Federal Judge Orders Censorship Undone
Harvard Medical School doctors sued after their work was censored. Now a federal judge has ordered that their work be restored.
by Alyssa Steinsiek
Last Friday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to republish previously censored peer-reviewed doctors’ papers from Patient Safety Network, finding that the plaintiffs, two Harvard Medical School doctors, “are likely to succeed in proving that the removal of their articles was a textbook example of viewpoint discrimination by the defendants in violation of the First Amendment.”
It appears that, not for the first time in recent memory, the Trump administration has tried to do away with important work after performing extremely rudimentary term searching and finding documents that contain words they don’t like. The removal of these documents was allegedly part of an effort to comply with Trump’s January 20th executive order demanding that federal agencies “remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology.”
After the party of free speech censored these articles, they notified Patient Safety Network’s editorial team that the articles could be republished only if they agreed to scrub the word “transgender” and acronym “LGBTQ” from the articles’ content. They would be allowed to include an editorial note explaining that the documents had been altered to comply with an executive order, but would not have been allowed to specify what words or terms had been purged.
Considering one of the censored papers was a Suicide Risk Assesment, the author declined to republish without “transgender” or “LGBTQ,” because “to do so would be factually inaccurate, unethical, and run contrary to the purpose of the article, which was to identify risk factors for suicide.”
Requesting injunctive relief (that is, the republishing of the articles while the constitutionality of Trump’s censoring them is debated in court), the plaintiffs’ complaint said, “When the government creates a forum for private speech, it cannot engage in viewpoint-based discrimination. The First Amendment forbids such discrimination in all fora, but the necessity for the rule is perhaps most obvious in a case like this—where the speech at issue constitutes the scientific, medical views of experts tasked with identifying errors, indicators, and populations that others are most likely to overlook in their medical practice for the purpose of enhancing patient safety.”
In his 28-page order demanding that the defendants restore the censored articles, Judge Leo Sorokin said, “[It] is difficult to imagine how Drs. Schiff and Royce will not prevail in proving their constitutional claim. They have established—and, during the motion hearing, the defendants conceded—government conduct that constitutes viewpoint discrimination. This is a flagrant violation of the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights as private speakers on a limited public forum. The defendants’ only response on this point is an assertion that ‘the requirement of viewpoint neutrality is not absolute … They offer no authority supporting this position, because there is none.”
This isn’t the first time Judge Sorokin has made overtures against a Trump executive order. In February, Sorokin joined federal judges from Maryland, New Hampshire and Washington state in blocking Trump’s executive order seeking to terminate birthright citizenship.
Sorokin gave the Trump administration seven days to republish the Harvard doctors’ papers, and the other papers they blocked based on arbitrary keyword searches, to Patient Safety Network. We’ll see on Friday whether or not they obey; these days, Trump and his people like to run to the Supreme Court to overrule federal judges, and some in the administration are signaling that they don’t believe SCOTUS itself has the right to check the president.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a trans woman journalist who reports on news relevant to the queer community and occasionally posts on BlueSky.
