Colorado hospital ordered to resume minors’ transgender treatments

The Colorado Supreme Court ordered the state’s largest provider of gender-altering care for minors to resume medical treatments that were halted months earlier. The court said Monday that Children’s Hospital Colorado must offer puberty blockers and cross-sex hormone therapy to patients under 19 while a legal case plays out. The hospital suspended the treatments in January after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services opened an investigation into the hospital. 

The Children’s Hospital Colorado said it was reviewing the court’s ruling and considering its next steps. A permanent ruling in the case is still pending in the lower courts.

How did the case get to this point? Four minors identified as transgender and their parents sued the hospital later in January. The families argued that the hospital’s decision discriminated against transgender patients because other patients still had access to puberty blockers and hormone therapy for medical reasons, such as to start puberty. They noted that the hospital operated the largest center focused on gender-altering care in the state. A state district judge initially denied the families’ request for the hospital to resume offering treatments for minors identified as transgender. The Colorado Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s ruling.

What was the court’s justification for the ruling? In a 5-2 ruling, Justice William Wood III said that the harm the youth face by not receiving these treatments outweighed the potential harm the hospital faced from the government. In the dissent, Justice Brian Boatright said the hospital’s decision wasn’t meant to discriminate against transgender patients. Rather, it stopped its treatments because of a direct threat to the entire hospital. 

Dig deeper: Read Elizabeth Black’s report on a Texas hospital set to create a detransition clinic.