A federal judge ruled that Democratic states can proceed with a lawsuit claiming the Trump administration violated their rights to regulate medicine through its push to criminalize gender affirming care for young people.
US District Judge Angel Kelley said Wednesday 16 states and the District of Columbia properly challenged a White House executive order and resulting Justice Department memos seeking to equate gender affirming care with “female genital mutilation” under existing criminal law.
“The Memos’ interpretations directly conflict with Plaintiff States’ laws protecting transgender adolescents’ access to gender-affirming care, which were enacted in exercise of Plaintiff States’ traditional authority to pass laws regulating medicine and to safeguard its citizens health and welfare,” Kelley said in her ruling denying the federal government’s motion to dismiss the case.
The ruling waved off the Justice Department’s arguments that the enforcement memos couldn’t be reviewed, and held that the states have standing to sue over the policies due to the threats of prosecution against state-run facilities, increased costs, and injuries to their sovereign regulatory authority.
The government’s push “aims to end gender-affirming care by frightening” providers as well as transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people and their loved ones, Kelley said for the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
Backing states’ authority to regulate healthcare for transgender youth, Kelley cited to the US Supreme Court’s ruling in US v. Skrmetti, which held a Tennessee law prohibiting medical treatments for transgender minors isn’t subject to heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause.
Kelley pointed to the majority opinion’s view that states are afforded “wide discretion to pass legislation in areas where there is medical and scientific uncertainty,”
Representatives for the parties weren’t immediately available for comment on Thursday.
The states are represented by their respective attorneys general. The federal government is represented by the Justice Department.
The case is Massachusetts v. Trump, D. Mass., No. 1:25-cv-12162, order issued 6/3/26.