AMA, others kicked out of CDC vaccine workgroups.
Seventeen Democratic officials accused President Donald Trump’s administration of unlawfully intimidating health care providers into stopping gender-affirming care for transgender youth in a lawsuit filed Friday.
The complaint comes after a month in which at least eight major hospitals and hospital systems — all in states where the care is allowed under state law — announced they were stopping or restricting the care. The latest announcement came Thursday from UI Health in Chicago.
Trump’s administration announced in July that it was sending subpoenas to providers and focusing on investigating them for fraud. It later boasted in a news release that hospitals are halting treatments.
The Democratic officials say Trump’s policies are an attempt to impose a nationwide ban on the treatment for people under 19 — and that’s unlawful because there’s no federal statute that bans providing the care to minors. The suit was filed by attorneys general from 15 states and the District of Columbia, plus the governor of Pennsylvania, in U.S. District Court in Boston.
“The federal government is running a cruel and targeted harassment campaign against providers who offer lawful, lifesaving care to children,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement.
Trump and others who oppose the care say that it makes permanent changes that people who receive it could come to regret — and maintain that it’s being driven by questionable science.
Since 2021, 28 states with Republican-controlled legislatures have adopted policies to ban or restrict gender-affirming care for minors. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states have a right to enforce those laws.
For families with transgender children, the state laws and medical center policy changes have sparked urgent scrambles for treatment.
Medical centers are responding to political and legal pressure
The Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, the biggest public provider of gender-affirming care for children in teens in the U.S., closed in July.
At least seven other major hospitals and health systems have made similar announcements, including Children’s
National in Washington D.C., UChicago Medicine and Yale New Haven Health.
Kaiser Permanente, which operates in California and several other states, said it would pause gender-affirming surgeries for those under 19 as of the end of August, but would continue hormone therapy.
Connecticut Children’s Medical Center cited “an increasingly complex and evolving landscape” for winding down care.
Other hospitals, including Penn State, had already made similar decisions since Trump returned to office in January.
Alex Sheldon, executive director of GLMA, an organization that advocates for health care equity for LGBTQ+ people, said the health systems have pulled back the services for legal reasons, not medical ones.
“Not once has a hospital said they are ending care because it is not medically sound,” Sheldon said.
Trump’s administration has targeted the care in multiple ways
Trump devoted a lot of attention to transgender people in his campaign last year as part of a growing pushback from conservatives as transgender people have gained visibility and acceptance on some fronts. Trump criticized gender-affirming care, transgender women in women’s sports, and transgender women’s use of women’s facilities such as restrooms.
On his inauguration day in January, Trump signed an executive order defining the sexes as only male and female for government purposes, setting the tone for a cascade of actions that affect transgender people. About a week later, Trump called to stop using federal money, including from Medicaid, for gender-affirming care for those under 19.