Judge Orders Trump-Era Gag Order on Trans Health Mentions to Be Reversed

A federal court has slammed the brakes on a Trump-era directive that led to the quiet purging of government health content simply because it acknowledged transgender patients.

At the center of the ruling: two Harvard Medical School doctors whose peer-reviewed articles vanished from the Patient Safety Network, a public resource overseen by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Their work — one discussing suicide risk, the other, endometriosis — included brief mentions of trans individuals. That was enough to trigger deletion under a sweeping executive order signed by Donald Trump on his first day back in office this January, commanding all federal agencies to scrub any language promoting what he labeled “gender ideology.”

But in a scathing decision handed down in Boston, U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin called the move what it plainly was — unconstitutional censorship.

“This is a textbook example of viewpoint discrimination,” Sorokin wrote, blasting the administration for suppressing medical speech in violation of First Amendment rights. Notably, he didn’t just order the restoration of the doctors’ articles. He ordered all content removed by keyword purge to be put back online.

The court’s decision lands as a pointed rebuke to a policy that forced researchers and clinicians into a bureaucratic word game — remove references to transgender patients, or see your work erased.

Drs. Gordon Schiff and Celeste Royce, the plaintiffs in the case, had refused to sanitize their language. Their legal team with the ACLU of Massachusetts called the ruling “a victory for free speech and public health.” The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the affected website, offered no comment.

The executive order behind the removals insists on a binary view of biological sex and directs federal agencies to conform accordingly. But the court made clear: that doesn’t extend to silencing science or rewriting peer-reviewed content to suit a political narrative.

This ruling restores not only a collection of buried articles — but also, in a broader sense, the idea that patient care and public safety shouldn’t come second to ideological policing.

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