A federal judge late Friday evening blocked President Trump’s executive order restricting federal aid to hospitals and healthcare clinics that perform transgender surgeries on minors.
Trump previously signed two executive orders aimed at protecting children from monsters who surgically mutilate minors and give them cross-sex hormones.
President Trump’s order directed federally funded programs such as Medicaid, military and other insurance programs to exclude transgender surgeries.
Various left-wing LGBTQ and family doctor groups sued Trump to challenge the executive orders.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs argued that President Trump’s executive order is “unlawful and unconstitutional” because it blocks federal funds previously allocated by Congress.
On Friday US District Judge Lauren King, a Biden appointee, blocked Trump’s executive orders after her previous restraining order expired.
The judge said Trump’s executive order doesn’t target surgeries on “cisgender children.”
“In fact, its inadequate ‘means-end fit’ would prevent federally funded medical providers from providing necessary medical treatments to transgender youth that are completely unrelated to gender identity,” the judge wrote, according to AP. “For example, a cisgender teen could obtain puberty blockers from such a provider as a component of cancer treatment, but a transgender teen with the same cancer care plan could not.”
The Associated Press reported:
President Donald Trump’s plan to pull federal funding from institutions that provide gender-affirming care for transgender youth will remain blocked on a long-term basis under a federal judge’s ruling in Seattle late Friday.
U.S. District Court Judge Lauren King previously granted a two-week restraining order after the Democratic attorneys general of Washington, Oregon and Minnesota sued the Trump administration — Colorado has since joined the case.
King’s temporary order expired Friday, and she held arguments that day before issuing a preliminary injunction blocking most of Trump’s plan pending a final decision on the merits of the case. She rejected a portion of the states’ challenge regarding the order’s protections against female genital mutilation, on grounds that “no credible threat of prosecution exists” in such cases.
