As Massachusetts hospitals bow to Trump, these organizers are fighting to protect trans futures

This story originally appeared on Them.

On September 2, forty organizers, healthcare providers, and concerned transgender people gathered inside the John W. McCormack Building, home to the offices of Democratic Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell. The members of Protect Trans Futures, a youth-led direct action coalition in Massachusetts fighting to expand access to gender-affirming care across the state, stood in the atrium of the art deco building, many with hormones and syringes in hand, ready to make a statement.

“When trans rights are under attack, what do we do?” a speaker chanted on the megaphone as several protestors injected themselves with HRT. “Act up, fight back!”

After three hours occupying the building, organizers tell Them that nine protestors were arrested that day for refusing to leave until Campbell heard their demands (Eyewitness reporting by The Guardian corroborates this account.). The “care-in,” a common direct action strategy used by grassroots organizations like the Gender Liberation Movement and ACT UP, marks the latest escalation in a series of meetings, phone bank campaigns, and other forms of intervention Protect Trans Futures has organized since its founding last October.

Organizers tell Them that their goal is to push the state’s attorney general, who assumed office in 2023, to pursue legal action against hospitals that have ceased providing gender-affirming care to trans youth in the wake of President Donald Trump’s second term in office. Following mounting pressure from the Trump Administration on hospitals across the country, over the last year, Fenway Health, Outer Cape Health Services and Baystate Health, and have all ended their gender-affirming care programs for trans people under 19 in the case of the first two, and 18 in the last, meaning that trans youth across wide swaths of Massachusetts cannot get access to HRT. Trans young people in Boston, Western Massachusetts, and Cape Cod will now have to work much harder to find providers outside of these major healthcare networks, or travel elsewhere.

While providing gender-affirming care to minors is legal in Massachusetts, and the state is home to various trans sanctuary cities with additional protections for trans young people and their healthcare providers including Boston and Worcester, PTF organizers say hospitals shuttering their youth-gender-affirming care programs have left trans minors in a precarious position, scrambling to find new providers. In September, Campbell joined 21 other state attorney generals across the country in filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration for cutting gender-affirming care coverage for trans minors under Medicaid and CHIP, but PTF says fighting the federal government in court doesn’t fully address the material reduction in gender-affirming care resources for trans youth in Massachusetts on the ground.

Instead, PTF organizers have urged Campbell to hold the hospitals that have discontinued care to account, similarly to New York AG Letitia James or California AG Rob Bonta, who have respectively threatened legal action or actively prosecuted them for violating state anti-discrimination policies.

“We’ve tried genuinely almost every tactic we could to get the attention of this office and convey to this office that they need to take decisive action on this issue and every time they do it, they say, ‘We’re fighting it federally. We don't need to do anything here.’ And it’s not enough,” Berry Andres, a member of Protect Trans Futures, tells Them.

Alexa B. Wilkinson

For these organizers, “Protect Trans Futures” isn’t just a slogan on a T-Shirt or an Instagram infographic; it’s a rallying call they must respond to. Many of them are still young enough to be completing undergraduate degrees, young enough to remember just how difficult accessing gender-affirming care as a trans minor in the current United States can be In fact, several of them even moved from their home states to Massachusetts in an effort to access gender-affirming care and a more progressive environment, much like the thousands of other transgender people who have relocated their entire lives from red states in the U.S. South and Midwest to coastal blue “sanctuary states.”

Since Trump was elected in 2024, 400,000 thousand trans people have moved, per a January survey by the Movement Advancement Project. According to a 2025 study by the UCLA School of Law Williams Institute analyzing where trans people were planning to relocate to, many respondents surveyed named Massachusetts. It’s perhaps no surprise given the New England state’s long-standing history of legal protections for LGBTQ+ people. As the fight for marriage equality raged in the early aughts, Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in 2004. The state was also an early adopter of policies that legalized the X gender marker option on state IDs and drivers licenses in 2019.

Even in recent years, trans youth in neighboring states with harsher restrictions on gender-affirming care or longer waiting lists such as New Hampshire have ventured to Massachusetts to receive puberty blockers, HRT, or surgical procedures from large LGBTQ+ health clinics such as Fenway. However, once Trump enacted an executive order in January 2025 targeting hospitals that provided such care, Massachusetts’ trans healthcare landscape shifted rapidly. Threatened with federal funding cuts if they continued providing gender-affirming care to trans people 19 and under, hospitals across the country, including major LGBTQ+ service providers in sanctuary states like Massachusetts, shuttered their youth gender-affirming care programs. In October 2025, Fenway Health announced they would stop providing gender-affirming care like puberty blockers and HRT to patients under 19, citing the possible loss of its status as a “Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC).” During the same month, Outer Cape Health Services ceased providing such care for trans patients under 19. In February 2026, Baystate Health sent patients letters announcing they would no longer provide gender-affirming care to patients under 18.

“I moved to Massachusetts from South Texas when I was 16 and started gender-affirming care at Bay State Health and then I moved to Boston at 18 and started getting gender-affirming care at Fenway,” Protect Trans Futures founder Teddy Walker tells Them. “It felt like a complete betrayal of what Massachusetts claims to stand for.”

Alexa B. Wilkinson

Beyond the Trump administration’s attack on care, the biggest blow, Walker said, came after the executive order was stripped of its force by federal judges repeatedly blocking it, and the hospitals still did not reinstate care to trans youth, nor did the AG’s office pursue legal action. In patient testimonies collected by PTF and reviewed by Them, young patients shared their accounts of providers at major hospitals suddenly ceasing care, even prompting some of them to return to the more conservative states they came from to get puberty blockers and HRT.

“There are families who are now driving to New Hampshire because it’s closer,” Walker says. “There was this trans teen [...] who we talked to who had to return to their home red state. They had chosen to go to college in Massachusetts to get care from Fenway Health and after that they were referred to Boston Children’s. They were 18, so Boston Children’s was like we can’t help you and they went back to Fenway Health, [who] didn't pick up the phone. They had to just fly back home. It was easier to do it that way to get a prescription filled than to access care in Massachusetts.”

This sudden care vacuum is what catalyzed Protect Trans Futures to form in October 2025. Inspired by the direct action work of ACT UP, which uses demonstrations and other forms of direct action to draw attention to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, PTF conducts attention-grabbing protests that press on the comfort level of a polite establishment.

Alexa B. Wilkinson

After a year of organizing, Protect Trans Futures, and the families of trans children in their ranks, demand to be heard. Since November, when PTF completed its first action by disrupting the annual Fenway Health Gala immediately after the service provider announced it would cease gender-affirming care for trans people under 19, organizers have continued to ramp up their efforts, all with the help of established grassroots organizers from ACT UP and the Gender Liberation Movement.

Over the early months of 2026, organizers collected testimonies from parents of trans youth faced with new barriers to medical care, launched letter writing and phone campaigns with thousands of participants, and tried to schedule meetings with Campbell’s office. In April, organizers and parents of trans youth met with Campbell to discuss their concerns regarding the specific gaps in care created by hospitals bowing to the Trump administration. In May, the attorney general met again with trans youth and their families, releasing a statement reiterating that gender-affirming care for minors is legal in the state of Massachusetts. Despite these repeated attempts, PTF says they have yet to see any movement towards the attorney general pursuing legal actions against these hospitals, which is why organizers have been turning up the pressure.

During a live interview with Campbell on Boston Public Radio in August, a PTF member interrupted the live taping to demand answers from the attorney general about what the AG’s office would do to punish hospitals for ceasing care.

“These hospitals are not being shown that breaking the law is going to have any consequences for them in this state and these clinics are dropping like flies,” Walker said. “Your office keeps telling us, ‘Wait until it gets worse.’ There's nothing we can do, even though attorney generals in California and New York are taking the brave and correct stance of prosecuting hospitals for discrimination and for removing life-saving care that is protected in our shield law and is protected under public access.”

September’s care-in and occupation of the AG’s offices succeeded in at least forcing an official reply. In response to that September 2 action, The Guardian reported that the attorney general’s office shared an email, stating that gender-affirming care in the state remains legal, and claiming that it was not a fair comparison to look at strategies from California or New York’s AGs to incentivize hospitals to reinstate care.

“The cessation of gender-affirming care for minors by Fenway Health, Outer Cape Health Services and Baystate Health has not resulted in a wave of hospitals or clinics ceasing to provide care in the Commonwealth,” the email read, adding “The AGO and PTF share a common goal: maintaining access to gender-affirming care.”

Despite the obstacles, PTF is not slowing down. It’s been nearly a year leading to this moment, and PTF does not plan to stop fighting for trans youth until they have reliable access to care.

“I want to make a statement to any trans kids out there, I know it can be incredibly isolating,” Jane Doen’t, an organizer for Protect Trans Futures who uses a pseudonym, tells Them. “It can feel like the world is imploding on you, but I just want to tell you it is not all over. They have not won. They are screaming and biting, but we here are fighting for you. We are going to win and tomorrow is going to be a great day.”

Them has reached out to Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office, Fenway Health, Baystate Health, and Outer Cape Health services for comment. We will update the story if we receive comments.

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