In a brazen act of forum shopping, the Trump administration has filed a petition in the Northern District of Texas—the most notoriously conservative federal court in the country—to compel Rhode Island Hospital, 1,800 miles away, to hand over patient records from its transgender youth care program. The petition seeks to enforce an administrative subpoena served on the hospital last July under HIPAA authority, as part of an investigation into alleged violations of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. The subpoena includes level clinical records and private patient and doctor information. The hospital has refused to comply for ten months. It is easy to see why the DOJ chose Texas: it has lost every single subpoena fight it has brought against hospitals providing gender-affirming care—in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Colorado. Now, rather than accept those rulings, the administration is exploiting a HIPAA provision that allows subpoena enforcement wherever "the investigation is being carried out"—a location the DOJ selected itself.

The filing reveals the scope of what the administration is after. The DOJ served the subpoena on August 7, 2025, claiming authority to “investigate violations of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.” The legal theory is that because the FDA has not specifically approved puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones for the treatment of gender dysphoria, any hospital prescribing them for that purpose is engaged in “misbranding”—distributing drugs without adequate labeling for their intended use. The filing states that the FDA “has determined neither their safety nor effectiveness” for gender dysphoria treatment. This framing ignores the fact that off-label prescribing is legal, routine, and up to 25% of all prescriptions written in the United States—from aspirin for heart disease to gabapentin for anxiety. No court has ever held that a doctor commits a federal drug crime by prescribing medication off-label.

But the most alarming part of the filing is what the DOJ intends to do with the information. The subpoena seeks to identify the doctors involved in patient care, obtain billing and coding records, and acquire the private medical records of the transgender patients themselves. The filing makes explicit that the DOJ wants to go directly after patients: “Providing patient records including patient identities can also provide essential investigative leads,” it states. “Parents may be witnesses about what disclosures were made. Patients (depending on age and circumstances) may provide information about the informed consent process, side effects, or other false or misleading information about the drugs conveyed during treatment.” The filing goes further, arguing that “without this information, the Government cannot fully determine the scope of the violations, identify patterns of misbranding or fraudulent billing, or assess whether the conduct was undertaken with intent to defraud or mislead, as required for felony liability.”

Similar subpoenas have been quashed by federal courts across the country—and the language those judges used was scathing. In Massachusetts, a federal judge found that the DOJ's subpoena to Boston Children's Hospital was "motivated only by bad faith," concluding that "the true purpose of issuing the subpoena is to interfere with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' right to protect GAC within its borders, to harass and intimidate [the hospital] to stop providing such care, and to dissuade patients from seeking such care." In Washington state, a judge quashed a subpoena to QueerDoc, a small telehealth provider, finding it was "issued for a purpose other than to investigate potential violations of law." In Pennsylvania, a judge limited a subpoena to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, ruling that patient-specific records were not relevant to the DOJ's stated investigation—because the records "do not speak to how products were labeled, marketed, introduced into interstate commerce, or billed to health care benefit plans." The DOJ's own filing in Texas acknowledges these losses—but dismisses them in a footnote as the work of "mistaken district judges" whose rulings "are wrong."

Instead of accepting these rulings, the DOJ moved its fight to Texas. The HIPAA statute allows enforcement of administrative subpoenas in the district where the hospital is located or where "the investigation is being carried out." Ordinarily, these investigations are based in Washington, D.C. or at nearby DOJ field offices—the Enforcement and Affirmative Litigation Branch that signed this petition is headquartered in D.C., and the subpoena was signed by its Acting Director, Lisa K. Hsiao, the same official whose subpoenas were quashed in Massachusetts, Washington, Pennsylvania, and Colorado. Instead, the administration chose to base this investigation in the Northern District of Texas—a court that has become the go-to destination for conservative litigants seeking friendly judges, that refused to adopt the Judicial Conference's anti-judge-shopping reforms, and where every case filed in certain divisions is guaranteed to land before a single Trump-appointed judge. The DOJ is laundering a Rhode Island subpoena through the most conservative court in America because every fair court told it no.

If the Northern District of Texas sounds familiar, that is because it is home to Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk—a former attorney for a Christian legal organization who was appointed by Trump in 2019 and has since become the most sought-after judge in the conservative legal movement. Kacsmaryk is the sole judge handling civil cases in the court's Amarillo Division, meaning any case filed there is guaranteed to land on his desk. He has used that position to try to revoke FDA approval of mifepristone, a ruling so extreme the Supreme Court unanimously reversed it, and recently ruled in favor of a drag ban in the state. Though this filing is not in Amarillo, the district is known for its extreme Republican slant, and its parent circuit, the 5th Circuit, has acted as a rubber stamp for the Trump administration. Now, through a major loophole, the administration has chosen its own judges who are likely to accept its demands.

You can view the full filing here:

Us Petition For Enforcement

854KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

This morning, President Donald Trump announced that he would be nominating Nicole Saphier, a longtime Fox News contributor, to serve as the next surgeon general of the United States. Saphier has been an ardent anti-transgender voice, hosting detransitioners on her podcast, attacking the inclusion of a transgender researcher in a youth health study, calling being transgender a "fad" and a "trend" among youth, equating gender-affirming care with "promoting body dysmorphic disorder," and declaring that transgender youth constitute a mental health "national emergency." Saphier must now be confirmed by the Senate. She is Trump's third nominee for the position—his first pick, Fox News contributor Janette Nesheiwat, went nowhere, and his second, wellness influencer Casey Means, stalled for months after senators questioned her lapsed medical license and anti-vaccine views.

“I am pleased to announce that I am nominating Dr. Nicole B. Saphier to be the next SURGEON GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,” said Trump in a morning Truth Social post. “Nicole is a STAR physician who has spent her career guiding women facing breast cancer through their diagnosis and treatment while tirelessly advocating to increase early cancer detection and prevention, while at the same time working with men and women on all other forms of cancer diagnoses and treatments. She is also an INCREDIBLE COMMUNICATOR, who makes complicated health issues more easily understood by all Americans. Dr. Nicole Saphier will do great things for our Country, and help, “MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN.” Congratulations Nicole, our Country has long been waiting for you!”

Dr. Saphier has a long history of anti-science statements and positions. She has criticized the American Academy of Pediatrics for releasing an evidence-based immunization schedule that conflicted with the CDC's revised schedule after RFK Jr. pushed the agency to stop recommending some childhood vaccines. She also owns DropRx, a nutraceutical supplement company selling unregulated herbal tinctures on Amazon, creating a potential financial conflict of interest for the person who would serve as the nation's top doctor. Her 2020 book, Make America Healthy Again, became the cornerstone of RFK Jr.'s brand at HHS.

Saphier's anti-science positions are not limited to vaccines. She has also taken a hard line against transgender people. In a podcast episode featuring a detransitioner, she called being transgender a "fad" and a "trend," framed trans youth as part of a mental health "national emergency," and suggested that children identify as transgender primarily because of unstable home environments and peer pressure rather than genuine gender dysphoria. She has also falsely equated being transgender with body dysmorphic disorder, stating, "A lot of these transgender medical interventions are the exact same way. It's just another pathway of promoting body dysmorphic disorder." The comparison is clinically wrong—body dysmorphic disorder involves a distorted perception of one's own appearance, where a person fixates on flaws that are minor or nonexistent. Gender dysphoria is the opposite: a person perceives their body accurately, and the distress arises from the conflict between that body and their gender identity.

While the surgeon general has very limited direct regulatory authority—the position cannot make laws, issue binding regulations, or enforce policy—it is nonetheless one of the most influential medical platforms in the country. Surgeon General's Reports and Advisories carry enormous weight in the medical and legal world. Should Saphier be confirmed, it is nearly certain she would use that platform to issue advisories or reports casting doubt on gender-affirming care. A Surgeon General's statement declaring gender-affirming care for minors harmful would be cited by state legislatures drafting bans, by courts weighing the constitutionality of those bans, by hospitals looking for cover to shut down their programs, and by insurance companies seeking to deny coverage.

Saphier has already left her Fox News contributor role ahead of the confirmation process. To be confirmed, Saphier must first clear the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Bioethicist Art Caplan of NYU told NOTUS that "the mere fact that she is a practicing doc is going to increase the chances of her success greatly." If confirmed, Saphier would become the nation's “top doctor” at a moment when the Trump administration is already waging an unprecedented campaign against transgender people—including passports, hospital threats, television characters, school forced outing policies, and more.

Six Idahoans have filed a class action lawsuit against the state over what amounts to the most extreme anti-trans bathroom ban in the country.

HB 752, signed into law last month, extends to restrooms both in public and private buildings, as well as single and multi-occupancy bathrooms. Trans people could face criminal penalties, including years in prison, for entering a restroom that differs from their sex assigned at birth.

The rule applies to government-owned buildings as well as private businesses that are open to the public, such as libraries, rest stops, airports, malls, gas stations, restaurants, entertainment venues, hospitals, and more.

Left unchallenged, HB 752 would go into effect on July 1st. But the ACLU, Lambda Legal, and several law firms are requesting an injunction for what’s been characterized as a brazenly unconstitutional and animus-driven bill.

Nearly half of all states have anti-trans bathroom restrictions, but Idaho’s are particularly pernicious. “What makes Idaho’s law really unique is its criminal punishments, which are incredibly severe, as well as the fact that it reaches so far into public life in Idaho by covering government-owned buildings and places of public accommodation,” said Barbara Schwabauer, senior staff attorney for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Rights Project.

Kell Olson, counsel for Lambda Legal, also issued a scathing condemnation of the policy. “This law leaves transgender people in the impossible and exhausting position of trying to determine what is allowed on a daily basis almost anywhere in their public lives,” Olson said. “HB 752 applies even to single-user restrooms that are designated by sex, revealing that its purpose is not safety or privacy, but to subject transgender people to the humiliation that comes with a state-mandated disavowal of their identity.”

The complaint argues HB 752 violates the Fourteenth Amendment, and should be struck down for its vagueness; that it constitutes sex discrimination; that it violates the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses; and that the law is unconstitutional because the state has “no legitimate interest, let alone a compelling or important one” in functionally forcibly outing a trans person any time they use a public restroom.

Statehouse testimonies from lawmakers characterized transgender people as criminal and violent. Meanwhile, in those same hearings, those same legislators openly fantasized about physically brutalizing transgender women, as seen in the complaint excerpt below—evidence that the bill is motivated by animus.

Moreover, the law is rife with “exceptions” carved out to make it as unobtrusive as possible for cisgender people. It undermines the rhetorical red herring that contends lawmakers simply wanted to reinforce barriers between men and women in bathrooms, and that it didn’t exceptionalize trans people.

Some of the law’s exceptions “have nothing to do with restrooms at all,” Schwabauer pointed out. “If you are an athletic trainer or a coach, you can go into the restroom of the opposite sex, and talk to your team during a team event.”

Of course, we know from experience that these discriminatory policies harm cisgender people, too. Those who are presumed to be trans often face violence due to the anti-trans bathroom panic.

Meanwhile, multiple law enforcement groups begged lawmakers not to pass the bill due to the burdensome and litigious risks thrust upon those called in to be the literal bathroom police. “Officers responding to a complaint would be placed in the difficult position of determining an individual’s biological sex in order to enforce the statute,” a letter from Idaho Fraternal Order of Police addressed to lawmakers reads. However, “there is no clear or reasonable way for officers to make that determination without engaging in questioning or investigative actions that could be viewed as invasive and inappropriate.” The law’s vagueness creates an “unenforceable standard.”

Plaintiffs emphasized the impacts are dire. One plaintiff, Diego Fable—a transgender man who has called Idaho home for a decade—said this would likely cause him to have to flee the state.

“Do I risk my personal safety and privacy by complying with the law and using the women’s restroom? Since I look like a man, using the women’s restroom would only invite suspicion, questions, harassment, and potentially violence,” Fable said. “Or, do I avoid going out altogether?”

On Monday, the Colorado Senate Judiciary Committee passed HB26-1322, a bill that creates a private civil right of action allowing survivors of conversion therapy to sue the practitioners who subjected them to it. The bill, which has no statute of limitations for such claims, would likely make the practice of conversion therapy financially prohibitive in the state. It comes in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's 8-1 decision last month in Chiles v. Salazar, which found that Colorado's 2019 ban on conversion therapy unconstitutional—effectively legalizing the discredited practice nationwide. The new bill has one final legislative hurdle to clear—the full Colorado Senate—before heading to Governor Jared Polis's desk, though the governor has so far offered only lukewarm signals about whether he will sign it, saying he is "hopeful there is still time to construct a framework he could support."

The bill targets what it calls "sexual orientation or gender identity change efforts"—defined as "any practice by a licensed mental health professional that seeks to direct a patient toward a predetermined sexual orientation or gender identity outcome, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of a particular sex or gender, regardless of the sexual orientation or gender identity the patient is directed toward." The inclusion of "eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions" is notable—conversion therapists have long used this framework to argue disingenuously that they are not trying to change a person's sexual orientation, merely helping them manage unwanted feelings. The bill explicitly carves out any counseling or therapy that "provides acceptance, support, and understanding of a patient" or "facilitates a patient's coping, social support, and identity exploration and development"—meaning therapists who support a patient's own process of self-discovery, without steering them toward a predetermined outcome, would face no liability.

The bill uses a novel legal mechanism to target conversion therapy—a private right of action. Rather than the government banning conversion therapy outright, which is what the Supreme Court struck down in Chiles, the bill instead allows survivors to sue their practitioners directly, stating that "a person who suffered an injury as a result of sexual orientation or gender identity change efforts may bring a civil action for damages" against their conversion therapist. It also states that a lawsuit to recover damages can be commenced "at any time without limitation," making its statute of limitations effectively endless. The mechanism may be insulated from the constitutional problem the Supreme Court identified in Chiles because the government is not restricting speech—instead, private citizens are seeking civil remedies for harm they suffered, the same way a patient can sue a doctor for malpractice. As Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School, told Erin in the Morning after the Chiles ruling, "While the Supreme Court decision limits the abilities of states to regulate conversion therapy through professional standards, they did not limit the ability for states to protect LGBTQ youth from these abusive practices through tort or malpractice law."

If the mechanism sounds familiar, it is because Republicans pioneered it to get around Supreme Court rulings they didn't like—most famously in Texas's SB 8, the 2021 abortion "bounty hunter" law. That law banned abortion after six weeks not through government enforcement but by allowing any private citizen to sue anyone who performed or aided an abortion for $10,000 in damages. The legal trick was simple: when abortion providers tried to challenge SB 8 in court, they couldn't get an injunction because there was no government official to enjoin. Courts found that you can't sue "the state" to block a law that only private citizens enforce. The Supreme Court effectively let SB 8 stand, and the strategy worked—abortion access in Texas collapsed virtually overnight even while Roe v. Wade was still the law of the land. Kansas used the same model in SB 244, which allows anyone to sue a transgender person for using a restroom that doesn't match their assigned sex at birth. Now, Colorado Democrats are exploiting the same constitutional loophole in the opposite direction—using private civil enforcement to deter a harmful practice that the Supreme Court says the government cannot directly ban.

It is important to note that some have raised concerns the bill could be weaponized against gender-affirming therapists—with anti-trans groups arguing that helping a trans youth transition constitutes its own form of "conversion therapy." But the bill contains multiple layers of protection against such misuse. Its carveouts explicitly shield counseling that provides "acceptance, support, and understanding of a patient.” The bill also has protections in its causation standard. To establish that conversion therapy caused harm, a court must weigh "the nature, duration, and intensity" of the efforts, "the age and vulnerability of the plaintiff at the time," "the relationship between the plaintiff and the mental health professional," and "expert testimony regarding the general psychological effects of sexual orientation or gender identity change efforts.” It is unlikely that judges will consider anti-trans activists to be considered medical “experts” on this topic.

LGBTQ+ organizations, activists, and Democratic lawmakers in the state have supported the bill's passage. "This decision only reinforces the urgent need for state-level protections," said One Colorado, the state's largest LGBTQ+ advocacy organization. "[HB 1322] provides a pathway for accountability, allowing survivors to seek justice against those who administer this harmful practice. We remain committed to ensuring that those responsible for such profound damage are held accountable." Rep. Karen McCormick, a Democrat from Longmont, was blunt about the bill's intent: "The purpose of this bill is seriously to send a chilling effect to any licensed professional therapist who may think about bringing that practice back."

Conversion therapy is a discredited practice broadly decried by every major American medical organization. The APA concluded in a 2009 systematic review that the practice is "unlikely to be successful and involves risk of harm, including depression, suicidality, and anxiety," and called for its total elimination. The United Nations has deemed conversion therapy a form of torture. A 2020 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that LGBTQ+ youth subjected to conversion therapy were more than twice as likely to report attempting suicide. For transgender people specifically, conversion therapy often takes the form of so-called "gender exploratory therapy," a rebranded approach that seeks to convince trans youth they are not actually transgender, keeping transition just out of reach by tricking trans youth that it might be offered if they jump through endless hoops while intending to deny it the entire way.

The bill now heads to the full Colorado Senate for a floor vote, where Democrats hold a 23-12 majority and passage is expected. Coloradans who support the bill can contact their state senator through the Colorado General Assembly's legislator lookup tool. If the Senate passes the bill, it will go to Governor Polis, whose signature remains the final and most uncertain step. Polis, the first openly gay governor elected in the United States, signed the original 2019 conversion therapy ban and has called the practice "a scam and a waste of people's hard-earned money"—but his office has stopped short of committing to sign this bill, saying only that he is "hopeful there is still time to construct a framework he could support." What changes, if any, the governor is seeking remain unclear. The bill includes a safety clause that would make it take effect on July 1, 2026, and would exempt it from voter referendum. If signed, Colorado would become the first state in the country to use a private right of action to combat conversion therapy in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling.

Several protesters were dragged from the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) meeting’s conference hall this past Sunday in Boston. The crowd clapped as security hauled them off—in support of the activists disrupting the very event they were attending, hosted by the organization where most of them were ostensibly members.

The demonstrators sought to challenge the misleadingly-named panel entitled “A Scientific Dialogue on the Care of Transgender and Gender Diverse Youth,” an early morning event at one of the largest and most influential academic pediatric gatherings in the United States.

Erin in the Morning reported last week that all the speakers on stage for this particular workshop—the only one dedicated exclusively to trans care—were tied in one way or another to the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine (SEGM). Civil rights groups argue SEGM is plagued by seedy origins, pseudoscientific fanfare, and tireless anti-trans advocacy, fueling countless state and federal attacks on transgender people.

This is what motivated the activists who disrupted the event, and the independent efforts of other clinicians to either change or stop the PAS panel with SEGM affiliates altogether. “Trans liberation now!” one protester yelled as they were wrestled out of the door. “This is a hate group!”

Reports indicate the audience was visibly sparse for a convention with 7,000 attendees. Nonetheless, they overwhelmed the room with applause for the dissidence.

The demonstrators were wrestled into the hallway after only a minute or two. There, PAS clinicians were autonomously staging their own, separate action—redirecting attendees to evidence-based resources about trans health care, passing out pride flags, and distributing peer-reviewed literature critiquing the “Gender Dysphoria Report” commissioned by the Trump Administration—and co-authored by Dr. Moti Gorin, the Colorado State University bioethicist chairing that PAS panel.

Researchers published a scathing commentary on the report in the Journal of Adolescent Health, which was handed out to people passing by or entering the room. This paper found that the report contained “numerous violations of scientific norms” and “misrepresentation[s] of scientific evidence.”

“The [HHS] report is a dangerous example of government incursion into the provision of evidence-based medical care,” they concluded.

Health care workers at the conference told Erin in the Morning they were concerned that unwitting attendees wouldn’t know about SEGM’s hate group status, panelists’ ties to the wider anti-trans pseudoscience network, or ethical and methodological controversies surrounding their work. SEGM’s crowning achievement has arguably been its ability to artificially inflate doubt around trans people’s health care and market anti-trans propaganda as dispassionate clinical concern—which in turn manufactures legal grounds to restrict care.

A report published by the Southern Poverty Law Center said that “since its founding, members of SEGM have undertaken a global media and public policy blitz to challenge the affirming care model, advocate against gender-affirming care, and lend scientific credibility to legal claims against LGBTQ+ civil rights.” It also designates SEGM as an anti-LGBT hate group.(SEGM disputes this.)

Even more, medical professionals at the conference would be able to receive continuing medical education (CME) credits from the event, which are necessary for doctors to maintain their licensure. Last year, an Erin in the Morning investigation into SEGM’s CME content at Washington State University found its presentations were rampant with pseudoscience and political messaging. After people filed complaints and called its accrediting status into question, WSU removed SEGM content from its for-credit offerings.

This is why Dr. A Koyama, an Arizona-based pediatrician, approached the conference room doors with her own sign—”KNOW THE PANELISTS.” It was plastered with a QR code leading to Erin in the Morning’s investigation into the PAS speakers. When she saw other people passing out the papers, she joined that effort, too.

Even with a disruption or two the panel went on, save some light apparent sabotage; a QR code meant to submit questions to panelists was leaked online.

“I don’t feel that what happened on that day was a big organized event,” Koyama told Erin in the Morning in a phone interview. “It was more like, one or two friends saying, ‘I’m going to do this,’ or ‘I’ll bring that.’ People just coming together by themselves.”

It was around this time security guards asked her to leave because of her sign. She obliged, which is when she encountered a couple dozen protesters on the sidewalk—a brass band, a team of trans youth, and a cadre of allies and supportive health care providers. They were picketing the event and handing out fliers to warn attendees about SEGM’s history of anti-trans activism. The youth canvassing on the outside had no idea that these doctors on the inside were organizing, too.

Koyama stepped up to the mic to join the trans youth on the pavement. “I am proud to have been kicked out of PAS for our sign,” she declared.

Meanwhile, posters were spotted around the convention center’s perimeter reading: “Transphobia isn’t science. Conversion therapy isn’t health care.” (This was ostensibly a nod to “gender exploratory therapy,” sometimes also marketed as “Cass-informed therapy,” which deploys conversion tactics condemned by human rights groups and experts.)

Protect Trans Futures, a grassroots direct action group led by young, transgender Bostonians, led the sidewalk protest. “We are the ones that have benefitted from the evidence-based medicine that’s come about,” Teddy Walker, PTF’s co-founder, told Erin in the Morning. “We are the ones that have been able to start our transitions as minors, and that has saved our lives.”

The 21-year-old organizer said that over the span of hours, the modest group engaged in dialogue with hundreds of medical professionals, handing out upwards of 800 flyers about the event. “Every provider we talked to was shocked and outraged once they heard what was happening,” Walker said.

Protect Trans Futures also organized an email-petition campaign that sent messages to around two dozen PAS leaders and sponsors for every signatory, resulting in over 90,000 emails sent by the time they capped the drive on Monday. The goal: Convince PAS to drop Dr. Moti Gorin and cancel the panel, or at least strike its eligibility for CME credits.

Although PAS is hosting the event, the CME credits had to be approved by the Baylor College of Medicine, a partner institution, which said it reviewed the panel for compliance ahead of time.

After the panel, the Pediatric Endocrine Society also came out in opposition to the event. “Prior to and during the meeting, we had been in communication with some of PAS leadership about our serious concerns” it said in an email to members.

“While the description advertised the session as a scholarly review, the panel was made up entirely of individuals who have espoused views that run counter to the bulk of the primary literature and the advice around care provided by the vast majority of major medical associations. While PES welcomes different points of view, we believe that presentations at conferences should be as evidence-based as possible.”

Neither PAS leadership nor Gorin responded to a request for comment for this follow-up. The other panelists—Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, Dr. Anna Hutchinson, and Dr. Steven Montante—did not respond to initial requests for comment for Erin in the Morning’s reporting on the matter.

In response to internal backlash ahead of the event, PAS Program Chair and Q&A moderator Dr. Daniel Rauch, of the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine in New Jersey, told the audience that PAS had tried to recruit an affirming gender care provider, but those they asked declined to participate. It is not clear who they asked, how many providers they asked, when they asked or why they turned PAS down. He also said he added resource links to gender-affirming literature to provide additional perspectives.

Meanwhile, in a prior interview with Erin in the Morning, Gorin rejected characterizations that SEGM or the Trump-ordered report he worked on might contain hateful or pseudoscientific rhetoric. He said he picked a cohort for the panel that was approved by PAS; one he felt was diverse. He tapped into clinicians from different countries, different areas of medicine, and people who may not “agree on everything.” He had hoped that detractors would attend the panel and engage with the speakers.

But unlike other conference sessions, the PAS moderator didn’t even give the audience a chance to hold the microphone to directly address them.

Walker, meanwhile, said the events of the day were nonetheless “a huge win” for their organizing to spread awareness of anti-trans actors and narratives.

“Everyone told us: ‘We are with you. This panel does not represent our views. We don’t understand how this was allowed to happen.’”

Last week’s permanent injunction on the Kennedy Declaration marked a devastating blow to the Trump regime’s attempts to supersede science and state laws alike. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has now come out with his own state’s guidance, vowing to protect providers and emphasizing that the state will step in should the White House try to curb legally-protected, medically-necessary care for transgender people.

“The district court has rightfully ruled to block the Trump Administration’s unlawful attempt to de-legitimize and restrict access to gender-affirming care,” said Attorney General Bonta in an April 21 press release. “This ruling protects transgender Americans’ rights to receive crucial care from providers they trust without unfair roadblocks.”

“Gender-affirming care remains legal […] Right now, providers in California can and should continue to provide the care their patients count on without fear of unjust retaliation,” reads the release.

California is part of a cohort of nearly two dozen state officials suing the federal government for discriminatory and unlawful restrictions on gender-affirming care and its providers.

California—like many other blue states—has robust civil rights protections for transgender people in place. In theory, these laws not only protect hospitals providing gender-affirming care from federal attacks, but also compel them to continue providing trans kids with the same care they provide to those who are not trans. Bonta and other Attorneys General could sue hospitals that comply with Trump’s anti-trans care threats.

So far, however, Bonta is the only one to have done so, filing a lawsuit against Rady Children’s Hospital, which serves the greater San Diego area. But the cause of action was not the ample equal rights laws in Bonta’s arsenal.

Instead, “Attorney General Bonta argue[d] that Rady’s decision to end care violates legally binding conditions placed by Attorney General Bonta on Rady Children’s Hospital of San Diego’s merger with Children’s Hospital of Orange County and its affiliates (CHOC),” the AG’s office said in a January statement. A judge agreed, ordering Rady’s and CHOC to continue care in the interim. This marked the first court order in the nation telling a hospital that it must resume gender-affirming care.

It’s notable, experts told Erin in the Morning, that this was the manner in which Bonta filed a lawsuit. It’s a strategy that might be advantageous in other states, too.

“This is a very strategically pled lawsuit,” said Rachel See, who spent over a decade as an attorney in the federal government, in an interview with Erin in the Morning back in February.

“It’s being brought solely under California law, because of the California AG’s unique power to approve mergers between California nonprofit hospitals,” she said. “It means that this is a lawsuit that only the California Attorney General could bring, and only against Rady, because of the merger conditions.”

By orienting the lawsuit around the breach of the merger conditions under state corporate laws, Bonta was able to side-step the potential of federal officials escalating the issue to higher, and possibly more unfavorable, jurisdictions.

Others, such as New York’s Attorney General Letitia James, have applied pressure to hospitals to resume care—but not gone as far as taking formal legal action.

Roughly 40 clinics across the country capitulated to Trumpian threats and rolled back care for trans youth. As the courts catch up to Trump, some of this is being undone. Earlier this month, the Colorado Supreme Court heard a case deciding whether Children’s Hospital Colorado can be forced to resume gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Likewise, Children’s Minnesota recently resumed care it had suspended as a result of federal pressures.

“The decision follows a federal court ruling that vacated a federal declaration attempting to restrict gender-affirming care,” a statement from the hospital, shared with Erin in the Morning, said at that time. And while the restoration of access to health care is no small victory for trans kids and their families, the nerve-wracking back-and-forth has left many families reeling. Disruptions in care, however brief, can be devastating; families have been uprooting their lives, fleeing their state or the country, emptying out their savings to seek out private practitioners to get the care their children desperately need.

The saga began in December, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, announced that Trump’s HHS believes gender-affirming care “fail[s] to meet professional recognized standards of health care.” Therefore, hospitals that provide such care would be excluded from federal funding like Medicaid and Medicare, a financial lifeline for these institutions—without it, many could cease to be able to operate.

The problem: RFK Jr. does not have the legal authority to decide what constitutes industry best practices; medical organizations and state medical boards are the ones that do that. He also cannot single-handedly wield the power of the purse when it comes to Medicare and Medicaid funds.

“Despite repeatedly emphasizing their commitment and obligation to protect children, Defendants [the HHS] have sweepingly wielded the Kennedy Declaration to threaten children’s hospitals that provide life-saving care to children,” wrote U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai in his ruling.

“Citing the Kennedy Declaration, Defendants have exploited the threat of exclusion to bully healthcare providers into suspending gender-affirming care they would otherwise provide in compliance with statewide standards of care out of fear they will lose federal healthcare program funding and the attendant ability to provide any life-saving care to all children.”

The feds argued it violated RFK Jr.’s First Amendment rights by not allowing him to manufacture policy, and the power to implement it, out of thin air. Kasubhai balked at the notion. “Defendants cannot bully or gaslight this Court into ignoring the many procedural and legal flaws of the Kennedy Declaration by invoking one of the most sacred principles of our constitutional democracy—the freedom of speech—when that principle comes nowhere close to being implicated,” he wrote.

However, RFK Jr.’s crusade against trans kids isn’t dead yet. The HHS can and likely will file an appeal. The fate of the Kennedy Declaration could lie in the hands of the Supreme Court.

There are also several proposed federal rules—which have not been finalized—to strip hospitals providing gender-affirming care of their Medicaid and Medicare funds. Even if these proposals do get the green light, there’s a 30-day minimum grace period before such policies would go into effect—in addition to the months of time that could be bought by additional litigation and legal challenges.

“The Attorney General’s Office is prepared to take further legal action to prevent these rules from going into effect,” a presser from the California Department of Justice says.

The Trump administration has made attacking transgender people one of its signature priorities. It has issued a orders threatening to defund hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to trans youth, targeted children’s television through the FCC for including transgender characters, and spent millions in taxpayer resources pursuing anti-trans executive orders across the federal government. But according to the latest Fox News poll, released this week, the American public is not on board. Voters say Democrats would do a better job on transgender issues by a 13-point margin, 56 to 43 percent—the second consecutive Fox News poll this year to show a significant Democratic advantage on the issue.

The finding is consistent with the January Fox News poll, which showed Democrats with a 22 point advantage on transgender issues. While the margin has narrowed somewhat, the direction has not changed: voters across nearly every demographic subgroup continue to say they trust Democrats more than Republicans on this issue.

The demographic breakdown is significant. Black voters backed Democrats on transgender issues by a 54-point margin, 77 to 23 percent. Hispanic voters favored Democrats 59 to 40 percent. White voters—a group Republicans depend on for their electoral coalition—sided with Democrats 53 to 46 percent. Every age group favored Democrats, with the strongest support coming from voters under 35, who backed the Democratic approach 61 to 39 percent. But the finding was not limited to young voters: Americans 65 and older also preferred Democrats on the issue, 58 to 38 percent—a 20-point margin among seniors.

Self-identified moderates backed Democrats 60 to 38 percent—a 22-point margin that suggests anti-trans messaging continues to backfire outside the Republican base. Liberals preferred Democrats 86 to 13 percent. Even among self-identified conservatives, nearly a third—31 percent—said Democrats would do a better job. And among 2024 Trump voters, 27 percent crossed over to say they trusted Democrats more on the issue—more than one in four of the president’s own supporters.

The geographic breakdown was equally striking. Urban voters backed Democrats 68 to 31 percent and suburban voters—the decisive battleground in American politics—preferred Democrats 57 to 43 percent. Rural voters were the only geographic group to favor Republicans, 52 to 46 percent, but even that margin was narrow. Democrats also led among Catholics (54-45), white Catholics (51-48), Protestants (50-48), and military voters (54-44). White evangelicals were the only religious group to side with Republicans.

Perhaps most telling is how little voters actually care about the issue the administration has made central to its agenda. When the poll asked voters to name the most important issue facing the country, “wokeness/transgender issues” registered at less than 1 percent—rounding to zero. It ranked below every other issue tested, including inflation (26 percent), the economy (17 percent), political corruption (13 percent), the Iran war (11 percent), immigration (8 percent), healthcare (3 percent), and climate change (1 percent). The Republican Party is spending enormous political capital on an issue that is not salient to the American voter.

That political investment has come at the cost of attention to the issues voters actually do care about. Trump’s overall job approval sits at just 42 percent, with 58 percent disapproving. On the economy, only 34 percent approve of his performance. On inflation, just 28 percent approve—while 72 percent disapprove. Seventy percent of voters say the economy is getting worse for their families. Sixty-two percent say grocery prices are a “major problem.” And Trump’s overall approval among many polling outlets has fallen to its lowest in history.

These numbers are part of a pattern. In Virginia, Republican Winsome Earle-Sears spent more on anti-trans ads than on any other issue and lost by 15 points. In New Jersey, Jack Ciattarelli ran anti-trans ads and lost. In Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race this month, anti-trans attack ads failed for the third consecutive cycle. As ACLU communications strategist Gillian Branstetter observed of the latest Fox News poll: “This is a really consistent poll finding—same was true of Harris in 2024 and Spanberger in Virginia—but it’s usually the least salient set of issues in any given poll. It’s why there’s an open lane to emphasize how much time Republicans waste on their obsession with us.”

The data points to a clear conclusion: voters prefer the Democratic approach to transgender issues, they do not consider the issue a priority, and Republicans centering their campaigns on transgender issues often leads to losses. The administration can continue to target transgender people through executive orders, FCC actions, and federal declarations—but as these numbers show, they do so without the American Public’s support. Democrats, for their part, should take note: running on support for transgender people is not the political liability it was made out to be in the aftermath of 2024. It is, as the data now consistently shows, a position the majority of voters find vastly more palatable than the Republican approach.

You can see the full Fox News poll results here.

A new memo at Texas Tech University establishes a sweeping and draconian censorship policy toward LGBTQ+ people, creating a campus equivalent of "Don't Say Gay" in one of the most extreme anti-speech policies ever imposed at a public university. The memo bars professors from discussing LGBTQ+ topics in core and lower-level courses and eliminates entire fields of study across the five-university system. It even requires that if an industry-standard textbook includes content on sexual orientation or gender identity, instructors must skip over it and avoid discussion around it. Most troubling, however, is that the censorship regime extends beyond professors to students themselves: the memo states that "no degree-culminating student research within the TTU System will be permitted to center on SOGI topics,” a total ban on LGBTQ+ mentions in dissertations or graduate thesis work.

The memorandum, which was issued by Chancellor Brandon Creighton—a former Republican state senator who authored Texas's ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at public universities and a campus protest restriction law that a federal judge blocked as unconstitutional—went out to the presidents of all five universities in the Texas Tech University System this month. The system serves approximately 64,000 students across Texas Tech University, Angelo State University, Midwestern State University, and two Health Sciences Centers. Under the new policy, all majors, minors, certificates, and graduate degrees "centered on" sexual orientation or gender identity will be eliminated. Provosts at each university must identify every affected program and submit finalized lists to the chancellor's office by June 15, 2026, at which point an immediate admissions freeze will take effect—no new students will be allowed to enroll in or declare any of the targeted programs. Currently enrolled students will be allowed to finish their degrees through a teach-out process, but once the last of them graduates, the fields will cease to exist at Texas Tech entirely.

The censorship policy directly targets all sexual orientation and gender identity content. "The Alternate Materials Rule requires that… in courses where course materials (inclusive of all assigned works, readings, case studies, peer-reviewed research, videos, etc.) are centered on or include sexual orientation or gender identity, alternate materials must be utilized," reads the memo. "If instructors choose permissible works that do not center on or include these topics, instructor-led discussions, class assignments, and instructional materials must not focus on sexual orientation or gender identity." Even passing mentions are policed: the memo instructs that "incidental references should be avoided" when selecting primary materials for core courses, and that if a history book or novel happens to include LGBTQ+ content, professors "must not highlight, assess, or allocate instructional time to it." The memo adds that "there are no exceptions to the Alternate Materials Rule for core, undergraduate courses."

The implications are profound—and at times border on absurd. In core and lower-level courses, there are no exceptions at all. A history professor course could not allocate instructional time to the Stonewall riots or the gay rights movement. If a U.S. history textbook includes a chapter on the AIDS crisis, the professor must skip it. An English professor assigning Oscar Wilde cannot lead a discussion of the trial and imprisonment that defined his later work and legacy. A professor teaching Virginia Woolf's Orlando—a novel whose entire premise is gender fluidity—would appear to be in direct violation of the policy. A core literature class reading Walt Whitman's "Calamus" poems could not explore their homoerotic themes. Sappho—the ancient Greek poet from whom the word "lesbian" derives—could not be taught with any meaningful analysis of her work's content. A professor teaching Shakespeare's Twelfth Night or As You Like It could not discuss the cross-dressing that is central to the plot, nor the long theatrical tradition of male actors performing female roles—because analyzing gender performance in Shakespeare would constitute allocating "instructional time" to gender identity themes. A political science class could not examine the Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges as anything other than a passing reference. A psychology professor in a core course could not discuss why homosexuality was removed from the DSM. Even a music appreciation course discussing Tchaikovsky or Freddie Mercury would need to avoid any sustained discussion of how their identities shaped their art.

The memo also imposes what it calls a "Two Human Sexes Requirement," stating that "state and federal law and TTU System guidance dictate that only two human sexes, male and female, are recognized." It goes further, declaring that "instructors may not teach that gender identity is a fluid spectrum, endorse the existence of more than two genders, or decouple gender from biological sex as a factual or scientific baseline." There is a narrow carveout for intersex conditions—the memo says instruction on "chromosomal variations, Differences of Sex Development (DSDs), and intersex biological conditions is expressly permitted"—but even here, it adds that "faculty may not use these biological conditions to advocate for or validate sociological frameworks of fluid gender identities." In practice, this means a biology professor could teach students that intersex conditions exist but would be barred from drawing the obvious scientific conclusion that biological sex is more complex than a strict binary. As Inside Higher Ed columnist John K. Wilson observed, the policy "is so extreme that it would seem to prohibit any professor (or any assigned reading) from asserting that trans people even exist, since that would mean recognizing 'fluid gender identities.'"

Perhaps most draconian of all are the policies targeting graduate students. Under the memo, graduate students will be permanently barred from writing theses or dissertations centered on LGBTQ+ topics once current teach-out programs conclude. This is the first policy at any major American university system that extends content censorship to student work itself—not even Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law, which restricted classroom instruction in K-12 schools, attempted to dictate what students could write about in their own research. The memo states that "graduate theses and dissertations may only center on SOGI topics as a strictly temporary teach-out exception, explicitly limited to currently enrolled students completing their degrees within formally identified teach-out programs," and that "upon the conclusive termination of all designated teach-out programs, no degree-culminating student research within the TTU System will be permitted to center on SOGI topics."

Policies barring students from writing on specific topics at public universities have a long and well-established First Amendment history—and they almost always lose. In Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967), the Supreme Court declared that "the classroom is peculiarly the 'marketplace of ideas'" and that "the Nation's future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas." In Healy v. James (1972), the Court ruled that a public university could not suppress a student organization based on its viewpoint, holding that First Amendment protections apply with no “less force on college campuses than in the community at large." In Rosenberger v. Rector (1995), the Court struck down a public university's refusal to fund a student publication based on its viewpoint, establishing that viewpoint discrimination at a public university is per se unconstitutional.

More recently, a federal court blocked Florida's Stop WOKE Act—which imposed content restrictions on higher education strikingly similar to the Texas Tech memo—calling the law "positively dystopian" and holding that professors' in-class speech is protected by the First Amendment. However, Texas Tech sits in the Fifth Circuit, which has proven to be the most hostile federal appeals court in the country toward LGBTQ+ rights and has consistently upheld restrictions that other circuits have struck down. Whether the Fifth Circuit would extend the same First Amendment protections to students and faculty challenging an anti-LGBTQ+ censorship policy remains an open and deeply uncertain question.

The policies have come under fierce criticism from faculty and academic freedom organizations alike. Jen Shelton, an associate professor of English who has taught at Texas Tech for 25 years, told the Texas Tribune, "I think the whole university has been betrayed. I think even the provost did not expect it to look like this." Kelli Cargile Cook, a professor emeritus who founded Texas Tech's Department of Professional Communication, said the policies at Texas Tech led her to cancel a class and draft a resignation letter. "I can't stomach what's going on at Texas Tech," she said. A statement from the Texas Tech chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) decried the policies in a public letter to Creighton: "We have collectively dedicated many decades of our careers to Texas Tech, proud to be part of an institution where students learn and faculty teach in an environment of rigorous inquiry, open debate, and intellectual freedom. Under this policy, the Constitution of the United States of America is rendered irrelevant, academic freedom and the core mission of our university are sacrificed, and the Texas Tech University we knew no longer exists.”

The policy is already being implemented. Provosts at each of the five universities must submit finalized lists of programs to be eliminated to the chancellor's office by June 15, 2026, after which an immediate admissions freeze will take effect. The memo also directs the TTU System to develop standardized syllabus templates so that "course materials can be efficiently evaluated by both students and component institution leadership and compliance teams"—creating a permanent surveillance apparatus for course content. Artificial intelligence has already been used to target hundreds of course materials, and further crackdowns are expected.

Today, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr announced that the FCC would be seeking comment on whether the TV Parental Guidelines rating system needs to be changed to address shows with transgender or nonbinary characters. The public notice, which Carr posted on twitter this morning, seeks to weaponize the TV ratings system to restrict shows that include such characters—asking whether programs that contain "the discussion or promotion of gender identity themes" should "be rated differently or contain relevant descriptions." Though the FCC's direct authority over the TV ratings system is limited—the system is voluntary and industry-run, and streaming platforms like Netflix and Disney+ can maintain their own standards—the FCC retains enormous coercive power over broadcast networks and their parent companies, many of which also operate streaming platforms. The move comes after a series of attacks on network television weaponizing the FCC for political purposes, including Carr's threats to revoke broadcast licenses over news coverage of the Iran war and his targeting of ABC over late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. It appears to be an attempt to extend "Don't Say Gay"-style policies—which have restricted discussion of LGBTQ+ people in classrooms across red states—to national television ratings.

“Years ago, Congress passed a law that empowers parents to decide the types of TV programs that are appropriate for their kids by standing up a TV show ratings system. But recently, parents have raised concerns with the industry’s approach—including with ratings creep. Specifically, they argue that New York & Hollywood programmers are promoting controversial issues in kids programming without providing any transparency or disclosures to parents. This undermines the whole point of the law and the ratings system parents rely on. The FCC is now seeking comment on whether the industry’s approach provides parents with the types of information and disclosures relevant to them today,” Carr wrote on twitter. However, the actual document posted alongside his statement tells a more specific story—it primarily centers on gender identity.

The document states, “Recently, parents have raised concerns that controversial gender identity issues are being included or promoted in children’s programs without providing any disclosure or transparency to parents. Specifically, the industry guidelines that parents rely on are rating shows with transgender and gender non-binary programming as appropriate for children and young children, and doing so without providing this information to parents, thereby undermining the ability of parents to make informed choices for their families.” It then poses a series of loaded questions: “Are parents aware that children watching programs rated TV-Y, TV-Y7 and TV-G may contain the discussion or promotion of gender identity themes? Should such programming be rated differently or contain relevant descriptions so that parents can make informed decisions?” The document also asks whether “additional faith-based organizations” should be given seats on the TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board—the industry body that oversees the ratings system.

The TV Parental Guidelines rating system was established in 1997, after Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board has overseen the system since, applying familiar ratings like TV-G and TV-PG to programming across broadcast television. Cable television and streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney+, and Hulu are not subject to the FCC's regulatory authority and are not required to use the system, but have voluntarily adopted the same rating categories for consistency—meaning that any changes to how the system treats transgender content could ripple across the entire television landscape even without a legal mandate. While the FCC cannot directly change how the industry rates its programming, under Carr it hasn't needed to—the agency has repeatedly used legally dubious threats to pressure networks into self-censorship, and this public notice sends the same kind of signal to an already skittish industry.

If networks bow to this pressure, the impact on LGBTQ+ programming could be enormous. Transgender and nonbinary characters in children's television are already vanishingly rare—GLAAD's most recent report found just one transgender character on all of broadcast television. Youth shows could see what little representation remains stripped out entirely, as networks preemptively remove trans and nonbinary characters rather than risk a ratings penalty or government scrutiny.

The pressure extends well beyond broadcast: Disney owns both ABC, which requires an FCC broadcast license, and Disney+, which does not. NBCUniversal owns NBC and Peacock. Paramount owns CBS and Paramount+. When Carr threatened ABC's station licenses over Jimmy Kimmel, it was Disney that pulled Kimmel off the air—and Disney also owns the streaming platform that produced The Owl House, one of the most beloved queer animated shows in recent memory, which Disney canceled after its creator said it didn't fit the company's "brand." The parent company dynamic means that FCC pressure on a broadcast license can cascade into content decisions on streaming platforms the FCC has no jurisdiction over. And the FCC appears to know this—the document explicitly targets streaming platforms despite having no regulatory authority over them, asking, "Is there disparity in ratings among different viewing platforms; i.e., is the same program consistently rated when it airs on broadcasting, MVPDs, and streaming platforms? Are streaming platforms more broadly interpreting what is allowable in categories intended for audiences under TV-Y14?"

The targeting comes at an already devastating time for queer animation. Beloved shows with LGBTQ+ characters have been systematically canceled or ended, and the shows that remain are under increasing pressure to strip queer content. Disney removed a transgender storyline from the Pixar series Win or Lose before it aired, with the company stating that parents should discuss such topics with children "in their own time"—the exact framing the FCC's public notice now uses. Disney+'s "Junior Mode" parental controls were found to filter out LGBTQ+ content entirely from kids' profiles. Anonymous Pixar employees have alleged that executives demanded they cut queer content, writing in a letter that "nearly every moment of overtly gay affection is cut at Disney's behest."

“It is hard to imagine just a few years ago when Pixar’s own Luca (2021) was celebrated within the community for its queer themes. Now, the queerness of Pixar’s Luca no longer seems like the result of a studio being held back by higher powers from telling an openly queer story but rather the result of Pixar leadership’s own mandate to relegate any queer characters to the background. I am no longer certain that the studio would have even released the same cut of Luca in 2025 as it did in 2021, such is the frighteningly fast normalisation of queer erasure in mainstream media, including animation, that has occurred in the last couple years,” writes Oliver Vigni, a fantasy/animation writer.

The public comment period is open now through May 22, 2026. Anyone can submit comments opposing this effort through the FCC's Comment Filing System under MB Docket No. 19-41. LGBTQ+ organizations, parents, animators, and allies are encouraged to make their voices heard—the FCC is required to consider all comments submitted during the period.

Thousands of medical professionals will flock to Boston from April 24-27 for the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) meeting. It will be one of the largest gatherings of its kind in the country. PAS is a collaboration of almost two dozen groups, including the Academic Pediatric Association (APA) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)—shaping global pediatric care standards and providing certified continuing medical education (CME) credits that physicians need to maintain their licensure.

However, some clinicians have raised concerns about the conference’s sole panel dedicated to transgender health care, sources familiar with the situation told Erin in the Morning. The workshop will be stacked exclusively with academics who have been tied to a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group—the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine, or SEGM.

The organization has been denounced for promoting conversion therapy practices and manufacturing the scientific facade for the Trump Administration’s state-sanctioned war on transgender children. Now, panel attendees can use this workshop to earn required CME credits.

“Pediatricians attend PAS to hear the latest in how to better care for the children and adolescents that they serve,” one attendee told Erin in the Morning, who requested anonymity due to the ongoing threat of professional retaliation or state persecution against medical professionals speaking out on trans issues.

“Platforming a one-sided perspective that is not based in medical society guidelines or in the preponderance of the scientific evidence misleads pediatricians, who are attending these talks in good faith that what they hear will be free from bias and rooted in science and good patient care,” they said.

Education-branded content from SEGM has already landed reputable institutions in hot water. Last year, SEGM and its very close affiliate, Genspect (another SPLC-designated hate group) were both approved to disseminate CME content through joint providerships with institutions such as Washington State University and the Michigan State Medical Society.

However, after investigations from Erin in the Morning revealed the unscientific practices promoted by these modules, the ACCME, or the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, placed the materials under review over concerns about scientific validity. The ordeal resulted in at least one joint provider organization losing its ACCME accreditation.

The courses promoted the “social contagion” myth of being transgender; some modules struck from course offerings featured the very same speakers attending the PAS, including Riittakerttu Kaltiala and PAS panel facilitator Dr. Moti Gorin.

The panel looks innocuous enough on the conference schedule. “A Scientific Dialogue on the Care of Transgender and Gender Diverse Youth” is advertised as “a scholarly review of the current evidence informing clinical approaches to care.”

In reality, the billed speakers have often been accused of pushing anti-trans ideology framed as “science” and misusing evidence to influence laws and public policies to harm transgender people.

SEGM rejects this classification, arguing it only seeks to establish nonpartisan and “evidence-informed discussions.” Notably, nearly a third of SEGM’s 2024 revenue—the latest year available on ProPublica’s searchable tax filing database—came from DonorsTrust, one of the largest conservative dark money groups in America. It is best known for bankrolling the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

SEGM’s most direct link to the panel is Dr. Anna Hutchinson, who is a psychologist based in the United Kingdom and a paid consultant for SEGM. Not only does she advocate for practices widely considered to be conversion therapy; she also suggested gender-affirming models of care are, themselves, a form of conversion therapy, a pipeline pushing “LGB” youth to become transgender.

The other speaker to self-disclose his SEGM ties in conference documents is Dr. Steven Montante of Richmond, Virginia, who works in private practice. He has also conducted research affiliated with the group through McMaster University, Montante has been compensated by SEGM with honoraria as part of the group’s “speakers bureau, symposia, and expert witness” activities. Montante represents a fringe faction of doctors and anti-trans activists who want to ban some, if not all, kinds of medical gender-transition care until age 25.

Then, there is Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, a Finnish researcher who is well-known to those tracking threats to trans rights in the states and abroad. Former patients have accused her clinic of abusive behaviors—claims she rejects—including allegations that she prodded minors with invasive sexual interrogations and called child protective services on a family who sought to obtain their child’s treatment legally through a private clinic. In addition, she promotes social contagion myths about transness.

In 2023, Kaltiala partnered with SEGM to host an event in Finland. She also reportedly went out of her way to advocate for the Florida Medical Board’s decision to gut access to gender-affirming care for trans kids—a body packed with Governor Ron DeSantis’s handpicked political appointees.

Finally, the session was assembled and is chaired by Dr. Moti Gorin, a bioethicist based out of Colorado State University. Of the four workshop speakers, he was the only one to respond to a request to comment from Erin in the Morning.

Gorin was a co-author of the Department of Health and Human Services “Gender Dysphoria Report,” which Mother Jones reported was largely shaped by conservative, anti-trans activist Leor Sapir. It has been decried as an ideologically-driven document with a predetermined, Trump-approved outcome: to manufacture a (pseudo)scientific basis to justify Donald Trump’s goal of eradicating the “stain on our Nation” that is trans youth.

Among other red flags—the report deadnamed and misgendered Christine Jorgensen, an early trans celebrity, throughout the document. Its scientific findings were slammed by the American Psychiatric Association as well as groups like USPATH, WPATH, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics for its purported misuse and misrepresentation of evidence.

Report authors also included several current and former affiliates of SEGM including co-founder Evgenia Abbruzzese, as well as Alex Byrne, a proponent of the idea that trans women may just be acting out some sort of elaborate sexual fetish in transitioning. (Byrne and Gorin co-authored a 2025 paper together as well.)

In conversation with Erin in the Morning, Gorin defended the HHS report as a sound review of evidence surrounding pediatric gender care, and rejected the idea it might be political. He further called the SPLC’s hate group list a “slimy hitpiece based on errors and misconceptions.” (SEGM has similarly rejected its place on the SPLC’s hate group list.) Gorin said he is not “against” trans people or any group of people.

At the same time, Gorin’s own past with SEGM has raised eyebrows. He received an honorarium for speaking at the group’s 2023 New York conference, and he presented at their 2025 Berlin gathering, but told Erin in the Morning he received no honorarium for the latter.

Neither Kaltiala nor Gorin’s past collaborations with SEGM are disclosed as a conflict of interest in conference materials, although based on PAS’s narrow self-disclosure policies, it appears neither had to do so. He also co-wrote a 2025 paper with an SEGM researcher, J. Cohn, for which SEGM covered open access fees.

Gorin was also a founding board member for the LGB Courage Coalition—a small but glaringly loud anti-trans group spearheaded by activist Jamie Reed. LGBCC appears to largely fund excursions for activists to testify in favor of anti-trans policies around the country, and publishes hateful content on its modest Substack. Gorin has since stepped down from his role in the organization but declined to tell Erin in the Morning why.

These are the educators that doctors from around the country will be relying on to inform culturally competent care for trans youth.

Texas’s Baylor College of Medicine has been the accredited body for PAS meetings overseeing CMEs for years, which are hosted in different states and cities each time. PAS selects presentations, speakers, and topics, Baylor’s Vice President of Communications, Lori Williams, told Erin in the Morning.

“We have no role in that,” she said. “We only confirm compliance for [ACCME] accreditation, which we did.”

PAS, meanwhile, would not answer questions about how it evaluated submissions for programming. Instead, Glenda Minshew, its Chief Meeting Officer, sent Erin in the Morning “topic-related sessions within the PAS program,” which were subsequently added to the public schedule as an addendum to Gorin’s talk.

It is possible this may have been seen as a sort of carbon offset—to steer attendees to more diverse perspectives without cancelling it or censoring speakers—although it should be noted that most of the supplemental events are tangentially related at best.

The suggestions included an APA-sponsored gathering more generally on LGBTQ pediatric health education; a panel on “inclusive language” in medicine; three “poster presentations,” in a sea of the 3,000+ posters displayed throughout the convention; and finally, “A Suicide Prevention Skills Workshop.” (The session description for this one makes no mention of LGBTQ youth.)

ACCME, the national accrediting body for CME content, told Erin in the Morning in a statement that it was not privy to the specifics of all of the PAS sessions. “If someone has a concern related to an activity offered by an ACCME-accredited provider, we encourage them to consider submitting an inquiry through our regular complaints process,” the statement said.

Many gender care or LGBTQ scholars continue to sound the alarm about SEGM, the academics in its orbit, and its many tendrils—especially as it pertains to “gender exploratory therapy,” “therapy first,” “Cass-informed therapy,” and a number of other monikers that, in some form or another, have been uplifted by those involved in the workshop and compared to conversion therapy.

Gorin does not agree such practices are akin to anti-gay conversion therapy. But other scholars in youth gender care and bioethics argue this view is tinted with anti-trans bias.

“Gender-exploratory therapy is an emergent and under-defined paradigm in trans health care,” writes Florence Ashley, a bioethicist from the University of Alberta.

Indeed, many experts point out that gender exploratory therapy is an under-studied, experimental medical intervention being thrust onto trans minors without high-quality and peer-reviewed longitudinal studies, randomized controlled trials, or any of the other standards of evidence that anti-trans advocates use to discredit the ample literature that does support gender affirming care.

“Gender exploratory therapy” often blames being trans on anything from “repressed homosexuality” to autism and delays treatments like puberty blockers or hormone therapies until irreversible psychological and physical damage has already been done.

Dr. M.A. Miller, an assistant professor of gender, race, and health at WSU when Erin in the Morning first broke the news about that college’s SEGM CME courses in October 2025, told Erin in the Morning that academia is an “intense battleground space of embracing freedom of speech, even if it’s speech that we don’t like.”

However, they said, “it’s another thing entirely” to create a false equivalency between practices with decades of research behind them, and those that have been “unanimously understood as not only pseudoscientific, but also deeply, deeply dangerous.”

Adds Ashley, “How proponents talk about gender-exploratory therapy is nearly identical to how individuals offering conversion practices targeting sexual orientation frame their own work,” they said.

“Despite the language of exploration, gender-exploratory therapy shares more with interrogation, if not inquisition. When you begin from the premise that trans identities are suspect and often rooted in pathology, your therapeutic approach soon becomes indistinguishable from conversion practices.”

On Saturday, U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai issued a blistering 49-page written opinion vacating the Kennedy Declaration—the December 2025 declaration that threatened to revoke all federal funding, including Medicare and Medicaid, from any hospital or provider that offered gender-affirming care for transgender youth, a virtual death sentence for any hospital system. The vacatur applies nationwide, eliminating the legal basis that roughly 40 hospitals cited when they shuttered their trans youth care programs earlier this year. It also bars the Trump administration from implementing the Declaration or any materially similar policy threatening providers' federal funding for offering gender-affirming care. The ruling could have enormous implications in states like Colorado, where Children's Hospital Colorado is fighting a state Supreme Court case while still citing federal threats as justification for refusing to treat trans youth, and in New York, where hospitals have come under fire under state nondiscrimination law. The ruling goes into effect immediately.

The case centers on the Kennedy Declaration, issued on December 18, 2025, which was widely covered at the time as a "nuclear option" against transgender youth care. The administration's attack came on two tracks. First, CMS released two proposed federal rules barring hospitals providing trans care from Medicare and Medicaid. Because virtually every hospital in America depends on Medicare and Medicaid funding to survive, the rules would have functioned as a de facto nationwide ban. Secretary Kennedy, not content to wait for the long rule-making process, simultaneously issued the Declaration, which invoked an obscure HHS regulation allowing the department to exclude providers from federal health programs if they furnish care that "fails to meet professionally recognized standards of health care." By declaring that gender-affirming care for minors was "neither safe nor effective" and therefore failed to meet those standards, Kennedy effectively short-circuited the rulemaking process—putting a chilling policy into immediate effect without notice, without public comment, and without any of the procedural safeguards required by law. HHS General Counsel Mike Stuart then began publicly referring hospitals to the Office of Inspector General for exclusion.

The opinion was scathing, and called out the Trump administration for flagrant abuse of authority and disdain toward the rule of law. “Unserious leaders are unsafe,” Judge Kasubhai wrote in the opinion’s opening line. “There is nothing more serious than our leaders’ dedication to the rule of law so that we might maintain the integrity of our constitutional democracy. This case highlights a leader’s unserious regard for the rule of law. This case demonstrates how disregard for the rule of law does not merely result in an abstract infraction. Rather, and tragically, this case is one of a long list of examples of how a leader’s wanton disregard for the rule of law causes very real harm to very real people.”

On the government’s core argument—that the Kennedy Declaration was merely Kennedy’s personal, non-binding opinion—the judge was withering: “Defendants’ jurisdictional arguments are based on the bald-faced lie that the Kennedy Declaration amounts to nothing more than one man’s musings on gender-affirming care. This Court is not persuaded by Defendants’ attempts to gaslight it into believing that the Kennedy Declaration does anything other than what it says.” And the judge reserved his harshest words for HHS’s treatment of children’s hospitals: “Despite repeatedly emphasizing their commitment and obligation to protect children, Defendants have sweepingly wielded the Kennedy Declaration to threaten children’s hospitals that provide life-saving care to children. Citing the Kennedy Declaration, Defendants have exploited the threat of exclusion to bully healthcare providers into suspending gender-affirming care they would otherwise provide in compliance with statewide standards of care out of fear they will lose federal healthcare program funding and the attendant ability to provide any life-saving care to all children.”

Specifically, the judge found the Kennedy Declaration violated the law in four ways: it bypassed the Administrative Procedure Act's notice-and-comment requirements, bypassed Medicare's own separate notice-and-comment procedures, violated the terms of federally approved state Medicaid plans that the HHS Secretary is statutorily obligated to pay under, and—most critically—exceeded HHS's statutory authority entirely. On that final point, the judge cited a provision in the Medicare Act that could not be clearer: the statute says that nothing in the law "shall be construed to authorize any Federal officer or employee to exercise any supervision or control over the practice of medicine or the manner in which medical services are provided." The Kennedy Declaration clearly was an attempt to exercise supervision and control over the practice of medicine.

"This Court can scarcely recall an APA action that has come before it in which the agency's action was so clearly unlawful," the judge wrote. Perhaps most absurdly, the government argued that striking down the Kennedy Declaration would violate Secretary Kennedy's First Amendment rights—essentially claiming that the Declaration was not a binding federal action that threatened hospitals' very existence, but rather just one man sharing his personal opinions about medicine, and that the court should treat it as protected speech. The judge was not amused: "Defendants cannot bully or gaslight this Court into ignoring the many procedural and legal flaws of the Kennedy Declaration by invoking one of the most sacred principles of our constitutional democracy—the freedom of speech—when that principle comes nowhere close to being implicated." The court noted that the lawsuit does not challenge Kennedy's right to talk about gender-affirming care—it challenges his authority to "unilaterally, categorically, and without any process, supersede professional standards of care" while 40 hospitals shut down their programs in response.

Now that the Declaration has been vacated, hospitals have lost the primary justification they have cited for ending gender-affirming care for trans youth. The ruling does not merely block the Declaration—it permanently enjoins any “materially similar policy,” meaning the administration cannot simply rename the Declaration and try again. Hospitals that shuttered their programs by citing fear of federal retaliation—from Children’s Hospital Colorado to Children’s Minnesota to NYU Langone and Mount Sinai in New York—must now reckon with the fact that the federal threat they cited has been declared unlawful by a federal court, and the injunction bars it from being reimposed. Children’s Minnesota has already resumed care, citing the earlier oral ruling. California Attorney General Rob Bonta successfully sued Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, forcing it to continue care under state nondiscrimination law. The Colorado Supreme Court is weighing whether to order Children’s Hospital Colorado to do the same. This ruling strengthens every one of those efforts.

For hospitals that continue to refuse care, the legal calculus has shifted dramatically. Many of the states in this lawsuit—including New York, California, Colorado, and Illinois—have state or local nondiscrimination laws that explicitly protect transgender people. Hospitals that drop gender-affirming care in these states are arguably violating those laws, but state attorneys general, governors, mayors, and city human rights commissions have been slow to act, in part because hospitals could point to a federal declaration threatening their very existence. That excuse is now gone. It remains to be seen if elected officials now push for a return to trans youth care in alignment with those laws.

You can see the full ruling here:

2026

743KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

On Monday, the Montana Supreme Court issued a landmark 5-2 ruling declaring that "transgender discrimination is, by its very nature, sex discrimination," and that transgender people constitute a suspect class under the state's equal protection clause. The ruling in Kalarchik v. State of Montana blocks a definition-of-sex law and related state policies that stripped all legal recognition from transgender people and barred them from obtaining accurate birth certificates and driver's licenses. The decision rests on Montana's constitution, whose Equal Protection and Individual Dignity clause has been repeatedly interpreted to protect transgender people—and which the court made clear provides far greater protection than the federal constitution. Justices have now issued the clearest declaration ever that transgender people in the state will have enhanced protections of their rights, grounding the ruling in equal protection, sex discrimination, and privacy—principles with broad applicability in a state that has become a major battleground for anti-trans legislation and resistance to it.

The ruling stems from a challenge to three interlocking state policies: Senate Bill 458, a 2023 law that defined sex as strictly binary throughout the entire Montana Code; a 2022 rule from the Department of Public Health and Human Services that restricted birth certificates; and an unpublished 2024 Motor Vehicle Division policy that barred transgender people from updating their driver's licenses. Together, the policies eliminated all pathways for transgender Montanans to obtain accurate identification documents. SB 458 was particularly sweeping—it inserted a rigid binary definition of sex into Section 1-1-201 of the Montana Code Annotated, the state's general definitions statute, meaning the definition rippled through virtually every area of state law: insurance regulations, employment protections, drivers licenses, birth and death certificates, and equal pay provisions. As Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr described the law's impact, it impacts trans people “from the cradle to grave." In December 2024, Lewis and Clark County District Court Judge Mike Menahan blocked all three policies, finding that the plaintiffs had a "fundamental right to be free from discrimination on the basis of sex under the Montana Constitution" and that the state had failed to articulate any compelling interest in enforcing them.

Now, a 5-2 majority of the Montana Supreme Court has affirmed that ruling and gone further. Justice Laurie McKinnon, writing for the majority, declared: "Government issued identification documents are necessary to access public life. When they do not accurately reflect a person's sexual identity, the transgender Montanan is prevented, based on their sex, from obtaining the same attributes of public life that a cisgender Montanan may obtain. Hence, the inability of transgender Montanans to receive government-issued identification documents accurately reflecting their gender identity is fundamentally about the nature of sex and suspect class discrimination under Article II, Section 4—a clause that enshrines individual dignity, equal protection, and nondiscrimination. Transgender discrimination is, by its very nature, sex discrimination." (emphasis added)

The court also went a step further. The Montana court separately declared that transgender people constitute a suspect class under the state's equal protection clause. In legal terms, a suspect class is a group that has historically faced such severe discrimination that any law targeting them must meet the highest level of judicial scrutiny to survive—the same standard applied to laws that discriminate on the basis of race. The Montana court stated: "Being transgender is also a suspect class under the Equal Protection Clause of Article II, Section 4—'no person shall be denied equal protection of the law.' The central premise of our state's equal protection guarantee 'is that persons similarly situated with respect to a legitimate governmental purpose of the law must receive like treatment.'" The practical effect is sweeping: any Montana law that singles out transgender people will now face strict scrutiny, meaning the state must prove the law serves a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve it—a standard that laws almost never survive.

The court's reasoning following this determination is straightforward. Under Montana's policies, if a cisgender woman's birth certificate incorrectly lists her as male, she can have it corrected to say female. But a transgender woman whose birth certificate also lists her as male—and who also lives, presents, and is perceived as female—is denied that same correction. Both women want the same document: one that says "F." One gets it; the other does not. The only difference is the sex they were assigned at birth. That, the court held, is sex discrimination—because the state "tolerates certain traits in one sex that it condemns in another." The state argued its policies apply equally to everyone, but the court dismissed this, finding that "the State's position ignores that only transgender persons are discriminated against when they are not allowed to have identification documents that match their gender identity." Because sex is explicitly protected under Montana's constitution, that discrimination triggers strict scrutiny.

The ruling was not universally agreed upon. Justice Baker, though part of the court’s left-leaning majority, issued a separate concurrence that took a narrower path, grounding her reasoning in Montana’s Individual Dignity clause rather than the majority’s broader holding that transgender people are a suspect class. Baker wrote that “when a person is forced to carry and display a government identification document that does not match who they look like or how they present themselves, this dishonors their dignity.” However, she appeared open to leaving portions of the definition-of-sex law intact, writing that “whether that requires invalidating SB 458 in its entirety must await determination on the merits.”

The two dissenters were far more hostile toward transgender people. Justice Jim Rice repeatedly referred to the plaintiffs—both transgender women—using male pronouns and the phrase “biological male” throughout his dissent, and dismissed the term “cisgender” as “not only inaccurate but potentially offensive.” He devoted multiple pages to a hypothetical about a person who identifies as “trans-aged,” sourcing the concept from Evie Magazine—an alt-right publication that the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as promoting “male supremacist politics of the hard right” and that Media Bias/Fact Check rates as publishing conspiracy theories and pseudoscience—and from a blog post on Care-Net.org, an evangelical anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center network. Chief Justice Cory Swanson, joining Rice’s dissent in full and writing his own, accused the majority of issuing “a political decision dressed up in constitutional garb” and predicted that the ruling “will not endure, nor should it.”

The ruling is monumental for transgender Montanans. Because the decision rests entirely on the Montana Constitution, it is insulated from the U.S. Supreme Court. Under the principle of adequate and independent state grounds, the federal Supreme Court cannot review a state court's interpretation of its own constitution, so long as that constitution provides more protection than the federal one. Montana's does—and it is not close. Adopted in 1972, Montana's constitution is widely considered one of the most progressive in the nation. Its Article II, Section 4, titled "Individual Dignity," contains three separate protections with no federal equivalent: a dignity clause declaring that "the dignity of the human being is inviolable," an equal protection clause, and a standalone non-discrimination clause that explicitly lists sex as a protected category—something the U.S. Constitution does not do. Montana's constitution also enshrines a direct right to privacy that the state supreme court has already used to strike down the state's ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth.

The majority in this case made the independence of its analysis explicit, writing: "Montana case law interpreting the Individual Dignity provisions directs our analysis, not federal precedent." The dissent cited Trump v. Orr and Skrmetti—both hostile federal rulings—but the majority rejected them outright. What this means in practice is that Montana's transgender residents now have a constitutional shield completely independent of the Supreme Court of the United State’s decisions.

The case now returns to District Court for a full trial on the merits. Meanwhile, Gov. Gianforte signed SB 437—a law nearly identical to the one just blocked—on March 24, just three weeks before this ruling. Attorney Rylee Sommers-Flanagan of Upper Seven Law has already filed a request to add SB 437 to the existing lawsuit, telling the Montana Free Press, "There is not a substantive difference between the laws." With the Montana Supreme Court now on record that transgender discrimination is sex discrimination and that transgender people are a suspect class, any future law targeting them in the state will face the highest level of constitutional scrutiny, and should help overturn all future laws targeting trans people should the court’s makeup remain similar.

Disclaimer: The author of this piece is lovingly married to Representative Zephyr of Montana.

On Tuesday, the Colorado Supreme Court heard oral arguments over whether Children's Hospital Colorado can be forced to resume gender-affirming care for transgender youth. The hospital was one of roughly 40 across the country that capitulated to Trump administration threats and shuttered their trans youth care programs. However, the hospital's position has grown increasingly untenable, as hospitals in states like Minnesota and California have begun reversing course and as the Trump administration has suffered mounting losses in federal courts—including an Oregon ruling that vacated the very declaration the hospital cited as justification for halting care. Hearing arguments on Tuesday, several justices appeared skeptical of the hospital's rationale, questioning whether Colorado's civil rights protections for transgender people—among the strongest in the nation—can simply be overridden by federal threats that do not constitute law.

In December, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. issued a declaration that gender-affirming care for transgender youth was "neither safe nor effective," warning that hospitals providing such care could be excluded from Medicare and Medicaid—a virtual death sentence for any hospital system. Crucially, Kennedy's declaration was illegal: Section 1801 of the Social Security Act explicitly states that "nothing in this title shall be construed to authorize any Federal officer or employee to exercise any supervision or control over the practice of medicine." Roughly 40 hospitals across the country capitulated, including Children's Hospital Colorado, which shuttered its trans youth care program in January. It is critical to note that many other hospitals continued to offer care throughout this period—and none had their Medicaid funding revoked, a fact that would prove significant in Tuesday's proceedings. In response to the closure, trans youth and their families sued Children's Hospital Colorado, arguing that no federal law compelled the hospital to stop—it was simply capitulating to Trump—and that Colorado's Anti-Discrimination Act, which prohibits discrimination based on gender identity, required the hospital to continue providing care equally to transgender and cisgender patients alike. Notably, the Kennedy Declaration was itself blocked in court in March.

The case first went to Denver District Court, where Judge Ericka F.H. Englert was sympathetic to the families on the merits—ruling that the plaintiffs would likely succeed in proving they had been discriminated against and that their children were suffering irreparable harm. Yet inexplicably, Judge Englert denied the families relief, concluding that the public interest weighed in the hospital's favor because forcing it to resume care could trigger federal retaliation. "Plaintiffs essentially ask the Court to call the bluff of the federal government," she wrote, "and order CHC to take action in violation of federal law." Scott Skinner-Thompson, a civil rights law professor at the University of Colorado Law School, told the Colorado Sun that it is "rare" to see a case where a trial court has found that plaintiffs are being discriminated against but then declined to issue an injunction to stop it. The families then appealed directly to the Colorado Supreme Court.

The hearing featured sharp exchanges over the nature of discrimination itself. Children's Hospital argued that it was not discriminating against transgender youth—and instead was discriminating on age and condition, mirroring the conservative Skrmetti ruling’s logic. "You can't infer any type of animus on the part of Children's Hospital," attorney Patrick O'Rourke told the justices. Civil rights advocates have noted that this reasoning is a thin veil for discrimination—akin to a hospital banning yarmulkes and claiming it is not discriminating against Jewish people, just enforcing a neutral dress code. Several justices appeared to see through the argument. "How is that not discrimination?" Justice Susan Blanco asked, with Justice Márquez noting that the hospital continues to prescribe the exact same medications to cisgender children. Justice Richard Gabriel agreed: "I guess I worry how that's not a pretextual argument to allow discrimination." The families' attorney, Paula Greisen, dismissed the hospital's reasoning as "semantics," arguing that all the patients—cisgender and transgender alike—"are all trying to align the timing of puberty," and that no federal law compels the hospital to discriminate. The Kennedy declaration has been blocked, she noted, and the hospital's remaining fears are "completely imaginary."

But the arguments extended beyond the question of discrimination—they went to the heart of whether state civil rights laws can survive federal intimidation. Greisen framed the case as existential for state sovereignty. “At the end of the day, if states don’t retain their sovereignty and the laws aren’t enforced, then it doesn’t matter how much our General Assembly stands up to the Trump administration or any administration and says, ‘We’re going to protect these groups,’” she told the justices. “If the court doesn’t enforce those laws, then all those laws become a house of cards.”

Several justices appeared to share that concern. Justice William W. Hood III questioned whether the hospital’s catastrophic predictions were even realistic, wondering aloud whether the “catastrophic nature of it makes it politically untenable”—suggesting the federal government would never actually follow through on shutting down a major children’s hospital. It is worth noting that no hospital that has continued to provide gender-affirming care has had its Medicaid funding revoked.

Justice Richard L. Gabriel went further, expressing alarm at the precedent the hospital’s argument would set. “I understand the position Children’s Hospital is put in here. My concern would be, pick a rogue administration down the road,” Gabriel said. “It would seem your argument is, they could take any number of absurd positions on saying whatever care could be unsafe. And that may be targeted at a particular identifiable group, and that identifiable group will always have no remedy because the government has all the cards and they control all the money. I’m concerned with that precedent.”

The justices were not universally supportive of the families' arguments, however, and some appeared to embrace caution in how they would rule. Justice Carlos A. Samour Jr. appeared the most hesitant, acknowledging sympathy for the families but expressing concern about the practical consequences. "I think we all are in favor of enforcing those laws," Samour said. "In this case, it gets really complicated, because the hospital is saying, 'Look, if we're required to provide this treatment, all these horrible, catastrophic things may very well happen.'" He asked whether there was any "middle ground" with the federal administration—such as allowing current patients to complete treatment while not accepting new ones—but the hospital's attorney said there was not. Even Gabriel, who had expressed deep concern about the precedent, acknowledged the difficulty of the court's position. "The trial court here found perfectly rationally that, 'The plaintiffs are asking me to call the federal government's bluff, and the injury if I lose on that would be dramatic,'" he said. "So how do we overturn that?"

The way the court rules could have enormous implications—not just for transgender youth in Colorado, but for how hospitals in supposedly safe states treat civil rights protections in the face of an administration that has weaponized federal funding as a cudgel against anti-discrimination laws. If the court accepts the hospital's argument that vague federal threats are sufficient to override state anti-discrimination law, the consequences extend far beyond gender-affirming care. Under that logic, any Republican administration need only issue stern threats—without passing a single law, without winning a single court case—and that alone would be enough to nullify state civil rights protections for any group it chooses to target. The laws themselves become meaningless, exactly the "house of cards" Greisen warned of. There is no timeline for when the Colorado Supreme Court will issue its ruling.

A DoorDash courier has gone viral after President Donald Trump tried, and failed, to use her as a prop for a downright bizarre anti-trans rant.

Sharon Simmons, a grandmother from Arkansas, was delivering a McDonald’s meal to the White House to celebrate a “No Tax on Tips” policy enacted by federal lawmakers. With “DoorDash Grandma” emblazoned on her bright red shirt, she handed off the meal—then tried to leave.

But President Donald Trump stopped her so he could talk more about the initiative as a part of his “Big Beautiful Bill.” And he kept her there as he off-roaded about her husband’s cancer, White House AI slop posts, falsehoods about 2020 “election fraud,” and open borders and transgender people.

“They want to have men playing in women’s sports,” Trump said, turning to Simmons. “Do you think that men should play in women’s sports?”

“I really don’t have an opinion on that,” she said.

“I’ll bet you do,” he said.

“No, no,” Simmons said with a gracious smile. “I’m here about—”

“Pizza?” Trump cut her off.

“...‘No Tax on Tips,’” Simmons said simultaneously.

You can see a clip of the viral moment below.

Make no mistake: DoorDash Grandma is not some bastion of progressive queer politics who is confronting the President on the White House Lawn. She’s not your average courier, either. She’s been spotlighted by the GOP on multiple occasions to promote the “Big Beautiful Bill,” and DoorDash openly orchestrated DoorDash Grandma “to commemorate the first anniversary of the No Tax on Tips policy.”

Trump’s controversial budget bill, while granting some amnesty on taxes to contract workers, like DoorDash drivers, has also been criticized as political theatre and bad tax policy. “‘No Tax on Tips’ is a symbolic tax break that is very limited and poorly targets the workers who need tax relief the most,” Corey Husak, Director of Tax Policy for the Center for American Progress, wrote last year.

Nonetheless, DoorDash Grandma resonated with Americans in this political moment. Simmons’s virality shows, among other things, that voters are hungry—literally hungry—for meaningful reform to things like food prices, health care and cost of living. Waging culture wars is not sustenance.

On Sunday, Hungarians flocked to the polls in record numbers to oust Prime Minister Viktor Orbán from office in a historic election, delivering a stunning defeat to a fiercely anti-LGBTQ+ regime that enacted some of the harshest laws against its LGBTQ+ population in Europe and was broadly viewed as autocratic. The defeat came despite Vice President JD Vance traveling to Budapest to decry trans people just days before the election to campaign for Orbán, and President Trump endorsing him on Truth Social. Instead, Péter Magyar's Tisza Party won 138 of 199 parliamentary seats in a landslide, securing a two-thirds supermajority with nearly 80% turnout, the highest in Hungary's recent history. The victory brought hope to many across the country, but especially to LGBTQ+ Hungarians, who saw it as a signal that the tide could be reversed on years of draconian laws targeting their community. That hope was advanced on Sunday night, when in front of tens of thousands of supporters gathered along the Danube River in Budapest, Magyar directly addressed the previous regime's treatment of LGBTQ+ people, declaring that he would pursue a government where "no one is persecuted because they love differently, or love in a different way than the majority."

"I long waited for this. I was 12 when this bullshit started. Now I feel so hopeful for the future. I know this is just the starting line. But finally we could step on the track," wrote Alice Grey, a transgender Hungarian woman, on Bluesky. Grey said Magyar's victory speech left her stunned—not because of a sweeping policy promise, but because of what it didn't contain: hatred. "He said that he will serve every Hungarian, listed some starting each with 'doesn't matter x' and said 'doesn't matter how they love,'" she wrote. "I was so shocked. In Hungary, a president acknowledged any LGBTQ+ related thing without hatred. This is so new for us." She added that the speech gave her hope that she might "finally get out of our trans care hell and finally properly begin my transition journey."

Magyar ran a campaign that some LGBTQ+ Hungarians criticized as too cautious, choosing to avoid LGBTQ+ issues almost entirely. Háttér Society, Hungary's leading LGBTQ+ rights organization, noted that "neither Magyar, nor his party have reached out to the organization," and their election guide stated bluntly that "the party's election program does not address LGBTQ+ issues." In a country where the government banned legal gender recognition for trans people, criminalized Pride marches with up to a year in prison for organizers, and is currently prosecuting Budapest's mayor Gergely Karácsony for allowing the 2025 Pride march to proceed, even Magyar's silence was a departure from the norm. But he did offer signals. He called the Pride ban a distraction from the suffering of ordinary Hungarians and said a Tisza government would protect the right of assembly. When asked about same-sex adoption, he said that in his personal opinion, a child is better off with a same-sex couple than in the child protection system.

However, upon winning the election, Magyar came out more fiercely. Speaking to tens of thousands along the Danube, he promised a country "where no one is stigmatized because they think differently than the majority. No one is stigmatized if they love someone else, and love differently than the majority." He decried the division of Hungarians against one another, declaring, "it is not allowed to differentiate between Hungarian and Hungarian, to divide, because that is a sin." He vowed to liberate the judiciary, and promised that those responsible for the previous regime's abuses would face consequences. "From now on, this will not be a country without consequences," he said. "Those who robbed the country must take responsibility. Those who incited hatred between Hungarian and Hungarian, they must take responsibility."

You can view the full speech here (Hungarian):

LGBTQ+ organizations in Hungary encouraged their communities to vote, even as they expressed frustration with the lack of specific commitments. On the eve of the election, Háttér Society posted a message to its followers encouraging them to vote. The post linked to the organization's election guide, which documented each party's stance on LGBTQ+ issues. The guide noted that while Tisza's official platform did not address LGBTQ+ issues, Magyar had repeatedly spoken of building a country where "it does not matter whom they love," had pledged to protect the right of assembly, and had personally stated that a child is better off with a same-sex couple than in the child protection system. By contrast, the guide documented Orbán's Fidesz party's extensive record of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, and noted that the far-right Mi Hazánk party openly characterized LGBTQ+ people as "deviant propaganda" and a "cultural Marxist, anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-family worldview."

American anti-LGBTQ+ and far-right Christian nationalist forces have long drawn inspiration from and cooperated with Orbán’s autocratic government. Since 2022, CPAC—the Conservative Political Action Conference, a major gathering of the American right—has held annual satellite events in Budapest, where Orbán delivered keynotes declaring that “the woke movement and gender ideology are exactly what Communism and Marxism used to be.” The Orbán-linked Danube Institute hosted American conservative researchers to study Hungary’s policies, and its executive director told a Hungarian publication that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law—which banned instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation in schools—was inspired by the Orbán government. DeSantis’s own press secretary confirmed the connection, stating, “We were watching the Hungarians.” Hungary’s 2021 anti-LGBTQ+ law, which banned the “promotion” of homosexuality to minors, preceded Florida’s law by nine months. Hungary’s 2020 ban on legal gender recognition for trans people likewise predated and may have influenced the wave of similar efforts in the United States happening now.

In the leadup to Sunday’s election, Vice President JD Vance traveled to Budapest to campaign for Orbán at a rally, telling the crowd, “We have got to get Viktor Orbán re-elected. Specifically, he said, “Across the left, there is a band of radicals… They reject mothers and motherhood, fathers and fatherhood in the name of liberation. They condemn children to mutilization and sterilization in the name of gender care, and they practice institutional murder in the name of quote end of life planning." President Trump endorsed him on Truth Social. Orbán lost anyway—and the playbook he exported to the American right lost with him.

See Vance’s speech decrying trans people in Budapest:

Hungary has been the site of some of the fiercest anti-LGBTQ+ laws in Europe in recent years, ranking among the worst in ILGA-Europe's most recent Rainbow Map. In 2020, Orbán's government banned legal gender recognition for trans and intersex people entirely, making it impossible to change legal documents. That same year, a constitutional amendment declared that "the mother is a woman, the father is a man" and effectively banned same-sex adoption. In 2021, parliament passed a sweeping law banning the "promotion" of homosexuality or gender change to anyone under 18 in schools, media, and advertising. In 2023, the Constitutional Court closed the door on trans recognition permanently, ruling that anyone who hadn't applied before the 2020 ban was locked out forever. And in March 2025, parliament criminalized Pride marches, with up to a year in prison for organizers and police facial recognition authorized to identify attendees. Despite the ban, up to 200,000 people attended Budapest Pride last June in one of the largest anti-government demonstrations in years.

It remains uncertain which, if any, of these laws Magyar's government will overturn. His campaign stayed silent on specifics. But with a two-thirds supermajority, Magyar has the constitutional power to reverse every anti-LGBTQ+ law Orbán enacted—from the trans recognition ban to the Pride criminalization to the constitutional amendments themselves. What is already clear is that the anti-LGBTQ+ panic that fueled Orbán's autocratic regime—and that was exported to state legislatures across the United States—has been repudiated by the Hungarian people themselves in this historic election. LGBTQ+ people will rest slightly easier knowing that regime is gone.

Try as they might, the Idaho state legislature can’t seem to silence Boise’s LGBTQ Pride.

Idaho Republicans have spent years crafting bills and passing laws trying to lower the rainbow flags flown in public schools, government-owned buildings, roads, and parks. The latest attempt got as far as compelling Boise Mayor Lauren McLean to remove City Hall’s Pride flag on March 31—the Trans Day of Visibility. The flag had billowed above the building as a symbol of acceptance and inclusion for over a decade.

Nevertheless, Boise persisted. With a flag ban in place covering just about any inch of state-owned properties, officials got crafty. Instead of Pride flags, they installed Pride flagpoles.

“The art additions to city hall demonstrate our unwavering commitment to the people that call Boise home and to the values that we uphold every day,” the city said in a statement to CBS 2 - Idaho News.

The saga over Idaho Pride flags arguably erupted during the 2024 legislative session, when the GOP introduced Senate Bill 1362, an “emergency” provision to limit “political” flags in schools. It characterized Pride flags as a bid to promote “ideology” about gender and sexuality. Thankfully, that proposal died in the House.

Then, in March 2025, Idaho House Republicans successfully rushed House Bill 96 into law. This policy restricted any flag displayed on government-owned property to a select, pre-approved few categories, including the United States flag, of course, as well as “the official flag of a governmental entity.”

It was widely understood that its primary target was Pride flags, even as bill supporters argued publicly that it was about government neutrality.

“The ultimate goal is for us to fly flags that unite and don’t divide,” said Republican State Senator Ben Toews, as per The Idaho Statesman.

Naturally, Boise then adopted the Pride flag as an official “government entity” symbol, making it fair game to continue flying over City Hall.

Conservatives were outraged. “That’s lawless, insubordinate, and intolerable,” said Representative Ted Hill, the Republican who sponsored several anti-Pride flag bills, according to Boise State Public Radio.

This year, Republicans went for a flag ban yet again with the passage of HB 561. This new provision further restricts permissible displays so that it could only include “entity” flags “established prior to January 1, 2023.” Furthermore, it explicitly expanded the restriction’s domain to any “land owned and maintained by the governmental entity, including buildings, adjoining land, parks, roads, and boulevards.”

That’s where the Boise flagpoles come in. If the city couldn’t fly the flag, they’d do the next best thing.

Now, gay and trans flag stripes are permanently wrapped around the metal poles outside Boise City Hall, and behind them, draped from the windows, is a new banner, too.

“City of Boise,” the sign reads, embellished with rainbow hues. “Creating a city for everyone.”

But the battle continues. In Utah, Pride flag bans have been repeatedly tightened to prevent locals from bypassing loopholes. Other forms of Pride displays have come under fire, too. The LGBTQ community has had to get bold and creative amidst state repression.

In Orlando, this looked like filling in rainbow crosswalks with chalk after the state stripped them of their colors. Also in Florida, a beloved bridge lighting ceremony went rogue, using flashlights to create a renegade rainbow in defiance of Governor Ron DeSantis’s anti-LGBTQ crackdowns.

Meanwhile, in Hungary, totalitarian leader Viktor Orbán—who has cultivated close ties with American conservatives—ushered in a ban on gay Pride parades, which was resisted through “gray Pride” demonstrations.

This was in addition to the Hungarians who simply refused to comply with anti-LGBTQ censorship altogether, gathering at Budapest Pride by the thousands, rainbows and all.

Back in Boise, the small but courageous flagpole gesture was felt earnestly. One Idahoan who stopped to admire the new display expressed just how important it was to see the city fighting back.

“I feel loved,” he told local news. “I feel accepted by the people that matter. I feel hope.”

On Tuesday, Judge Chris Taylor defeated Judge Maria Lazar in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race by 20 points, the largest margin in 26 years by any justice. The race is significant because Lazar ran on a heavily anti-trans ad strategy, reminiscent of the strategy used by some Republicans in the 2024 election—running ads that demonized transgender people as threats to the "safety and dreams" of children. When conservatives attacked Taylor's pro-LGBTQ+ legislative record, including bills she authored supporting transgender rights, she did not disavow or distance herself from it. Despite the ads, Taylor won by a historic margin, following two other Wisconsin Supreme Court races in recent years where anti-trans ad strategy was a major part of the losing campaign.

Lazar ran on a heavy anti-trans strategy. One ad opened with a mother saying, "It's just not fair. My daughter worked so hard and loves sports, but now I'm worried about her competing against boys because of activists like Chris Taylor. It breaks my heart to see her safety and dreams dashed by activist politicians." Lazar herself posted on twitter that Taylor would "legislate from the bench to knock down voter ID, allow abortion up to birth, and allow boys in girls' sports." The Federalist ran articles targeting Taylor's pro-transgender legislative record, including bills she authored for a transgender rights task force. Despite all of this, Lazar lost by a historic 20-point margin.

See an example of the ads here:

Instead, Chris Taylor cruised to victory. She won 60-40—a 20-point margin that represents the largest margin of victory in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race since 2000. Her win expands the liberal majority to 5-2, the largest liberal majority on the court since at least the 1970s. Taylor carried more than 20 counties that voted for Donald Trump in 2024, and virtually every county in the state swung toward Democrats compared to the presidential race. Perhaps most remarkably, Taylor flipped Ozaukee County—part of the notorious "WOW counties" (Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington) that have been the bedrock of Republican strength in southeastern Wisconsin for decades. In Dane County, Taylor hit 84%, meaning Lazar received just 16%—the worst performance by a conservative candidate in the county's history.

LGBTQ+ organizations praised the results. Fair Wisconsin posted a simple message to their Facebook page: "Thank you for voting for equality, Wisconsin!" The Movement Victory Project, a coalition partner of Fair Wisconsin, praised the victory and thanked the organization for "providing regular voting information and education, including a guide to voting while trans." The ACLU likewise praised the result, stating, "Tonight Wisconsinites proved that no matter what's going on at the federal level, we can have the greatest impact in our own state and communities."

Taylor's win is significant for LGBTQ+ rights in the state. Wisconsin Republicans have repeatedly tried to pass anti-transgender legislation, though Gov. Tony Evers has vetoed every bill that has reached his desk—including, just last week, five anti-trans bills he vetoed on Trans Day of Visibility. But Evers will not be governor forever; he is not seeking reelection in 2026. Meanwhile, the Trump administration's pressure campaign has already reached Wisconsin: in January, both Children's Wisconsin and UW Health—two of the state's largest pediatric hospitals—paused gender-affirming care for minors, despite having no legal obligation to do so, after the administration threatened to strip Medicare and Medicaid funding from providers. Congressman Mark Pocan urged both hospitals to resume care, calling the pause premature. Colleges across the country have also capitulated to Trump's demands to ban transgender athletes from women's sports. With Evers' governorship ending and federal pressure mounting, a 5-2 liberal Supreme Court majority may become the most important backstop transgender Wisconsinites have—and Taylor's pro-LGBTQ+ record gives advocates reason to believe she will be a reliable voice on that court.

The victory is just the latest in a repudiation of anti-trans politics that has become a defining feature of the 2025 and 2026 elections. In November 2025, Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the Virginia governor's race by 13 points despite more than 57 percent of Republican ad spending going toward anti-transgender messaging—and Democrats swept to leads in 65 House of Delegates contests, one of the largest state legislative gains in recent years. In New Jersey, Democrat Mikie Sherrill won the governor's race decisively despite a similar barrage of anti-trans ads. In Wisconsin itself, the pattern has now repeated itself: In 2025, Elon Musk poured tens of millions into the race backing Brad Schimel, whose campaign ran ads framing transgender rights as a "radical agenda"—Susan Crawford won by 10. And now in 2026, Lazar ran her own anti-trans ads and lost by 20. The trend is unmistakable: anti-trans politics is not winning elections.

In the wake of the 2024 election, Democratic strategists at organizations like Third Way and the Searchlight Institute urged candidates to throw transgender people under the bus—to "moderate" on trans issues, to treat us as a political liability. Some prominent Democrats, like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, have taken that advice. But the Democrats who are actually winning elections—Spanberger, Sherrill, Crawford, and now Taylor—have refused to do so. They have won by historic margins, while candidates running against transgender people have lost. The lesson could not be clearer: support for transgender people is not the political liability that some have promised. What is a liability is running a campaign built on scapegoating a minority group while voters are worried about the economy, their health care, and the future of their democracy.

On Monday, Mississippi enrolled an anti-trans bill that will ban driver's license gender marker changes for transgender people across the state. The bill, which now awaits Republican Gov. Tate Reeves' signature, requires that all Mississippi driver's licenses reflect the holder's sex assigned at birth and explicitly states that court orders recognizing a gender change "shall have no effect" on license issuance. It is the latest in a wave of extreme anti-transgender identification document bans in recent months, following Kansas's decision in February to invalidate transgender people's driver's licenses overnight with no grace period—a story we at EITM broke. Though the Mississippi bill does not retroactively invalidate existing licenses the way Kansas did, any transgender Mississippian whose license comes up for renewal will be forced to carry identification that does not match their identity, should the governor sign it.

The bill, SB2322, is extremely broad. Alongside a requirement that all new, renewal, or duplicate driver's licenses reflect sex assigned at birth, SB 2322 also invalidates out-of-state driver's licenses issued to individuals who it asserts could not prove lawful presence in the United States—meaning that some licenses that are legal in other states are no longer recognized in Mississippi. Officials who encounter such licenses, such as during police stops, are required to cooperate with ICE. The ACLU of Mississippi, speaking in opposition to the bill, notes that the provisions "disproportionately impact both LGBTQIA+ individuals and immigrant communities by limiting access to accurate identification and expanding pathways into enforcement." In practice, the bill merges two of the current political moment's most targeted populations into a single piece of legislation.

The bill will have direct negative impacts on transgender Mississippians. In a state with strict voter ID laws, forcing a mismatch between a person’s appearance and their identification documents carries consequences. Trans people could be forcibly outed during a traffic stop, turned away at a bar, blocked at the polls, or subjected to scrutiny in any situation where a license must be produced. Notably, this is dangerous in a state where anti-LGBTQ+ animosity can be extremely high. According to the 2022 U.S. Trans Survey, which had over 92,000 participants, roughly a quarter of transgender people whose identification documents do not match their gender identity reported experiencing verbal harassment, assault, or denial of services when showing their IDs.

The bill is the latest in a growing wave of anti-transgender identification document laws. In February, Kansas went further than any state before it, invalidating transgender people's driver's licenses overnight and sending letters demanding their immediate surrender—leaving many scrambling and unable to get to work, pick up their children, and navigate daily life with suddenly invalid IDs. Though Mississippi's bill does not contain those instant revocation provisions, the effect will be the same over time: as licenses come up for renewal, transgender Mississippians will be forced to carry documents that out them. According to the Movement Advancement Project, seven states already do not allow transgender people to update the gender marker on their driver's license. If Gov. Reeves signs SB 2322, Mississippi will become the eighth.

"We cannot ignore the reality that this provision targets a vulnerable group of people who already face disproportionate levels of discrimination, misunderstanding and, in many cases, outright hostility. Rather than offering protection, this law adds to that burden. Rather than making their lives safer, it makes them more exposed. That is not the role of government, and it is not the purpose of good legislation," said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. "Scripture teaches us in Micah 6:8 that we are called to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly. That is not just a personal calling, but also should be a standard for how we govern. Laws rooted in justice protect rather than target. Laws grounded in mercy recognize the dignity of every person. Laws shaped by humility reflect a careful use of power, not an overreach of it. Senate Bill 2322, particularly this provision, falls short of that standard."

The bill now awaits Gov. Reeves' signature. Reeves has signed every major anti-transgender bill to reach his desk, including the state's sports ban, youth care ban, and bathroom ban, and is expected to sign SB 2322 as well. If signed, the law would take effect July 1, 2026. Transgender Mississippians who believe their rights have been violated can contact the ACLU of Mississippi for legal assistance.

Some Minnesota families caught in the crosshairs of Trump’s war on trans kids can once again breathe a little easier, at least for now. Children’s Minnesota, a major regional hospital system, is reinstating the care it had paused on February 27 for transgender youth.

“The decision follows a federal court ruling that vacated a federal declaration attempting to restrict gender-affirming care,” a statement from the hospital, shared with Erin in the Morning, said.

“We are contacting patient families that were affected by the temporary pause in certain services. Offering science- and research-based health care to transgender and gender diverse youth is part of Children’s Minnesota’s vision of being every family’s essential partner in raising healthier children.”

Of the Gender Health program’s 700 active patients, less than 5% were directly and immediately impacted, the hospital said. In other words, the federal government’s crackdown targeted a program that was serving only a few dozen minors with these specific treatments.

The care pause only ever impacted puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy. Children’s Minnesota never performed gender-affirming surgeries specific to trans patients under 18 and psychotherapeutic interventions were relatively unaffected.

“This pause was difficult and hard news for all of our patients,” the statement continued. “The temporary pause was a decision we did not want to make. It was a decision we had to make due to conditions at the time.”

On Dec. 18, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services issued a declaration that dubbed gender-affirming care for trans minors as medically unsound, and could therefore be restricted. However, the March ruling from Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai found that Kennedy does not possess the legal or scientific authority to render an entire field of health care “not medicine.” Therefore, the Dec. 18 HHS declaration, which excluded providers of such care from participating in federal healthcare programs, was deemed unlawful.

Over 20 states filed a federal lawsuit in December, including Minnesota, against the Trump regime in response to the attacks on trans people’s health care.

Then, in April, the BMJ reported:

The coalition argued that the HHS declaration unlawfully sought to pressure providers by threatening their participation in federal health programmes including Medicare and Medicaid. Accepting this argument, Kasubhai said, “There’s a theme of break it and see what others will do” in the way that the HHS attempted to change national health policy on gender affirming care, using a public statement without allowing the necessary public consultation.

“That’s not a system or method committed to the rule of law,” Kasubhai added.

Now, Judge Kasubhai must decide “whether the federal government should be barred from using the declaration’s reasoning in any future action against hospitals, according to legal analysts,” Becker’s Hospital Review, an industry publication, reported on April 1. In other words, it’s weighing whether the declaration can be cited or used as evidence in a court of law in the future.

“That question, which could determine how much leverage the administration retains over healthcare organizations going forward, remains unresolved.”

Recently, the Department of Justice also sued the state of Minnesota over its trans-inclusive bathroom and sports policies in schools.

“We have been living in a world in Minnesota that is inclusive of LGBTQ people for a long time, and these issues have never been prevalent—it’s not been a problem until we had a federal government that decided that we had to eradicate these people,” said Rep. Leigh Finke, the first openly transgender member of the Minnesota Legislature and a founding member of its Queer Caucus, in an interview with Erin in the Morning earlier this month.

Pam Bondi, who had been leading the charge at the DOJ since Trump’s return to office, was fired from her position as the Attorney General on April 2. It’s not immediately clear who will take her place—or how they will maneuver the upcoming legal battles over trans rights coming down the pike.

In the latest episode of their podcast A Touch More, all-star athletes Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird denounced the International Olympic Committee’s new rule requiring sex testing for athletes competing in the women’s category.

The anti-trans policy will subject athletes competing in the women’s division—and only women’s, not men’s—to invasive sex testing to determine whether they have an SRY gene. Why this is where the International Olympic Committee chose to draw the gender line is arguably arbitrary.

No major medical organization endorses this litmus test as a reliable marker of athletic skill or “biological sex.” Even the scientist who discovered the SRY gene has slammed this practice in sports, saying “science does not support” this “overly simplistic” approach. Rather, it’s an arbitrary line in the sand used to cram unscientific ideas about gender and sex into manmade, binary boundaries.

Nonetheless, if a woman tests positive for the gene, she could be forced to compete in the “male” category. This has had dire consequences the last few times it was deployed against women’s athletes. From 1992 to 1999, cisgender women were forced into testing and found out, on the world stage, that they had intersex conditions they never knew about. The spectacle led to ostracization, disqualification, and at least one suicide before such testing was abolished.

“What we’re doing is subjecting everybody, all women and all people who are identifying as women, to this really invasive testing that only to me just says like, oh, so we’re just trying to whittle it down to a certain type of woman,” Rapinoe said.

Rapinoe is one of the most high-profile athletes in the country, a soccer player with three Olympic competitions under her belt and a decorated career in the U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT). Bird, meanwhile, is among the most successful athletes in history—the retired WNBA legend spent her 20-season professional career as a point guard for the Seattle Storm, and is a record-breaking Olympian in her own right. The athletic power couple has been engaged since 2020. Together, they’ve long been outspoken advocates for the LGBTQ community.

Rapinoe connected the anti-trans vitriol in sports to the right wing’s broader attacks on queer and trans people, calling the push for sex testing “hateful.”

“They sort of like, lost the battle on gay marriage,” Rapinoe said. “So, it’s just like, we’re going to have this whole campaign for all these years to just hate trans people, which is such a small percentage of the population.”

Countless women, cisgender and transgender alike, have faced harassment and persecution because of the anti-trans athlete witch hunt.

“It’s just a total acquiescence to the Trump Administration,” Rapinoe said. “It’s just horrible, and I’m just sickened by it.”

The IOC rule is part of a broader pattern. In the United States, sports bans have served as a Trojan Horse for more sweeping anti-trans policies. The DOJ’s recent lawsuit over “women’s sports,” for example, also demands that transgender students be banned from bathrooms and locker rooms.

“Can we please stop obsessing over trans people and, I don’t know, maybe focus our time, energy, and resources into real problems women’s sports face?” Bird chimed in. She rejected the idea that sex testing, as the IOC claims, “protects women,” instead calling it a “fear-mongering” political ploy meant to generate support from conservative voters.

“That’s all this is,” Bird said. “If you crack this door open, it gets blown open. You’re now policing women’s bodies across the board.”