A federal judge has hit pause on an effort by the Trump administration to ban federal support for transgender medical care.

On Friday afternoon, Joe Biden-appointed U.S. District Judge Lauren King, sitting in Seattle, issued a temporary restraining order in favor of three states and three doctors who sued the government on Feb. 7.

The court barred a litany of named federal defendants from “enforcing or implementing” two major sections of a recent anti-transgender executive order signed by President Donald Trump.

Under the terms of Executive Order 14187, which is fashioned as an effort to protect “Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” the 45th and 47th president intends to cut off all federal funding for institutions that offer pediatric gender transition services or provide any kind of gender-affirming care for people under the age of 19.

A Seattle-area mother previously accused of medical child abuse and subsequently cleared of any and all wrongdoing is now taking the fight to her former accusers in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit.

Sophie Hartman, on behalf of herself and her two minor children, accuses the Washington Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF) and several other named defendants of battery, false imprisonment, fabrication of evidence, and other constitutional violations, according to the 71-page lawsuit obtained by Law&Crime.

“To defend against false medical accusations and a myriad of violations of professional standards, the Hartman family has spent millions of dollars on lawyers just to keep the family together and Sophie out of jail,” the complaint reads. “The actual harm to the family is vast and the spirit of subversion and hubris with which various defendants betrayed the Hartman family is shocking.”

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Family Law

Utah Supreme Court rules for adult adoptee who wanted to unseal records for medical and genetic information

By Debra Cassens Weiss

February 28, 2024, 8:42 am CST

A district court misinterpreted the law when it ruled that an adult adoptee can’t obtain her 1978 adoption records to provide her doctors with information about health predispositions, the Utah Supreme Court has ruled.

At issue is whether adoptee Marianne Tyson had shown “good cause” to obtain the records as required by Utah law, which seals adoption records for 100 years.

A district court had ruled that Tyson didn’t satisfy the “good cause” standard because the health and genetic information that she sought was not related to a specific medical condition.

The district court reasoned that giving Tyson access to the records would undermine the law’s privacy protections for birth parents.

The Utah Supreme Court ruled that the district court erred by trying “to breathe a more specific meaning into the phrase ‘good cause.’ Although it is understandable that the court would want more guidance than the statute provides, it interpreted the statute in a fashion that rewrote the law.”

“Stated differently,” the Utah Supreme Court said in its Feb. 22 decision, “if the legislature had wanted to impose a requirement that a petitioner point to something more than wanting to know her medical history, it could have put that in the statute. It did not, and it was error for the court to do so.”

The district court had determined that Tyson’s reasons for obtaining the records did not outweigh her birth mother’s interest in privacy.

“But instead of balancing both interests” as required by a Utah procedural rule, the district court “focused solely on the birth mother’s privacy interests,” the Utah Supreme Court said.

The state supreme court said it was returning the case to the trial court to conduct a balancing “that gives weight to both the birth mother’s privacy interests and Tyson’s reasons for wanting to see her adoption records.”

Law.com covered the case, In re M.A.

An inmate whose HIV-positive diagnosis devolved into AIDS died because the medical staff at the California jail where he was housed denied him lifesaving medication even though they had his prescription and were told he needed it to survive, a new federal wrongful death lawsuit alleges.

Nicholas Overfield, 38, couldn’t stand or speak and was in a wheelchair when his mother visited him at the El Dorado County Jail on April 22, 2022. He died months later after being transferred out of the jail and then to two hospitals and a hospice. The lawsuit, filed in a federal court in California on Tuesday, names El Dorado County and Wellpath Community Care, LLC, the jail’s health care contractor.