Children’s hospitals in Minnesota are fully reinstating their gender-affirming care programs for people under 18 after parts of them were paused for over a month. The healthcare centers had temporarily suspended parts of their programs after the Trump administration threatened the hospitals’ federal funding in December.

“Offering science- and research-based health care to transgender and gender diverse youth is part of Children’s Minnesota’s vision of being every family’s essential partner in raising healthier children,” Children’s Minnesota said in a statement.

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Children’s Minnesota is a non-profit children’s hospital system in Minnesota with locations in both Minneapolis and St. Paul. Like many hospitals and clinics across the country, it suspended elements of its gender-affirming care plan for youth because of pressure from Trump and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

On February 27, Children’s Minnesota released a statement noting that they would “temporarily pause prescribing puberty-suppressing medications and pubertal hormones (estrogen and testosterone) for patients under age 18 in our Gender Health program,” citing “an increase in federal actions directed at pediatric health systems like ours that provide this care.”

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Under that pause, the hospitals still provided gender-related mental health care and counseling. Gender-affirming surgeries were not part of the pause because the hospital does not offer them to minors.

The threat to Children’s Minnesota’s federal funding came in December when Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. issued a declaration deeming puberty blockers, hormone treatment, and surgeries as unsafe (contradicting the evidence-based findings of numerous studies and the best practices recommended by every major medical association). Kennedy’s declaration cited the HHS’s own much-criticized review from May 2025 (which was anonymously generated in 90 days and underwent no peer-review process). His declaration threatened to potentially deny Medicaid and Medicare funding to any hospitals or clinics that still offered those treatments to minors.

Medicaid alone was estimated to have covered the cost of roughly 48% of patients admitted to the Children’s Minnesota Hospitals in 2023. A loss of the Medicaid and Medicare funding would represent millions of dollars of federal funding and result in the hospital being unable to care for many of its patients.

After the declaration, Minnesota was among the 21 states (plus D.C.) that came together to sue HHS in response. The lawsuit, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, said, “Health care services for transgender young people remain legal, and the federal government cannot intimidate or punish the providers who offer them.”

In March, Oregon-based federal judge, Mustafa Kasubhai, ruled that the administration had overreached with its declaration, providing preliminary relief to hospitals and doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors.

The judge also noted that the declaration did not allow for proper notice periods or hearings, and implied that it was an attempt to circumvent proper policy change procedure.

In his ruling, Judge Kasubhai wrote, “The notion that ‘I will go forward and issue a declaration and see if we can get away with it’ is not a principle of governance that adheres to the overarching commitment to a democratic republic that requires the rule of law to be regarded and respected and honored as a sacred.”

With Judge Kasubhai’s ruling in place, Children’s Minnesota appears to have felt safe enough to offer gender-affirming care in its entirety once more. In its statement, the hospital wrote that the decision was related to “a federal court ruling that vacated a federal declaration attempting to restrict gender-affirming care.”

At this point, 27 states have passed laws restricting access to gender-affirming care for youths. Conversely, Minnesota has passed a law that protects people’s right to access trans healthcare.

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