Military families with transgender children are suing the Pentagon over the Trump administration’s efforts to cut off gender-affirming health care to military dependents.
In a lawsuit filed Monday, three families are alleging that the administration’s moves go beyond a law that was passed last year to restrict gender-affirming care for military children and violate a separate law that says federal regulations cannot be “arbitrary and capricious.”
“Tricare’s sudden refusal to cover medically necessary care has inflicted profound harm on plaintiffs,” the lawsuit says.
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“Their prescriptions have been cut off without notice,” it continues. “Their trusted doctors at military hospitals have been forced to abandon them. Plaintiffs’ families now face significant and, in some cases, crushing out-of-pocket costs or the prospect of watching their family member’s health deteriorate without the medications that kept them healthy and stable. This is not an abstract policy shift – it is an immediate and devastating disruption of essential health care that affects the physical and psychological well-being of plaintiffs and other young people throughout the country.”
A Defense Department spokesperson declined to comment on active litigation.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which was filed by two LGBTQ+ advocacy groups on behalf of the families, are anonymous to protect the children’s privacy. But the suit details the families’ struggles to get care.
Two of the children, referred to in the lawsuit as Diana Doe and Nathan Noe, were taking hormones with their parents’ consent on the advice of their doctors at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland. This spring, they were told by their Walter Reed doctors that the medical center could no longer provide the hormone therapy, but neither family ever received a notice from Tricare about benefits changing, according to the lawsuit.
The third plaintiff, known as Parker Poe, who is described as a young adult, has been unable to access treatment after his doctor at an unnamed medical facility informed the family that Tricare would no longer cover his testosterone or related care.
“He is months overdue for the lab work that he needs to monitor his treatment. Additionally, without Tricare coverage, Parker’s prescription for testosterone [redacted] was too expensive to purchase out-of-pocket,” the lawsuit says. “This process has resulted in unnecessary stress and panic.”
The hardships detailed in the lawsuit come after Congress passed a law last year that barred Tricare from covering any “medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria that could result in sterilization” for beneficiaries who are minors.
The law didn’t specify which treatments would be banned, but it was widely expected to prohibit hormone therapy and puberty blockers, as well as surgery, which is a very rare treatment for transgender minors.
In January, President Donald Trump also issued an executive order that attempted to ban any federal funding from going toward puberty blockers, hormones or surgery for anyone under 19 years old.
Throughout the spring, defense health officials issued policies and memos to implement the law and the executive order that cumulatively barred military treatment facilities from providing and Tricare from covering gender-affirmation care for military dependents of any age, including minors and adult children.
Trump’s executive order and the Pentagon’s implementation go beyond what last year’s law required, the lawsuit argues. Specifically, the law applies only to minors, while the Pentagon is restricting health care for all dependents.
Further, the lawsuit said, the law “does not support a categorical ban” on puberty blockers and hormone therapy.
“Puberty blockers and hormones for treatment of gender dysphoria do not cause ‘sterilization,’” the lawsuit says. A Pentagon memo “misstates the medical evidence by conflating potential fertility impacts with sterilization. DoD then uses this conflation to categorically deny gender transition treatments to all transgender adolescents and young adults, despite the absence of individualized medical justification and despite the statute’s limited scope, which does not support such a broad application.”
The lawsuit also argues that the new health care policies violate the Administrative Procedure Act, which allows courts to block policies that are arbitrary or capricious.
The lawsuit was filed in federal district court in Maryland by GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders, or GLAD Law, and National Center for LGBTQ Rights, or NCLR.
“This is a sweeping reversal of military health policy and a betrayal of military families who have sacrificed for our country,” Sarah Austin, staff attorney at GLAD Law, said in a statement. “When a service member is deployed and focused on the mission, they deserve to know their family is taken care of. This administration has backtracked on that core promise and put service members at risk of losing access to health care their children desperately need.”
The same pair of organizations is representing service members in a separate lawsuit against the Trump administration’s ban on transgender troops.
The restrictions on gender-affirmation health care are part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to erase transgender people from public life.
In addition to kicking out transgender troops and denying health care to transgender military kids, the administration has banned books about transgender people from Defense Department schools and ended gender-affirmation care at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Outside of military and veterans spheres, the administration has also tried to remove transgender people from the history of the Stonewall riots, blocked transgender people from changing the gender marker on their passports, and tried to force states to ban transgender women from competing in women’s sports.
Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also posted on social media that he was firing a Navy doctor after Libs of TikTok, a conservative account focused on publicly shaming LGBTQ+ people, posted a screenshot of her LinkedIn page that said she provides transgender health care at a Navy hospital in California.
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