NJ Hospital Chain Cuts Gender-Affirming Care for Minors
RWJBarnabas Health faces backlash from ~100 New Jersey families after abruptly ending gender-affirming care for transgender minors with no transition plan.
Families across central New Jersey say RWJBarnabas Health has abruptly cut off gender-affirming care for their transgender children, even as the hospital system insists the services remain available to existing patients.
The contradiction has left roughly 100 families scrambling to find new providers with no referrals, no transition planning, and no clear answers about what changed or why.
Vidhi Goel, a Central Jersey mother whose transgender son was receiving hormone therapy in New Brunswick, said she received a call from providers within the RWJBarnabas system telling her that services for her child were ending. She said she is part of a text group with nearly 100 other parents who got similar news in recent weeks.
“You just can’t pull the plug on these kinds of things. There has to be some transition planning,” Goel said. “Physicians are supposed to do no harm and to curtail care in the middle of a treatment plan is not under the umbrella of ‘do no harm’.”
RWJBarnabas operates 12 hospitals across New Jersey, multiple pediatric programs, and the Proud Center for LGBTQ+ patients. The system includes nationally recognized gender-affirming surgeons. Last fall, it stopped accepting new pediatric patients for hormone therapy and other gender-affirming care, but the system maintained that existing patients would continue to be served.
Spokesperson Carrie Cristello said Friday that the system’s policy has not changed.
“The federal government and Congress continue to propose and impose restrictions on the provision of gender-affirming care for minors, including proposing rules that will impact physicians, hospitals and healthcare systems,” Cristello said in a statement. “It is our goal to apprise our physicians and patients of anticipated changes in the law that, if enacted, could affect their current clinical care plans. RWJBarnabas Health continues to provide this care to our patients, pending further federal action.”
Cristello did not address why some parents were told by providers within the system that care was ending.
The Trump administration has pushed aggressively to limit gender-affirming care for minors at the federal level, and that pressure is filtering down to hospital systems nationwide. In North Carolina, that state’s largest providers halted gender-affirming care for minors in January. Similar rollbacks have followed at other institutions as health systems brace for potential cuts to federal funding.
For New Jersey families, the stakes are immediate. Hormone therapy for transgender adolescents is not a treatment that can be paused without consequence. Endocrinologists and pediatric specialists have long cautioned that abrupt disruptions to hormone regimens can cause significant physical and psychological harm. The families speaking out say they were given no guidance on how to safely discontinue treatment or where to seek continued care.
New Jersey has some of the strongest state-level protections for transgender residents in the country, and lawmakers here have repeatedly pushed back against federal encroachment on gender-affirming care. But state law cannot fully shield a private hospital system from federal funding threats, and that tension is now playing out in exam rooms and phone calls across the state.
What makes the RWJBarnabas situation particularly difficult to parse is the gap between the institution’s public statements and what patients say they are hearing directly from providers. The system claims continuity. Families describe abandonment. And unlike an official policy shift that could be challenged through state regulators or in court, a pattern of individual phone calls from nurses and doctors is far harder to document and contest.
Goel and others in her network say they are determined to hold the system accountable. But the immediate priority is finding new providers, and in a moment when healthcare systems across the country are restricting this kind of care, that search is getting harder.
The New Jersey Health Department and the state’s congressional delegation have not yet publicly weighed in on the dispute. Given the breadth of RWJBarnabas’s reach across the state and the number of families affected, that silence is unlikely to hold for long.
