Mount Sinai health system will end gender-affirming care for youth, under agreement with Justice Department

The Mount Sinai health system has agreed to stop providing gender-affirming care for minors, pay a fine for performing such services in the past and spend $2 million to help people who received gender-affirming care to “detransition," the U.S. Department of Justice announced Friday afternoon.

The agreement is the latest of the Trump administration’s aggressive moves to stop doctors and parents from allowing adolescents and children to obtain puberty blockers, hormone treatments and gender-affirming surgery.

David Kilmnick, president of the Hauppauge-based NY LGBT Network, which has five locations on Long Island and in Queens, said the government is trying to force hospitals, doctors, parents and patients to bend to its will.

“They're interfering in a way that is abusive, and it's cruel, not based in science," he said. “They're weaponizing the Department of Justice to target transgender young people and intimidate healthcare institutions into abandoning them. This is isn't about protecting children. It's about using transgender people as political targets."

Kilmnick said some Long Island families had traveled to Mount Sinai in Manhattan to obtain pediatric gender-affirming care. No such care was provided at Mount Sinai South Nassau in Oceanside, said Mount Sinai spokesperson Lucia Lee.

In hospitals nationwide, there were nearly 3,700 gender-affirming surgeries performed on adolescents 12 to 18 years old between 2016 and 2020, a 2023 study found.

Mount Sinai’s move came after the Trump administration launched investigations of Mount Sinai and other health systems, including NYU Langone, for what it says were “potential violations of federal law" for providing gender-affirming care, which President Donald Trump, in an executive order he signed shortly after taking office in January 2025, called “chemical and surgical mutilation."

The Department of Justice turned to a conservative federal court in Texas for much of its investigation, and that led a U.S. Attorney’s Office there to seek medical records of people who had received gender-affirming care as minors from Mount Sinai, NYU Langone and other New York City hospitals. A federal appeals court in Manhattan on July 6 issued a preliminary injunction blocking the release of records.

Lee said in a statement Friday that the health system entered into the settlement “so that Mount Sinai would not be compelled to produce these highly sensitive patient records to the grand jury."

Mount Sinai prioritized its "commitment to safeguarding our patients’ confidential information and protecting our clinicians," she said.

“The settlement contains an express denial of any wrongdoing on Mount Sinai’s part," she added.

Lee declined to comment further, including to disclose the amount of the “monetary penalty" that it will pay and details of what the Justice Department said was medical care for those “suffering harmful consequences of ‘gender-affirming care’ they received as children," which it also described as "detransition care."

Kilmnick said he was “deeply disappointed in Mount Sinai" and that the health system should have fought the Trump administration rather than “capitulate."

“When the government targets a vulnerable community, institutions with power have a responsibility to stand up, not surrender," he said.

The Trump administration has taken numerous actions against the transgender community. On his first day in office in January 2025 following his reelection, Trump signed an executive order stating there are only two sexes, male and female, and that “sexes are not changeable," and mandating that people use the sex they were born with to identify themselves on federal documents, such as passports.

The American Academy of Pediatrics and other U.S. medical groups support gender-affirming care for minors, saying doctors, patients and families should make decisions on it, not the government. But the American Society of Plastic Surgeons in February issued a statement that surgery for children with gender dysphoria — when the gender someone identifies with differs from their sex at birth — should be delayed until at least age 19, because of “insufficient evidence" that the benefits outweigh the risks.

Under pressure from the Trump administration, NYU Langone in February stopped providing gender-affirming care to minors, citing the “current regulatory environment." A week later, the New York Attorney General’s Office said the ban violated state anti-discrimination law and ordered the health system to resume such care. 

Asked whether NYU Langone currently provides gender-affirming care to minors, the attorney general’s office Friday referred questions to NYU Langone, which declined to comment.

Northwell Health and Stony Brook Medicine also have provided gender-affirming care to minors, but neither health system confirmed Friday whether they currently provide such care or whether they have been targeted by the Trump administration.

By David Olson

david.olson@newsday.com@DavidOlson11

David Olson covers health care. He has worked at Newsday since 2015 and previously covered immigration, multicultural issues and religion at The Press-Enterprise in Southern California.