The U.S. Department of Justice tried to force a Philadelphia children’s hospital to hand over information on young transgender patients as part of Donald Trump’s crackdown on gender-affirming care for minors, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
A subpoena issued to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in June demanded access to “every writing or record of whatever type” that doctors had made, including everything from emails, Zoom recordings, and texts to names, birth dates, and Social Security numbers.
Notably, gender-affirming care is not illegal in Pennsylvania. Still, the Trump administration is taking efforts to invade young patients’ privacy, endangering them and the health care providers who treat them.
The subpoena became public Monday as part of a separate lawsuit from Washington state Attorney General Nicholas W. Brown, who is suing the Trump administration to block its executive order threatening to end federal funding to medical institutions that provide lifesaving gender-affirming care for anyone under the age of 19.
In a court filing, Brown wrote that the DOJ’s request for info from CHP has “only escalated” Trump’s efforts since a judge blocked his executive orders earlier this year.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the DOJ had issued more than 20 subpoenas to doctors and clinics that it claimed “mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology.” The subpoenas arrived at hospitals in states that had banned gender-affirming care, as well as those that had not.
HuffPost conducted an independent review and found that 25 hospitals had ended gender-affirming care services since July, and none of them were in states that had bans. Health care providers are concerned that providing hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and surgeries could result in them being charged with a felony.
In July, Trump claimed credit for ending gender-affirming care at specialized adolescent programs in several states where it is legal: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Colorado, Illinois, New York, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia.
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