When a federal judge appointed by the very president whose administration she is criticising calls government lawyers dishonest, it is worth paying close attention. That is exactly what happened in Rhode Island, and the story deserves to be told plainly.
The Justice Department issued a sweeping administrative subpoena to Rhode Island Hospital demanding sensitive medical records for every minor transgender patient who had received care there. Not a targeted investigation with a specific allegation, not a safeguarding concern about a named individual, just a blanket demand for years of private medical information about vulnerable children. U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy quashed it. She found the subpoena lacked any congressionally authorised purpose and had been issued, in her words, "for an improper purpose in bad faith."
That alone would be remarkable. What followed was extraordinary.
Judge McElroy did not merely rule against the Justice Department. She laid out, in careful detail, a pattern of conduct she found deeply troubling. She wrote that DOJ lawyers had misrepresented facts under oath, withheld information from her court and from a court in Texas, and done so in what she described as an obvious effort to find a friendlier forum after other courts had rejected the same tactics. A DOJ lawyer named Lisa Hsiao stated in a declaration that the hospital had stopped communicating with the department. McElroy called that claim "clearly misleading, if not utterly false," because hospital representatives had in fact responded to a DOJ email about search terms for compliance just days before that declaration was filed.
"This reckless disregard for the duty of candor owed to a federal court is appalling," she wrote. The gap between the honourable conduct expected of federal prosecutors and what she found here, she said, was "unsettling."
She went further still, pointing out that DOJ lawyers pursued enforcement of the subpoena before a judge in Fort Worth, Texas, despite the lawyers themselves being based in Washington. The Texas court went ahead and ordered the hospital to hand over the records. The hospital has appealed. Meanwhile, Judge McElroy has now referred the DOJ lawyers for possible professional discipline.
The DOJ's Civil Division says the allegations are without merit, that its lawyers did nothing wrong, and that it will take appropriate action where warranted. Fine. That is what any institution says when it is embarrassed. What is harder to explain away is that Judge McElroy was a Trump appointee, not a perceived political opponent, and that her ruling describes a department that has proven, at every point in the case, "unworthy of trust."
At the heart of this case are children. Real children, with real doctors, real medical histories, and a real expectation that their private health information is protected. Gender-affirming care for young people is supported by the World Health Organisation, the Endocrine Society, WPATH, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. It is not experimental, it is not controversial in any medical sense, and it is not the business of federal investigators conducting a politically motivated trawl through a hospital's records with no specific legal purpose the court could identify.
This is what bad faith looks like when it has a docket number. The federal government, wielding the full weight of the Justice Department, went after the medical records of trans children, misled courts in multiple jurisdictions to do it, and got caught. A Trump-appointed judge was so troubled by what she saw that she used some of the strongest language available to her.
I think about the families whose children were treated at that hospital. They trusted the healthcare system with the most private details of their children's lives, as patients do. They did nothing wrong. Their children did nothing wrong. They are now dealing with the reality that the federal government tried to obtain those records through a process a federal judge found to be dishonest and without lawful purpose.
The hospital fought back, and a judge listened. That matters. It will not be the last fight of this kind, and it will not always go this way. But for now, at least this time, someone with authority looked at what the government was doing to trans children and said: no, not like this, not here.
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Dr Helen Webberley is a gender specialist, medical educator, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes on gender diversity, trans healthcare, and equality.