The American Parents Coalition is urging Congress to investigate the American Academy of Pediatrics’ federal funding, alleging that the group has prioritized promoting transgender ideology “over parental rights,” the Daily Caller News Foundation has first learned.
APC Executive Director Alleigh Marré claimed in a Wednesday letter to Republican Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy and Republican Kentucky Rep. Brett Guthrie that the AAP has “seemingly abandoned its role as a scientific body” and substituted “evidence-based medicine” for “political advocacy.” She added that the pediatric organization has “openly” defied President Donald Trump’s “executive order on transgender medical interventions for children” while still receiving “millions of dollars” in taxpayer-funded federal grants.
Marré’s letter alleges the AAP has continued to promote “puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones as ‘reversible’ and ‘partially reversible’ treatments for minors, even as other medical reports highlight the harms of these treatments for children.”
“Organizations that receive federal funding must be held accountable for blatant disregard of federal policy,” Marré told the DCNF in a statement. “Despite mounting scientific evidence, the American Academy of Pediatrics continues to recommend harmful and irreversible gender interventions for minors.”
“Americans deserve transparency about whether their tax dollars are being used to advance political priorities rather than children’s safety and well-being,” she added.
The AAP did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
The AAP previously worked “very closely” with a transgender medical advocacy group to push for medical sex change treatments for children, the DCNF first reported in June 2024. In December 2025, AAP publicly called on federal officials to “rescind proposed restrictions on care for transgender youths that are unprecedented and not grounded in science.”
The AAP notably sued the Trump administration in February for launching a probe into its guidance on sex-change procedures for minors.
Trump issued an order in January 2025 stating it is now the “policy” of the U.S. that “it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. alleged in a November 2025 statement that the American Medical Association and the AAP have each “peddled the lie that chemical and surgical sex-rejecting procedures could be good for children.”
Between 2019 and 2023, 13,994 minors underwent sex change treatments in the U.S. with 5,747 minors undergoing sex change surgeries, according to Do No Harm’s Stop the Harm Database.
