Boston Children’s Fights Back For Trans Kids: Judge Quashes Trump Subpoena

Around 2,000 BCH employees and untold numbers of patients were targeted by the DOJ. A judge just told them, “No.”

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A judge has dismissed a hospital subpoena sent out by the Department of Justice as part of its nationwide crackdown on gender-affirming care—a notable first, as per Reuters.

U.S. District Judge Myong Joun slammed the DOJ in a Sept. 9 ruling, penned in response to a subpoena of Boston Children’s Hospital earlier this summer alongside nearly two dozen other purported providers of legal, evidence-based, trans-friendly health care. The DOJ asserted they were investigating BCH over “false claims” and “unlawful off-label promotion” of puberty blockers and hormones for transgender people, which would hypothetically violate the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA).

But Joun denounced what he painted as a politically, rather than legally, motivated attack. The federal government failed to present even “an iota of suspicion” that BCH is actually engaging in fraudulent or off-label billing practices, Joun writes. “[I]t cannot use its subpoena power to go on a fishing expedition.”

While this does not mean the DOJ investigation will come to a hard stop, it does mean its capacity to go after individuals at BCH has been, at least for now, severely stymied. It also sends a powerful message: Institutions and officials have the power to throw a wrench in the systems that are hell-bent on attacking transgender people, if and when they have the audacity to do it.

In June, the Department issued a public memo announcing that it would prioritize prosecuting the health care providers of trans people with “all available resources.” That same day, the agency issued a subpoena to BCH for a wide range of sensitive patient details, including everything from procedural billing codes to the names and addresses of transgender patients. It also subpoenaed “the personnel files of nearly all 2,000 individuals who work for BCH in any capacity, not limited to their employment as it relates to [gender-affirming care].”

Health care systems that provide treatment to transgender people have faced an onslaught of harassment and violence. At BCH, this includes bomb threats, death threats, phone calls, emails, social media posts, mail, and even abusive messages submitted through the hospital’s online appointment system, the Sept. 9 document says.

The DOJ denied any wrongdoing. Officials posited that they “would not have issued the subpoena unless it was for an ‘appropriate’ investigation,” and therefore, “the subpoena must have been issued for a proper purpose,” Joun writes. “This logic, if followed, would preclude any form of judicial review as the Government’s self-proclaimed say-so would always be sufficient [...] This is no logic at all.”

The Trump Administration has made its intentions clear through policy and propaganda alike—the anti-trans military ban, attempts to bar trans girls from women’s sports, the confiscation of many transgender people’s passports, and the cluster of executive orders dedicated to eradicating trans people from law and public life.

In fact, Joun found, federal officials failed to provide “any support” at all that the information sought pertained to allegations of fraud “as opposed to the Government’s stated goal of ending GAC.”

The filing further reads:

Joun also shot down thinly-veiled government assertions that the subpoena was an attempt to “evade state bans on gender dysphoria treatments.”

“Massachusetts does not ban GAC,” Joun writes. “It is thus difficult to understand what exactly the Government is trying to investigate BCH for.”

He concluded that the effort was motivated purely by bad faith political attacks. “[T]he 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 BCH to stop providing such care, and to dissuade patients from seeking such care.”

In July, The Washington Post unearthed another DOJ subpoena from this batch, which was made public via a case filing in Washington state. It reads similarly, demanding every conceivable record on employees and even volunteers within the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), plus sensitive patient information dating back to 2020.

“The subpoena to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia was filed in court by the Washington state attorney general’s office, which in January successfully sued the Trump administration over two executive orders that sought to withhold federal money from institutions that offer gender care to minors,” The Post reported. “State Attorney General Nicholas W. Brown said in legal documents that he added the subpoena to the court record because President Donald Trump has ‘only escalated’ his attack on this type of medical care.”

CHOP, like BCH, is fighting the most dangerous parts of the subpoena. In a July court filing, they denounced the DOJ’s efforts as an attack not just on trans patients, but all patients:

Due to the shrouded nature of such investigations, the full list of subpoenaed providers—and whether they are complying—is not publicly known at this time.