\n<\/p>\n
A<\/span> group of trans activists from across Massachusetts brought their needles, hormone gels, pills and sharps containers to Boston on Wednesday to send a message to state attorney general Andrea Campbell.<\/p>\n Organizers with the youth-led group Protect Trans Futures (PTF) took their hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in the lobby of her office building, then occupied the space, refusing to leave without a commitment to protect civil rights for trans kids.<\/p>\n While Massachusetts is considered one of the legally \u201csafest\u201d places for trans people, some local hospitals are still dropping youth gender-affirming care and canceling surgery appointments amid an expansive legal fight across the US. Gender-affirming care remains legal for all in Massachusetts, but the Trump administration\u2019s attempt to undermine state laws has still created barriers to care, and a chilling effect.<\/p>\n So organizers came asking Campbell to order those hospitals to reinstate care, or investigate or launch litigation against them for failing to do so.<\/p>\n Some advocates \u2013 who share Protect Trans Futures\u2019 outrage at the hospitals for pre-emptively complying with Donald Trump\u2019s agenda \u2013 fear undermining a sympathetic attorney general and eventually ending up with a less friendly replacement. But many trans organizers see the action as simply holding the government to its own standards.<\/p>\n \u201cMassachusetts politicians at the local, state and federal level are very naive in thinking and hoping that there\u2019s not this massive loss of care, but that\u2019s not the reality of patients and families,\u201d said Teddy Walker, a 21-year-old with Protect Trans Futures. \u201cThe Trump administration\u2019s policies are working exactly as intended.\u201d<\/p>\n A majority of American medical experts support access to trans youth care, which demonstrably reduces suicide and mental health risks. Nonetheless, in 27 states, such as Texas and Missouri, youth gender-affirming care is now restricted or banned; in some, doctors can be prosecuted for providing it, and parents have been investigated for seeking it out for their children. Fifty percent of trans youth ages 13 to 17 live in one of those states. Even hospitals in blue states, like New York\u2019s NYU Langone, which ended care last year, have been subpoenaed for the medical records of their former minor clients.<\/p>\n After the state attorney general\u2019s building had closed for the day, organizers were handed a phone: An assistant attorney general offered them a meeting \u2013 a step organizers had taken months before, with no results.<\/p>\n So they refused.<\/p>\n After a few hours, nine organizers, including Walker, were arrested by state troopers. (The attorney general\u2019s office told the Guardian they were not involved in the decision to arrest the protesters.)<\/p>\n He screamed a message to supporters witnessing his arrest \u2013 a chant from LGBTQ+ activists who held die-ins and other protests to force a change in the Aids epidemic: \u201cAct up! Fight back!\u201d<\/p>\n Over the last few years, hundreds of thousands of trans people and families with trans kids have fled home states with anti-trans laws, relocating to states like Massachusetts in hopes of maintaining access to gender-affirming care and other trans civil rights.<\/p>\n Massachusetts is one of a handful of US states with shield laws to protect LGBTQ+ residents from lawsuits and penalties from states where gender affirming care is criminalized. In addition, elected officials in the state are vocal supporters of their trans constituents, including Gov Maura Healey, the state\u2019s first woman and lesbian governor, and Senator Edward Markey, who won the Democratic primary this week in a race that was largely defined by trans rights.<\/p>\n But the Trump administration attacked these state-level protections for trans youth healthcare soon after taking office in January 2025. In the first weeks of his second term, the president signed an executive order threatening to cut off federal funding for hospitals that provide gender-affirming medical care to trans youth. Later that year, health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr sought to target Medicaid funding to hospitals providing youth gender affirming care. Many of those efforts have been tossed; there are no reports of hospitals losing federal funding for providing this care.<\/p>\n Still, in response to the administration\u2019s directives, at least three local hospitals or healthcare systems in Massachusetts have ended gender-affirming care programs for patients under 19. (This means that 18-year-olds, who are legally adults, are impacted.) A fourth Massachusetts hospital canceled all appointments for a gender-affirming surgery for adult trans women, even though adults aren\u2019t the subject of Trump\u2019s executive order.<\/p>\n <\/span>\u2018Once we let the government start making decisions about what we do with our bodies and what our children are able to do with our bodies \u2026 we\u2019re in a really dangerous territory.\u2019<\/span> Photograph: Alexa B Wilkinson\/courtesy of Gender Liberation Movement<\/p>\n Initially, organizers protested outside these hospitals in an effort to pressure them to reinstate the care. They later shifted their focus to pressuring state officials to enforce existing civil rights laws.<\/p>\n In April, Campbell\u2019s office met with a group of trans youth advocates after some hospitals ended care for youth. She has repeatedly expressed support for trans youth, saying that trans healthcare \u201cremains legal and protected\u201d in Massachusetts, and warning hospitals that ending youth gender-affirming care \u201cmay amount to discrimination\u201d under state law. And on 2 September, the same day as the protest at her office, Campbell joined 21 other state attorneys general in suing the Trump administration over its attempt to block Medicaid coverage for youth gender affirming care.<\/p>\n In August, Walker publicly confronted Campbell at an event at the Boston public library over her inaction. She stated she will not litigate against hospitals that have ended care, and has not ordered them to reinstate it, as attorneys general in blue states like New York and California, as well as Colorado\u2019s supreme court, have done.<\/p>\n After Wednesday\u2019s protest, the attorney general\u2019s office shared with the Guardian the email it sent to Protect Trans Futures. In it, the attorney general\u2019s office argued that what\u2019s been done in California and New York were imperfect comparisons and would not result in care being reinstated in Massachusetts. The office reiterated that youth gender affirming care remains legal in the state, and wrote, \u201cThe cessation of gender-affirming care for minors by Fenway Health, Outer Cape Health Services and Baystate Health has not resulted in a wave of hospitals or clinics ceasing to provide care in the Commonwealth.\u201d<\/p>\n The email added, \u201cThe AGO and PTF share a common goal: maintaining access to gender-affirming care.\u201d<\/p>\n Campbell\u2019s office has said it is unaware of any youth who has lost care, but Walker, of the group Protect Trans Futures, says he knows dozens of youth and their families who have. In its email, the attorney general\u2019s office asked PTF to connect with those families. Walker said that the group has previously brought those families to meetings with the office, but nothing came of it.<\/p>\n Last October, Fenway Health, Massachusetts\u2019 largest LGBTQ+ healthcare provider, stopped providing youth hormone care and puberty blockers, routine medical care to prevent the major physical changes that come during puberty. Fenway was a particular blow: from its founding as a community health drop-in location in the early 1970s, it centered gay clients and made the first Aids diagnosis in New England. Other providers, including Outer Cape Health Services, which runs three facilities on Cape Cod, and Baystate Health, which services western Massachusetts, followed suit.<\/p>\n Other hospitals and clinics have taken in those who\u2019ve lost care. Transhealth in Northampton, the country\u2019s only independent clinic focused solely on trans and gender-nonconforming patients, has shouldered an avalanche of referrals.<\/p>\n Josh, who asked to use a pseudonym for privacy reasons, 18, was born at Fenway to lesbian parents, and still sees his primary care physician there. Following the typical medical routine for youth who transition in childhood, he started going to Fenway for hormone replacement therapy in middle school.<\/p>\n After two years on puberty blockers, he then started taking testosterone. That process is intentionally slow, requiring letters from therapists and evaluations, often taking at least a year. When Fenway halted care last year, Josh was able to get a referral to Boston Children\u2019s hospital, which has vocally refused to close its trans healthcare program. Restarting the intake process, however, took over a year, he said. It shattered his trust that his home state would be able to protect him.<\/p>\n He\u2019s just one case of young people abruptly stripped of care.<\/p>\n Safara Malone, a senior at Harvard University, moved to Massachusetts from Texas, which has extreme anti-trans laws, in 2024. Malone was a strident advocate for trans rights in her home state and intentionally chose a college where she would face fewer barriers and find more explicit support. But with graduation less than a year away, Malone says she\u2019s not sure where she\u2019ll feel safe living next, amid what she called the trans \u201cgreat migration\u201d. It was difficult for her to realize that had she arrived in Boston just one year later \u2013 after the changes at Fenway \u2013 she would have been refused her care.<\/p>\n Malone is now considering leaving the country.<\/p>\n Now, trans people of all ages are fighting to protect the very civil rights that brought many of them to Massachusetts in the first place.<\/p>\n Fenway\u2019s cessation of care spurred the creation of Protect Trans Futures, a group of trans youth that has been fighting the state government and hospitals themselves to reinstate care. PTF has held a series of actions this summer pushing Campbell to consider their demands, including coordinating a letter campaign which now has more than 3,000 signatures.<\/p>\n After Baystate cut off youth gender affirming care, another group, Western Massachusetts Trans Alliance (WMTA), emerged to push back. These nascent grassroots efforts join the existing fabric of LGBTQ+ and trans advocacy organizations across the state, including the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition. Other organizations like the Boston chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America have signed on to PTF\u2019s efforts.<\/p>\n <\/span>\u2018For them to end this gender-affirming care means that people have to travel further, and search harder, to find any kind of gender affirming care for their youth.\u2019<\/span> Photograph: Alexa B Wilkinson\/Courtesy of Gender Liberation Movement<\/p>\n Many of these groups, as well as the national Gender Liberation Movement, joined PTF outside Campbell\u2019s offices. A grassroots group of parents and other adults from western Massachusetts also came in to support and set up a large banner depicting a blue bus labeled \u201cBaystate Health\u201d. Around the banner, people held smaller signs that read \u201cthrows trans kids under the bus\u201d. Under the banner, fabric legs with children\u2019s sneakers poked out.<\/p>\n \u201cUnlike Boston, western Mass does not have as many choices for healthcare,\u201d Ali Wicks-Lim, one of the grassroots organizers protesting Baystate, said outside the attorney general\u2019s office Wednesday. \u201cSo for them to end this gender-affirming care means that people have to travel further, and search harder, to find any kind of gender affirming care for their youth.\u201d<\/p>\n Wicks-Lim says that they\u2019ve heard of many families who have not been able to find another provider.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce we let the government start making decisions about what we do with our bodies, and what our children are able to do with our bodies, and the decisions that parents and grandparents and caregivers need to be able to make for their children\u201d, they said, \u201cwe\u2019re in a really dangerous territory.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A group of trans activists from across Massachusetts brought their needles, hormone gels, pills and sharps containers to Boston on Wednesday to send a message to state attorney general Andrea Campbell. Organizers with the youth-led group Protect Trans Futures (PTF) took their hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in the lobby of her office building, then occupied<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":52124,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[165,7865,699,10232,364,4124,702,736,25274,2481,801],"class_list":{"0":"post-52123","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-care","9":"tag-fighting","10":"tag-lgbtq","11":"tag-massachusetts","12":"tag-people","13":"tag-protect","14":"tag-rights","15":"tag-risk","16":"tag-safehaven","17":"tag-trans","18":"tag-young"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/52124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The \u2018trans great migration\u2019<\/h2>\n
Shattered trust<\/h2>\n
Fighting for change<\/h2>\n