After Boasting About $40K Trans Surgeries, Vanderbilt Reverses Course

Just a few years after boasting about how transgender surgeries were “huge money makers,” Vanderbilt University Medical Center will no longer perform the procedures.

The Nashville-based health care center confirmed to The Daily Wire that the surgeries, which include procedures like crafting pseudo-genitalia for gender-confused individuals and removing the breasts of women who identify as men, were being phased out for logistical reasons.

“Due to operational limitations and lack of surgical coverage, Vanderbilt Health will cease providing gender-affirming plastic surgeries for adults,” a spokesman for the hospital told The Daily Wire. “Vanderbilt Health continues to provide nonsurgical gender-affirming care for adults 19 years and older. Vanderbilt Health does not provide any gender-affirming care for patients younger than 19.”

Vanderbilt University Medical Center, also known as Vanderbilt Health, is a separate entity from Vanderbilt University.

The hospital’s transgender medical program first faced criticism in September 2022 when Daily Wire host Matt Walsh published videos highlighting comments from Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor discussing how lucrative transgender surgeries were.

“It’s a lot of money,” said Taylor, the program’s director at the time. “These surgeries make a lot of money.”

Taylor discussed how “chest reconstruction” could bring in $40,000 per patient and described “female-to-male bottom surgeries” — where a fake penis is constructed by taking skin from the forearm, abdomen, and thigh — as “huge money makers.”

“These surgeries are labor intensive, there are a lot of follow-ups, they require a lot of our time, and they make money,” Taylor said. “They make money for the hospital.”

Vanderbilt Health’s transgender center opened in 2018, and Taylor said its purpose was “to coordinate” patients’ “care wherever they are in the transition process.”

Taylor has since left VUMC and now runs a primary care center in Massachusetts and describes herself as an expert in “general LGBTQ Health and Adolescent Medicine.”

The investigation from Walsh prompted a statewide probe from Republican officials who moved quickly to pass a ban on transgender procedures for kids. That ban was challenged by the ACLU, but was upheld in June 2025 by the Supreme Court.

Over two dozen states have passed laws to shield minors from transgender surgeries and hormonal procedures. The Trump administration has come down hard on hospitals that offer transgender procedures to kids, pulling federal funding and initiating investigations into hospitals across the country.

One bill currently making its way through the Tennessee legislature would prohibit dollars from TennCare, the state’s health funding program for impoverished people, from funding transgender procedures.