Gender-affirming care for transgender youth is at risk in LA and nationwide

November 28, 2025·31 min·2 clips

A former Children's Hospital LA patient says gender-affirming care is the reason he is alive today — and he later became a staff member before the clinic closed.

The center is gone. Nereida Moreno, filling in for Antonia Serejido, opens with the closure of Children's Hospital Los Angeles's Los Angeles Center for Trans Youth Health and Development. The timing matters. The episode ties the shutdown to threatened federal funding cuts for providers of gender-affirming care for minors and wider restrictions on LGBTQ rights. The hospital heard plenty of public pressure. Current and former patients, community members, and the California Attorney General's office called on Children's Hospital Los Angeles to stand up to the Trump administration and keep the center open. It closed anyway. Then the story turns to access. After the break tease, the reporting asks where families go when many doctors no longer publicly advertise this care. Visibility has narrowed. Families are having a harder time finding providers who openly say they offer gender-affirming care, which makes the search much more practical and much more stressful. This is not treated as an abstract policy fight. The show keeps it rooted in Los Angeles while connecting it to national pressure, federal funding threats, and LGBTQ-rights restrictions. Underwriting and public-broadcasting support take up a lot of the excerpt. Pasadena Water and Power, Shopify, LAist listener support, Gordon and Donna Crawford, and Corporation for Public Broadcasting language appear around the reporting, separate from the story itself. The main thread stays clear: the closure, the calls to resist it, and the harder search for care afterward. The closing material moves away from the episode, with LAist promoting voter guidance and its effort to make complicated issues easier for listeners to follow.

As heard by us

A careful local story that connects one closure to a broader rollback in care.

Imperfect Paradise takes a local Los Angeles closure and uses it to show how quickly transgender youth care can narrow when one center closes and families have fewer obvious places to turn.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a grounded read on what the closure of a trans youth care center means for families in Los Angeles.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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