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New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) has issued a warning to health care centers across the state that are considering ending their gender-affirming care programs due to a recent executive order from President Donald Trump: Doing so will violate state law.
Last fall, New York voters passed a constitutional amendment expanding protections against discrimination for several groups, including transgender and nonbinary people. But after Trump issued an order barring gender-affirming care treatments for trans youth and some trans adults, some health care centers began canceling appointments for individuals who had been scheduled to have their treatments continue.
Trump’s order contains a number of bogus claims, including that health care professionals are “maiming and sterilizing” children, and wrongly insinuates that a large number of people who receive gender-affirming care experience regret. The order also falsely calls gender-affirming care a “dangerous trend,” errantly pushing the far right talking point that trans youth are merely taking part in a fad or a “social contagion.”
Trump’s order bars federal assistance to health care centers that provide transgender youth and adults as old as 19 with gender-affirming care options, including puberty blockers and hormones, treatments that are still available to cisgender youth as prescribed by health care professionals under the order — clearly a discriminatory action. It also blocks surgeries for transgender youth, a rare treatment plan that is typically only offered to older teens where other options have failed, and which is also still offered to cisgender youth.
According to the Williams Institute at UCLA:
Gender-affirming care is considered safe, effective, and medically necessary by major professional health associations, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Endocrine Society. … [Laws] that limit access to gender-affirming health care for minors include criminal penalties against health professionals and parents who provide or enable access to such care.
Hospitals across the country reacted to Trump’s order by halting their youth-based gender-affirming care programs. At least one New York City hospital system, NYU Langone Health, was one of them. Although that system didn’t publicly state that it was their official policy, after two children’s appointments for receiving puberty-blocking medication were canceled, word spread quickly that treatments were being stopped for all.
Shortly after news of NYU Langone Health’s actions, James’s office issued a letter directed to hospitals and health centers across the state that receive federal funds, telling them that, while the executive order may apply to them, New York’s constitutional amendment barring discrimination against trans people still does, too.
“Regardless of the availability of federal funding, we write to further remind you of your obligations to comply with New York State laws,” the letter stated. “Electing to refuse services to a class of individuals based on their protected status, such as withholding the availability of services from transgender individuals based on their gender identity or their diagnosis of gender dysphoria, while offering such services to cisgender individuals, is discrimination under New York law.”
The letter further advised the health care centers being impacted by Trump’s order to contact James’s office with any questions.
Although Trump’s order appears to be blocked within the state of New York, for now, that is not the case for other states across the country. Dozens of states have laws specifically barring gender-affirming care for transgender youth, while medical professionals in areas that had previously protected gender-affirming care are now barred from administering it because their state lacks the constitutional protections that are in place in the Empire State.
A legal challenge to the executive order is likely to happen.
“It’s very clear that this order, in combination with the other orders that we’ve seen [since Trump took office], are meant to not protect anyone in this country, but rather to single-mindedly drive out transgender people of all ages from all walks of civic life,” Harper Seldin, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, said to PBS News.
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