This week’s announcement that one of the largest gender clinics for minors in the US will shut its doors could well go down in history as America’s equivalent to the Tavistock scandal.

The Tavistock Center was shuttered in England three years ago amid concerns that it was fast-tracking troubled kids onto puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones without adequate reviews and guardrails. It has been replaced by two regional centers that are designed to follow stricter protocols for medicalized gender transitions and sex change procedures.

In the United States, the Center for Transyouth Health and Development, at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, notified nearly 3,000 patient families that the Trump Administration’s policies leave it no choice but to cease operations. According to the Los Angeles Times, the center told the families that federal authorities warned of dire consequences — including potential prosecution of doctors — for flouting the Trump administration’s edicts.

The Trump administration has taken actions to make this happen. There was an Executive Order barring federal funding for such medical interventions (the order has been temporarily halted by a federal judge), a Department of Justice directive to investigate “gender-affirming” surgeries, and an FBI hotline for the public to submit tips about hospitals, clinics or doctors who “mutilate” children “under the guise of gender-affirming care.”

The pressure from the administration is no doubt a major factor in the Los Angeles children’s hospital decision to suspend operations of its Center for Transyouth, but another potential factor is the likelihood of class-action lawsuits against such centers amid growing concerns that they recklessly endangered children with false promises and experimental procedures.

The Center for Transyouth’s medical director, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, was a pioneer in relaxing the standards created by the so-called Dutch Protocol for treating children with gender dysphoria. The Dutch model was based on “watchful waiting” for as long as a year to make sure the youth qualified for medical interventions that would lead to a permanent sex change.

Olson-Kennedy was featured on a recent New York Times podcast, called The Protocol, that described how she helped usher in a new approach that dispensed with psychological assessments and other “gatekeeping” precautions that created obstacles and delays in providing medical interventions.

Olson-Kennedy has already been sued by a former patient who was put on puberty blockers at age 12, got a double mastectomy at age 14, and later regretted the decision and detransitioned.

As the New York Times has reported, Olson-Kennedy has withheld publishing a federally funded study on the effectiveness of puberty blockers because her results did not show that the hormones improved mental health for children. Olson-Kennedy admitted that she sat on the study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, because the poor results could provide ammunition for conservatives to challenge the validity and morality of medicalized gender interventions for youth.

More than half the states in the US have imposed bans on medicalized sex-change procedures for minors, and the Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling soon on the legality of Tennessee’s ban on pediatric gender medicine.

Jurors will likely listen to descriptions of the phallus-preserving vaginoplasty or penile-preserving vaginoplasty, a cosmetic procedure that creates a person with both a penis and a vagina. Some may even wonder whether these ambitious surgeons are also creating patients with two penises.

Olson-Kennedy belongs to the school of thought that one’s gender is not a product of biology or sex, that children know their true gender, and that these children should be encouraged to express their true authentic selves.

With these multiplying examples, and much more sure to come as details continue to emerge, hospital officials and medical malpractice insurers must be looking at gender clinics not as cash cows or wonder drug dispensaries, but as a massive liability.