The Dictatorship
Kids should be allowed to just be kids. This Pride Month, that’s getting harder.
A group of three families, on behalf of their transgender childrenand two transgender young adults, filed a lawsuit Tuesday in New York seeking to block a subpoena from the Justice Department for NYU Langone to release their medical records and other personal information to the government. The filing is only the most recent in a slate of lawsuits led by trans kids and their families across the country, from Maryland to California.
The timing of these lawsuits is notable as they come in and around Pride Month, a period intended for the celebration of queerness and to honor hard-won battles for social and legal acceptance. Instead, trans children, and their families, are living in fear and using time, energy and resources to protect themselves from the state for the perceived transgression of merely existing.
The timing of these lawsuits is notable as they come in and around Pride Month, a period intended for the celebration of queerness and to honor hard-won battles for social and legal acceptance.
The government’s objective in its subpoena, which bids hospital representatives to appear in court before a grand jury in June and present documents “sufficient to identify each patient” who as a minor received gender-confirming care of any kind dating back to 2020, appears to be twofold: to deny healthcare to trans kids, by, among other things, citing billing to insurance companies as “fraudulent”; and to intimidate healthcare providers from providing gender-confirming care to transgender patients at all.
This tactic appears to be working as trans healthcare centers and clinics around the country shutter, making care increasingly hard to access. “In addition to concerns about how the government might use private health information, parents said they fear that their children’s records will be held up as part of an investigation that ultimately aims to deny them medical treatment,” The New York Times reported Tuesday.
While the DOJ told the Times that it does not respond to requests for comment on grand jury subpoenas or activities, the Times also reported that “[t]he government has said it is acting on the behalf of patients and families as it investigates whether health providers and drug companies have illegally promoted off-label use of medications or used fraudulent billing practices to secure insurance coverage for gender-related treatments to minors.”
The DOJ has based its investigations into gender-confirming care for trans youth in the Northern District of Texaswhich is home court for a notoriously reactionary and partisan chief district judge, Reed O’Connor, and therefore “a venue favored by conservatives,” Reuters explains. In the past, O’Connor has taken initiatives to quash legal recourse for the subjects of his rulings, such as Rhode Island Hospital, which has been treating trans minors. “He…issued an injunction claiming to prohibit the hospital from seeking relief in the federal courts that oversee Rhode Island under threat of contempt. And he barred the hospital from ‘aiding and abetting’ any other party that might ask for help from these courts, including the children whose rights will be trampled by disclosure of their records,” Slate reported in May.
In basing its investigation in the Northern District of Texas, the department can file requests for subpoenas — for medical records and private patient information in other states — in O’Connor’s court. This, as Slate reporting describes, is part of the DOJ’s wider attempt at “forum shopping key cases to MAGA judges across the country who are much more likely to reward underhanded tactics.” It’s a breach of the sanctity of state laws, variations of which have been an important part of this country’s legal framework.
The Justice Department has made the case that part of its investigation involves looking at trans healthcare providers’ use of off-label drugs, arguing this could be either fraudulent or illegal. Yet as the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality explainsoff-label use is both “legal and common.” (For instance, Trazodone, while originally intended to treat depression, is often prescribed for other conditions, such as insomnia, bulimia, alcohol dependence or diabetic neuropathy.)
This is all to say that this administration is not just failing to take care of our most vulnerable populations, but it is actively targeting them. The fact that vulnerable children and their families are compelled to sue the federal government in an effort to have their constitutional rights honored says everything we need to know about this current political landscape.
“Every week there’s something new,” one teenager targeted in the Rhode Island Hospital case, who was only identified by their first initial because their family has faced harassment and threats in the past, told WBUR. “One week, they try to ban care. Another week, you find out that they want to know your personal information.”
It is the job of any well-functioning democracy to protect children and other vulnerable groups. As a trans man, navigating the progressively hostile and reactionary medical, political and legal landscapes demands an enormous amount of energy, not to mention it produces a great deal of fear and anxiety — and I am in my 40s. I cannot imagine how much this state targeting of trans youth is derailing the lives of children who want and deserve nothing more than to simply be kids.
Noor Noman is a writer focused on culture, race and LGBTQ issues.