California Sues Trump Administration Over Restrictions to Transgender Surgeries for Minors

Eliciting disgust from conservatives, California Attorney General Rob Bonta last week joined a multi-state coalition suing the Trump Administration over its efforts to restrict so-called gender affirming care for minors.

The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, claims that the President’s executive order denying federal funding to hospitals that provide this care to minors, as well as the Department of Justice investigations of providers, “trammel” on states’ rights to make the care available because the 10th Amendment guarantees them the right to regulate medicine.

“These efforts to chill the provision of healthcare for adolescents — even in states where such care is legal and protected — show that the Agency Defendants have adopted and are engaged in a systematic effort to leverage the threat of criminal and civil enforcement to eliminate medically necessary care for transgender adolescents in the United States,” the complaint states.

At a press conference announcing the lawsuit, Bonta said that the Trump Administration had “trampled over state rights, overstepped their constitutional authority and endangered vulnerable minors and 18-year-olds.”

State rights, of course, was traditionally an argument made by Southerners in favor of segregation.

As for “vulnerable minors.” Bonta has it backwards.  Confused and troubled minors are often cajoled into surgeries and puberty blockers and hormone treatments by doctors and other health care professionals.

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles is currently being sued for bamboozling a young woman into having these procedures.

At the press conference, Bonta also complained about  the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles shutting down its transgender youth clinic under pressure from the Trump Administration.

“The shutdown came despite efforts my office took over recent months to assure [the Hospital] that they were protected and required to provide gender-affirming care,” he said.

The lawsuit takes issue with the executive order that Donald Trump issued on sex change procedures for minors and the Department of Justice memorandum implementing enforcement of the order.

The executive order, titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” was  issued on January 28 of this year.

It said that, “Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding.  Moreover, these vulnerable youths’ medical bills may rise throughout their lifetimes, as they are often trapped with lifelong medical complications, a losing war with their own bodies, and, tragically, sterilization.

“Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called “transition” of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”

Section 8 of the order said the Attorney General should “prioritize” enforcement of the federal law that prohibits gender mutilation.

To that end, on April 22, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued an order called “Preventing the Mutilation of American Children” that told all federal prosecutors “to investigate all suspected cases of [female genital mutilation] FGM—under the banner of so called ‘gender-affirming care’ or otherwise—and to prosecute all FGM offenses to the fullest extent possible.”

In June, Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate issued a similar directive to members of the Justice Department civil division,  urging them to also investigate providers of “gender-affirming care” for possibly running afoul of civil laws, such as violating the “False Claims Act” by billing the government for “impermissible” services.

The lawsuit is asking the Court to issue an injunction against the implementation of both memorandum.  It says that by following them, the Justice Department has “interfered with numerous critical aspects of the provision of this medically necessary healthcare, including (but not limited to) the States’ role as the regulators of the practice of medicine within their borders, the benefits that patient-centered care provides to transgender and intersex patients, the consensus among all major American medical organizations in favor of the availability of such care, and the informed consent and decision-making process of patients, their families, and their doctors.”

It also claims that the 1996 federal law prohibiting female genital mutilation makes an exception for surgeries  done by medical doctors that are necessary for the “health” of the person on which it is performed.  Therefore, it argues,  the law does not cover sex change surgeries. “The [Female Genital Mutilation Act] is not designed to criminalize the provision of medically necessary care to transgender individuals.”

Local and national conservatives reacted with disgust to the lawsuit.

Julie Hamill, head of the California Justice Center, a conservative-leaning public interest law firm, told the California Globe that, “This lawsuit is horrifying and stomach-turning, and I cannot believe my tax dollars are funding it.”

She said, “My first question is, do states have a 10th Amendment right to exempt themselves from the federal prohibition against female genital mutilation, a human rights abuse and form of violence against women and girls?”

“If Newsom and his friends want to litigate the purported “medical benefits” of sterilizing and mutilating children, I would welcome that discussion in open court. Perhaps that is what it will take to get the remaining 20% of the population still in support of child mutilation to realize what is actually happening to these kids.”

Similarly, California Family Council vice-president Greg Burt told the California Globe that,  “It’s stunning how willfully blind” Bonta and the other state attorney generals suing the Trump Administration “are to the growing mountain of evidence against so-called ‘gender-affirming care.’ Over 20 states have wisely moved to protect vulnerable children from harmful interventions like puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible surgeries like breast removal—treatments that fail to address the root of psychological distress and instead leave lifelong damage. Even progressive nations like Sweden, the UK, and Finland have backed away from these protocols after reviewing the science. But rather than acknowledge the real and growing medical debate, Bonta and his allies are digging in their heels, pretending that all dissent is ‘discrimination.’”

And Sarah Parshall Perry, a lawyer at the Arlington, VA-based group Defending Education, said by email that the states rights argument the lawsuit makes is absurd.

“While the regulation of the medical profession is generally a matter handled by the states under the Constitution’s 10th Amendment, there are important caveats. Medicine does not exist within a bubble. And Attorney General Bonta’s lawsuit against the Trump Administration is one aimed at the continuation of a practice discredited throughout the world. If a state insists on mutilating its own children for the sake of naked profiteering, the federal government is well within its constitutional right to enforce implicated federal laws like those prohibiting FGM, as well as the False Claims Act and the Food Drug and Nutrition Act.”

She added that, “the rise of de-transitioners, recent medical research, and the bombshell Cass report have shown–gender “affirming” care doesn’t actually help children, it hurts them. A state has no constitutional right to sanction medical child abuse.”