The POTUS had issued an executive order calling for the removal of statements about gender ideology
Two doctors from Harvard Medical School have sued the Trump administration for deleting articles referencing LGBTQ communities from the US Patient Safety Network (PSNet) website, reported Reuters.
Celeste Royce and Gordon Schiff filed the suit in Boston federal court on Tuesday. They claimed that their articles were deleted from the government-operated site in line with an executive order requiring agencies to scrub statements that championed “gender ideology.”
The order pushed the government to acknowledge biological sexes. It was signed by US President Donald Trump on January 20; shortly after, the US Office of Personnel Management released guidance to delete “gender ideology” mentions from sites, social media, and other front-facing media.
Subsequently, Royce and Schiff’s articles were scrubbed from the PSNet site, which publishes patient safety news and resources. Royce had co-written an article about endometriosis that contained a sentence about the condition’s diagnosis in transgender and gender-nonconforming people; Schiff had helped author an article on “Multiple Missed Opportunities for Suicide Risk Assessment in Emergency and Primary Care Settings” that had a sentence on the increased suicide risk in LGBTQ communities.
“Censoring information about transgender people or anyone a politician does not like, who have documented increased risks of negative health outcomes, is antithetical to the very mission of public health,” Schiff said in a statement published by Reuters.
Royce and Schiff’s suit alleged that the Trump administration breached the First Amendment of the US Constitution by restricting their participation in a government-provided forum open to private speakers based on viewpoint. The suit also said that by deleting the doctors’ articles without a reasoned basis, the administration defied the Administrative Procedure Act.
The PSNet website is operated by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which is under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. According to Reuters, HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The case is Schiff, et al, v. U.S. Office of Personnel Management, et al, U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, No. 25-cv-10595. Royce and Schiff are being represented by Jessie Rossman of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, Scarlet Kim of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation and Ben Menke of Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School.
Last month, the medical advocacy group Doctors for America scored a win in Washington federal court when a judge issued a temporary restraining order that pushed the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration to revive websites that were taken down as a result of Trump’s executive order.
