RFK Jr.’s Anti-Trans Policy Has Been Toppled for All the Right Reasons

It’s a relief to see the courts reject the Trump administration’s policies on the basis of the harm they do to people, not only the harm they do to the law.

On Saturday, a U.S. district judge, Mustafa T. Kasubhai, blocked a federal policy that forced healthcare providers to follow the government’s agenda and halt gender-affirming care for young people. The ruling began with a short, emphatic declaration: “Unserious leaders are unsafe.” My distinct impression was that if Kasubhai could have left it there, with just those few words, he would have. In a way that sentence said it all, but still, he had to go on. The judge declared that the defendant—Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in his role as director of the Department of Health and Human Services—“lacked the authority” to “unilaterally” define the standards for gender-affirming care, as his policy sought to do, and that the agency lacked the authority to “exclude” providers from federal healthcare programs solely on the basis of their offering gender-affirming care to minors.

The order comes in a legal challenge brought by more than 20 states and the District of Columbia, to the so-called Kennedy Declaration, released on December 18, 2025. Kennedy had proclaimed that gender-affirming care for young people—which he mischaracterized as “sex-rejecting procedures”—was “neither safe nor effective,” and threatened to withhold federal health care program funding from any health care institution that offered it. Kasubhai’s ruling applies to those plaintiff states, vacating the policy and barring the federal government from attempting to issue or enforce such a policy again.

There was little legal basis for RFK Jr.’s declaration. In response to the legal challenge, lawyers representing HHS raised an increasingly desperate set of defenses, amounting to “It’s not policy, it’s just his opinion,” and arguing that to reject the purported non-policy would amount to suppressing Kennedy’s right to free speech. Kasubhai succinctly dismissed the latter argument: “Defendants........

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