The U.S.Department of justice has agreed to stop demanding medical records that identify young patients who received gender-affirming care from Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, ending a legal standoff with families who sued to block a subpoena that some feared would be used to criminally prosecute the parents of transgender kids.
The agreement, filed in federal court Thursday, allows the hospital to withhold certain records and redact personal information from others who underwent gender-affirming treatments, which Trump administration officials have compared to child mutilation despite support for such care by the nation’s major medical associations.
Several parents of CHLA patients expressed profound relief friday, while also acknowledging that other threats to their families remain.
Jesse Thorn, the father of two transgender children who had been patients at Children’s Hospital, said hospital officials have ignored his requests for information as to whether they had already shared his kids’ data with the Trump administration, which had been scary. Hearing they had not, and now won’t, provided “two-fold” relief, he said.
“The escalations have been so relentless in the threats to our family, and one of the things that compounded that was the uncertainty about what the federal government knew about our kids’ medical care and what they were going to do about that,” he said.
Less clear is whether the agreement provides any new protections for doctors and other hospital personnel who provided care at the clinic and have also been targeted by the Trump administration.
The agreement follows similar victories for families seeking to block such disclosures by gender-affirming care clinics elsewhere in the country, including a ruling Thursday for the families of transgender kids who received treatment at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C.
“What’s unique here is this was a class action,” said Alejandra Caraballo,a civil rights attorney and legal instructor at Harvard,who was not involved in the Los Angeles case. “I can’t undersell what a major win that is to protect the records of all these patients.”
Some litigation remains ongoing, with families fearful appeals to higher courts could end with different results. There is also Republican-backed legislation moving through Congress to restrict gender-affirming care for youths.
Another father of a transgender patient at Children’s Hospital, who requested anonymity because he fears for his child’s safety, said he was grateful for the agreement, but doesn’t see it as the end of the road. He fears the Trump administration could renew its subpoena if it wins on appeal in cases elsewhere.
“There’s some comfort, but it doesn’t close the book on it,” he said.
In a statement to The Times, the Justice Department said it “has not withdrawn its subpoena. Rather, it withdrew three requests for patient records based on the subpoenaed entity’s depiction that it did not have custody of any such records.”
“This settlement avoids needless litigation based on that fact and further instructs Children’s Hospital Los Angeles to redact patient information in documents responsive to other subpoena requests,” the DOJ statement said. “As Attorney General Bondi has made clear, we will continue to use every legal and law enforcement tool available to protect innocent children from being mutilated under the guise of ‘care.’”
Children’s Hospital did not respond to a request for comment.
“This is a massive victory for every family that refused to be intimidated into backing down,” Khadijah Silver, director of Gender Justice & Health equity at Lawyers for Good Government, which helped bring the lawsuit, said in a statement Friday. “The government’s attempt to rifle through children’s medical records was unconstitutional from the start. Today’s settlement affirms what we’ve said all along: these families have done nothing wrong, and their children’s privacy deserves protection.”
Until last summer, the Center for Transyouth Health and Progress at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles was among the largest and most well-known centers of its kind in the country.
