By The Department of Justice (DOJ) says it sent more than 20 subpoenas to doctors and clinics “involved in performing transgender medical procedures on children,” furthering a Trump administration goal of banning gender-affirming health care for minors.
The department announced the subpoenas in a brief communication on Wednesday that did not say when the subpoenas were sent or who received them. The Justice Department said in its announcement that its investigations “include healthcare fraud, false statements, and more.”
“Medical professionals and organizations that mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology will be held accountable by this Department of Justice,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement.
Chad Mizelle, the DOJ’s chief of staff, said separately during a Federal Trade Commission event in Washington this week that the department also issued subpoenas to major manufacturers of “the drugs used in trans-related medical interventions” in investigations related to companies’ marketing of prescription drugs and the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.
The subpoenas are the latest in a series of actions by President Trump’s administration targeting providers of gender-affirming care.
In June, the FBI asked the public to report tips “of any hospitals, clinics, or practitioners” that offer transition-related surgeries to minors, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sent letters in May to nine hospitals demanding information on “medical interventions for gender dysphoria in children.”
In announcing the letters to hospitals, CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz referenced an unsigned report released by the Department of Health and Human Services that month that broke with major professional medical organizations in casting doubt on evidence supporting gender-affirming care for minors.
The roughly 400-page review advocates for greater reliance on psychotherapy, rather than medical intervention, to treat minors’ gender dysphoria, or the severe psychological distress that stems from a mismatch between a person’s sex at birth and gender identity.
The report came at the direction of an executive order Trump signed in January to end federal support for transition-related medical care for children and teens up to 19 years old. Two federal courts blocked parts of the order that sought to withhold funding from hospitals providing such care.
Trump, who campaigned heavily on a promise to ban gender-affirming care for youth, has also called for Congress to pass legislation “permanently banning and criminalizing sex changes on children and forever ending the lie that any child is trapped in the wrong body.” He has endorsed a bill by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) that would make providing gender-affirming care to youth illegal.
State laws prohibiting doctors from administering transition-related care to minors have been adopted in roughly half the country since 2021, including some that make providing such services a felony. In June, the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s law banning gender-affirming care for minors, ruling the measure does not discriminate based on sex or transgender status.
In May, the court’s conservative majority allowed Trump to begin enforcing a ban on transgender people serving openly in the military, one of several policies instituted by his administration that broadly target transgender Americans.
Trump has also sought to bar trans student-athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports and block trans, nonbinary and intersex Americans from changing the gender marker on their passports. An order he signed on his first day back in office proclaims the U.S. recognizes only two unchangeable sexes, male and female, and broadly prohibits federal funds from supporting “gender ideology.”