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A federal judge in Manhattan has the Department of Justice (DOJ) from using grand jury subpoenas to obtain medical records of patients who have received gender-affirming care as minors at NYU Langone, Mount Sinai, and other New York City hospitals.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla granted a temporary restraining order after several families and patients sued to block a grand jury subpoena that demanded the medical records of all transgender minors who have received gender-affirming care at the New York City hospitals since 2020. The order blocks the subpoena until the case’s next hearing on July 8.
Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order ending federal funding for gender-affirming care for transgender youth and directing the DOJ to investigate doctors and hospitals that provide such care.
Failla said that the executive order was one of many issued by Trump “that sought to identify, to demonize, and ultimately to eradicate an entire population of transgender people.”
The judge also pointed out that the Trump administration had previously issued many other subpoenas prior to this grand jury subpoena, and they had all been partly or fully shut down.
“ But undeterred by its disastrous showing in the courts, DOJ decided to issue nearly identical document requests in the form of grand jury subpoenas emanating from the Northern District of Texas,” Failla said.
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Families and patients had filed a lawsuit in early June asking Manhattan’s federal court to block New York City’s hospitals from turning over their records, arguing that the subpoena violates patients’ civil rights as well as laws ensuring physician-patient privileges.
The that the subpoena was issued “as part of the Administration’s systemic campaign to exclude transgender people from public life and to ‘end’ the gender-affirming medical care that enables many transgender people to live authentically as themselves.”
Activists have also called for NYU Langone, Mount Sinai, and New York-Presbyterian hospitals to be banned from participating in Sunday’s annual NYC Pride March over their complicity in Trump’s attacks on transgender health care. NYU Langone and Mount Sinai ended their gender-affirming medical programs for minors in February, and the hospitals have agreed to provide the Trump administration with minors’ medical records. While the hospitals claim that they will anonymize the medical records, the DOJ could later request the identifying information, and could likely use data to identify the records anyway.
In a letter to organizers of the annual NYC Pride March, activists and parents of transgender children wrote: “We call on NYC Pride to prohibit any hospital system that has ended, restricted, or suspended gender-affirming care for transgender youth from marching in the 2026 NYC Pride March and festival, and any future prides, unless and until they restore that care and publicly commit to protecting trans youth and their families.”
Mount Sinai Health System plans to attend the parade.
Activists have also criticized Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose new clinic for transgender people – put forward as a solution to Trump’s attacks — will deny care to anyone under 19 years old, essentially replicating Trump’s cutoff for care for transgender youth.
In May, a survey of over 10,000 transgender people found that transgender and nonbinary youth who are denied access to gender-affirming hormone therapy are nearly twice as likely to report a suicide attempt over the past year. A previous study also found that anti-transgender laws increased suicide attempts by up to 72 percent, particularly among youth. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey has found that over half of transgender high school students seriously considered suicide and over a quarter attempted it during the recent rise in anti-transgender laws.
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