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"Denying care hurts trans kids' growth, Mount Sinai honor your oath!" a crowd chanted on East 97th Street on Tuesday evening, the sound reverberating through the otherwise somnolent late summer evening on the Upper East Side.
Over a hundred people turned out to protest Mount Sinai, which for months had been in negotiations with the Trump administration regarding its young patients who receive gender-affirming healthcare. Late Friday, right before the long holiday weekend, the Department of Justice announced that Mount Sinai had agreed to end gender-affirming care for minors, along with paying an undisclosed penalty and dedicating $2 million to people "harmed" by trans health care, to end the investigation.
The hospital joins NYU Langone and New York Presbyterian, as well as many hospitals across the country that have curtailed trans healthcare for minors under the Trump administration. One of Trump's first actions of his second term in office was to sign an executive order to roll back gender-affirming healthcare for minors. The Department of Justice later adopted the strategy of subpoenaing hospitals for sensitive medical records, a tactic that seems to have worked to strong-arm Mount Sinai.
"Receiving gender affirming care is the only reason I'm alive today," Sam, a 17-year-old who has been undergoing gender-affirming care at Mount Sinai, and whose treatment has now been stopped, told the crowd. "If 12-year-old me didn't have the hope of one day being able to receive gender-affirming care as a youth through Mount Sinai, I wouldn't be standing here telling you my story. It saved my life. It saves lives. It gave me something to live for."
The protest, organized by the Gender Liberation Movement and Act Up NY, featured transgender New Yorkers doing their daily Hormone Replacement Therapy in front of the hospital, injecting themselves and then safely disposing of the used needles.
"There is nothing shameful or unsafe about HRT care," said one individual as they publicly injected themselves in protest.
Eliel Cruz, co-founder of Gender Liberation Movement, said that even if Mount Sinai were to change course after the Trump administration leaves office, its reputation is now forever tarnished among transgender New Yorkers, and New Yorkers as a whole.
"We have a long memory, and if these institutions are comfortable abandoning transgender New Yorkers during this administration, we'll remember that," said Cruz. "It absolutely damages trust not just for transgender people seeking care, but for anyone who goes to Mount Sinai seeking medical care. It's hurting their brand immensely and will be almost impossible to regain trust with the LGBT community." (The Gender Liberation Movement has been pushing for hospital systems that have backed off gender-affirming care to be banned from the NYC Pride March.)
Even more galling to protesters, was the fact that Mount Sinai has also agreed, according to the DOJ, to cover $2 million to provide free medical care to individuals "suffering harmful consequences of 'gender affirming care' they received as children."
A second-year Mount Sinai medical student who attended the protest, who declined to give her name for fear of repercussions from the institution, said that she felt it was deeply disingenuous for Mount Sinai to frame the settlement as somehow protecting its patients and doctors. In a message from the hospital president that she received, Mount Sinai said that the settlement was a way for the hospital system to avoid turning over patient records to the DOJ, and downplayed the end of its gender-affirming care program.
"Sinai talks a lot about us being advocates for our patients as part of its curriculum, and this is totally a betrayal, this is the antithesis of being an advocate and sets a really scary precedent," they told Hell Gate. "It's trans clients this week, but what is it next time?"
Mount Sinai did not return a request for comment.
Protesters urged Mayor Zohran Mamdani and State Attorney General Letitia James to pursue lawsuits against Mount Sinai, alleging that the hospital system is now in violation of both city and state human rights laws.
Taylor Brown, the director of the NYC Mayor's Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs, spoke at the rally, and downplayed the possible role the administration could play in stopping Mount Sinai from ending care, instead focusing on City Hall's efforts to send millions of dollars to public healthcare providers to ramp up their own gender-affirming care programs.
While private hospital systems have all retreated, New York's public hospitals have increased their services for transgender youth and adults.
"What the administration has been focused on is maintaining access for our youth to receive health care at our City hospitals," said Brown. "A private lawsuit against Mount Sinai is not something that we can necessarily be involved in."
A spokesperson for AG James told Hell Gate via email that her office was currently reviewing the settlement, the text of which has not been made public.
In case you missed it, everything "controversial" about the mayor attending 9/11 memorials is actually just insanely racist, the bejeweled owners of a local media conglomerate are allegedly not playing fair with their company's new union, and if you like piña coladas, you're going to love this article.
More stories for your Wednesday:
- Right-wing opposition to Mayor Zohran Mamdani's attendance at the 9/11 memorial ceremony on Friday—on account of his being Muslim—is getting louder and uglier. There's a bizarre fixation on a signing ceremony he held for a 9/11 remembrance bill. There was an "anti-DSA rally" in lower Manhattan yesterday, and Vickie Paladino's Islamophobia is breaking containment once again.
- But, as a Suffolk University poll found, the mayor is still popular, and voters say he should attend the remembrance ceremony.
- The 170,000 9/11 air quality-related documents released by the Mamdani administration are just the first tranche to be made public. There will be more to come, and likely more revisiting of decisions made by Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg. "People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air," Mamdani said at a press conference Tuesday (which Julie Menin says she wasn't invited to).
- The NYPD is touting rosy crime numbers, but Bronx North "has seen a 20 percent surge in shootings."
- Thanks to New Jersey's concerns about ocean contamination, a huge fracked gas pipeline project has hit a snag.
- Reminder: contamination is bad.
- Upstate, bikes are the future.
- Leave her alone.
- The man who stabbed an Asian man and a Jewish man on the Upper West Side in July is being charged with an antisemitic hate crime.
- Kids are returning to school tomorrow, where AI is not allowed in elementary and middle school classrooms, and use is limited in high school.
- You can knock yourself out in college though.
- Social services organizations are scrambling to help people keep their health care when new federal work requirements take effect in January.
- "At 3:33 a.m. on Wednesday morning, under the lights and in front of as many people who had dared to sacrifice the night of sleep and the next day of work to stick around and witness as good a tennis match as most of them would ever see, Ben Shelton let all his emotion go."
- Republicans are retreating from the race in New York's 19th Congressional District after their candidate posted on Facebook about his grandpa's Nazi service.
- Why isn't the city updating its database on car crashes?
- Can anyone stop Rodneyse?
- Can the National Supermarket Association stop City-run grocery stores?
- The IBX will change everything.
- Just $7.5 million for a charming cottage in the sky.
- Landry Shamet takes a different kind of shot.
