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Officials in 16 states and Washington, D.C., filed a lawsuit Friday to block the Trump administration’s investigations into hospitals and doctors who provide transition-related care to minors.
The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, argues that the administration, by threatening to prosecute providers, is trying to institute a national ban on puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgeries for transgender minors even though Congress has enacted no such federal ban.
“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, who is leading the coalition of states in the suit, said in a statement. “This administration is ruthlessly targeting young people who already face immense barriers just to be seen and heard, and are putting countless lives at risk in the process. In New York and nationwide, we will never stop fighting for the dignity, safety, and basic rights of the transgender community.”
More than half of states have laws that restrict or completely ban transition care for minors. Care is legal in all of the states that joined Friday’s complaint. They are California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai’i, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, as well as Washington, D.C.
Within days of his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order seeking to restrict such care nationwide for anyone under 19 years old. Among its provisions, the order sought to bar federal funding from going to medical schools and hospitals that provide such care. As a result of the order, several hospitals announced they were pausing transition care for people under 19. Multiple judges blocked that part of the order, and many hospitals resumed care.
Despite the injunction, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo in April that said the Justice Department would use a variety of existing laws to investigate providers of gender-affirming care for minors. According to Friday’s complaint, the DOJ has issued guidance that “threatens baseless civil and criminal prosecution” of providers, and, just last month, issued more than 20 subpoenas to providers of such care across the country demanding that they give the federal government private patient information.
The lawsuit, which names Trump, Bondi and the DOJ as defendants, challenges Trump’s executive order seeking to restrict access to transition care for minors, Bondi’s April memo and another June memo from Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate that directed the DOJ’s Civil Division to prioritize investigations into doctors who provide such care.
The complainants, 16 attorneys general and the governor of Pennsylvania, argue that transition care is legally protected in all of their states and that federal attempts to block the care “trammel on State power” in violation of the Tenth Amendment. They also argue that the administration’s actions force providers to make “an impossible choice” of either defying the federal threats or complying and violating their state’s laws against discrimination in medical care.
“These efforts to chill the provision of healthcare for adolescents — even in states where such care is legal and protected — show that the Agency Defendants have adopted and are engaged in a systematic effort to leverage the threat of criminal and civil enforcement to eliminate medically necessary care for transgender adolescents in the United States,” the complaint states.
The Trump administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As the DOJ has opened investigations into some providers of transition care for minors, a rising number of hospitals — including those in states without laws that restrict trans health care — have announced that they plan to close their youth gender clinics.
Just in the last two months, the Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU, Yale New Haven Health, Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, Children’s National Hospital, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, UChicago Medicine and the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles have announced they will end gender-affirming care programs for minors and, in most cases, anyone under 19.
The complaint notes that the administration has celebrated these announcements, pointing to a press release from the administration last week titled, “President Trump Promised to End Child Sexual Mutilation — and He Delivered.”
“These changes have been touted by Defendants as precisely what was intended by their unlawful and disingenuous targeting: the end of healthcare for transgender individuals under 19,” the complaint states.
The plaintiffs ask the court to declare unconstitutional the portion of Trump’s order that would bar federal funding from going to hospitals that provide transition care to people under 19 and prohibit the DOJ from enforcing the memos from Bondi and Shumate.
Nearly all major medical associations in the United States, such as the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association, support access to transition-related care for minors and oppose restrictions on it.
Some European countries have restricted access to such care, but only the United Kingdom has indefinitely banned new prescriptions of puberty blockers to treat minors for gender dysphoria, the medical term for the distress caused by a misalignment between someone’s birth sex and gender identity.
Jo Yurcaba is a reporter for NBC Out.
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More than a dozen states sue Trump administration to block trans care investigations – NBC News
