The New York attorney general’s office has ordered a major Manhattan hospital to resume providing puberty-blocking medication and hormone treatments to transgender adolescents, just two weeks after the hospital had stopped doing so.
The hospital, NYU Langone Health, had closed its Transgender Youth Health Program after the federal government threatened to pull federal funding from hospitals that provided gender-transition treatments for adolescents. For more than a year, the Trump administration has sought to prevent hospitals from helping adolescents transition, asserting that many of the children are impressionable and confused and that the medical treatments maim and sterilize them. In response, many clinics and hospitals in the United States have scaled back or stopped providing gender-related treatments to children.
In a letter to the hospital, a senior official in the attorney general’s office raised the question of whether NYU Langone’s action violated New York’s anti-discrimination laws, by barring a single category of patients from receiving medications that others could access. The official, Darsana Srinivasan, who leads the office’s health care bureau, wrote in the letter that puberty blockers and hormone treatments remained available to pediatric patients who were not transgender.
“New York state laws prohibit discrimination based on a patient’s membership in a protected class,” Ms. Srinivasan wrote.
The letter states that the attorney general’s office had received several complaints from patients and their families regarding NYU Langone’s decision to close the program for transgender adolescents.
“You are hereby advised to immediately resume all service offerings as they had before the change in policy and to make medically necessary puberty-blocking medications and hormone therapies available for patients under 19 who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria,” the letter, which is dated Feb. 25, states.
The letter, addressed to NYU Langone Health’s top lawyer, instructs the hospital to notify the attorney general’s office that it has complied within 10 days. The letter threatens further action and mentions the possibility of an investigation if the hospital refuses to comply.
NYU Langone did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office declined to comment on the letter.
The letter leaves NYU Langone in a difficult position.
During the past year, Mr. Trump has wielded the power of the federal government to try to put an end to gender-related care for minors across the United States. The Justice Department has sent more than 20 subpoenas to doctors and clinics that perform transgender medical procedures on minors, demanding confidential patient information.
The F.B.I. has asked the public to call its tip line with information about doctors “who mutilate” children “under the guise of gender-affirming care.” And the Federal Trade Commission is examining whether “practitioners of ‘gender-affirming care’ may be actively deceiving consumers.”
In December, the Trump administration proposed rules that would pull federal dollars from hospitals that provide gender transition treatments for adolescents. NYU Langone began calling patients’ families a month later, saying that the hospital was discontinuing the treatments for adolescents.
But Ms. Srinivasan’s letter noted that the proposed rules that would end federal funding have not gone into effect.
“NYU Langone’s change in policy is self-imposed,” the letter states. “There has been no change in federal law to require the cessation of medically necessary transgender health care.”
Joseph Goldstein covers health care in New York for The Times, following years of criminal justice and police reporting.
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