A federal judge in San Jose has blocked the Trump administration from obtaining the hospital records of transgender minors in California. U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts issued the order on Monday night, and according to Shannon Minter of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, it covers every hospital in the state that has provided transgender care.
The language in the government's court filings is striking. The Justice Department was seeking the identities of every patient who underwent what it called "sex-rejecting procedures", along with their diagnoses, sexual and mental health histories, treatment records, and details of "family decision-making". Every patient. Every family. Every conversation between a child and their doctor. The government was demanding all of it, and threatening prison sentences of up to twenty years for anyone who tried to stand in the way.
Think about what that means for a moment. These are children. Children who, with their families and their doctors, made careful, considered decisions about their own healthcare. Those decisions were reached in confidence, in clinic rooms, in the kind of trust that medicine depends on. The administration was not seeking oversight of a rogue institution. It was not investigating a specific complaint. It was demanding a comprehensive list of names.
Shannon Minter put it plainly: judges have found that these lawsuits "lacked a proper purpose and were just designed to intimidate and harass doctors and parents." That is the conclusion courts have reached, repeatedly. Nearly a dozen federal judges rejected the initial wave of lawsuits seeking records from hospitals nationwide. So the Justice Department changed tack, quietly opened criminal investigations, and threatened to prosecute hospitals directly. The restraining order Judge Pitts issued stops that, at least for now.
What we are watching is not an oversight mechanism. It is an attempt to build a surveillance architecture around trans healthcare. The goal is not to protect children: if it were, the administration would not be threatening the doctors and parents who care for them. The goal is to make trans healthcare visible, traceable, and frightening enough that families stop seeking it. When that approach failed in court after court, the administration moved to criminal threats. A judge has now stepped in front of that too.
I have spoken with families who have been through gender-affirming care pathways with their children. The care they describe is thoughtful, slow, and centred entirely on the wellbeing of the young person. Parents agonise over these decisions. Doctors take them seriously. The idea that the federal government should have access to every file, every diagnosis, every family conversation, without any specific cause or complaint, is not child protection. It is the opposite of it.
The executive order underpinning all of this is titled "Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation." That framing tells you everything about the intent. It does not describe medicine. It is designed to make care sound monstrous, so that the removal of that care sounds reasonable. Courts are not buying it. Doctors are not buying it. And the families who have watched their children flourish after receiving appropriate care are certainly not buying it.
There is also the investigation announced the same day into four California school districts, accused of running programmes on sexual orientation and gender "ideology". The assistant attorney general's statement talked about protecting parental rights. But inclusion in schools does not threaten parental rights. It means that a trans child, or a child who might be trans and does not yet have the words for it, encounters a curriculum that does not erase them. That is not ideology, it is basic dignity.
The relief from Shannon Minter was palpable: "We're very relieved." So am I. The restraining order may be temporary, and the Justice Department may yet challenge a longer injunction through the appeals courts. But for now, the records stay private. The families stay protected. The doctors can carry on doing their jobs without the threat of criminal prosecution hanging over them for daring to provide care.
Courts have now blocked this approach over and over again. That consistency is not accidental. It reflects something the administration seems determined to ignore: that trans children are children, that their healthcare is healthcare, and that the law, read properly, still protects them.
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Dr Helen Webberley is a gender specialist, medical educator, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives at the centre of both.