Three families of transgender youth and two transgender young adults sue the Attorney General and the U.S. Department of Justice over their efforts to seize the private health information of transgender youth at NYU Langone Health and other New York City hospitals
Lambda Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) today filed a federal class action lawsuit challenging the Attorney General’s and U.S. Department of Justice’s efforts to compel healthcare institutions in New York City, including NYU Langone Hospitals, to hand over the identities and sensitive health information of transgender youth who received gender-affirming medical care between 2020 and 2026.
Lambda Legal, the ACLU, and NYCLU brought the lawsuit on behalf of three families with minor children and two young adults who received gender-affirming medical care as minors at hospitals in New York City during those years. The legal advocates are also asking the court to certify a class of all impacted patients and families whose identities and medical records are being sought.
The lawsuit was filed after NYU Langone Health received a subpoena purportedly under the authority of a federal grand jury empaneled in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas demanding patient identities and sensitive health information in the most recent escalation of the Trump Administration’s across-the-board attacks on healthcare for transgender adolescents. Other New York City hospitals are believed to have received similar subpoenas. The suit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, asks the court to protect the patients’ privacy rights and prevent the disclosure of their identities and their deeply personal medical histories.
“The Trump Administration has been clear that it will use every tool it has to harass and intimidate hospitals into shutting down necessary and, at times, lifesaving care for transgender youth,” Lambda Legal Senior Counsel and Director of Constitutional Law Practice Karen Loewy said. “But we will not allow the privacy rights of those youth and their families to be sacrificed as DOJ abuses its authority.”
“These subpoenas are a baseless intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship, demanding medical professionals substitute their expertise for the Trump administration’s politics,” said Elizabeth Gill, Senior Counsel for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Rights Project. “By weaponizing federal investigations, the administration is trying to scare hospitals into dropping patients and abandoning families. As courts across the country have already told this administration, this heavy-handed overreach has nothing to do with fraud prevention; it is a direct attempt by politicians to interfere with the New York’s exercise of its police power to ensure the health and welfare of its residents, override parental rights, and block families from making their own private healthcare decisions.”
“New York’s laws emphatically embrace the common-sense idea that transgender young people and their families deserve the strongest possible protections for their sensitive medical records, and to have access to the care they and their doctors agree that they need,” said Bobby Hodgson, Deputy Legal Director at the New York Civil Liberties Union. “The Trump administration is trying to intimidate healthcare providers, scare families, and erode New Yorkers’ fundamental privacy protections. But the Constitution doesn’t permit these tactics.”
The lawsuit argues that allowing the Attorney General and DOJ to require hospitals like NYU Langone to reveal the identities of both patients and their parents and to turn over medical records containing diagnoses, assessments, courses of treatment, and other deeply personal health information in service of abusive targeting of providers of gender-affirming medical care would violate patients’ constitutional rights to privacy and to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. It also asserts that for NYU Langone to comply in turning over this information would breach duties of confidentiality under New York law. The legal advocates are also asking for a temporary restraining order (TRO) blocking enforcement of the subpoena ahead of a June 10 deadline for turning over the health data.
Read the complaint and about the lawsuit here.