Blue State AGs Unite to Challenge Trump’s Assault on Trans Kids
Leading Off: Intimidation of doctors and invasion of patient privacy are being fought in the courts. A radical right-wing assault on academic freedom is headed there as well. The week’s top story lines.
by Assigned Media
Attorneys general in 20 states filed a lawsuit last week against RFK Jr and the Department of Health and Human Services, challenging their unilateral efforts to withhold all Medicaid and Medicare funding for care-givers that provide gender affirming treatment to minors.
The Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield called the HHS declaration unlawful, saying that it “baselessly and unlawfully attempts to limit a family’s ability to work with their providers to make the healthcare decisions without interference from the federal government.”
This coalition of AGs suing HHS features nearly the same lineup as a challenge in September to the FTC’s nefarious investigation into doctors providing gender affirming care. The FTC’s action, framed as an issue of “false advertising,” functioned as a measure to intimidate individual doctors practicing lawfully.
These two joint actions mark an increasingly regular, concerted resistance by Democratic-led states to Trump’s escalating attacks on the rights of trans Americans.
A federal judge in Pittsburgh blocked a Department of Justice subpoena that sought to obtain personal information about minor transgender patients of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. This ruling, from Chief Judge Cathy Bissoon in Pennsylvania’s Western District, is the latest of five such decisions blocking invasive DoJ subpoenas that target young patients as part of the administration’s broad effort to intimidate providers of gender affirming care.
These subpoenas sought to obtain vast confidential patient information, including all employee and contractor personnel files, all billing data relating to gender affirming care, and data regarding diagnoses of gender dysphoria or other gender related disorder.
Judge Bissoon noted that the government’s demands had “more than a whiff of ill intent.” She went on to accuse the DoJ of cherrypicking precedent, noting that the federal government’s effort to interfere in gender affirming care “flies in the face of the Supreme Court’s decision in Skrmetti, wherein the majority repeatedly emphasized the reservation of these matters to the states.”
The Texas A&M lecturer Melissa McCoul, baselessly fired for teaching about gender identity, appears ready to take her case to court.
“Dr. McCoul is disappointed by the university’s unexplained decision to uphold her termination, but looks forward to pursuing her First Amendment, due process, and breach of contract claims in court very soon,” her attorney, Amanda Reichek, said in a statement to the Texas Tribune.
Two faculty panels found McCoul’s termination was unjustified and that her academic freedom was violated, The Tribune reported. The panels both concluded Texas A&M, a public university, fired her over what she taught and had failed to follow required dismissal procedures. The course and its content had breached no university policies.
But McCoul had been targeted on social media by a single radical right state legislator, and her dismissal was enabled by a weak university administration that refused to even explain its decision. The case also signals a wider assault on both trans people and academic freedom itself.
Following her firing, the university utilized AI to review all of its courses, leading to a new policy this month prohibiting courses from “advocating race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.”
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