DOJ drops demand for hospital records

L.A. facility prevails in standoff over data on youths who got gender-affirming care.

- BY KEVIN RECTOR AND SONJA SHARP

The U.S. Department of Justice has agreed to stop demanding medical records that identify young patients who received gender-affirming care from Children's Hospital Los Angeles, ending a legal standoff with families who sued to block a subpoena that some feared would be used to criminally prosecute the parents of transgender kids.

The agreement, filed in federal court Thursday, allows the hospital to withhold certain records and redact personal information from others who underwent gender-affirming treatments, which Trump administration officials have compared to child mutilation despite support for such care by the nation's major medical associations.

Several parents of CHLA patients expressed profound relief Friday, while also acknowledging that other threats to their families remain.

Jesse Thorn, the father of two transgender children who had been patients at Children's Hospital, said hospital officials have ignored his requests for information as to whether they had already shared his kids' data with the Trump administration, which had been scary. Hearing they had not, and now won't, provided "twofold" relief, he said.

"The escalations have been so relentless in the threats to our family, and one of the things that compounded that was the uncertainty about what the federal government knew about our kids' medical care and what they were going to do about that," he said.

Less clear is whether the agreement provides any new protections for doctors and other hospital personnel who provided care at the clinic and have also been targeted by the Trump administration.

The agreement follows similar victories for families seeking to block such disclosures by gender-affirming care clinics elsewhere in the country, including a ruling Thursday for the families of transgender kids who received treatment at Children's National Hospital in Washington, D.C.