Civil rights leaders stress we must protect medical privacy of trans youth, after DOJ subpoena

National LGBTQ+ civil rights leaders are sounding the alarm after Trump’s Department of Justice criminally subpoenaed NYU Langone and several other hospitals for the names of transgender patients who were minors when they received gender-affirming care.

Transgender rights advocates across the country are urging medical institutions to not comply with the DOJ by refusing to release sensitive medical information about trans minors to federal courts. In a press conference on May 19 hosted by the Human Rights Campaign, representatives from Planned Parenthood and AIDS United as well as parents of trans children negatively impacted by such breaches of medical privacy spoke on the consequences of sharing confidential patient information.

“For half a century, abortion opponents have been executing a strategy to replace our reproductive rights with their beliefs,” Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Action Plan, said. “The weaponization of private health care information is one of their most tried and true tactics. The specifics vary of course, but the goal is always the same: Interfering with private decisions they don't like. For this administration and their allies, surveillance, subpoenas, and criminal prosecutions are all just instruments of control.”

The calls for intervention come after months of mounting pressure from the Trump administration on medical institutions to bow to its anti-trans agenda. NYU patients were alerted on May 11 to a subpoena issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the North District of Texas, which requested the names of medical providers in addition to identifying information for trans youth patients seen from 2020 to 2026.

The subpoena sought extensive patient information related to gender-affirming care, intensifying fears among advocates that the federal government is attempting to build a nationwide apparatus for investigating trans health care providers and families. Just four days later, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that following a DOJ investigation, the state secured a $10 million settlement from Texas Children’s Hospital to create a “detransition clinic” as well as requiring the hospital to fire “five woke doctors” for previously providing gender-affirming care to trans minors.

Institutions, advocates, and some judges have fought back against the administration’s mandate against trans healthcare access for minors, as in the case of Rhode Island U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy, a Trump appointee who accused the DOJ of "appalling" behavior for targeting trans youth’s high sensitive medical records on May 13. McElroy’s remarks came during litigation involving a federal demand for records connected to Rhode Island Hospital, where state officials and advocates argued the DOJ’s actions threatened patient privacy protections and could deter families from seeking medically necessary care.

Even with state representatives passing sanctuary laws to protect trans youth and federal judges ruling to temporarily halt these directives, the impact of the DOJ's assault on the medical privacy of trans minors has had real consequences on the lives of these children and their families.

An anonymous parent of a trans child from HRC’s Parents for Transgender Equality National Council shared how their family “suffered directly because of lax medical information controls and government misconduct.” After the breach of their daughter’s medical information, their family was forced to relocate from their home in the South to a northern state, a decision more than 400,000 trans people have had to make in the last several years, according to Erin in The Morning.

“We had to move states, and I'm not using my real name here today because we still feel reprisals from the people currently in power just because our family has tried its best to take care of our daughter,” they said. “For our family, this began as a medical privacy violation. It became a life-altering lesson in what happens when institutions fail to protect vulnerable people and when private medical information becomes weaponized for political purposes.”

Advocates say that allowing the Trump administration to access such sensitive medical information on trans minors through subpoenas and court orders is a slippery slope that only leads to everyone having less access to privacy and care.

“It is going to be an uphill battle to protect our medical privacy under these circumstances, which is why it is so important for everyone, patients, doctors, state attorney generals, electives to understand what is happening here, be angry and place pressure against DOJ to step back and conform to his traditional institutional limits and role as an even-handed enforcer of federal law,” Cynthia Cheng-Wun Weaver, senior director of litigation for the Human Rights Campaign, said.