President Donald Trump holds up a signed executive order in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, Feb. 3, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Evan Vucci).
Another federal judge has slammed the brakes on Donald Trump’s crusade against gender-affirming care last week, halting the executive order that the president issued in January banning federal medical support for transgender youths under the age of 19. She explained why on Sunday, saying the move is “unconstitutional” and prevents transgender youth from obtaining necessary medical treatments that are “completely unrelated” to their gender identity.
“For example, a cisgender teen could obtain puberty blockers from a federally funded medical provider as a component of cancer treatment, but a transgender teen with the same cancer care plan could not,” wrote U.S. District Court Judge Lauren King in a memorandum opinion explaining her decision to issue a temporary restraining order Friday in favor of three states and three doctors who sued the government on Feb. 7 over the executive order.
King, a Joe Biden appointee, paused the gender-affirming care ban after a lawsuit was filed last week in Seattle by the state’s attorney general, Nick Brown, in the Western U.S. District of Washington. Brown blasted Trump’s order as being “clearly illegal and unusually cruel.” His office said Friday in a statement that the order “directs unconstitutional criminal enforcement” against medical professionals and patients, while hailing King’s ruling.
“Today’s order reaffirms that we live by the rule of law,” Brown said. “Young people’s ability to receive lifesaving gender-affirming medical care remains in place. Providers won’t be criminalized for providing the best care for their patients, and this order removes any hurdles from medical professional giving young people the care they need. Washington state’s world-leading medical and research institutions can continue their work with the funding already allocated by Congress.”
On Sunday, King explained that she believed Trump’s gender-affirming ban was unconstitutional for multiple reasons. She agreed with claims in Brown’s suit that it violates both the Fifth and 10th Amendments, saying he’d likely succeed in proving it.
“The Fifth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause prohibits the federal government from treating people differently based on sex or transgender status unless such differential treatment serves important governmental objectives and is substantially related to the achievement of those objectives,” King said. “It oversteps the President’s authority and invades an arena of lawmaking reserved to the states in violation of the 10th Amendment.”
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King explained that while the Trump administration’s stated purpose is to protect “children” from regret associated with adults “changing a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions,” the executive order is not actually limited to children or to irreversible treatments, nor does it target “any similar medical interventions performed on cisgender youth,” the judge said.
“When it comes to surgery, the Executive Order sweeps far more broadly than its stated purpose of protecting ‘children’ from medical treatment decisions made by adults,” King wrote. “For example, the Order forbids federal funding to providers who offer surgeries ‘to alter or remove an individual’s sexual organs to minimize or destroy their natural biological functions.’ This would prevent such a provider not only from performing gender-affirming surgery on an 18-year-old transgender individual, but also from performing, for example, a vasectomy on a married cisgender 18-year-old man who desires the surgery because he has Huntington’s disease and does not want to pass it to his children.”
On Friday, King barred a litany of named federal defendants from “enforcing or implementing” two major sections of the anti-transgender executive order signed by 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. King’s temporary restraining order delineates what the defendants are not allowed to do in terms of redefining federal statutes.
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“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 TRO says.
The temporary restraining order is slated to be in effect until Feb. 28, King noted, unless it is extended.
Colin Kalmbacher contributed to this report.
