This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
So the feds are coming for our kids’ medical records.
Okay, to be more accurate, the feds have been coming for our kids’ medical records, and the latest casualty in this open war against hospital patients’ right to privacy (only when they are transgender) is NYU Langone Hospitals, whom you may remember for halting trans youth care in fear of Donald Trump’s evil attention… and then resuming trans youth care in fear of the ire of New York’s Attorney General Letitia James… and then ending trans youth care again, because of the “current regulatory environment.”
So, what’s the deal? This is clearly a violation of HIPAA’s Privacy Rule, right? Identifiable patient information, particularly data on minors, is rigorously protected by the Health and Human Services’ own rules. Individually identifiable health information simply cannot be given out by healthcare providers per the Privacy Rule, which defines that information as data that relates to “the individual’s past, present or future physical or mental health or condition; the provision of health care to the individual, or; the past, present, or future payment for the provision of health care to the individual.”
Well, the grand jury behind this kangaroo court shit has already thought up a perfectly reasonable explanation for why they’re allowed to intimidate Langone (and other providers) into violating HIPAA’s Privacy Rule, and it’s: Because we said so. The subpoena argues that the Justice Department is well aware of HIPAA constraints, but that the requested information is relevant to “a legitimate law enforcement inquiry,” and that “de-identified information could not reasonably be used in its stead.”
What information is the grand jury requesting in their subpoena? Oh, just the drawings, designs, manuals, memoranda, emails, reports, financial reports, notes, diaries, notations of any sort of conversations, working papers, letters, envelopes, telegrams, messages, studies, analyses, books, articles, notebooks, booklets, circulars, bulletins, notices, instructions, pamphlets, pictures, films, videos, voice recordings, maps, work papers, arithmetical computations, calendars (including electronic calendars), date books, task lists, minutes, all communications of any type (e.g., e-mail, voice mail, text messaging, WhatsApp and similar applications), social media content (including posts, messages, comments, and metadata), audio and video files, electronically stored data on magnetic or optical storage media as an “active” file or files (readily readable by one or more computer applications or forensics software), including metadata; any electronic files saved as a backup, including metadata; any deleted but recoverable electronic files, including metadata; any electronic file fragments (files that have been deleted and partially overwritten with new data), including metadata; every copy of every document where such copy is not identical to the original because of any addition, deletion, alteration, or notation; and all attachments, enclosures, or other matter affixed to, transmitted with, or incorporated by reference within documents responsive to this Subpoena including, but not limited to, any pages showing who reviewed, approved, or rejected a particular document between January 1, 2020, and May 5, 2026.
Sorry, I thought that would be kind of illustrative of the unbelievable overreach on display in this subpoena. I won’t make you read through all of that… especially because it isn’t even everything the court is demanding Langone turn over. In brief, they want any and all files relating to employees involved with, and patients who received, what they call “sex-rejecting procedures,” which they define as, “any medical, surgical, pharmaceutical, or clinical intervention provided to an individual under eighteen years of age that is intended or reasonably expected to suppress, alter, or eliminate endogenous pubertal development, or to modify primary or secondary sex characteristics, for the purpose of aligning with or affirming a minor’s asserted gender identity rather than the minor’s biological sex.”
Maybe overreach is an understatement, now that I think about it!
This has been going on for a while, mind you. The Justice Department has issued dozens of subpoenas in the last year to countless hospitals across America trying to bully healthcare providers into dropping trans youth as patients and denying them life saving medical care, as part of a sustained long-term effort from the federal government to commit genocide against trans Americans and remove us from public life entirely. Some providers are fighting these illegal demands, others are capitulating, and a federal judge has made it very clear that Trump’s Justice Department has absolutely no right to the information they are asking for. Another federal judge recently told Robert Kennedy that the HHS can’t force healthcare providers to deny service to trans patients, even if he really hates us and thinks we’re super icky.
Of course, like any savvy fascist regime, the Trump administration has simply gone judge shopping to get the ruling they want. If federal judges in Oregon and Maryland tell them to knock it off, they’ll simply go to a Texas judge to ensure the law is interpreted in their favor. How a 5th District federal court can compel an entity in the 2nd District to violate federal law, I simply do not know. That’s a high level legal question that I can’t answer, unfortunately.
So… what can be done? Well, New Yorkers are protesting, for a start. Major LGBTQ+ advocacy groups in New York are demanding that Langone refuse to comply with this blatantly unlawful order motivated entirely by animus. Should Langone comply, it’s likely that AG James will get involved in an attempt to protect trans New York residents’ rights, as she has done before. Langone could challenge the subpoena, relying on their duty as a healthcare provider to obey HIPAA rules.
Langone doesn’t have the most stellar track record when it comes to defying the Trump administration. For now, we can only hope that they’ll value their patients’ right to privacy, and their own culpability should they betray those patients. We can be sure that the Justice Department wants these records explicitly to do harm to trans youth and the people who support them. They must not be allowed to do that.
Aly Gibbs (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.