Amid Federal Attacks on Transgender Youth, Families Fight to Preserve Health Care at Rady Children's Hospital
Megan Flynn, Law Fellow
Earlier this year, transgender youth and their families in the San Diego, California area filed a putative class action lawsuit against Rady Children’s Health to prevent the hospital system from unlawfully cutting off medically necessary treatment for transgender adolescents and young adults. Impact Fund,Western Center on Law & Poverty, and the National Center for LGBTQ Rights represent the plaintiffs.
In January 2026, Rady announced it would no longer provide gender-affirming medications and procedures. Rady planned to end these services in less than three weeks but did not provide referrals to the nearly 2,000 patients whose care it was cutting off, leaving them scrambling to find essential medical care overnight.
Rady’s decision to terminate medical treatment for transgender youth comes at a time when the federal government is launching horrific attacks at the transgender community. In the past eighteen months, the federal government has taken unprecedented actions targeting transgender youth, including trying to eliminate access to transgender youth health care and obtain the private medical information and identities of transgender youth, their families, and their medical providers. Soon after taking office, President Trump issued executive orders directing federal agencies to restrict support for gender-affirming care for minors. In July 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice issued more than twenty administrative subpoenas to doctors and clinics seeking private medical records of transgender youth patients. Transgender young people and their families and advocates successfully blocked multiple of these subpoenas through court litigation across the country, including the subpoena issued to Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.
The federal government has taken unprecedented actions targeting transgender youth.
Now, the federal government is illegally trying to use the criminal justice process to get the same information instead, going to a hand-picked judge and grand jury in Texas to issue grand jury subpoenas to hospitals. The Trump administration is using these attacks to intimidate transgender people and deter health providers from offering legal, medically necessary care.
While 19 state Attorneys General and some hospitals have joined with families and advocates in challenging the federal subpoenas as illegal, other hospitals have instead chosen to capitulate to federal pressure and abandoned their patients with no options for continuing care. We saw the same dynamic play out when Children’s Hospital Los Angeles closed its Center for Transyouth Health and Development the day after it received the DOJ’s administrative subpoena. Following announcement of a proposed federal rule that would prohibit hospitals providing gender-affirming care from receiving Medicare or Medicaid funding Rady cited “recent federal actions” as the reason for its decision to terminate care, despite the fact that the rule has neither been finalized nor yet has any legal effect. Transgender youth and their families are being forced to fight, again and again, just to preserve access to vital healthcare.
After Rady’s announcement, the California Attorney General sued Rady, alleging that the hospital system violated conditions of a state-approved merger that brought together three hospitals under the Rady Children’s Health umbrella. The Attorney General quickly secured a temporary restraining order preventing Rady from halting services. The temporary restraining order will remain in effect until June 24, 2026, when the court will decide whether to continue to require Rady to provide gender-affirming care.
While the Attorney General’s lawsuit focuses on violations of its contract agreement with Rady, our lawsuit addresses the fundamental issue at the core of these attacks on transgender youth: discrimination. We allege that Rady’s decision violates California law by discriminating against transgender patients on the basis of sex, gender identity, and disability. California’s anti-discrimination laws guarantee equal access to healthcare and prohibit hospitals from selectively denying care to transgender patients simply because of who they are. None of the federal actions give Rady or any other California provider license to single out a class of patients and refuse treatment.
Our lawsuit seeks to stop Rady from denying treatment to youth because they are transgender, and to ensure continuity of treatment without disruption. In order to protect the privacy of our youth plaintiffs, the court allowed our case to proceed using pseudonyms. The court also deemed our case “related” to the Attorney General’s case because they concern the same events and defendants.
We are committed to ensuring that our courageous plaintiffs’ voices are heard and are grateful to support them in the fight to protect access to healthcare for transgender youth.