I have been following the current regime’s vicious attack on gender-affirming care for minors – a subset of its abuse of trans people in general – for Unbreaking.org, and this week I wrote a mini-briefing about it. After struggling to get a complex issue down to a few sentences, I realized I had a lot more to say.
The effort to block gender-affirming care for minors is an excellent example of why everyone in this country should fight back against the abusive actions of the extremists in power.
Staring in the summer of 2025, the Department of Justice began sending administrative subpoenas to hospitals and other medical offices that offered gender-affirming care to minors. The subpoenas sought extensive data on their patients.
They did this quietly, without fanfare. Only a few reporters noticed, most of them with LGBTQ+ publications.
Administrative subpoenas are issued by federal agencies and not approved in advance by a judge. They are supposed to be used to further an agency’s regulatory authority, but their use has been substantially expanded.
I suspect DOJ expected the recipients to be frightened and just send the documents. After all, at the time they first sent them, major media companies, wealthy universities, and big law firms were caving in the face of pressure by the regime.
But while a few hospitals shut down their gender-care facilities as a result and others tried to finesse the situation by “negotiating,” a number of institutions – starting with the medical practice QueerDoc in Seattle – went to court to “quash” (or shut down) the subpoena.
And they all won, because the subpoenas were, in fact, inappropriate (to put it nicely). In a couple of cases where the hospital didn’t take action, patients or family members of patients did, with the same results.
Which is to say: fighting back works.
Dithering, not so much. Continue reading “Just Say No”…