University of Utah shuts down LGBTQ youth health clinic citing lawmakers’ crackdown on gender-affirming care​on May 21, 2025 at 12:00 pm

The University of Utah says it has had to shutter its popular health clinic for LGBTQ youth — pointing to a drop in patients after the Legislature’s 2023 ban on doctors providing gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

​The University of Utah has shuttered its popular health clinic for LGBTQ youth — fallout from the Legislature’s 2023 ban on doctors providing gender-affirming care for transgender minors.  

The University of Utah says it has had to shutter its popular health clinic for LGBTQ youth — pointing to a drop in patients after the Legislature’s 2023 ban on doctors providing gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

The U.’s Gender Management & Support Clinic, which had been operating out of Primary Children’s Hospital, informed all patients of the closure this month, and canceled any appointments that had been scheduled for May.

U. Health spokesperson Kathy Wilets confirmed that people who are eligible to continue receiving care have already been transferred to the more general Adolescent Health Program at the university.

“Our commitment is to follow Utah law and provide quality care for our patients,” Wilets said in a statement.

The Utah Legislature passed its ban during the 2023 session, under SB16, and Gov. Spencer Cox quickly signed it into law. The measure prohibits transgender people younger than 18 years old from receiving gender-affirming care in the state, such as a full mastectomy — often called “top surgery” — or accessing hormone therapy, such as puberty blockers or testosterone.

Those treatments are typically prescribed for people experiencing gender dysphoria, a medical diagnosis of the distress caused when there is a conflict between a person’s gender identity and their sex at birth.

The law went into effect on Jan. 28, 2023. Anyone who had already been diagnosed at that time and was receiving hormone treatment was allowed to continue with that care. But surgery was still banned until age 18. And no new patients could start any kind of gender-affirming health care.

Under the law, doctors who provide care in violation of the ban could lose their licenses and face criminal charges.

Legislative lawyers had warned the bill might be found unconstitutional if challenged in court. Initially, the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah and the National Center for Lesbian Rights said they would file a lawsuit. That still has not happened.

“Trans kids are kids — they deserve to grow up without constant political attacks on their lives and health care; we will defend that right,” the ACLU of Utah said in a statement at the time.

The children who had been receiving care before the ban, and therefore are still eligible, have started to age out of the youth clinic, Wilets said. The others who remain able to receive care will do so under the Adolescent Health Program, which has many of the same team members that the Gender Management & Support Clinic did.

Wilets also said the law did not require the U. to shut down the LGBTQ youth clinic, but the decision “was a natural outgrowth of the law as fewer and fewer patients were eligible for these therapies.”

Before it was shut down, Wilets said the clinic was seeing about 200 patients. No employees, she added, were let go because of the closure.

The U. has updated its website for transgender teen medical care to remove references to the gender clinic. An archived version showed it used to say “Adolescent Transgender Medicine.” It now redirects to a site labeled only “Adolescent Health.”

The site had also previously highlighted a recognition from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation from 2022, when the group included the U. on its list of leaders for LGBT+ health care equality.

And it used to say: “We offer a comprehensive clinic for transgender, nonbinary, intersex and gender diverse youth, as well as for youth questioning their gender — care for physical, mental and emotional health.”

In February 2023, the U. had updated the site to note the law change. That note remains on the new website. And that also lists more broad care that teens and young adults can access, including treatment for eating disorders or chronic pain, through the Adolescent Health Program.

To receive gender-affirming care, a young Utah patient would have to travel out of state.

Then a member of the Utah Senate, Republican Mike Kennedy — who now represents Utah’s 3rd Congressional District in the U.S. House — said he ran the measure because the science isn’t there to support gender-affirming care.

“We can’t allow social policy to outpace science, especially when scientific evidence is still emerging and lacking in consensus,” Kennedy said in a statement at the time.

He also said the bill wasn’t perfect, which Cox echoed when he signed it, but that a pause was needed in Utah.