Several states — 16 to be exact — are standing with America’s trans youth by filing lawsuits against the Trump administration over the ban of gender-affirming care, Associated Press reports.
Attorneys general from 15 states, in addition to the District of Columbia, and the governor of Pennsylvania, issued the suit in early August 2025, claiming the current administration had unlawfully intimidated healthcare providers into stopping gender-affirming care for transgender youth with the ban. In July 2025, President Donald Trump and his team threatened to issue subpoenas to providers, investigating them for fraud and pushing criminal prosecution if they continued the treatment.
While there were states where care was permitted by law, eight major hospitals and systems in those states announced they were stopping or limiting the care that hundreds of trans youth depend on. In a statement, New York Attorney General Letitia James labeled Trump and his administration’s actions as “a cruel and targeted harassment campaign against providers who offer lawful, lifesaving care to children.”
“We will never stop fighting for the dignity, safety, and basic rights of the transgender community,” she continued, according to NPR.
Filed in a Massachusetts federal court, the suit accuses the administration of trying to issue a de facto ban, a Latin term meaning “in fact” — a national ban on youth gender-affirming care, despite the absence of a federal statute that prohibits it. “The result is an atmosphere of fear and intimidation experienced by transgender individuals, their families and caregivers, and the medical professionals who seek only to provide necessary, lawful care to their patients,” the lawsuit read.
The fight against trans youth has been ongoing since 2021, while the former Biden-Harris administration was in the White House. Twenty-eight Republican-controlled states adopted policies banning or restricting gender-affirming care for minors, supported by the Supreme Court, which ruled that those states were in the right. The motion resulted in a domino effect of families of transgender children scrambling for treatment. The nation’s largest public provider of gender-affirming care for youth, the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, closed in July 2025.
Source: 16 States Sue Trump Administration Over Anti-Trans Ban On Gender-Affirming Care
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