Trump administration not held in contempt in case over cut funding for trans youth study

(CN) — Despite previously blocking President Donald Trump’s executive order halting federal funding for gender-affirming care, a federal judge stopped short on Monday of holding the Trump administration in contempt for cutting funding for a research study at Seattle Children’s Hospital related to transgender youth.

U.S. District Judge Lauren King, a Joe Biden appointee, denied the request for contempt by Washington and three other states because they had raised the possibility but not shown that a decision by the National Institutes of Health to terminate the hospital’s grant was made per Trump’s executive order on “gender ideology.”

“A mere possibility that an action violates a court order is not enough to establish contempt,” Kind said. “Plaintiffs must instead provide clear and convincing evidence. Here, they have not done so.”

The judge, however, allowed the states to conduct expedited discovery as to whether the NIH’s March 4 funding revocation was carried out on the basis of the blocked provisions of Trump’s executive orders.

Representatives of the Washington attorney general’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.

King had issued a temporary restraining order last month, and later a preliminary injunction, against two of Trump’s orders: one of which is a medical services executive order issued Jan. 28 that directs federal agencies to immediately pull funding from any medical institution, such as a medical school or hospital, that is providing gender-affirming treatment, include hormone treatments and surgeries, to minors.

The president’s other order, the so-called gender ideology executive order, cancelled federal funding for providing gender-affirming care, which the order describes as promoting “the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa.”

The judge in Monday’s order slammed the government for misconstruing, in their opposition to states’ request for a contempt order, her preliminary injunction to make it seem as if it only related to the four kinds of medical treatment that were listed in the medical services executive order and not to the broader range of transgender care prohibited by the gender ideology executive order.

Despite the federal defendants’ “contrived arguments to the contrary,” King said, it was clear from her preliminary injunction order that “gender-affirming care” includes things such as assistance with elements of a social transition, evaluation of persistency of gender dysphoria, emotional and cognitive maturity, and coexisting psychological, medical, or social problems.

“Defendants also adopt an unreasonably narrow and self-serving view of what constitutes ‘care,’ arguing that research studies categorically cannot include the provision of care,” King said. “Such an interpretation appears to be deliberately ignorant: it is common knowledge that research studies frequently involve patient care.”

Under the Trump’s orders, insurance programs like TRICARE for military families and Medicaid are directed to stop coverage for gender-affirming care. The Department of Justice is also directed to vigorously pursue litigation and promote legislation to allow children who received this type of care and their parents to sue medical professionals.

Washington state, joined by Oregon, Colorado and Minnesota, argued in the motion for a preliminary injunction that the executive order, and another seeking to define sex as only male or female — signed by Trump on his first day in office, and titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government" — both unconstitutionally discriminate based on sex and transgender status.

“These orders have unleashed unbridled fear and irreparable harms,” the states wrote in the preliminary injunction motion.

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