US District Court Judge Lauren King today temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order to withhold all federal funding for gender-affirming care for people under age 19 from taking effect in Washington, Oregon and Minnesota—the three states that filed suit against the Trump administration last week.

The order is blocked for the next 14 days. King, a Biden appointee, said Trump’s executive order intended to erase transgender people and “blatantly discriminated against trans youth.” The decision came less than 24 hours after a judge in Maryland temporarily blocked the order nationwide.

King believed that Trump’s executive order—titled “Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation”— was not likely to “survive judicial scrutiny” because it subverted the power of Congress to distribute money for potentially lifesaving gender-affirming care and violated equal protection under the 5th Amendment by not funding trans health care, while continuing to fund the same, or similar treatments, for cisgender children.

Judge King’s temporary restraining order comes exactly one week after Washington Attorney General Nick Brown sued over Trump’s order. As AG Brown said at a news conference announcing the suit, the order not only threatened to defund hospitals and research institutions that provided this care, but possibly prosecute providers. Transgender people across the country have lost care because doctors and hospitals took those threats seriously, including Seattle Children’s Hospital, which last week postponed a trans teen’s masculinizing top surgery the night before it was scheduled, attracting protest from trans people, parents of trans kids, and their supporters.

During the hearing, Washington Deputy Solicitor General Tera Heintz argued Trump’s order was “open and unapologetic bigotry” that rejected the overwhelming medical consensus that gender-affirming care is safe and effective for children. She read comments from a plaintiff in the case, a doctor who has treated hundreds of trans children, and remains anonymous for fear of retribution.“There are going to be young people who take their lives if they can no longer receive this care,” she read. “Without access to this care, transgender adolescents will die—I am certain of it.”

Heintz said the states’ lawyers had introduced a mound of evidence showing how gender-affirming care, introduced in slow and deliberate stages, drastically improved children’s lives, Heintz said. Heintz also said that this order reads as an implict threat to providers because it equates all trans care to “chemical and surgical mutilation,” and asks the Department of Justice to review and prioritize laws against female genital mutilation, or the cutting, sewing, or removal of the labia or clitoris for non-medical reasons. Now it was the government’s burden to prove, with evidence, that it is the mutilation it claims it is.

It could not. The government’s lawyer, Vinita Andrapalliyal, argued the President had the constitutional authority to direct his agency heads to take appropriate next steps on a “policy preference.” It is possible the order “could be implemented lawfully,” she said, and until an agency revoked any grant, the court did not have to decide, and should wait to see how this “shakes out.”

Her argument fell apart a few minutes later when Judge King started asking simple questions, like: Were all the treatments as “irreversible” as the order claimed they were?

“No, I don’t think we specifically say one way or the other—” Vinita Andrapalliyal said.

“I’m asking you today,” King interjected.

“I don’t—I don’t know, I’m here today—”

“You have not looked into it.”

“I’m here within the lawfulness of the executive order—”

“This is part of it,” King said. “Do you have any evidence that all of the treatments listed in the executive order are irreversible?”

Andrapalliyal said she had evidence of the President’s policy prerogative to not fund the “so-called transition of a child from one sex to another.”

“But we’re looking at goals here—irreversible treatment is central to the goals. You haven’t looked into that at all. You don’t have an answer for me today.”

This carried on for 13 more excruciating minutes.

When King asked for an example of the order targeting similar treatment for cisgender people, there was a thirty second pause.

When King asked if the government would allow doctors to prescribe puberty blockers, a drug given to both cisgender and transgender children to delay the onset of puberty, to a cisgender boy with prostate cancer, while disallowing doctors from giving the same medication to a transgender girl with the same condition, there was another long pause. After disagreement about the meaning of the text, Andrapalliyal reiterated that the President is asking his agencies to take next steps consistent with the law, and they don’t yet know those steps.

King posed another hypothetical: A recently married, 18-year-old cisgender man with Huntington’s Disease gets a vasectomy because he does not want to pass it onto his children. Was that included in the government’s refusal to support the alteration or removal of an individual’s sex organs to “minimize or destroy their natural biological functions?”

“I don’t know,” Andrapalliyal said.

“Can you read the text and let me know what you think?” King asked.

Another pause, which like the others, was filled with snickering from an obviously queer audience. (Before the hearing, activists had circulated a flier encouraging people to “pack the court.” At 9:20, forty minutes before the hearing, the line for security nearly snaked out the door. Every seat was taken, even in the overflow room.)

“I’m not a medical provider,” Andrapalliyal said.

“If you can’t figure it out—how is a medical provider supposed to know that?” King said. “This is not a medical text. This is an executive order.”

After back and forth of when and how medical providers were supposed to determine a person’s birth sex, for which Andrapalliyal had no answers, she said there were a lot of unknowns. 

“Medical providers have no direction on where to go because you can’t read the text and apply it to various facts,” King said, sharply exhaling. “This is extremely frustrating, counsel.”

At courthouse steps, a reporter asked AG Brown what he thought of this exchange. “A bit embarrassing,” he said to laughter and applause, but he later turned serious.

“I want to remind people that the Department of Justice was created to defend civil rights,” he said. “What we’re seeing from this President is a specific undermining of its purpose, a specific directive to no longer defend civil rights, and it is upsetting to me, personally and professionally.”

Indigo, a nonbinary person who responded to the activist call to “pack the court,” said it was important to show up in numbers to support the community, even just to be a “body in a room.” They’re also Asian-American, and went through the “whole China virus thing” during COVID-19, so they knew how Trump’s comments could galvanize people with bigoted views to take violent action.

Standing in the courtyard outside, Danni Askini, executive director of the Seattle-based trans advocacy organization Gender Justice League, wondered if the “shock and awe” effect of the Trump Administration is their “own undoing.”

“They’ve pushed so much stuff down on the Department of Justice, and they’re firing people left and right,” she says. “Who wants to work in a politicized law firm like the DOJ as it is now? I really feel for the Assistant US Attorney who argued the case.”

After all, the DOJ essentially failed to make the same case twice this week. On Thursday, US District Judge Brendan Hurson of Maryland also issued a temporary restraining order blocking Trump’s order. During the hearing, Hurson said he was skeptical that the government’s order was not effectively banning care nationwide by threatening to pull funding from hospitals and research institutions that provide or study transgender care for youth and young adults. Patients had received phone calls stopping care, stopping their appointments, stopping their “everything,” he said. “I don’t know how you can credibly argue that this is not demanding the cessation of funding for gender affirming care.”

Whether or not hospitals needed to comply with Trump’s order in the first place is unclear. Executive orders are not laws. They’re directives to federal agencies. As of today, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services has not issued a new rule on trans care. Even if it had, any policy change would be subject to the Administrative Procedure Act. The rule would undergo public comment. Implementation should take months if not years.

However, the Trump administration has a, let’s say, creative approach to  current law and administrative procedure. During today’s hearing, Heintz told Judge King that at least one recipient of a federal grant at the University of Washington received a five sentence notice from Health and Human Services that told them to terminate any program in conflict with the executive order. King remarked that the title of the email indicated it was likely sent to all recipients of those grants.

President2 Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance have openly questioned the judiciary’s authority over the executive branch. We don’t know what those Yankees teach over at their fancy-schmancy Yale Law School, but that is very much the point of the courts. But Vance is not one to let knowledge get in the way of power.

Seattle Children’s filed a declaration in support of Brown’s lawsuit, where Jeffrey J. Ojemann, the hospital’s senior vice president and chief physician executive, argued that losing federal funds would be cataclysmic.

He explained the hospital’s research program employs more than 375 faculty investigators, and 100 postdoctoral scholars, who study every “aspect of pediatric health and disease,” including childhood cancer and blood disorders, immunotherapy, infectious diseases, neurological disorders and respiratory diseases. Research takes money, a lot of it federal funds: In 2024, the hospital was awarded nearly $185 million in federal research grants.

According to a lawyer from the ACLU, Hurson’s decision should give hospitals like Children’s the confidence to care for their patients without risking their funding. AG Brown reiterated that point today.

“I want to encourage all of the providers in this state, in the state of Oregon and the state of Minnesota to get back to work,” he said.

It appears that’s already happening.

After the hearing, The Stranger checked in with Sarah, the mother of the trans teen whose top surgery Children’s postponed last week. She’d just gotten a call from the hospital to reschedule her son’s surgery.

Children’s did not confirm if it had resumed all forms of gender-affirming care, but thanked AG Brown for filing the complaint “so that Seattle Children’s has the clarity needed at this time to deliver on our mission while ensuring we operate within all applicable laws.”

Temporary restraining orders are just that. Temporary. The state will likely seek a preliminary-injunction, an order that will last longer than 14 days.