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'Cruel and Unconstitutional': Trump, RFK Jr. Escalate War on Trans Youth With Threat Against US Hospitals
"These proposed actions would put Donald Trump and RFK Jr. in those doctor’s offices, ripping healthcare decisions from the hands of families," said one critic.
Dec 18, 2025
President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday unveiled new policies aimed at cutting transgender minors off from gender-affirming care.
As reported by the New York Times, Kennedy announced new proposed rules that would bar Medicare and Medicaid from sending any funds to hospitals that carry out gender-affirming care on transgender minors, a move that would essentially force these facilities to shut down given that spending from those two programs account for nearly half of all spending on hospital care.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, warned during a news conference announcing the proposed rules that hospitals are "going to pay a very steep price" if they continue providing gender-affirming care to minors.
Many hospitals throughout the US are already under financial strain while bracing for the impact of the Medicaid cuts in this year's Republican-passed budget law, which are projected to total $1 trillion over the next decade.
Dr. Susan Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), slammed Trump administration health officials for their "unprecedented actions and harmful rhetoric" while announcing the new proposed rules, which she described as a vast overreach by the federal government.
"These rules are a baseless intrusion into the patient-physician relationship," said Kressly. "Patients, their families, and their physician—not politicians or government officials—should be the ones to make decisions together about what care is best for them. The government’s actions today make that task harder, if not impossible, for families of gender-diverse and transgender youth."
Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, hammered the Trump administration for being "relentless in denying healthcare to this country, and especially the transgender community."
"Families deserve the freedom to go to the doctor and get the care that they need and to have agency over the health and well-being of their children," Robinson added. "But these proposed actions would put Donald Trump and RFK Jr. in those doctor’s offices, ripping healthcare decisions from the hands of families and putting it in the grips of the anti-LGBTQ+ fringe."
The ACLU wasted no time in announcing that it would sue the administration if it goes forward with enacting the proposed rules, which it described as an unconstitutional attack on healthcare practices that have been endorsed by both the the American Medical Association and the AAP.
Chase Strangio, co-director of the ACLU’s LGBTQ and HIV Rights Project, accused the administration of launching "cruel and unconstitutional attacks on the rights of transgender youth and their families."
"By attempting to strip away essential healthcare, the administration is not 'protecting' anyone," Strangio added. "It is weaponizing the federal government to target a vulnerable population for political gain. Healthcare decisions belong to families and their doctors, not politicians. The latest proposals from the administration would force doctors to choose between their ethical obligations to their patients and the threat of losing federal funding."
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'Middle Finger to the LGBTQ Community': Trump Halts US Commemoration of World AIDS Day
The move came on the heels of a report detailing how the Trump administration's foreign aid cuts set off a crisis in global AIDS response efforts.
Nov 28, 2025
The Trump administration drew outrage this week for ending formal US commemoration of World AIDS Day, directing US State Department officials to "refrain from publicly promoting" it through social media or other communication channels.
The decision was reported after the Joint United Nations Program on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS) released an analysis detailing the harms done by the Trump administration's sweeping foreign assistance cuts.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration temporarily halted HIV-related funding, sending global response efforts into "crisis mode," USAID said. Though President Donald Trump ultimately dropped a proposal to slash hundreds of millions of dollars from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the administration's throttling of funds forced clinics to shut down and disrupted key community programs, the report states.
"The funding crisis has exposed the fragility of the progress we fought so hard to achieve,” said Winnie Byanyima, executive director of UNAIDS. “Behind every data point in this report are people—babies and children missed for HIV screening or early HIV diagnosis, young women cut off from prevention support, and communities suddenly left without services and care. We cannot abandon them. We must overcome this disruption and transform the AIDS response."
In its reporting on the Trump administration's decision to halt official commemoration of World AIDS Day, which is on December 1, the New York Times pointed to studies suggesting that "cuts by the United States and other countries could result in 10 million additional HIV infections, including one million among children, and three million additional deaths over the next five years."
Today, @realDonaldTrump gave a middle finger to the LGBTQ community. His deplorable cancellation of World AIDS Day commemoration was unconscionable and unforgivable. This action was fueled by raw bigotry and fealty to his Project 2025 masters.
FIGHT.https://t.co/PcyduBcbkI
— Truth Wins Out (@truthwinsout) November 26, 2025
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), head of the Congressional HIV/AIDS Caucus, said in a statement that "silence is not neutrality; it is harm."
"I'm calling on the administration to immediately reverse this decision and recommit our fight against HIV/AIDS," he added.
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Librarians and Publishers Alarmed as Tennessee Libraries Shut Down for GOP 'Book Purge'
"It is illegal to remove books from public libraries because some people do not like them," said a coalition of 33 library groups, publishing companies, and civil rights organizations.
Nov 27, 2025
Public libraries in Tennessee have begun to shut down as they carry out an order from state officials to remove children's books containing LGBTQ+ themes or characters.
For Popular Information, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims reported Tuesday that the "book purge" is required to be carried out at all 181 libraries in the Tennessee Regional Library System, which encompasses most of the state, aside from cities like Nashville and Memphis.
It comes after Tennessee's Republican Secretary of State, Tre Hargett, sent a pair of letters earlier this fall. The first, sent on September 8, said that in order to receive state and federal grants, which run through his office, libraries needed to comply with a Tennessee law banning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices from agencies, as well as President Donald Trump's executive order on "gender ideology," which effectively ended the federal recognition of transgender and nonbinary individuals.
As the report notes, neither of these orders says anything about library books. However, Hargett argued that compliance with the executive order mandated book bans because it states that "federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology.”
Not only do executive orders typically not apply to state and local governments, but the federal funds Tennessee's libraries receive are not used to purchase books at all. Instead, according to the secretary of state's website, they “provide all state residents with online access to essential library and information resources, including licensed databases, a statewide library catalog and interlibrary loan system, bibliographic services, and materials for the disadvantaged.”
The Every Library Institute, an advocacy group that supports federal funding for libraries, said that Hargett's instructions "contain significant errors, likely exceeding the secretary’s authority and reflecting a political agenda rather than a neutral or accurate interpretation of federal or state law."
"Hargett is setting a dangerous precedent by placing Tennessee’s state and municipal government under the authority of any executive order by any president," the group continued. "Executive orders are not laws."
But Crosby and Sims argued: "Even if the executive order did apply to Tennessee local libraries, simply having books with LGBTQ stories and characters does not constitute 'promoting gender ideology.' The classic fairytale Little Red Riding Hood involves a wolf eating a little girl, but does not promote violence. Children’s books are stories, not instruction manuals."
On October 27, Hargett sent another letter, giving libraries 60 days to undertake an "age appropriateness review" of all books in their children's section to find any books that may be inconsistent either with Tennessee's age appropriateness law or with Trump's executive order.
As Ken Paulson, the director of Middle Tennessee University's Free Speech Center, noted, the age appropriateness law, which was last updated in 2024, "is modeled after obscenity laws and prohibits nudity, excessive violence, and explicit sexuality, hardly the stuff of children’s sections. Further, the law applies to school libraries, not public libraries."
Though Hargett provided no criteria for how to assess what books would need to be purged, he did provide an example of one he felt violated both orders: Fred Gets Dressed, a 2021 picture book by the New York Times bestselling author Peter Brown. As Popular Information noted:
The book, which was written by a straight, cisgender man, does not feature any LGBTQ characters. Instead it is based on a childhood experience of the author in which he tried on his mother’s clothing and makeup. If a book about a boy trying on his mother’s clothes is the strongest example of “promoting gender ideology” that Hargett could identify, it raises questions about the necessity of the review.
Earlier this month, the state's Rutherford County Library System, which serves the cities of Smyrna and Murfreesboro, shut down several of its library branches for up to a week to “meet new reporting requirements" from Hargett's office.
It's unclear why the Rutherford County system determined it needed to shut down in order to carry out the review, nor has it been made clear whether other library systems will be expected to do the same.
As former librarian Kelly Jensen noted for the blog Book Riot, the Rutherford County system has made its own efforts to ban transgender-friendly books, but backed off from the policy earlier this summer for fear of litigation after a Murfreesboro law branding "homosexuality" as a form of "public indecency" resulted in the city being forced to settle a lawsuit for $500,000.
Kelly wrote that for Rutherford library system's board, Hargett's order is "a convenient means of subverting their fears of litigation, which drove them to change their anti-trans book policy earlier this summer. If the directive is from the state, then they 'have to' comply. The Tennessee secretary of state is granting permission slips to public library boards to ban away."
This week, a group of 33 major publishers, library advocacy groups, and free speech and civil rights organizations signed onto a letter to Hargett expressing "profound concern" over its review mandate.
The coalition included PEN America, the American Library Association, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and the transgender rights advocacy organization GLAAD. Major publishing houses also signed on, including Penguin Random House, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster.
"These types of reviews create immense administrative burdens for library systems and often lead to illegal censorship, which raises liability risks for local communities and the state," the groups said. "Many libraries, uncertain about the legal and procedural basis for the mandate, have had to redirect limited resources, with some temporarily closing branches to complete these reviews, which are implied to be necessary for future funding."
"The demands in your letter need immediate clarification, as it is not reasonable to expect libraries to follow directives that would risk violating applicable law, including the US Constitution," they added. "It is illegal to remove books from public libraries because some people do not like them. This is a well-settled legal principle."
The Rutherford County Library Alliance, which has challenged municipal anti-LGBTQ+ laws as well as the censorship policies of the library's own board, said that “we have seen firsthand the concrete harm of the Secretary’s directives—library closures during story time, intimidation of professional librarians, and the breakdown of democratic representation in our public library system."
"We hope Secretary Hargett will fulfill their duty to promote library development by supporting our constitutionally-guaranteed rights and our highly trained librarians," the alliance added, "rather than enabling censorship from 0.001% of our community for 100% of our community.”
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