President Trump’s crackdown on gender ideology hasn’t stopped a major medical organization from continuing to promote child sex changes through a multi-million dollar transgender affirming training program offered by its philanthropic arm, public records show.
The American Medical Association (AMA) Foundation launched an LGBTQ medical fellowship in 2021 that offers up to $750,000 grants to academic medical centers to provide “affirming” medical education that trains young doctors to become child sex-change advocates, initiate cross-sex hormones and care for sex-change surgical patients, records show. Top academic medical centers across the country, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Harvard Medical School, Vanderbilt University and Mount Sinai, have partnered with the AMA Foundation to develop LGBTQ fellowships and provide doctors with “experiential learning” opportunities such as following a transgender patient through the sex-change surgery process, providing medical interventions at a child sex-change clinic and learning to provide cross-sex hormones to gender-confused teenagers.
“Knowing this fellowship exists gave me hope.”
The Harvard Medical School–Fenway Health LGBTQIA+ Health Fellowship Program —supported by the AMA Foundation—is shaping the future of LGBTQIA+ care. pic.twitter.com/ysgEIL3rWP
— AMA Foundation (@AMAFound) June 20, 2025
On Sept. 10, 2025, Harvard Medical School listed on its LGBTQ+ fellowship program website that participating doctors had a rotation in “pediatric and adolescent transgender health care” at Boston Children’s Gender Multispecialty Service. However, this description was removed after the DCNF reached out to the LGBTQ fellowship program leadership for comment and did not receive a response.
“The idea that this is normal treatment — that any child that feels confused about their gender ought to get put on these pathways and ought to get affirmed, and ought to get hormones and puberty blockers, and ultimately, surgical procedures — it’s really incredibly dangerous,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, board chairman of Do No Harm told the DCNF.
In June 2025 the AMA Foundation awarded Dr. Elle Lett, a man who identifies as a “transgender woman,” the 2025 Excellence in LGBTQ Health Award for his work on “health equity for queer and trans people of color.”
“This award demonstrates that a career focused on supporting the excluding and marginalized populations in our society through advocacy, research, and organizing is a viable and lauded path for the next generation of physicians,” the AMA foundation said in a Sept. 9 X post.
Additionally, the AMA Foundation awarded a grant to Galaei, a Philadelphia based organization that provides “services, support and advocacy for all Queer, Trans, Indigenous and People of Color (QTBIPOC) communities,” in honor of Dr. Lett, according to its website.
The AMA did not provide the DCNF with a comment. The AMA Foundation did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
Excellence in Medicine Feature: Elle Lett, MD, PhD, MA, received the 2025 Excellence in LGBTQ Health Award.
Dr. Lett is a physician and statistician-epidemiologist whose work focuses on advancing health equity for queer and trans people of color in the United States. pic.twitter.com/xm884UXrPq
— AMA Foundation (@AMAFound) September 9, 2025
Promoting ‘Junk Science’
The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Harvard Medical School and Vanderbilt University, were listed as being actively funded through the AMA Foundation LGBTQ Fellowship program in July 2025 on an archived webpage that has been removed from the AMA Foundation website. The Harvard Medical School, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Vanderbilt University LGBTQ programs are recruiting doctors for a fellowship program beginning in July 1, 2026, according to their websites.
The inaugural four-year fellowship grant was awarded to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and as part of their clinical rotation fellows provided medical services at the UW Health‘s pediatric sex-change clinic. The currently clinic uses standards created by the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), which have been called “junk science” by the Trump administration, to provide puberty blockers and cross sex hormones’ to children, according to its website.
“Our team offers a full range of care and support based on the needs of the child and family. This ranges from observation, advocacy, and guidance to puberty suppression and gender-affirming hormone therapy,” states the UW Health website.
Dr. Brittany Allen, co-medical director of the UW Health’s pediatric gender clinic, described herself as the “pediatrics champion” of the inaugural 2021 LGBTQ+ fellowship and helped develop its curriculum. Allen’s emails revealed the learning objectives for LGBTQ fellowship participants had a significant focus on child sex-changes.
Doctors were expected to identify when gender-confused children were candidates for puberty blockers, be aware of the fertility implications of puberty blockers and understand “best practices and advocacy within school settings.” Allen is an influential child sex change activist and of one of four American Academy of Pediatrics doctors that helped pressure WPATH to remove sex-change surgery age limits from clinical guidance.
The Vanderbilt University Medical Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, UW Health and Allen did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
Learning objectives from the University of Wisconsin-Madison LGBTQ+ Fellowship program.
Dismantling White Supremacy
In addition to promoting child sex changes, the LGBTQ Fellowship focuses on combatting “structural racism” in health care, according to the learning objectives obtained by the DCNF from the University of Wisconsin-Madison program. The objectives stated fellows would learn to understand how structural racism is inherent in health care, identify where they were in their “journey of becoming an anti-racist” and apply an equity lens when caring for patients.
In 2021, the AMA articulated its vision of equipping doctors to “dismantle white supremacy” and create equitable health care systems in its first strategic health equity plan which outlined how it could embed racial justice and health equity into the organization.
Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which have been determined to be illegal by the Supreme Court, undermine the trust between Americans and their doctors Goldfarb told the DCNF.
“The Supreme Court has decided, basically, that DEI is unfair in admissions,” Goldfarb told the DCNF.
“I think this whole agenda undermines the trust of the American people in their physicians. It also gives physicians a very false idea of what what their role should be. Their role should be to take care of the person in front of them in the best way possible, and not factor in race or anything else. But factor in what’s in the patient’s best clinical interest and look at them as an individual and not look at them as some identity that is part of an identity group,” Goldfarb stated.
The AMA has received $15,815,180 in federal funding since 2020, according to the federal Department of Health and Human Services. The AMA told the DCNF these funds have gone towards initiatives meant to improve the U.S. public health infrastructure and workforce.
President Trump signed executive orders on January 20, 2025, prohibiting the use of federal funds to promote gender ideology, the false idea that men and women can change their sex, and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives (DEI).
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