DOJ Pulls All The Stops To Get Confidential Trans Youth Medical Records

Featured Image: AG Pam Bondi with Donald J. Trump (Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

In July, the Justice Department (DOJ) announced that it had issued subpoenas to medical practitioners who provided gender-affirming care to minors. But only over the past few days, has the depth of the ask become more clear: more than 20 medical providers have received demands to share sensitive personal data, including in states where such care has remained legal.

A subpoena to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia demanded “every writing or record of whatever type” dating back to January 2020. A glimpse into that legal order, now made public, shows the extent of the violation of doctor-patient privilege.

Information sought by the DOJ includes details on patients who were prescribed puberty blockers or hormone therapy, such as social security numbers, birth dates, addresses, parent info, and doctor notes. Voice mails and encrypted texts are requested, plus information on hospital personnel, patient intake procedures, insurance records, “billing codes utilized for pediatric sex trait modification procedures” and more.

“There is a radical ideological agenda being pushed throughout every aspect of American life—from TV programming and Hollywood film production to children’s books and elementary school classrooms—that teaches children to deny biological reality,” Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in an April memo that kicked off her campaign. The medical community, she states, is “well-positioned to serve as a bulwark against this sociological disease.”

And she’s going full throttle in her quest to hold “medical professionals and organizations that mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology” accountable. 

The DOJ is now specifically employing accusations of billing fraud as a tool of intimidation, alleging that endocrine disorder or precocious puberty codes have been used for the purpose of treating what they call gender dysphoria. Even the medication management code is suspect.

Many gender affirmation programs have already buckled under MAGA-fueled Trump pressure. Announcements of closures last month include a trans youth clinic at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles (one of the country’s oldest and largest providers of gender-affirming care for minors) and multiple clinics in Arizona, Illinois, California, Connecticut, and Washington, D.C. Chicago clinics for such care are virtually now non-existent.

While gender-affirming care is not llegal in every state, threats of prosecution, withholding of critical hospital funds and other forms of retribution have made it nearly impossible for practitioners to continue. AG Pam Bondi has made clear that harsher punishments are on the table too—for a procedure that would be “rarely performed”, per Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Bondi has directed all U.S. Attorneys to investigate medical practitioners, hospitals, and clinics for suspicions of what she calls female genital mutilation (“FGM”) on any person under the age of 18. “That crime carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years per count.”