The Texas Court Trying to Intimidate a New York Hospital |
The Texas Court Trying to Intimidate a New York Hospital
NYU Langone used to offer gender-affirming care. Now a district court in Texas is subpoenaing it. What the hell?
Just a few weeks into Trump’s return to the White House, thousands of people made their way to a Manhattan park close to NYU Langone Hospital. The rally, one of the earlier mass protests against the president’s second administration, was in defense of transgender rights. NYU Langone had begun quietly canceling appointments for gender-affirming care for minors, seemingly in response to a cruel executive order decreeing that the new administration would “rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.” (The executive order had not, to be clear, made it illegal to prescribe puberty blockers or hormones, Chase Strangio, the co-director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, told me at the time; it was mostly a threat to withhold funding.) Speakers at the rally urged everyone to contact the hospital’s management and trustees and demand they stand up to the administration. The hospital’s complying with Trump, the protesters warned, would not protect it.
They were more than correct. The hospital ended care when it was under no legal obligation to do so, and the Trump administration still did not let up. Earlier this month, a federal court in the Northern District of Texas issued a subpoena to NYU Langone, ordering it “to provide information pertaining to patients under the age of 18 who received gender affirming care,” as well as the names of those who provided that care as far back as January 2020, according to an announcement the hospital posted to its website. Among the records the Department of Justice wants handed over are “documents sufficient to identify each patient who underwent Sex-Rejecting Procedures” (the administration’s term for gender-affirming care), as well as related billing records, insurance claims, and clinical evaluations, along with “complete personnel files” on hospital staff involved.
In the administration’s ongoing attacks on trans kids, legal experts have said, the subpoena is a marked escalation, in which the federal government is using the secretive grand jury process to extract private health care information from an institution providing gender-affirming care to minors. The Justice Department purposefully pursued this order in a district with no relationship to the underlying issues, but where it would get a judge, Reed........