Protestors shame Mount Sinai for bowing to Trump by dropping trans youth care

This story originally appeared on Them.

NEW YORK — On Tuesday evening, over 250 protestors gathered outside of Mount Sinai Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to condemn the hospital system for settling with the Trump administration last week, agreeing to permanently cease providing gender-affirming care to transgender people under 18.

Organized by the Gender Liberation Movement and ACT UP NY, the rally included remarks from speakers including Taylor Brown, the director of New York City’s first-ever Mayor’s Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs; nurse and activist Qween Amor; a parent of a trans child who relocated from Florida to New York for its sanctuary state protections, which guard trans youth and their families from prosecution for seeking gender-affirming care; and Sam, a 17-year-old trans man who says he is currently receiving care at Mount Sinai.

Clustered on a sidewalk outside the East 98th Street entrance to the May Center for Mount Sinai Doctors, trans youth and their supporters chanted calls such as “Our Families, Our Rights, Our Healthcare, Our Lives,” and “Support Trans Kids Humanity.” With signs in hand bearing slogans such as “Rise Up For Trans Youth,” the group garnered attention — and indeed some sympathetic support — from medical professionals funneling in and out of the facility, as Them witnessed on the scene.

“Trans people exist and no executive order will change that,” Sam said during the rally.

“Mount Sinai had a choice, and it chose to abandon trans children and their families rather than hold the line against federal pressure,” Raquel Willis, co-founder of Gender Liberation Movement, said in a statement. “New York has some of the strongest protections for transgender people in the country; elected officials and institutions must enforce them. History will remember those that bowed to Trump’s fascism.”

As our sister publication The Advocate previously reported,, Mount Sinai, one of the major hospital systems in New York City which sees approximately 6 million outpatient visits each year, announced a settlement with the Justice Department on September 4, agreeing to stop providing gender-affirming care such as hormone replacement therapy and puberty blockers to patients under 18. In the agreement, Mount Sinani also agreed to allocate $2 million to the creation of a “detransition clinic,” similar to other medical institutions that have bowed to DOJ pressure such as Texas Children’s Hospital.

The New York City healthcare giant is the latest to fold to mounting pressure from the Trump administration’s use of investigations, subpoenas, and funding cuts to attack gender-affirming care. Despite a June motion by U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla to block the Justice Department from obtaining sensitive medical information about people who received gender-affirming care as minors from New York City hospitals like Mount Sinai, the hospital giant cited protecting patient privacy as the reason it settled, per a statement.

Organizers and New York lawmakers say that Mount Sinai’s capitulation is especially egregious, given the level of protections anti-discrimination protections for trans people in New York State. In February 2025, soon after Trump’s sweeping executive order attacking hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to minors, New York State Attorney General Letitia James told state hospitals such as NYU Langone and Mount Sinai that they would be in violation of state anti-discrimination laws for doing so. In March 2026, James ordered NYU Langone to resume its gender-affirming care program for trans youth, but the hospital system kept the program shuttered.

The action is part of a longstanding effort by GLM to hold local hospital systems to account, which also included a campaign by NYC Pride Grand Marshalls in June, asking the country’s oldest Pride celebration to bar hospital systems that stopped providing gender-affirming care for minors from attending. During Tuesday evening’s action, organizers called on the New York state AG as well as Mayor Zohran Mamdani to litigate against Mount Sinai for settling with the Trump administration, as well as NYU Langone and New York Presbyterian, for ceasing the provision of gender-affirming care to minors.

In response to the settlement, several city and state lawmakers have also spoken out against Mount Sinai’s decision to end gender-affirming care for trans minors. On Bluesky, New York Democratic Congressional candidate Brad Lander wrote that he had met with parents of trans youth who had relocated their entire families to New York in hopes of a more progressive state.

“Gender-affirming care saves lives, respects the rights of patients, and reflects that healthcare is supposed to be between providers and patients, not between providers and the Trump Administration,” he said. “I recently met with families of trans kids, some of whom moved to New York because of our legacy of inclusion, who now feel like refugees forced to look for a new home that will protect their kids’ well-being. Shame on Mt. Sinai for capitulating with this settlement, which violates that legacy of inclusion, their own Hippocratic oath, and New York’s human rights laws.”

Congresswoman Grace Meng (D-NY-6) also put out a statement condemning the actions of the Trump administration to disrupt private medical decisions between patients and doctors.

“This week, the Justice Department strong-armed one of New York’s largest hospital systems into turning its back on some of its own patients — with no law behind it and in defiance of any medical authority,” Meng wrote in a statement to reporters. “Doctors and families, not federal prosecutors, should decide what care a child needs. Every major medical association in this country has found this care safe and necessary.”

New York Assemblymember Linda B. Rosenthal called the decision by the New York hospital system “infuriating.”

“Under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice, Mount Sinai has chosen to end its gender-affirming care program for minors and will pay millions into a federal fund that the Trump administration will weaponize to spread myths that hormone therapy and other routine medical treatments are causing harm to young people,” she wrote in a statement. “As a result of this spineless decision, many kids grappling with gender dysphoria will be told to seek care elsewhere.”

Them reached out to Mount Sinai for comment and will update the story as it develops.

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