US President Donald Trump arrives before signing the Laken Riley Act into law in the East Room at the White House in Washington on January 29, 2025. The law, named after a Georgia student murdered by an undocumented immigrant is the first bill of the second Trump administration (Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa USA/Sipa via AP Images).
A federal judge has hit pause on an effort by the Trump administration to ban federal support for transgender medical care.
On Friday afternoon, Joe Biden-appointed U.S. District Judge Lauren King, sitting in Seattle, issued a temporary restraining order in favor of three states and three doctors who sued the government on Feb. 7.
The court barred a litany of named federal defendants from “enforcing or implementing” two major sections of a recent anti-transgender executive order signed by President Donald Trump.
Under the terms of Executive Order 14187, which is fashioned as an effort to protect “Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” the 45th and 47th president intends to cut off all federal funding for institutions that offer pediatric gender transition services or provide any kind of gender-affirming care for people under the age of 19.
In their original petition, Washington, Minnesota, Oregon and three unnamed professors at the University of Washington School of Medicine singled out the defunding provision of the executive order.
The plaintiffs allege Trump’s threat to block funding for state-run medical institutions that continue to serve transgender children and teenagers is an “unconstitutional usurpation of the spending power of Congress, an unconstitutional effort to amend Congressional appropriations by attaching conditions not contemplated by Congress, and a violation of the separation of powers.”
The lawsuit goes on to argue that clawing back already-allocated federal funds will have a substantial and negative impact on medical services entirely unrelated to transgender issues.
This dire state of affairs would allegedly jeopardize over one billion dollars of federal aid relied on in the three plaintiff states alone. The lawsuit says these funds are used by medical schools and hospitals “to research and treat hundreds of conditions having nothing to do with gender-affirming care, including cancer, AIDS, diabetes, substance use disorder, mental health conditions, autism, aging, cardiovascular diseases, maternal health, and so much more.”
After a late morning hearing, King barred some 11 administrative agencies and their respective directors, as well as “all their respective officers, agents, servants, employees, and attorneys, and any person in active concert or participation with them who receives actual notice” of the temporary restraining order from cutting off such funds.
The second section blocked by the court is a law enforcement provision. This section mulls “weaponizing” a federal law against female genital mutilation — a practice largely occurring outside of the Americas — to threaten compliance with the administration’s anti-transgender medical care policy, according to the lawsuit.
On its own terms, the enforcement section anticipates using attorneys general “and other law enforcement officers to coordinate” the enforcement of the 1996 federal ban on female genital mutilation.
To hear the plaintiffs tell it, this section of the executive order “threatens baseless criminal prosecutions against providers” because “transgender minors do not receive gender-affirming genital surgery.”
The temporary restraining order delineates what the defendants are not allowed to do in terms of re-defining federal statutes:
Defendants..are hereby fully enjoined from enforcing or implementing Section 8(a) of Executive Order 14,187 within the Plaintiff States to the extent that Section 8(a) purports to redefine “female genital mutilation” under 18 U.S.C. § 116 as “chemical and surgical mutilation” as defined in Section 2(c) of the Order.
The underlying lawsuit repeatedly rubbishes efforts by the Trump administration to “define out of existence” transgender people.
“The Executive Order attempts to redefine non-surgical treatments for minors as ‘mutilation,’ but this is frivolous,” the filing reads. “The statute has no possible bearing on gender-affirming care. Rather, the Order invokes it solely to sow fear among providers and bully them out of providing gender-affirming care at all.”
The filing elaborates:
To be clear, genital surgery is not performed on transgender minors. But the Order threatens to weaponize this federal statute against puberty blocking medication and hormone therapy, which it defines as “chemical mutilation.” In doing so, the Order attempts to redefine these medically necessary treatments as federal crimes.
The judge will elaborate on her reasoning in a forthcoming opinion, according to the federal docket.
The temporary restraining order is slated to be in effect until Feb. 28, King noted, unless it is extended.
Notably, a lone footnote may somewhat limit the extent of the relief granted to the plaintiffs.
“For the purposes of this Temporary Restraining Order, ‘Defendants’ herein refers to all Defendants listed in the Complaint except President Trump,” King wrote.
