A federal judge has dealt a fresh blow to the Trump administration’s attempt to crack down on doctors who provide gender-affirming care to transgender people.
U.S. District Judge Jamal Whitehead ruled that a wide-ranging subpoena the Justice Department served in June on QueerDoc, a medical practice offering gender-affirming care online, cannot be enforced because the demand was not part of a legitimate law enforcement investigation.
Whitehead, a Biden appointee, said it was apparent that the subpoena is intended to advance President Donald Trump’s goal of wiping out such care for people with gender dysphoria.
“This is not speculation about hidden motives — it is the Administration’s explicit agenda,” Whitehead said in his ruling dated Monday and made public on Tuesday. “The Government seeks the ‘intended effect’ of its Executive Orders and these subpoenas to ‘downsize or eliminate’ all gender-affirming care. No clearer evidence of improper purpose could exist than the Government’s own repeated declarations that it seeks to end the very practice it claims to be merely investigating.”
Attorneys for QueerDoc did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Justice Department announced publicly in July that it issued a flurry of more than 20 subpoenas to “doctors and clinics involved in performing transgender medical procedures on children.”
“Medical professionals and organizations that mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology will be held accountable by this Department of Justice,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said.
Asked about the judge’s ruling, a Justice Department official echoed Bondi’s earlier comment.
“As Attorney General Bondi has made clear, this Department of Justice will use every legal and law enforcement tool available to protect innocent children from being mutilated under the guise of ‘care,’” the DOJ statement said.
Major U.S. medical associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association, support gender-affirming care for adolescents. But medical experts say gender-affirming care for children rarely includes surgery.
QueerDoc provides referrals and information about surgery, but doesn’t offer any in-person care.
Whitehead’s decision joins a similar ruling last month from a federal judge in Boston, Myong Joun, who quashed a subpoena issued to Boston Children’s Hospital. A Justice Department motion to revisit that decision remains pending.
Legal fights over subpoenas to clinics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center are also underway. Lawyers filed copies of Whitehead’s ruling in some of those cases Wednesday.
In his decision, Whitehead said the Justice Department appears to be seeking to ban gender-affirming care by peppering providers with investigative demands, which he said is improper.
“The question before the Court is whether DOJ may use its administrative subpoena power to achieve what the Administration cannot accomplish through legislation: the elimination of medical care that Washington and other states explicitly protect. The answer is no,” the judge wrote.
QueerDoc had asked Whitehead to keep secret the legal fight over the subpoena the medical practice received, but the judge declined to do so and released legal filings that had been under seal for months. They show investigators demanded 15 categories of documents from the practice.
While the DOJ statement announcing the subpoenas indicated a focus on “transgender medical procedures on children,” the document demand issued to QueerDoc is much broader. Among other things, it seeks the identities of all patients prescribed “puberty blockers or hormone therapy.”
