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The Trump administration on Thursday announced new measures to target hospitals and doctors providing care to trans youth. Under the new rules unveiled by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who leads Medicaid and Medicare, the government would strip federal funding for any hospitals that provide pediatric gender-affirming care. The new rules were announced a day after the House of Representatives narrowly approved a bill that aims to criminalize providing gender-affirming medical care for any transgender person under 18 and subject providers to hefty fines and prison time.
"This is a drastic departure from any concern about science, concern about parents and their rights," says Chase Strangio, co-director of the American Civil Liberties Union's LGBTQ & HIV Project. "It is putting hospitals in an impossible situation, and just another example of this administration undermining and threatening all of our health and welfare."
We also speak with Dr. Jeffrey Birnbaum, a pediatrician and adolescent medicine specialist who works with transgender youth in New York City. He says the families he works with are "terrified right now," but vows to continue his work. "I refuse to stop providing this care, knowing that I could potentially face 10 years in prison and a felony charge. I'm willing to go down that route, if necessary."
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 NEONMovies can't, by definition, be all things to all people, and yet Anora—winner of the Cannes Film Festival's highest honor, the Palme d'Or—manages to vacillate between assorted registers with stunning, and ultimately affecting, aplomb.
Another of The Florida Project and Red Rocket writer/director Sean Baker's tales of marginalized individuals struggling to survive and find themselves in an often-unforgiving world, the film is a character study, romance, crime saga, screwball comedy, and vérité drama all wrapped into one unique and dexterous package. More impressive than its nimbleness, however, is its poise and empathy, the latter of which is chiefly bestowed upon its protagonist, whose life is thrown for a rollercoaster-grade loop-di-loop thanks to a chance introduction.
Ani (Mikey Madison, in a star-making turn) is a Brighton Beach 23-year-old who lives with her sister and earns a living stripping at a local club. Anora, which hits theaters Oct. 18, introduces her at the end of a long pan along a bench where men are receiving lap dances from erotic professionals. Fixating on Ani's face as she flashes the fake smile that her customers crave and her superiors demand, Baker's camera creates immediate, intimate engagement with the young woman, and that continues as it presents snapsh
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