Three Democratic-led states — Washington, Oregon, and Minnesota — and three doctors filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Friday, challenging its anti-trans order that targets gender-affirming care for transgender youth.
Last month, Trump signed an executive order threatening to block federal funding for hospitals that offer gender-affirming care for transgender youth under the age of 19. Although LGBTQ advocates have emphasized that the order is not law (and that hospitals should not comply even if it were), many health care providers have preemptively restricted access to care.
The attorneys general’s lawsuit challenging this executive order argues that cutting federal funding for gender-affirming care exceeds Trump’s executive authority and violates constitutional protections, including equal protection and state sovereignty.
“The order is a cruel and baseless broadside against transgender youth, their families, and the doctors and medical institutions that provide them this critical care,” the complaint says. The states are asking the court to block the order and to keep the congressionally-allocated funding in place.
This is one of two current legal challenges to the executive order. Last week, seven families with transgender children, along with two advocacy groups, PFLAG National and GLMA, filed a separate lawsuit arguing that the order is unconstitutional.
“For decades, doctors and other health professionals have followed well-established medical standards to provide care that helps transgender youth thrive,” Alex Sheldon, executive director of GLMA, said in a press release about the lawsuit. “Now, an extreme political agenda is trying to overrule that expertise, putting young people and their providers in danger.”
The impact of the order is already being felt, particularly by families who relocated to states where gender-affirming care was once protected, only to find those safeguards disappearing. One plaintiff in the lawsuit, a mother who moved her family from Tennessee to Virginia after Tennessee banned gender-affirming care, was notified just hours before her daughter’s appointment that treatment would no longer be provided “because of everything going on.”
“[H]er family moved to Virginia to escape the discrimination that they faced in Tennessee and ensure that [her transgender daughter] would have access to necessary medical care.” the complaint states. “Now, [she] feels that the rug has been pulled out from underneath their feet.”
In response to these disruptions, leaders in Democratic-led states are taking action to safeguard access to gender-affirming care. Earlier this month, attorneys general from more than a dozen Democratic-led states — including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Nevada, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin — reaffirmed their commitment to protecting access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth.
“State attorneys general will continue to enforce state laws that provide access to gender-affirming care, in states where such enforcement authority exists, and we will challenge any unlawful effort by the Trump administration to restrict access to it in our jurisdictions,” a collective press release stated.
Some have already cautioned hospitals about the potential legal risks of stopping gender-affirming care for transgender youth. For example, California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) has said that state hospitals and clinics remain legally required to provide this care under California’s anti-discrimination laws. Similarly, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) recently warned health care providers that shutting down gender-affirming care programs in response to Trump’s executive order would violate state law.
While the exact number of trans youth affected by Trump’s order and the preemptive compliance of health care providers remains unknown, a 2022 report by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law estimates that approximately 300,100 youth between the ages of 13 and 17 identify as transgender in the United States.
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