Transgender patients file class action against NYU Langone to stop health system from turning over medical records to Trump admin
Transgender patients and their families are suing NYU Langone Hospital and the Department of Justice to halt a federal subpoena filed last month demanding patient records from all minors the health system has provided gender affirming care to since 2020 be turned over to the Trump administration.
The suit demands Manhattan’s federal court block the hospital from turning over the records, which would include the names of trans minors, their doctors and the medical care they received, arguing the subpoena violates patients’ civil rights, state law prohibiting breaches of physician-patient privilege and is a “gross overreach of governmental power, founded on an improper purpose to ‘end’ gender-affirming medical care and cast transgender persons into the shadows.”
“The Subpoenas at issue here were not issued for a proper purpose, but, as part of the Administration’s systematic campaign to exclude transgender people from public life and to ‘end’ the gender-affirming medical care that enables many transgender people to live authentically as themselves,” says the suit, filed jointly by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) and Lambda Legal.
NYCLU and Lambda Legal allege the DOJ is insidiously using a subpoena filed from the Northern District of Texas to obtain trans patients’ records after federal district courts across the country have limited the DOJ’s ability to obtain such information via civil subpoenas, ruling they were issued for an improper purpose or violated the rights of the patients whose information they sought.
“Faced with this wall of resistance to its discriminatory and improper aims, DOJ has now shifted tactics, purportedly moving the locus of its ‘investigation’ to the Northern District of Texas and relying on grand jury subpoenas to obtain the same information it was prohibited from obtaining through other means by multiple courts,” the suit says.
Trans advocates say question DOJ motives for record pursuit
The advocacy groups say the Trump administration is simply using the May subpoena to carry out its political fight against gender affirming care, which it has made abundantly clear via public statements.
“DOJ’s aims are not to impartially enforce the law—no federal law prohibits the provision of gender-affirming medical care to minors, which the U.S. Supreme Court has determined is for the states to regulate—but rather to effectuate the Administration’s policy priorities to ‘end’ the gender-affirming medical care, even if coercion is necessary,” the suit says.
The DOJ and NYU Langone did not respond to requests for comment on the suit or whether patient records had been turned over yet. The subpoena, filed May 6, gave the health system 30 days to inform patients before it would be legally required to send the records, a deadline that was only days away.
New York Attorney General Letitia James declined to comment on the suit. When the subpoena was filed last month, she said after being asked for comment that the state had “strong protections in place to protect the privacy of patient records” and that “every health care institution in New York should seek to protect both patients and providers.”
Gender affirming care has a regret rate of less than 1%, lower than nearly all elective procedures, and has been shown to decrease the chances of trans youth committing suicide by 73%. Gender affirming care for trans youth requires parental consent and involves a significant amount of consultation, assessment and therapy before healthcare professionals begin prescribing procedures or hormone treatments.
Gender affirming care for trans youth typically involves drugs known as puberty blockers, which stop a person from going through the puberty associated with their birth-assigned sex, and, in later teen years, hormonal replacement therapy, so they can move through the puberty aligned with their gender identity. Sex reassignment and breast modification surgeries are typically only available to people over the age of 18, but in rare cases, may be carried out when a person is 16 or 17 years old.
“Plaintiffs [are] unwittingly caught in the crosshairs of that attack simply because they received medically necessary gender-affirming medical care here in New York City, near their homes in the New York City area, and with the expectation that their private medical records would remain private,” the suit says. “This Court’s intervention is necessary.”
