Philadelphia hospital slams Trump's DOJ, saying it 'reverse-engineered' claims about gender-affirming carehttps://www.advocate.com/news/chop-gender-affirming-care-trump-doj 🔗Jacob Ogles (22 Oct 2025)
A Pennsylvania hospital says the Trump administration used "dubious" and "unreliable" data on gender-affirming care to justify its attempt to seize children's medical records.
Attorneys for the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) filed a scathing legal brief, first reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, that challenges an attempt by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to subpoena private medical information for minors obtaining the medical care in question.
Specifically, the brief questions data submitted by Lisa Hsiao, DOJ's Acting Director of the Consumer Protection Branch, who offered the government's legal justification for the record seizure nine weeks after first demanding the patient files.
"The Hsiao Declaration includes two CHOP-specific allegations. Both are threadbare, of dubious origin, and so heavily qualified and caveated as to offer the Court no meaningful information," reads the brief, filed by Lawrence McMichael and attorneys for the Philadelphia hospital.
Hsiao asserted in a legal declaration that over the course of seven years, more than 250 CHOP patients were diagnosed with "precocious puberty" at age 10 or older, then claimed that was "well beyond the age at which children are typically diagnosed." But the administration provided no evidence, such as diagnosis data from other hospitals, to defend that assessment.
"Even assuming the cited figure is atypically high, the Government's allegation is far too underdeveloped to offer useful information. For one thing, the provenance of the dataset is entirely unknown. The Hsiao Declaration does not indicate whether it might include patients who were diagnosed at a younger age by another provider," the CHOP brief states.
"And critically, the Declaration does not specify how many patients received treatment for gender dysphoria."
