The Trump administration’s campaign against Children’s Hospital Colorado is not about protecting children. It is about power, politics and intimidation, threatening one of Aurora’s most vital institutions.
At issue is gender-affirming health care for transgender minors, care that Children’s Hospital has provided lawfully under Colorado law and consistent with mainstream medical practice.
Yet the U.S. Department of Justice has issued a sweeping subpoena demanding some of the most sensitive records a hospital possesses, including confidential patient files, personnel records, internal emails and billing data. Federal officials admit they have no evidence of wrongdoing. None, according to reporting in the Colorado Sun. That fact alone exposes this action for what it is, a punitive fishing expedition meant to bully doctors and frighten families.
Gender-affirming care is not a fringe experiment. It is recognized and sanctioned across mainstream American medicine. It is delivered by specialized providers, governed by professional standards and subject to rigorous informed-consent requirements.
Children’s Hospital Colorado has reported no adverse events related to such care, and federal judges in other states have already ruled that similar subpoenas were motivated by bad faith or were legally irrelevant.
All of this isn’t a coincidence. It’s a pattern.
What the Trump administration is peddling instead is quackery dressed up as concern. Its disdain for gender-affirming care is rooted not in science nor medicine but in pseudoscience, religious dogma and partisan politics.
The administration has gone so far as to issue declarations claiming these treatments “do not meet professionally recognized standards of health care,” a false claim being challenged by the attorneys general of 19 states, including Colorado. Those states are right to call out the lying. Declaring something untrue does not make it so, especially when the declaration runs headlong into established medical practice and clinical evidence.
Even more troubling is how the federal government is attempting to impose its ideology. Regulation of medical care has long been the purview of the states. Colorado has chosen to allow and support gender-affirming care. The Trump administration is now misusing federal power to override that decision, threatening to block hospitals from Medicare and Medicaid if they continue providing care it politically disfavors. That is not oversight. It’s extortion.
The financial consequences are no abstraction. Nearly half of Children’s Hospital Colorado’s patients are covered by Medicaid. Exclusion from federal programs would inflict catastrophic harm, not just on transgender patients but on every child who relies on the hospital for cancer treatment, trauma care, neonatal services and specialized pediatric medicine. This is an institution that saves thousands of lives each year and improves the health of tens of thousands more. To put its viability at risk over a crackpot ideological crusade is reckless beyond measure.
This administration has repeatedly shown disdain for vetted science and medicine, promoting backward and disproven ideas about vaccines and public health while undermining trust in medical professionals. The consequences of that approach have endangered lives nationwide. Now the same contempt for evidence is being weaponized against children’s hospitals and the families they serve.
Children’s Hospital Colorado is right to resist. Its decision to fight this subpoena is not defiance. Instead, it’s the defense of patients, of medical ethics, vetted science and of state authority.
Aurora and Colorado should stand firmly behind this hospital. So should anyone who understands that medicine must be guided by scientific evidence, not ideology, and that the federal government has no business threatening the survival of a children’s hospital to score political satisfaction.
