By Melissa O’Rourke
A coalition of over a dozen blue states is suing the Trump administration in an attempt to block federal policies aimed at curbing transgender medical interventions for minors.
The lawsuit, filed Friday in federal court in Boston, comes from 16 Democrat-led states and Washington, D.C. It challenges President Donald Trump’s January executive order titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” which instructs the Department of Justice (DOJ) to prioritize enforcement against so-called “gender-affirming” care — a term encompassing things like puberty blockers and surgeries — for minors.
“Since taking office on January 20, 2025, President Donald J. Trump and his administration have relentlessly, cruelly, and unlawfully targeted transgender individuals,” the complaint reads. “The Trump administration has sought to deny their very existence, banish transgender residents from the public square, and refuse them medically necessary healthcare.” (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Here’s How A Small Band Of Pediatricians Pushed Medical Org Into Nixing Age Minimums For Sex Changes)
WASHINGTON, DC – FEBRUARY 05: U.S. President Donald Trump joined by women athletes signs the “No Men in Women’s Sports” executive order in the East Room at the White House on February 5, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Trump’s January executive order cuts off all federal funding for the chemical and surgical mutilation of children and threatens legal consequences for institutions that support the practices. In April, Attorney General Pam Bondi followed the president’s order with a directive calling on federal attorneys to investigate and prosecute doctors who perform or attempt to perform sex change surgeries on minors.
“Gender ideology, masked as science, teaches that children should process adolescent stress and confusion as a case of mistaken identity and that the solution is not to root out and eliminate the underlying condition but to acquiesce in it permanently through life-altering chemical and surgical intervention,” Bondi’s memo reads.
The states participating in the lawsuit include California, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Illinois, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Wisconsin, as well as Washington, D.C.
Since the Trump administration’s crackdown began, a growing number of major hospitals have announced that they will no longer provide transgender-related treatments to minors, including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries. The Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles are among those backing away from such services.
The DOJ has subpoenaed over a dozen hospitals and doctors as part of its investigation into transgender procedures involving children.
The states accused the Trump administration of “creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation experienced by transgender individuals, their families and caregivers, and the medical professionals” through its actions.
From 2019 to 2023, hospitals across the U.S. billed nearly $120 million for transgender-related procedures for roughly 14,000 minors, according to Do No Harm, a watchdog group fighting back against left-wing gender ideology in the medical field.
The lawsuit marks the latest legal clash between Democrat-led states and the Trump administration over transgender policy. In July, the Trump administration sued California for allowing men to compete in women’s sports in violation of federal law.
Transgender treatments have significant side effects. A recent study shows 95% of young biological women on testosterone developed pelvic floor dysfunction. The participants had bladder and bowel symptoms that medics would expect to see in a woman after the menopause.
As the London Telegraph reports, “Around 87 per cent of the participants had urinary symptoms such as incontinence, frequent toilet visits and bed-wetting, while 74 per cent had bowel issues including constipation or being unable to hold stools or wind in. Some 53 per cent suffered from sexual dysfunction.”
“The researchers said the rate of urinary incontinence, where urine unintentionally leaks, was around three times higher in transgender men than women, affecting around one in four compared to eight per cent of the general female population.”
“Almost half had an ‘orgasm disorder’, while a quarter suffered from pain during sexual intercourse.”
Sex-change procedures come with serious side effects than can leave transgender people with lifelong pain and discomfort, as a transgender activist conceded in a New York Times op-ed, “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy.” That”s because of the physical pain and discomfort that result from a sex change, and the artificial, subpar nature of the sex organ that doctors create in sex-change surgery. As Andrea Long Chu wrote in that op-ed:
Next Thursday, I will get a vagina. The procedure will last around six hours, and I will be in recovery for at least three months. Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagina as a wound; as a result, it will require regular, painful attention to maintain. This is what I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don’t expect it to.
“Gender affirming” surgery is risky. “An 18-year-old boy died when doctors tried to create a vagina for him using part of his colon. His colon was used because puberty blockers stopped growth of his genitals, which meant there wasn’t enough tissue to do the penile inversion surgery,” notes Chris Elston. A “trans teen died from vaginoplasty complications during landmark Dutch study used to justify child sex changes,” reports The Post-Millennial. “Major complications began within just 24 hours of the surgery.”
Progressives have long made false claims that getting a sex-change or “gender-affirming care” prevents transgender people from committing suicide, but these claims turned out to be false. The transgender lawyer challenging Tennessee’s ban on certain transgender treatments for minors, Chase Strangio, was forced to admit to the Supreme Court that “completed suicide is thankfully and admittedly rare” among transgender youth, even those not given gender-affirming treatment, and that “there is no evidence…that this treatment reduces completed suicide.”
But even an FDA official who supported giving minors puberty blockers conceded that they actually increase suicidality. Indeed, the “FDA knew ‘gender affirming’ puberty blockers increase ‘suicidality’ in 2017,” reported Just the News.
Researchers have found that sex changes massively increase suicide risks, rather than reducing them. “Gender-affirming surgery is significantly associated with elevated suicide attempt risks,” according to that study in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science.
Yet doctors who do sex changes often tell parents that they need to gender transition their kid to keep them from committing suicide, even though this isn’t true. One of America’s most prominent gender doctors, “Dr. Olson-Kennedy disclosed to how she speaks with parents of gender dysphoric patients: ‘We often ask parents, “Would you rather have a dead son than a live daughter?”’”
