Trump continues attack on trans people, going after trans kids, teens in new order

After anti-trans orders defining "sex" and seeking to ban trans people from the military, Trump's latest discriminatory order attacks gender-affirming medical care.

President Donald Trump continued on Tuesday in his efforts to attack the lives of transgender people and to hobble the federal government — failures of both his responsibility to protect Americans and his duty to run the government.

Tuesday’s actions followed on the heels of different actions taken toward those same two ends on Monday — both of which led to lawsuits on Tuesday.

In his third order in eight days focused singularly on attacking trans people, Trump issued an executive order on Tuesday attempting to block the availability of gender-affirming medical care for transgender children and teenagers across America.

Notably, however, the executive order defines 18-year-old adults as “children.”

This is care that is deemed medically necessary for a small number of children across the nation and, until 2021, was legal everywhere in the nation. That year, Arkansas became the first state to pass a ban on such care — barring puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and gender-affirming surgery for transgender minors — and it was passed over the veto of the state’s Republican governor. In the four years since, according to the Movement Advancement Project, 23 other states passed laws like the Arkansas law. Two additional states passed laws that solely ban gender-affirming surgery for transgender minors.

Twenty-four states, in other words, have no ban, and 26 states do not ban puberty blockers or hormone therapy for transgender minors when appropriate. In addition to that, most of the states whose bans were challenged were initially blocked by federal district court judges appointed by presidents of both parties. After some appeals courts reversed those rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court took up one such case and heard arguments in December. No decision has come in the case.

And yet, on Monday, Trump declared that “it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”

This is unconstitutional under current law, as has been argued in cases challenging the state bans. This order discriminates impermissibly based on sex and based on transgender status, and it limits parents’ rights under constitutional due process protections to control the upbringing of their children, including regarding the provision of appropriate medical care.

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The order, in depth

Specifically, the order purports to block coverage of gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors — as per the definitions section of the order, this care is offensively called “chemical and surgical mutilation” — in TRICARE, which is the military’s health care program, and for all federal employee health insurance plans starting in 2026.

First, as to TRICARE:

The fact that, even in its own order, the Trump administration later needs to refer to data it has on how many individuals covered by TRICARE are under 18 goes to show how out of the ordinary its age choice is.

Note also that this is more expansive than the limited ban on coverage of certain gender-affirming medical care under TRICARE that was contained in the National Defense Authorization Act last month:

As to federal employee health insurance plans the order states:

Beyond that, the order seeks to stop all medical institutions — “including medical schools and hospitals” — from providing gender-affirming medical care for trans minors by threatening to cut off “research or education” grants to institutions that do not stop providing this care.

The order also directs the secretary of Health and Human Services to “take all appropriate actions“ to end gender-affirming medical care for minors and directs the attorney general to “prioritize” concocted investigations relating to gender-affirming medical care. Notably, at least one section of Tuesday’s order is not restricted even to Trump’s expanded definition of children. There is simply no age restriction to this section directing the attorney general to:

There will be challenges, and Law Dork will have coverage of them. It is, however, a failure of humanity, governing, advocacy, and journalism that we have gotten to this point.

Those who were insistently “just asking questions” and unceasingly pushing the needle further right — in addition to those who encouraged and then exploited that for their explicitly discriminatory or hateful aims — all bear a measure of responsibility for this, for making trans teens — and, with them, trans adults — fear for their lives tonight.

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Litigation update

As I highlighted above, litigation came quickly regarding Monday’s actions.

A first lawsuit already has been filed against Trump’s anti-trans military executive order. (More on that here in a note posted earlier Tuesday.)

There also was a lawsuit filed against the Office of Management and Budget’s sought-after grants and loans “pause” that sparked chaos and confusion across the country. Moments before the pause was set to go into effect at 5 p.m. Tuesday, however, U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhen issued an administrative stay temporary blocking the implementation of the “pause” as to current federal grants and loans. (More on that here in a note posted earlier Tuesday.)

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The OPM email

Finally, on Tuesday evening, the White House Office of Personnel Management sent an email to federal employees — virtually all of them, with some exceptions — essentially warning them that anyone could lose their job in the near future under “four pillars” of a “reformed federal workforce,” which were apparently decided upon with no public discussion or notice (and that are vague and disconcerting).

At the same time, the letter announced a new “program,” telling federal employees that they can agree by February 6 to resign via a “deferred resignation” letter, with their resignation purportedly to take effect September 30 and signatories whose resignations are accepted being exempted from any return-to-office requirements.

Somehow — whether through being lied to or misled, not seeing this for what it is, or just not caring — we got stories about a “buyout,” care of NBC News, and employees being given “an easy way to quit,” per the initial report from The Washington Post.

Once the facts came out, the Post at least removed “easy” from their story.

As of this writing, though, NBC News is still calling this a “buyout.”