Several hundred people rallied in a park outside Lurie Children’s Hospital on Feb. 15 to protest the hospital’s early compliance with President Donald Trump’s executive order banning gender-affirming care for anyone under 19.
Amid a snow flurry, they waved homemade protest signs defending transgender youth and chanted slogans like, “When trans kids are under attack, what do we do? Stand up fight back.”
The rally at Seneca Park, 225 E. Chicago Ave., was organized by Asher McMaher and their partner Charlee, a transgender couple whose 13-year-old daughter, Noella Bella, is also trans and has been a patient of Lurie’s Gender Development Clinic since she was four.
“[Lurie] has been a pioneer in this care and for them to preemptively start rolling back care for our trans youth—as people who are pillars in their community for trans health—is appalling, disgusting and life-threatening,” McMaher said.
Trump issued the executive order on Jan. 28 mandating the U.S. “will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another.” The federal government will also “rigorously” enforce all laws banning or limiting such health care for youth and pull funding from institutions that provide it, according to the executive order.
Since then, Lurie Children’s Hospital, which houses one of the oldest youth gender development clinics in the country, announced it has paused gender-affirming surgeries for patients under 19 to comply with the order.
A federal judge later blocked the executive order with a temporary restraining order after a hearing in Baltimore, but spokespeople from Lurie’s said the hospital’s pause on such care will continue.
“Lurie Children’s acknowledges recent court developments related to the January 28th Executive Order addressing gender care,” hospital spokespeople said in a statement. “We continue our pause of gender care surgeries within the gender care program for all patients under the age of 19 as we continue to assess the rapidly evolving environment. At this time, we are continuing to provide other care and treatment plans for the program’s patients.”
McMaher runs a private Facebook group for parents with transgender children to connect with each other and share advice, experiences and camaraderie. McMaher said they’ve been inundated with parents concerned about how the recent executive order is affecting their families.
“I have gotten dozens of families reporting to me, but it’s not just Lurie Children’s Hospital,” McMaher said. “It’s the whole country, and we are here to show the country that we are standing with our trans youth, teens and adults.”
Lurie’s halt on such gender-affirming care came days after another Chicago hospital, UI Health, also tried to pause its surgeries for transgender youth. This was met by a lawsuit from a parent whose transgender teen’s chest surgery was allegedly canceled due to concerns about the hospital losing funding under the executive order and a Feb. 6 protest outside its campus.
UI Health later said in a statement that it’s “committed to providing inclusive care to our community” and that it will “continue to provide gender-affirming care to our patients in accordance with the law.”
At the protest outside Lurie’s, transgender people and parents of transgender children spoke on the life-saving benefits of gender-affirming care, which has been proven to improve mental health and reduce suicidality among transgender people.
“The thing that gave my son a glimmer of hope was that, after meeting with the Lurie team, his pediatrician, therapist and psychiatrist all agreed it was medically necessary for him to begin receiving gender-affirming care from Lurie,” said one mother who spoke at the Feb. 15 protest. “This is the very same place that is now ripping life-saving care away from its transgender patients.”
Shoshana Waskow, a primary care pediatrician from Wilmette, attended the Feb. 15 rally in support of her transgender patients and to show that medical caregivers are not aligned with the hospital’s pause on its gender-affirming surgeries, she said.
“One of the things that’s really important that we all know is it’s not medical providers, pediatricians or the doctors at Lurie who are trying to withhold care from their patients, because it’s the last thing in the world they want to do,” Waskow said. “There’s a financial reality that these hospitals are being threatened with right now, but the choice to preemptively capitulate is what we’re out here protest, and we want to make sure that we take this fight all the way to the courts and to the Supreme Court if we have to.”
Channyn Lynne Parker, CEO of Brave Space Alliance, a Black- and trans-led community center on the South Side, spoke at the rally about how she began her medical transition as a teenager.
“I’m the product of a transition before the age of 19 years old,” Parker said. “I was supported, I had access to care, and because of that, I’m standing here today whole, healthy and thriving with no regrets.”
She said preventing trans youth from receiving such care will lead to “more fear, more pain, more death and more young people questioning if they have a future at all.”
“We are not going to allow that to happen,” Parker said.
