Lawsuit Filed by Transgender Youth and Their Families Regarding Trump's Actions Against Gender-Affirming Care

Seven families with transgender or nonbinary children have filed a lawsuit Tuesday regarding President Donald Trump’s executive orders surrounding halting gender-affirming care for people under the age of 19.

According to the Associated Press, both PFLAG, a “national group for family of LGBTQ+ people; and GLMA, a doctors organization, are also plaintiffs in the court challenge in a Baltimore federal court.” This comes one week after Trump “signed an order calling for the federal government to stop funding the medical care through federal government-run health insurance programs including Medicaid and TRICARE.”

Brian Bond, the CEO of PFLAG, stated that the organization is receiving a “drumbeat of calls” from “parents whose kids’ care is being canceled.” The ACLU and Lambda Legal will be representing the plaintiffs, arguing that the executive orders are unlawful because they “seek to withhold federal funds previously authorized by Congress and because they violate antidiscrimination laws. The challenge also says that the order infringes on the rights of parents.”

Alex Sheldon, executive director of GLMA, stated that “there are established medical standards for caring for transgender youth,” and that an “extreme political agenda is trying to overrule that expertise, putting young people and their providers in danger.”

CBS News also reports that the executive orders follow actions taken by the president on his first day back in office, prohibiting the use of federal funds to promote so-called “gender ideology” and officially declaring that U.S. policy only recognizes “two sexes, male and female.” The Supreme Court is also currently considering the constitutionality of a Tennessee law passed in recent years “restricting access to gender-affirming care for minors.”

The filing of the lawsuit from the transgender youths and their families argues that the “president does not have unilateral power to withhold federal funds that have been previously authorized by Congress and signed into law, and the president does not have the power to impose his own conditions on the use of funds when Congress has not delegated to him the power to do so.” They also say that this directive from the president has already had concrete effects, citing a hospital in Washington, D.C. that announced it would be “pausing its provision of puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender youth.”