A Colorado hospital that halted gender-transition treatment to transgender minors after the Trump administration threatened to cut off funding must resume providing those treatments, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled on Monday.
The 5-2 ruling from the heavily Democratic state’s highest court was a victory for four transgender minors and their families who sued Children’s Hospital Colorado, one of the top children’s hospitals in the nation, over the hospital’s decision to stop providing hormone therapy and puberty blockers to transgender youth.
The hospital’s suspension of care left the plaintiffs “suddenly abandoned during a precarious time,” the Colorado Supreme Court said. Some experienced depression, and two contemplated suicide, the court said.
Paula Greisen, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the ruling recognized the “profound and immediate harm caused when vulnerable young people are abruptly denied medically necessary care.” Shannon Fern, a spokeswoman for Children’s Hospital Colorado, in Aurora, Colo., said hospital officials were “reviewing the court’s ruling and assessing our next steps.”
The hospital has been a leading provider of gender-related care, serving about 500 patients, according to John McHugh, another of the plaintiffs’ lawyers. Some were families who came to Colorado after their own states passed laws outlawing gender-transition treatments for minors.
But in December, the federal Department of Health and Human Services proposed rules that would block any federal money to hospitals that provide gender treatments to adolescents. The rules have not gone into effect.
Children’s Hospital in January paused medical gender-related treatments to transgender minors. Denver Health, another leading hospital in Colorado, announced a similar pause that month.
Losing federal money could be catastrophic to Children’s. In 2024, most of its funding of about $180 million came from the federal government, and about half of its patients were on Medicaid, the Colorado Supreme Court said in its decision on Monday. The hospital would also not be able to serve people with private insurance if it loses federal funding.
But the patients and their families argued that the hospital’s move to safeguard those funds violated Colorado’s anti-discrimination law, which protects people on the basis of their sexual identity, gender identity and gender expression.
“These threats from the administration are not enough to allow the hospital to ignore state law,” Mr. McHugh said in an interview after the ruling on Monday.
Gender-transition treatments for minors remain a topic of fraught debate among medical authorities. The major American medical societies endorse them, but a report commissioned by the Trump administration concluded that the risks outweigh the benefits.
And they are the subject of a series of legal and political fights in the federal government and the states. Days before the ruling in Colorado, a judge blocked Kansas from enforcing a state law banning nonsurgical gender-transition treatments.
An estimated 2.8 million people aged 13 and older in the United States identify as transgender, according to the Williams Institute, a demographics research center at the University of California, Los Angeles. That amounts to about 1 percent of the U.S. population in that age group. A small fraction of them seek medical transition.
Amy Harmon contributed reporting.
Jack Healy is based in Colorado and covers the west and southwest for The Times.
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