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Families, LGBTQ advocates sue to block Trump order on care for transgender youth

By Jenna Portnoy and Fenit Nirappil Washington Post

Transgender minors and advocacy groups representing LGBTQ individuals and their families and health-care providers sued Tuesday to block President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting transgender people and their health care.

The suit seeks to roll back orders Trump signed to officially recognize only male and female sexes and to attempt to end federal support for providers of gender transition care for people under the age of 19. The latter order prompted some hospitals to suspend or scale back care, leaving patients and parents reeling.

Kristen Chapman, one of the plaintiffs, moved with her daughter to Virginia in July 2023 to access care banned in their home state of Tennessee. The day after Trump’s order denying care to transgender young people, her 17-year-old daughter’s appointment at Children’s Hospital of Richmond was canceled, Chapman said in a virtual news conference.

“I thought Virginia would be a safe place for me and my daughter,” she said. “Instead, I am heartbroken, tired and scared.”

Chapman’s daughter is one of seven unnamed transgender individuals younger than 19 who are suing the Trump administration, along with advocacy groups PFLAG, which represents parents, families and friends of LGBTQ+ people, and GLMA, which supports LGBTQ+ health-care providers. Lambda Legal and the American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of the group in federal court in Baltimore.

The Richmond children’s hospital at Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Virginia paused care, including surgeries, while Children’s National Hospital in D.C. and the children’s hospital in Norfolk, paused prescriptions of puberty blockers and hormone therapy.

Outside the region, Denver Health in Colorado stopped performing gender-affirming surgeries and NYU Langone Health canceled some appointments for transgender children, the New York Times reported, prompting protests Monday.

“What these orders try to do by presidential fiat is not only to violate the rights of transgender patients and their families but to circumvent Congress’s desire that federal financial recipients do not discriminate on the basis of sex,” said Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, senior counsel and health-care strategist at Lambda Legal.

Critics of gender transition care, including Trump, have decried it as “chemical and surgical mutilation.” The president’s order seeks to cut Medicare and Medicaid funding to health providers that offer gender transition care to people under 19. A loss of federal funding could jeopardize care for not just transgender young people, but also all patients, they say.

The lawsuit details how the orders could endanger the mental and physical health of the young transgender plaintiffs, who are between the ages of 12 and 18.

A 14-year-old boy from Bethesda, Maryland, learned two days after Trump signed the order seeking to block gender transition care that he would not be able to start hormone therapy as planned at Children’s National, according to the suit. (The hospital has said care was paused while officials navigate the orders.)

In another case, the suit says, a 12-year-old girl told her parents from the time she was a toddler that she did not want a beard when she grew up. She couldn’t get an appointment for a puberty-blocking implant at NYU Langone Health after the Trump order, and her father fears her depression will return.

An 18-year-old from New York who has awaited chest masculinization surgery for six years had surgery set for early this month at NYU, the suit said. The procedure was canceled, leaving him devastated.

In the past five years, more than half of states have already banned doctors from offering transition health care to minors, including medication. Yet most transgender children do not take medication to assist with their transition.

Trump’s orders have drawn a mix of criticism and praise in the past week, and are part of a broader effort by the administration to roll back care and protections for transgender people.

The president has also, among other changes, directed agencies to issue government documents showing people’s sex at conception, and ordered revisions to the Pentagon’s policy on transgender troops, which could lead to a future ban on their military service and have already been challenged in court.

Virginia Attorney General Jason S. Miyares (R) wrote in a memo Thursday to UVA and VCU that any hospital or state agency that “continues to perform chemical and surgical mutilation of children” risks losing all federal medical and research grants.

The White House on Monday issued a news release saying the order was already having its “intended effect” to prevent children from “being maimed and sterilized by adults perpetuating a radical, false claim that they can somehow change a child’s sex.”

But the order also drew fierce backlash, including statements of support for transgender rights from governors and attorneys general, and protests from patients disappointed in hospitals that they say caved to the president’s orders rather than fight back.

Allison Spillman, the mother of a transgender teenager who received transition care at UVA, blasted the hospital’s leadership for abruptly ending its program. She wonders if the hospital would have been as quick to scrap other types of health care, such as cancer treatment, if Trump had ordered that.

“I was appalled this care was being ripped out from underneath us and, for so many families like us, without any planning or preparation,” Spillman said.

Julie Swoone, a member of the New York City branch of the Democratic Socialists of America, helped organize Monday’s protest of hundreds against NYU Langone Health after the system halted appointments. Swoone has received care, including gender transition care as an adult, at the health system for more than a decade.

“It’s not based on their medical expertise or what they think is best for me or any other patient,” Swoone said. “It’s the administration’s decision based on politics and money and power.”

Families and doctors of transgender adolescents say gender transition care, including medications, can be lifesaving and help young people who may already be struggling for acceptance to live happier lives.

New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) said in a letter Monday that federal funding could not be frozen based on the order and that ending gender transition care could put hospitals at risk of violating state law.

Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown (D) said he is considering all options to protect transgender people, their families, teachers and health-care providers. “We cannot stand by while the Trump administration denies the humanity of our family members, neighbors, and friends,” said Kelsey Hartman, a spokeswoman for the Maryland attorney general. She said the office “stands with the transgender community and will defend their rights with all the tools at our disposal.”

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Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.