On Monday the Colorado Supreme Court, by a wide 5-2 margin, ordered a Colorado children’s hospital to resume transgender treatments and surgeries on minors based on state law, even though the decision could force the hospital to lose its federal funding. The Trump Administration has taken strong action against the transgender movement, yet it marches on.
Last December the Trump administration threatened to withhold federal funding from facilities that provide transgender treatment to children, but a Biden-appointed federal judge in Oregon named Mustafa T. Kasubhai blocked that rule. Children’s Hospital Colorado had wisely suspended its program of applying hormonal treatments and puberty blockers to children due to the threatened loss of funding.
A lower court upheld the hospital’s decision against a legal challenge. Children’s hospitals depend heavily on federal funding, including their services under Medicaid, and thus ordering the hospital to continue with transgender treatment would do more harm than good.
The practice of medicine is historically regulated by state law, but since health care providers receive billions of dollars of federal funding, the Trump Administration said it would cut federal funding from facilities that continue to perform harmful procedures aimed at altering a child’s gender. Recently the American Medical Association and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons reversed their guidance on such procedures, urging a delay in transgender surgery prior to the age of 19.
Dominated by federal employees, Virginia has become like Colorado and other blue states in pushing the transgender agenda. When a police officer in Norfolk in southern Virginia objected to orders requiring him to use transgender pronouns, he was ordered to leave, stripped of his gun, suspended, and then fired.
Norfolk has historically been conservative, with many military veterans. It is alarming that police officers in Norfolk have been suspended and even fired for objecting to the use of the women’s locker room by a man purporting to be a transgender woman.
State courts in the mostly conservative states of Kansas and Montana are also imposing the transgender ideology on their residents. In Kansas last Friday, a county judge appointed by Democrat Gov. Laura Kelly issued a 117-page injunction against a good Kansas transgender law, which had been passed by the Republican legislature over her veto.
The ACLU brought this lawsuit against the Kansas ban on transgender operations and treatments for children. The county judge blocked the law based on an activist decision by the liberal Kansas Supreme Court, which invented a right of “personal autonomy” to expand abortion there even though those words cannot be found in its 167-year-old state constitution.
Meanwhile, the Montana Supreme Court has rendered multiple Leftist decisions, despite being in a red state that Trump won by 20 points in 2024. On April 14, the 5-2 court held that birth certificates and driver’s licenses must be changed to accommodate transgender demands.
The Montana Supreme Court ruled, based on its state constitution, that state agencies cannot refuse to alter birth certificates and driver’s licenses to accommodate transgender demands. Despite being born male, for example, a resident of the Big Sky Country can now change his birth certificate to state falsely that he was born female instead.
These Kansas and Montana decisions were based on their state constitutions, and the Colorado ruling was based on state law. This reasoning generally shields such decisions from review by the U.S. Supreme Court which, regardless, has avoided review of many important transgender cases that it could have decided.
The 7-2 decision last week by the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of abortion pill manufacturers was the result of all three Trump appointees crossing over to the liberal side of the Court, without explanation. Justices Thomas and Alito expressed their dismay at how well-established principles of law were disregarded to allow the continued distribution of the abortion pill without sensible safeguards such as in-person dispensing, and without compliance with a longstanding federal ban on abortion-by-mail.
The entire Democrat Party is lockstep in support of the transgender agenda, due to how Planned Parenthood supplements its revenue by offering transgender treatments. Only a few courts have been willing to defend children against harmful transgender procedures.
The U.S. Supreme Court indicated last year in the Skrmetti case that there is no right to transgender operations and treatments for children under the U.S. Constitution, but this good decision was silent about state constitutions. The Court upheld a law in Tennessee protecting minors against this harm, but this precedent does not protect children against pro-transgender state court decisions based on state law.
Under Skrmetti the federal government can act further to protect children against life-altering procedures and treatments pushed on them by the transgender ideology. In addition to withholding federal funds from facilities that promote transgender treatments, federal regulations could require transparency to the public about which facilities provide these objectionable treatments.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.