National
Trump’s HHS appoints anti-trans activist to protect trans health
Severino a former staffer with the anti-LGBT Heritage Foundation
Roger Severino, director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity at the Heritage Foundation. (Image courtesy C-Span)
A series of statements from LGBT advocates came out Thursday over the appointment of Roger Severino, who until this week was director of the DeVos Center for Religion & Civil Society for the Heritage Foundation.
Winnie Stachelberg, executive vice president for external affairs at the Center for American Progress, gave no quarter in a statement over the Severino’s appointment and its implications for transgender health.
“Frankly, it is sick that President Trump would appoint Roger Severino to lead OCR – putting a man who made his career opposing healthcare non-discrimination laws in charge of enforcing those very same protections,” Stachelberg said. “Before the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies routinely denied equal treatment to same-sex couples and more than half of private insurance plans explicitly discriminated against transgender patients, with more than a quarter of transgender people reported being denied medical care by a provider. Severino’s writing makes it clear that he wants to take us back to the days when 1 in 4 transgender people was refused medical care outright.”
Among the posts Severino wrote for The Daily Signal, the blog for the Heritage Foundation, were in opposition to LGBT people, especially transgender rights. After the White House came out against a provision in a congressional defense spending package that would have allowed anti-LGBT discrimination among federal contractors, Severino wrote a post called “Obama Threatens to Veto Military Bill Because It Protects Religious Groups.” After the Pentagon lifted its ban on openly transgender service, Severino wrote a post called “Pentagon’s Transgender Policy Defies Common Sense.”
Severino also defended North Carolina’s anti-LGBT House Bill 2, which prohibits transgender people from using the restroom in schools and government buildings consistent with their gender identity. Decrying the “unrelenting and coordinated attacks” against the state for enacting the law, Severino criticized former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch for filing a federal lawsuit against the measure, which he said amounted to progressives “using government power to coerce everyone, including children, into pledging allegiance to a radical new gender ideology.”
Marguerite Bowling, a spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation, defended Severino in response to concerns he’d seek to undermine transgender health in his role at HHS.
“Roger Severino has a distinguished record of fighting for the civil rights and freedoms of all Americans,” Severino said. “We have no doubt that Roger in his new role at HHS will protect the civil rights of all Americans.”
As head of the HHS civil rights division, Severino would be charged with enforcing Section 1557 of Obamacare, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, sex, disability and age in health programs. The Obama administration interpreted the prohibiting on sex discrimination to bar discrimination against transgender people in health care, including the refusal of gender reassignment surgery.
Wade Henderson, outgoing CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights, said in a statement the office of civil rights at HHS requires “strong and experienced leadership” to enforce Section 1557, and Severino is “not that leader.”
“Since enactment of the ACA seven years ago today, members of The Leadership Conference have strongly advocated for the full and complete implementation of Section 1557,” Henderson said. “In his previous position at the Heritage Foundation, Mr. Severino repeatedly denounced and actively worked to oppose OCR’s implementation of Section 1557. These actions call into question his ability to fully enforce the ACA and protect communities of color and other underserved populations, who are most at risk for unequal access to health and health care.”
It should be noted U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor has enjoined the enforcement of the Obamacare regulation interpreting Section 1557 to apply to transgender people. The Trump administration missed a deadline to appeal the decision to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, but the American Civil Liberties Union is seeking to intervene to defend the regulation.
Harper Jean Tobin, policy director for the National Center for Transgender Equality, said Severino could still do “a number of things” to impact transgender protections under Section 1557 as litigation proceeds.
“The government will now have to make a decision, and OCR is ostensibly the client DOJ in this decision, as to whether to ensure, as the government normally would in a case like this, that federal law and the federal regulation interpreting it and applying the federal law is defended, that a rule overturning it is reviewed by a higher court,” Tobin said. “I think the fear is that OCR and DOJ could sort of work together to have this injunction made permanent without any review by a higher court, which would be highly unusual and really inappropriate.”
After a rule-making process consisting of many years and with two separate comment periods, Tobin said letting the injunction against the regulation stand would be “tantamount to repealing the regulation without going the required rule-making process and instead just acceding to a fringe legal position by one district court judge.”
Tobin added OCR has other responsibilities related to transgender health, such as the federal health care privacy law, or HIPAA, which assures privacy for transgender people in health care settings.
“Up until now, OCR has in cases involving transgender people, just as it does for everybody else, acted to enforce the laws to protect their privacy, but given Mr. Severino’s aggressively hostile work to dismantle any kind of legal protections for transgender people, we’re worried about what kind of direction the agencies would take on those bedrock protections,” Tobin said.
Caitlyn Oakley, an HHS spokesperson, had no comment in response to concerns from LGBT advocacy groups that Severino wouldn’t protect transgender health in his new role.
“We aren’t commenting on personnel at this time,” Oakley said.
Matt McTighe, executive director of Freedom for All Americans, said in a statement Severino appointment to HHS and his anti-trans history spells trouble for transgender health.
“Roger Severino has a proven track record of opposing fair and equal treatment for the transgender community,” McTighe said. “He is a dangerous pick for a position that is meant to enforce critical civil rights protections. This is yet another example of the Trump administration’s failure to live up to the president’s campaign promise of protecting LGBT people and it will have devastating consequences for transgender people across the country.”
Federal Government
Holiday week brings setbacks for Trump-Vance trans agenda
Federal courts begin to deliver end-of-year responses to lawsuits involving federal transgender healthcare policy.
While many Americans took the week of Christmas to rest and relax, LGBTQ politics in the U.S. continued to shift. This week’s short recap of federal updates highlights two major blows to the Trump-Vance administration’s efforts to restrict gender-affirming care for minors.
19 states sue RFK Jr. to end gender-affirming care ban
New York Attorney General Letitia James announced on Tuesday that the NYAG’s office, along with 18 other states (and the District of Columbia), filed a lawsuit to stop U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from restricting gender-affirming care for minors.
In the press release, Attorney General James stressed that the push by the Trump-Vance administration’s crusade against the transgender community — specifically transgender youth — is a “clear overreach by the federal government” and relies on conservative and medically unvalidated practices to “punish providers who adhere to well-established, evidence-based care” that support gender-affirming care.
“At the core of this so-called declaration are real people: young people who need care, parents trying to support their children, and doctors who are simply following the best medical evidence available,” said Attorney General James. “Secretary Kennedy cannot unilaterally change medical standards by posting a document online, and no one should lose access to medically necessary health care because their federal government tried to interfere in decisions that belong in doctors’ offices. My office will always stand up for New Yorkers’ health, dignity, and right to make medical decisions free from intimidation.”
The lawsuit is a direct response to HHS’ Dec. 18 announcement that it will pursue regulatory changes that would make gender-affirming health care for transgender children more difficult, if not impossible, to access. It would also restrict federal funding for any hospital that does not comply with the directive. KFF, an independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism, found that in 2023 federal funding covered nearly 45% of total spending on hospital care in the U.S.
The HHS directive stems directly from President Donald Trump’s Jan. 28 Executive Order, Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation, which formally establishes U.S. opposition to gender-affirming care and pledges to end federal funding for such treatments.
The American Medical Association, the nation’s largest and most influential physician organization, has repeatedly opposed measures like the one pushed by President Trump’s administration that restrict access to trans health care.
“The AMA supports public and private health insurance coverage for treatment of gender dysphoria and opposes the denial of health insurance based on sexual orientation or gender identity,” a statement on the AMA’s website reads. “Improving access to gender-affirming care is an important means of improving health outcomes for the transgender population.”
The lawsuit also names Oregon, Washington, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin as having joined New York in the push against restricting gender-affirming care.
At the HHS news conference last Thursday, Jim O’Neill, deputy secretary of the department, asserted, “Men are men. Men can never become women. Women are women. Women can never become men.”
DOJ stopped from gaining health care records of trans youth
U.S. District Judge Cathy Bissoon blocked an attempt by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to gain “personally identifiable information about those minor transgender patients” from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), saying the DOJ’s efforts “fly in the face of the Supreme Court.”
Journalist Chris Geidner originally reported the news on Dec. 25, highlighting that the Western District of Pennsylvania judge’s decision is a major blow to the Trump-Vance administration’s agenda to curtail transgender rights.
“[T]his Court joins the others in finding that the government’s demand for deeply private and personal patient information carries more than a whiff of ill intent,” Bissoon wrote in her ruling. “This is apparent from its rhetoric.”
Bissoon cited the DOJ’s “incendiary characterization” of trans youth care on the DOJ website as proof, which calls the practice politically motivated rather than medically sound and seeks to “…mutilate children in the service of a warped ideology.” This is despite the fact that a majority of gender-affirming care has nothing to do with surgery.
In United States v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court ruled along party lines that states — namely Tennessee — have the right to pass legislation that can prohibit certain medical treatments for transgender minors, saying the law is not subject to heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because it does not involve suspect categories like race, national origin, alienage, and religion, which would require the government to show the law serves a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored, sending decision-making power back to the states.
“The government cannot pick and choose the aspects of Skrmetti to honor, and which to ignore,” Judge Bissoon added.
The government argued unsuccessfully that the parents of the children whose records would have been made available to the DOJ “lacked standing” because the subpoena was directed at UPMC and that they did not respond in a timely manner. Bissoon rejected the timeliness argument in particular as “disingenuous.”
Bissoon, who was nominated to the bench by then-President Obama, is at least the fourth judge to reject the DOJ’s attempted intrusion into the health care of trans youth according to Geidner.
A Wider Bridge on Friday announced it will shut down at the end of the month.
The group that “mobilizes the LGBTQ community to fight antisemitism and support Israel and its LGBTQ community” in a letter to supporters said financial challenges prompted the decision.
“After 15 years of building bridges between LGBTQ communities in North America and Israel, A Wider Bridge has made the difficult decision to wind down operations as of Dec. 31, 2025,” it reads.
“This decision comes after challenging financial realities despite our best efforts to secure sustainable funding. We deeply appreciate our supporters and partners who made this work possible.”
Arthur Slepian founded A Wider Bridge in 2010.
The organization in 2016 organized a reception at the National LGBTQ Task Force’s Creating Change Conference in Chicago that was to have featured to Israeli activists. More than 200 people who protested against A Wider Bridge forced the event’s cancellation.
A Wider Bridge in 2024 urged the Capital Pride Alliance and other Pride organizers to ensure Jewish people can safely participate in their events in response to an increase in antisemitic attacks after Hamas militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported authorities in Vermont late last year charged Ethan Felson, who was A Wider Bridge’s then-executive director, with lewd and lascivious conduct after alleged sexual misconduct against a museum employee. Rabbi Denise Eger succeeded Felson as A Wider Bridge’s interim executive director.
A Wider Bridge in June honored U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) at its Pride event that took place at the Capital Jewish Museum in D.C. The event took place 15 days after a gunman killed two Israeli Embassy employees — Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim — as they were leaving an event at the museum.
“Though we are winding down, this is not a time to back down. We recognize the deep importance of our mission and work amid attacks on Jewish people and LGBTQ people – and LGBTQ Jews at the intersection,” said A Wider Bridge in its letter. “Our board members remain committed to showing up in their individual capacities to represent queer Jews across diverse spaces — and we know our partners and supporters will continue to do the same.”
Editor’s note: Washington Blade International News Editor Michael K. Lavers traveled to Israel and Palestine with A Wider Bridge in 2016.
The White House
‘Trump Rx’ plan includes sharp cuts to HIV drug prices
President made announcement on Friday
President Donald Trump met with leaders from some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies at the White House on Friday to announce his new “Trump Rx” plan and outline efforts to reduce medication costs for Americans.
During the roughly 47-minute meeting in the Roosevelt Room, Trump detailed his administration’s efforts to cut prescription drug prices and make medications more affordable for U.S. patients.
“Starting next year, American drug prices will come down fast, furious, and will soon be among the lowest in the developed world,” Trump said during the meeting. “For decades, Americans have been forced to pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs by far … We will get the lowest price of anyone in the world.”
Trump signed an executive order in May directing his administration “to do everything in its power to slash prescription drug prices for Americans while getting other countries to pay more.”
“This represents the greatest victory for patient affordability in the history of American health care, by far, and every single American will benefit,” he added.
Several pharmaceutical executives stood behind the president during the announcement, including Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson, Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan, Genentech CEO Ashley Magargee, Boehringer Ingelheim (USA) CEO Jean-Michel Boers, Gilead Sciences CEO Dan O’Day, Bristol Myers Squibb General Counsel Cari Gallman, GSK CEO Emma Walmsley, Merck CEO Robert Davis, and Amgen Executive Vice President Peter Griffith.
Also in attendance were Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary.
Under the Trump Rx plan, the administration outlined a series of proposed drug price changes across multiple companies and therapeutic areas. Among them were reductions for Amgen’s cholesterol-lowering drug repatha from $573 to $239; Bristol Myers Squibb’s HIV medication reyataz from $1,449 to $217; Boehringer Ingelheim’s type 2 diabetes medication jentadueto from $525 to $55; Genentech’s flu medication xofluza from $168 to $50; and Gilead Sciences’ hepatitis C medication epclusa from $24,920 to $2,425.
Additional reductions included several GSK inhalers — such as the asthma inhaler advair diskus 500/50, from $265 to $89 — Merck’s diabetes medication januvia from $330 to $100, Novartis’ multiple sclerosis medication mayzent from $9,987 to $1,137, and Sanofi’s blood thinner plavix from $756 to $16. Sanofi insulin products would also be capped at $35 per month’s supply.
These prices, however, would only be available to patients who purchase medications directly through TrumpRx. According to the program’s website, TrumpRx “connects patients directly with the best prices, increasing transparency, and cutting out costly third-party markups.”
Kennedy spoke after Trump, thanking the president for efforts to lower pharmaceutical costs in the U.S., where evidence has shown that drug prices — including both brand-name and generic medications — are nearly 2.78 times higher than prices in comparable countries. According to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, roughly half of every dollar spent on brand-name drugs goes to entities that play no role in their research, development, or manufacturing.
“This is affordability in action,” Kennedy said. “We are reversing that trend and making sure that Americans can afford to get the life-saving solutions.”
Gilead CEO Dan O’Day also spoke about how the restructuring of drug costs under TrumpRx, combined with emerging technologies, could help reduce HIV transmission — a virus that, if untreated, can progress to AIDS. The LGBTQ community remains disproportionately affected by HIV.
“Thank you, Mr. President — you and the administration,” O’Day said. “I think this objective of achieving the commitment to affordability and future innovation is extraordinary … We just recently launched a new medicine that’s only given twice a year to prevent HIV, and we’re working with Secretary Kennedy and his entire team, as well as the State Department, as a part of your strategy to support ending the epidemic during your term.
“I’ve never been more optimistic about the innovation that exists across these companies and the impact this could have on America’s health and economy,” he added.
Trump interjected, asking, “And that’s working well with HIV?”
“Yes,” O’Day replied.
“It’s a big event,” Trump said.
“It literally prevents HIV almost 100 percent given twice a year,” O’Day responded.
A similar anti-HIV medication is currently prescribed more than injectable form mentioned by O’Day. PrEP, is a medication regimen proven to significantly reduce HIV infection rates for people at high risk. Without insurance, brand-name Truvada can cost roughly $2,000 per month, while a generic version costs about $60 per month.
Even when medication prices are reduced, PrEP access carries additional costs, including clinic and laboratory fees, office visits, required HIV and sexually transmitted infection testing, adherence services and counseling, and outreach to potentially eligible patients and providers.
According to a 2022 study, the annual total cost per person for PrEP — including medication and required clinical and laboratory monitoring — is approximately $12,000 to $13,000 per year.
The TrumpRx federal platform website is now live at TrumpRx.gov, but the program is not slated to begin offering reduced drug prices until January.
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