The Trump admin is trying to collect trans kids’ medical information. So families are suing.

The lawsuit says that hospitals that turn over trans kids' medical records to prosecutors are violating their constitutional rights.

Trans patients and their families filed a federal class action lawsuit this week aimed at preventing hospitals from handing trans kids’ medical records over to the Trump administration. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has been fighting a nationwide campaign to acquire the medical records from hospitals providing gender-affirming care to trans youth.

“The Trump Administration has been clear that it will use every tool it has to harass and intimidate hospitals into shutting down necessary and, at times, lifesaving care for transgender youth,” said Karen Loewy, Lambda Legal’s Senior Counsel and Director of Constitutional Law Practice, in a statement. “But we will not allow the privacy rights of those youth and their families to be sacrificed as DOJ abuses its authority.”

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DOJ ramps up pressure on hospitals for trans data, getting grand jury subpoenas & “judge-shopping”

The lawsuit, brought by Lambda Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) on behalf of five plaintiffs, is a response to the grand jury subpoena that was issued last month against NYU Langone Health, which has been ordered to turn over the personal information for trans youth who received gender-affirming care at the hospital from 2020 to 2026.

Of the five plaintiffs, three are the families of trans minors who received care before Langone suspended their program. The other two are young adults who received treatment when they were minors during those years and whose records would still be required by the DOJ’s subpoena.

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However, the lawsuit asks the court to recognize a class of plaintiffs that includes all minors who received gender-affirming care at any New York City hospital between 2020 and 2026. This means that any action would protect not only the plaintiffs, but also any other trans youth patients from these hospitals.

These grand jury subpoenas are only the latest part of the DOJ’s efforts against gender-affirming care for trans youth. The DOJ claims that the documents, including identifiable information attached to the health records of minors, are required for their investigations into off-label use of medications for gender-affirming care, and new claims that they are looking into the fraudulent billing practices used to get gender-affirming care covered by insurance companies.

The first of these is not actually a crime. Off-label use of medications – that is, when they are prescribed for a reason that has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – is a common practice. Taking aspirin, for example, to reduce the risk of heart attacks or strokes is an off-label use that is common but hasn’t resulted in a federal investigation.

The DOJ’s subpoenas have been repeatedly quashed by judges across the country who have called the attempts to use them to gather data on trans people “fishing expeditions” and an attempt to “intimidate” and “harass” trans people and their health care providers in an attempt to stop what is legal, best practice health care.

More recently, the DOJ has tried to circumvent those judges’ decisions by obtaining grand jury subpoenas, which are issued in secret and are significantly harder for judges to quash. Those subpoenas are what this lawsuit is targeting.

The lawsuit against the DOJ claims that the grand jury subpoenas violate the patient’s Fifth Amendment right to informational privacy, flout the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against “unreasonable searches and seizures” of papers without probable cause, and breach New York state’s physician-patient confidentiality rules, which prevent the disclosure of “any information … acquired in attending a patient in a professional capacity.”

The plaintiffs are seeking both temporary and permanent injunctions against the DOJ and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to prevent them from “seeking, receiving, using, retaining, or disseminating” the requested personal information as part of their “claimed investigations into healthcare offenses related to gender-affirming care.” They are also looking for the same to prevent “NYU defendants from disclosing or producing any identifying or sensitive health information of Plaintiffs and members of the proposed Class.”

This lawsuit has the scope to set an important precedent and show other hospitals that they can fight these grand jury subpoenas. Because of the way that grand juries work, subpoenas are filed under seal and not available to the public, which means it is unclear how many hospitals have been targeted with such subpoenas.

The subpoena against NYU Langone is only known because a New York shield law requires the hospital to inform patients of any requests for personal medical data at least 30 days before producing the files. The DOJ has confirmed it has already received documents from hospitals, which means those people may not even be aware that their data has been collected.

Various reports and court filings have suggested that New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, Lucile Salter Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford in California, Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, Michigan Medicine, and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia may all have received such subpoenas.

Speaking to the New York Times, Melissa Combs, whose trans teenager received care at Yale New Haven Health until they suspended their gender-affirming care practice, pointed to the real aim of all of this.  “It’s really the providers they’re going after, and that is what we worry about. If there are no people left to provide this care, then it’s gone.”

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