NYU Langone Releases Grand Jury Subpoena: Feds Want Names Of Every Trans Youth Care Patient
NYU Langone has released the subpoena it received from DOJ officials—but there may be ways to fight back.
Earlier this week, Erin in the Morning reported that the Texas Northern District Court issued criminal subpoenas to multiple hospitals, demanding “information” on every minor to whom they provided gender-affirming care to since 2020. NYU Langone, located in and around New York City, has been the first and only institution to publicly disclose the receipt of such a subpoena thus far. On Wednesday, Langone released the subpoena full.
We have published the subpoena at the bottom of this article. Here’s what it says and what it means for Langone patients and families.
Langone sent a message via their patient portal Monday night that it was told to hand over the names of “providers and others who were involved in offering such care at NYULH in that timeframe.”
It also said the Department of Justice wanted “information” on trans patients that it served, but it did not elaborate further on what that means. The message from Langone said it “was one of several institutions” that received a grand jury subpoena from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas.
While around two dozen institutions received subpoenas during ex-Attorney General Pam Bondi’s reign at the DOJ, these grand jury subpoenas are an escalation. Those issued by Bondi were civil in nature; these entail a criminal investigation, which introduces the prospect of jail time as both a punishment if someone is convicted of a crime and as a potential enforcement mechanism for the subpoena.
This newest revelation also shines a light on the increasingly common tactics of the Trump playbook: They cast a wide net and hope at least part of it will hold up in court.
Langone is located about 2,000 miles northeast of the Northern District of Texas, which is widely considered to be among the most conservative districts in the country. The choice to hold proceedings there was characterized by some experts as an abuse of the judiciary system.
“This is a blatant unlawful effort by the DOJ to intimidate providers of gender-affirming care to trans youth by engaging in judge and forum shopping,” Alejandra Caraballo, a Harvard Law instructor and trans legal scholar told Erin in the Morning, referring to the practice of bringing cases to districts that lawyers think will be most sympathetic to their cause.
Shannon Minter, the legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, told Sophie Hurwitz of Mother Jones that the subpoena is “a blatant attempt to harass and intimidate medical providers based on this administration’s ideological opposition to transgender people.”
“This,” Minter concluded, “is mafia-type behavior.”
However, hospitals, patients, and state actors can try to fight back. New York has rigorous shield laws that protect gender-affirming care patients and providers from out-of-state prosecution. It creates significant barriers to overreaching subpoenas, court proceedings, and law enforcement. How this applies to a federal case post-Trump is an emerging area of law, with many questions yet to be answered.
Moreover, a case from the Northern District of Texas is a particularly dire escalation, both because it is among the most hostile courts in the country towards transgender people, and because grand jury subpoenas are far harder to challenge than the administrative subpoenas that courts have quashed before.
But as seen with institutions like Rhode Island Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania, some hospitals are finding ways to resist Trumpian attacks on care. State actors and patients themselves have also gone to court to combat federal encroachments on care and potential hospital capitulation—such as with Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and Rady Children’s Hospital, both of which are in California.
For this newest case, here’s what we know so far.
Doctors aren’t the only providers targeted by the subpoena.
The DOJ is requesting names of administrators, accountants, attorneys and even hospital volunteers involved in rendering gender-affirming care or billing for it through insurance.
Excerpts from the subpoena sent to NYU Langone.
In addition to the names of providers, the DOJ wants the names and medical histories of every trans youth patient who received gender-affirming care from Langone since 2020. The DOJ also asserted that “de-identified information” is insufficient.
The request explicitly asks for patients’ names as well as any communications and “documents” relating to their care. This may include patient charts, medical and psychiatric notes, and detailed accounts of a patient’s medical history. It likely also includes sensitive information on patients’ families, such as addresses, and it directly asks for parental consent forms signed by caretakers.
The Langone subpoena targets communications with and documents about pharmaceutical companies, drug manufacturers, and the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH).
This isn’t surprising given the Trump Administration’s longheld assertion that “the gender industry,” as radical anti-trans activists call it, is some sort of wide-reaching apparatus tricking vulnerable children into needless medical procedures to turn a profit; further, it has fixated on WPATH, the premier organization for determining medical standards for trans people’s health care.
The Federal Trade Commission hosted an event last year, as Erin in the Morning reported, laying out how it planned to target medical institutions—like hospitals, clinics, professional organizations, and drug manufacturers—by accusing them of medical “fraud.”
The subpoena interrogates matters of informed consent and any “medically unfavorable consequence” experienced by patients. This is emblematic of the administration’s wider efforts to gather data for the purpose of manufacturing scientific doubt about gender-affirming care—and empower those in the “detransitioner” political movement to sue their doctors, an endeavor that has mostly been unsuccessful thus far.
The subpoena latches on to the term “sex-rejecting procedures,” an unscientific dogwhistle pushed by gender conservatives to describe and undermine gender-affirming care.
The term was popularized by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s screed against pediatric gender care, but one thing that makes this subpoena unique is that it also targets “voice modifications”—which could refer to surgical procedures to modify a person’s voice, but written this broadly, could in theory apply to simple voice training. It also calls affirming mental health care, such as psychotherapy, a “sex-rejecting procedure” when offered to transgender minors.
What comes next?
In short: We can’t know for sure.
Other hospitals may send out notifications to patients about the receipt of a subpoena in the coming weeks. New York’s shield law requires providers inform patients about any such pursuits within 30 days. For states without shield laws, the waters are murkier; criminal investigations are often much more opaque than civil ones. To this day, the full list of hospitals who received Bondi’s slate of administrative subpoenas is still not publicly known.
However, as per Law Dork’s Chris Geidner, even DOJ lawyers have acknowledged that the purpose of these subpoenas is to bully and intimidate hospitals and “to stop trans minors from being able to obtain gender-affirming medical care.”
This is a far cry from the concerns about medical “fraud” being touted by Trump propaganda. As per Geidner, one DOJ lawyer said, “[T]he policy is that the executive branch wants to reduce or eliminate gender-related care to minors [...] That [is what] this investigation is about.”
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Fight this to the death. It is just the beginning.
This is so infuriating and transparent. End goal is clear. Doesn’t seem to matter how they get there. My only ray of hope is that all the best advocacy groups are strategizing about how to fight this. 🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️