Oped: Thundermist Health Center has betrayed trans kids - Restore youth care!
"Trans youth healthcare is not a lost battle unless we let it be. And we cannot let it be. They are depending on us."
We are failing trans youth. And many of us don’t even know it.
In the past year, Boston’s Fenway Health, originally founded as a queer health program operating out of a church basement, has stopped providing youth transition care. East Bay Community Action Program shuttered its trans health program entirely. And closest to home, Thundermist Health Center—with the slogan “We Care for EveryBODY” painted in rainbow across its mission and values page—has quietly stopped providing youth gender affirming care.
The reason for this is as clear as it is infuriating: the September 2025 HRSA memo and subsequent December 2025 directive from the federal Department of Health and Human Services’ director, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that threatened to strip Medicare and Medicaid funding from health centers that continued to provide this life-saving care. But this order currently stands overturned by a federal judge—and yet trans youth remain abandoned by programs whose purported values should center them and their wellbeing.
Many Rhode Islanders have tuned in to the judicial volleyball match over subpoenas for trans youth’s healthcare information currently targeting Hasbro Children’s Hospital (the pediatric division of Brown University Health-owned Rhode Island Hospital). But many are not aware that this federal targeting—following the never-repudiated proclamation put forth by Michael Knowles at CPAC three years ago that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely”—seeks specifically to punish the only major clinic in the state that has continued to serve trans youth, forcing them into the unconscionable position of potentially having to give both identifying details and private personal information of children to a government that has made clear its intentions to persecute and strip rights from them.
We have let things reach this point. We have let the most vulnerable among us be abandoned, cast aside, and stripped of access to healthcare, without which they have a significantly higher chance of death. This is not a matter where we can stand by, nor where we can accept the losses we have already taken and only try to prevent further setbacks. Every week that children stand on waiting lists or are entirely without access, irreparable harm is being done to them. We have a duty to provide them with access to care—and therefore a duty to look critically at those who, every second, make the decision not to provide it despite having had the structures to do so up and running mere months ago.
Thundermist Health Center, with three main locations scattered across Rhode Island, has been a home for trans healthcare in our state for over a decade. Their Trans Health Access Team coordinated and provided care for over 1800 trans patients in 2023, with indications of continued growth. This is why it came as such devastating news to many trans people in the state, as we have learned—slowly, by word of mouth—that Thundermist took the cowardly route of dropping medical support for trans youth precisely when it is needed most.
We all understand the reasons why Thundermist and other providers have backed out of this care. Since January 2025, the federal government has ramped up funding and legal threats towards trans youth healthcare providers. Even this past month, Thundermist received a letter from a Senate committee demanding details on their trans healthcare over the last decade. But an explanation is not an excuse from our duty towards these children. Rather, it must be the impetus to come together and ensure that they are not left in the cold as targets of fascism.
It is possible for us to stand up for youth and try to make it so that access to healthcare increases rather than faltering. This could look like Thundermist and other clinics reopening youth care directly. Or it could look like caring people involved with these health centers using their expertise, connections, and knowledge to support the creation of independent clinics that are not reliant on federal funding. If these are impossible, it could even look like building a grassroots community clinic from the ground up. Each of these approaches has its own challenges. But the only way to face these challenges is together: working in solidarity to demand action from those who can support these efforts, and using our skills, connections, and care to create what we can together. Trans youth healthcare is not a lost battle unless we let it be. And we cannot let it be.
They are depending on us.
Providence General Assembly’s Trans Unity & Resistance Working Group
That Trump wants to deprive kids of healthcare is both despicable and totally expected. It is hard to be brave and resolute in defiance when your funding depends upon it, but the decision to abandon trans youth instead of shutting down completely or going as far as you can go with the law suits before giving in does not make the leadership of Thundermist look good.