A federal judge has ruled that the administration went too far when it deleted medical articles from a government website because they ran afoul of President Trump’s executive order banning the government from promoting transgender or gender identity ideas.
Judge Leo Sorokin, an Obama appointee to the court in Massachusetts, said Friday the whole operation was messy from the start.
The Health and Human Services Department used clunky word searches to try to spot offending pieces, and removed them without giving authors notice. And they were told the articles would only be re-posted after the offending words were removed.
Two authors who refused sued to demand their articles be restored in full, and Judge Sorokin issued a preliminary injunction granted that demand.
“This is a flagrant violation of the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights as private speakers on a limited public forum,” the judge ruled.
He said the articles were the speech of the authors, not the government.
And he said the administration’s arguments justifying the viewpoint discrimination were never made clear during the legal battle in his court.
At issue are articles on PSNet, a website run by HHS that publishes medical patient health findings, case studies and articles.
One 2020 piece by Dr. Gordon Schiff and Dr. Celeste Royce, two Harvard Medical School professors, dealt with endometriosis and included a mention that it “can occur in trans and non-gender-conforming people.”
Dr. Schiff also wrote a 2022 piece about suicide risk that included LGBTQ individuals as high-risk populations.
The pieces remained posted with no issues until after Mr. Trump’s order, when they were flagged.
HHS told the doctors to remove words such as “nonbinary,” “transgender” and “LGBTQ” in order to keep the pieces posted. Dr. Schiff declined.
Dr. Royce said she would revise the wording to say endometriosis “is a rare but possible diagnosis in men.” That idea was rejected by HHS, which said endometriosis cannot be diagnosed in men.
