A Second Judge Blocks Trump’s Anti-Trans Health Care Orders
A Maryland judge finds that transgender plaintiffs and their families are likely to succeed in proving the orders are unconstitutional.
A federal judge issued a nationwide order blocking a pair of executive orders from President Donald Trump seeking to criminalize the provision of gender-affirming health care to transgender youth.
U.S. District Judge Brendan Hurson, of the District of Maryland, granted a preliminary injunction to the families of several transgender young adults and adolescents whose access to gender-affirming care was disrupted by Trump’s orders. Those families are joined by the pro-LGBTQ advocacy group PFLAG National and GLMA, the country’s largest organization of LGBTQ and allied health professionals.
Trump’s executive orders, issued earlier this year, threaten to prosecute medical providers who prescribe gender-affirming treatments to anyone under the age of 19, yank funding from institutions or hospitals that provide such treatments, as well as any entity that promotes so-called “gender ideology,” and bar federal insurance programs like Medicaid and TRICARE from covering the cost of hormones, puberty blockers, or surgical interventions.
Hurson’s injunction was issued one day before a temporary restraining order previously issued by Hurson was set to expire. It also comes on the heels of a similar, but separate, ruling by a federal judge based in Seattle blocking Trump’s executive order from being enforced in Washington, Minnesota, Oregon, and Colorado — whose Democratic attorneys general brought their own lawsuit against the trans health care restrictions.
In his ruling, Hurson found that the plaintiffs in the PFLAG case had demonstrated that they were likely to succeed in their lawsuit by proving that Trump had overstepped his authority by issuing the executive orders, and that the orders themselves discriminate on the basis of sex and are unconstitutional, reports The Washington Post.
“The challenged provisions of the Executive Orders place significant conditions on federal funding that Congress did not prescribe,” he wrote, citing past legal precedent. “This, the Constitution simply does not allow, as ‘[t]here is no provision in the Constitution that authorizes the President to enact, to amend, or to repeal statutes.'”
In the first week after Trump signed the order restricting gender-affirming care, hospitals around the country abruptly halted medical care for transgender individuals, canceling appointments and turning away patients, as reported by National Public Radio. This led to protests against the executive orders.
On February 11, after Hurson issued his initial temporary restraining order, many providers who had previously stopped providing care said they would resume services for transgender patients. As a result of the most recent injunction, doctors and hospitals providing gender-affirming treatments will be allowed to continue providing care to existing patients while the case works its way through the courts.
Alex Sheldon, the executive director of GLMA, called Hurson’s ruling a “crucial step in resisting the extremist agenda of the Trump administration.”
“This administration as tried to bully providers into abandoning their ethical obligations, but we will not back down,” Sheldon said in a statement. “We will continue to fight for health professionals’ freedom to do their jobs based on medical expertise — not political ideology — and for the right of every patient to receive carefree from discrimination and fear.”
Joshua Block, a senior staff attorney for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, said Hurson’s decision provides relief to transgender youth, their families, and medical providers who were torn between violating the executive orders and continuing to provide gender-affirming care.
“This order from President Trump is a direct effort to threaten the well-being of transgender people while denying them equal protection under the law, enacted by coercing doctors to follow Trump’s own ideology rather than their best medical judgment,” Block said in a statement. “As Judge Hurson has said himself, it is hard to fathom a form of discrimination more nefarious than that which pretends the group of people being targeted doesn’t even exist.”
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