A federal judge has ruled against the Trump administration’s attempts to get transgender health records from Stanford University’s hospital.
“The disclosure of such information would also ‘out’ provisional class members as transgender to a federal government that for more than a year has ‘sought to identify, to demonize, and ultimately to eradicate an entire population of transgender people,’” U.S. District Court Judge P. Casey Pitts, a Joe Biden appointee, writes in his 43-page opinion when issuing a preliminary injunction against the Department of Justice’s attempt to get the records. “Such disclosure and the attendant loss of privacy, chilling of doctor-patient communications, and risk of governmental harassment, cannot be undone.”
In the 2026 case Z.A. v Blanche, Z.A. represents families and transgender children in California. The case involves the DOJ’s subpoena of Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, which is affiliated with Stanford University. The Trump administration has been attempting to get hospitals across the country to hand over the private medical records of trans kids in what some judges have called a “fishing expedition” intended to “harass” and “intimidate” as part of an effort to end gender-affirming care through “fear.”
The DOJ first tried to obtain records from Packard in July 2025 by issuing an administrative subpoena, and in May 2026, it obtained a grand jury subpoena in Texas. A similar maneuver was used on NYU Langone Hospital. Thankfully, New Jersey’s newly proposed Shield Law would prevent backdoor maneuvers of this sort as well as protect both citizens of the state and otherwise from being prosecuted and persecuted in such a manner.
The DOJ has been using the court system in Northern Texas to issue subpoenas to hospitals in other states, likely because it is more friendly to anti-trans arguments. This has led some federal judges to accuse the DOJ of “forum shopping.”
That’s when families of transgender minors who were treated at Packard sued, arguing that turning over the private medical records would violate their First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights. Including their rights to privacy.
The DOJ argued that the transgender individuals and their families have no right to privacy when it comes to grand jury investigations, a position that Judge Pitts promptly opposed.
“DOJ’s use of a grand jury subpoena does not obviate the extreme sensitivity of that information or the provisional class’s privacy interests therein,” he writes.
Currently his order only applies to Packard, which is the only hospital in California to have been subpoenaed for trans kids’ medical records at this point in time.
Many federal judges have been quashing these subpoenas for the past year, citing privacy concerns and the DOJ’s inability to show why it needs the records. But grand jury subpoenas are harder to quash, and some hospitals have been forced to turn over records.
The Trump administration’s nationwide campaign against trans kids has led to fears that the administration wants the records to build a database of transgender people for possible targeted oppression.
“CA families can breathe a sigh of relief,” GLAD Law’s senior director of transgender and queer rights Jennifer Levi tells Advocate in a statement. “This decision makes clear no family should fear that seeking lawful healthcare for their child will put them in the government’s crosshairs.”
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