A day after signing an executive order banning transgender individuals from serving in the military, Donald Trump today (Tuesday, Jan. 28) issued a broad ban on health care for trans youth, including denying coverage to children of federal employees, postal employees, and military service members. Trump’s order also is intended to ban federal funding for any healthcare institution that provides gender-affirming medical care for trans youth.
And just as Lambda Legal yesterday immediately stepped up today to challenge the ban on trans people in the military with legal action in the courts, the organization today promised swift action to challenge the trans youth health care ban.
Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, senior counsel and health care strategist for Lambda Legal said in a written statement, “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.
“This broadside condemns transgender youth to extreme and unnecessary pain and suffering, and their parents to agonized futility in caring for their child.”
Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, Lambda Legal
“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,” he continued. “It is an outrageous overreach of government power that reveals its cruel absolutism.
Gonzalez-Pagan called the ban “morally reprehensible and patently unlawful,” adding, “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.
He continued, “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.”
Gonzalez-Pagan pointed to Lambda Legal’s efforts opposing Trump’s efforts during his first administration to restrict healthcare, “and we won. We stand ready to fight back against this even more pernicious effort to deny medically necessary health care to our youth.”
— Tammye Nash