Briefing: Transgender Healthcare + more
This week, our update is focused on Transgender Healthcare, where the Trump administration is directly and indirectly restricting gender-affirming care and forcing people of all ages to detransition. We also have updates from the Archives & History, Data Security, and Infectious Disease Control & Prevention teams. Special note: We just rolled out a new feature on our timelines. You can now see any Unbreaking timeline in chronological or reverse chronological order — which is handy because our biggest timeline is now 449 entries long.
Transgender Healthcare
Wherever the Trump administration can directly force trans people to detransition, it is doing so. In federal prisons, the Department of Justice is pulling incarcerated adults off their prescribed hormone therapy. “People will die” from the physiological and psychological consequences of detransitioning, says an attorney representing prisoners suing to stop a Georgia law that would extend forced detransition to state prisons.
Where it can’t directly stop gender-affirming care, the administration is using every regulatory and investigative lever it has to scare healthcare providers into complying in advance and stopping care on their own. Since January 2025, an estimated 42 healthcare systems have discontinued gender-affirming care for trans youth. The University of Utah hospital system is one of the latest and offers an illuminating example of how federal and state laws work together to end access to care — and how much hospital systems are willing to sacrifice to avoid legal risk.
Some background: Utah passed a temporary moratorium on providing gender-affirming hormone therapy to new trans youth patients in 2023. In May of 2025, a follow-up study commissioned by Utah’s legislature found that gender-affirming care actually produced positive health outcomes. Last December, the Trump administration announced a plan to financially ruin all hospitals that provide any form of gender-affirming care to trans youth by making them ineligible for Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement for all patients and all kinds of care. A month later, Utah lawmakers advanced a permanent ban that will also require that existing patients be medically detransitioned by January 2027.
Rather than providing the year-long grace period the bill includes or allowing legal challenges to play out, the University of Utah has enacted a full ban, eight months before the state law would go into effect. The university also implemented restrictions no authorities had asked for, including prohibiting its staff from transferring patient care to other providers. A university spokesperson told reporters the ban was in response to the “evolving state and federal landscape.”
The cost for Utah’s tiny population of trans youth will be high. Initiating hormone therapy is already difficult even for adults, with many checkpoints where care can be refused, delayed, or re-routed. As hospital administrators are well aware, blocking transfers to new doctors means that youth in the university hospital’s system will have to start the whole treatment approval process over, if they can even find new providers.
This is not just a problem for Utah and other red states. Hospital systems across the country are abandoning patients who need gender-affirming care, including those in states with the strongest policies around gender identity. Major systems in California, New York, and Minnesota, for example, have voluntarily discontinued care.
Despite these headwinds, some health organizations and officials are standing up for trans youth. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health all filed suits against the Federal Trade Commission in February over investigations that the organizations say are intended to intimidate them into ceasing support for gender-affirming care for transgender youth. And in New York, the Attorney General has ordered NYU’s Langone Health to resume gender-affirming care for trans youth.
Archives & History
The Archives & History team added 11 new entries to our timeline. Efforts to suppress information continue — including the removal of all climate science material from a crucial reference work for the federal judiciary — but not without opposition. Panels about the history of enslavement have been partially reinstalled at the President’s House Site in Philadelphia.
Data Security
The Data Security team also added 12 new items to our timeline. Recent headlines have focused on federal retaliation against Anthropic for prohibiting the use of its software in unfettered domestic surveillance. The federal government continues its invasive collection of information on Americans, including new efforts to mine cell phone location data, social media information, and law enforcement records. Voter data is also in the news: Despite a new Michigan ruling protecting voter records, the administration is seeking the voter rolls of five more states.
Infectious Disease Control & Prevention
The Infectious Disease Control & Prevention team added 14 new items to our timeline. Chaos continues at the Department of Health and Human Services, with personnel shakeups and postponed meetings. We are seeing outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases like measles, tuberculosis, and whooping cough across the country, yet the administration continues to send mixed messages about vaccines.
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