone therapy is fully banned. Furthermore, it will protect me and my colleagues from hostile out-of-state prosecution,” she said.
The Judiciary committee vote was split across party lines, but the bill ultimately did not get a floor vote.
Across the country, the federal government’s policy on gender-affirmative care is also raising another controversial political issue: transition regret.
Trump’s January executive order on transgender care claims “countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated” after getting treatment.
But Heumann, the Connecticut-based transgender advocate, said he is unable to see gender-affirming surgery as mutilation.
“I was just doing something to make me feel comfortable in my body,” Heumann said.
He said the decision was made in consultation with a team of experts including psychologists, endocrinologists, surgeons and pediatric specialists.
“It doesn't happen overnight. It happens after years of questioning your gender and questioning who you are, and then it happens over years of having discussions with medical providers,” he said. “It is such a well thought out and deeply discussed transition.”
Data on gender-affirming care
Kinnon Ross MacKinnon, a researcher who studies detransition, recently wrote in the New York Times and in a subsequent longer piece in Substack that early studies on transition regret found rates of 1–6%, mostly among adult transgender women who had a full surgical transition.
Newer studies from Norway, the U.K. and Finland showed that as high as 10% of young patients stopped or reversed transgender treatment.
“We must take both realities seriously: that gender-affirming care is life-saving for many, and that some individuals experience profound regret, grief, or harm. Unfortunately, the current U.S. political climate is undermining efforts to understand and address these complexities,” MacKinnon wrote.
“Rather than using this data to argue for bans, researchers stress it should be used to improve informed consent and patient support — not eliminate care,” MacKinnon wrote.
‘I’m here today’
With hospitals shutting down tragender care, Melissa Combs’ daughter, 17-year-old June, said her hormone medications run out in three months – and she doesn't have a doctor yet.
And she can’t see herself as a man. She’s a woman – she said – showing off her long, silky purple hair.
“This is some really good hair dye that my mom has been doing,” June said, and talked of packing up for college in New York, where she will be studying film making.
Back in Williamantic, Daniel’s dad Micah Heumann, director of the office of undergraduate research at UConn, said Daniel didn’t change his gender on a whim. He said for years the family pushed him to embrace his birth gender, but the child was miserable.
And so at age seven, “Daniel changed his name and pronouns, and that happened based on hours and hours of discussion and research, knowing that he was struggling in his identity and always considering himself a boy from as early as we can even remember,” Micah said.
That parental support – and the gender-affirming care that Daniel continues to get from a different doctor – allows him to be himself, Daniel said.
“I am Daniel and I'm here today,” he said.
Connecticut Public’s Michayla Savitt contributed to the reporting.
Anyone in crisis, including young people, can call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
