“This broadside condemns transgender youth to extreme and unnecessary pain and suffering, and their parents to agonized futility in caring for their child.”
Today, President Trump issued a broad ban on health care for transgender youth, including denying coverage to children of federal employees, postal employees, and military service members, and also seeking to ban federal funding for any healthcare institution that provides this necessary medical care for transgender youth.
Lambda Legal issued the following statement from Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, Senior Counsel and Health Care Strategist for Lambda Legal:
“The Trump administration’s disdain and animosity towards transgender people and other minorities appears to know no bounds. With today’s announcement the Trump administration seeks to target and discriminate towards some of the most vulnerable: transgender youth. In seeking to deny transgender youth the medically sound and well-established health care that they need, this administration could put thousands of vulnerable young lives at risk. It is an outrageous overreach of government power that reveals its cruel absolutism.
“This policy by the Trump administration is morally reprehensible and patently unlawful. The federal government – particularly, this administration – has no right to insert itself into conversations and decision-making that rightly belongs only to parents, their adolescent children, and their medical providers.
“This broadside condemns transgender youth to extreme and unnecessary pain and suffering, and their parents to agonized futility in caring for their child — all while denying them access to the same medically recommended health care that is readily available to their cisgender peers. And make no mistake: this administration will not stop with attacks on transgender youth. With its just proposed ban on transgender people serving in the military, we know this administration has all transgender people in its sights.
“We fought previous attempts by the first Trump administration to restrict health care and we won. We stand ready to fight back against this even more pernicious effort to deny medically necessary health care to our youth.”
Read about Lambda Legal’s earlier lawsuit, County of Santa Clara v. HHS, here.