You Won One!

Trump & Company backed down because of all of you! You spoke your piece, and they backed off.

Trump administration caves to public pressure after avalanche of opposition to anti-trans hospital rule

More than 30,000 public comments helped derail an HHS proposal that threatened funding for hospitals providing gender-affirming care to transgender youth.

The Advocate

Christopher Wiggins

Jul 14, 2026

A flood of public opposition helped stop one of the Trump administration’s most extreme attempts to force hospitals nationwide to abandon gender-affirming care for transgender young people, offering a rare and instructive victory against a federal government that has otherwise moved aggressively to dismantle trans rights.

The Department of Health and Human Services has abandoned a proposed rule that would have threatened hospitals with the loss of all Medicare and Medicaid funding if they continued to provide transition-related care to minors, NPR was first to report on Monday. The proposal, issued in December, never took effect.

[...]

The administration has not publicly credited the comments for its reversal. But former federal health officials and administrative law experts told The Advocate that the public record created through the comment process can expose legal weaknesses, force agencies to confront evidence they would rather ignore, and make a rule more difficult to defend in court.

You did it! You stood up to Trump's juggernaut and made them blink!

NPR News reported that,

The fact that the Trump administration is backing off from this action is "a victory for people who are defending the rights and interests of trans people," says Sam Bagenstos, a professor at Michigan Law who served as general counsel at HHS under the Biden administration. "But I don't think it indicates a more general retreat from the aggressive posture of the Trump administration."

Bagenstos notes that this type of leverage — a "conditions of participation" rule for the Medicare and Medicaid program — has historically been used by HHS to compel states and hospitals to meet basic health and safety standards. Things like "making sure that you have stockpiles of certain kinds of equipment, making sure that you have certain kinds of emergency protocols, making sure that you have certain staffing ratios," he explains.

The proposed rule is unprecedented, Bagenstos says, because it instead would prohibit certain kinds of treatments for a certain population. He says it seems unlawful in a variety of ways. For one, "it violates the Medicare Act, which says that Medicare and Medicaid can't be used to control the practice of medicine within the state — states get to regulate the practice of medicine," Bagenstos says.

Just to be clear... we won a battle, not the war.

Trump still hates us. They got their hands slapped, but that is all. Still... I think it surprised the hell out of them. They live in their own little fantasy world and think that everyone thinks the same way they do.