August 27, 2025
President Donald Trump and his team threatened to issue subpoenas to providers, investigating them for fraud and pushing criminal prosecution, if they continued the treatment.
Several states — 16 to be exact — are standing with America’s trans youth by filing lawsuits against the Trump administration over the ban of gender-affirming care, Associated Press reports.
Attorneys general from 15 states, in addition to the District of Columbia, and the governor of Pennsylvania, issued the suit in early August 2025, claiming the current administration had unlawfully intimidated healthcare providers into stopping gender-affirming care for transgender youth with the ban. In July 2025, President Donald Trump and his team threatened to issue subpoenas to providers, investigating them for fraud and pushing criminal prosecution if they continued the treatment.
While there were states where care was permitted by law, eight major hospitals and systems in those states announced they were stopping or limiting the care that hundreds of trans youth depend on. In a statement, New York Attorney General Letitia James labeled Trump and his administration’s actions as “a cruel and targeted harassment campaign against providers who offer lawful, lifesaving care to children.”
“We will never stop fighting for the dignity, safety, and basic rights of the transgender community,” she continued, according to NPR.
Filed in a Massachusetts federal court, the suit accuses the administration of trying to issue a de facto ban, a Latin term meaning “in fact” — a national ban on youth gender-affirming care, despite the absence of a federal statute that prohibits it. “The result is an atmosphere of fear and intimidation experienced by transgender individuals, their families and caregivers, and the medical professionals who seek only to provide necessary, lawful care to their patients,” the lawsuit read.
The fight against trans youth has been ongoing since 2021, while the former Biden-Harris administration was in the White House. Twenty-eight Republican-controlled states adopted policies banning or restricting gender-affirming care for minors, supported by the Supreme Court, which ruled that those states were in the right. The motion resulted in a domino effect of families of transgender children scrambling for treatment. The nation’s largest public provider of gender-affirming care for youth, the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, closed in July 2025.
Connecticut’s Children’s Medical Center announced “an increasingly complex and evolving landscape” for limiting care. Roughly seven other major hospitals and health systems, including Washington D.C.’s Children’s National, UChicago Medicine, and Yale New Haven Health, followed suit.
While using a law that labels female genital mutilation on anyone under 18 as a felony, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi says the law applies to specific types of gender-affirming surgery. However, the number of transgender minors having surgery is rare.
This is not the first time Trump and his team have been handed a lawsuit in the fight for care for trans youth. In February 2025, families of transgender youth filed PFLAG v. Trump, which is still ongoing. However, the administration doesn’t seem fazed by the suits. With more than 20 subpoenas sent to doctors and clinics involved in gender-affirming care, the White House celebrated the decision with a statement labeling it as a “barbaric, pseudoscientific practice.”
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