Two Harvard Medical School doctors have launched a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's removal of articles about their research from a government-run website focused on patient safety because they referenced people in the LGBTQ communities.
Drs Celeste Royce and Gordon Schiff, represented by lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, filed their lawsuit last Tuesday in Boston federal court alleging their articles were removed as a result of an executive order President Donald Trump had signed, requiring agencies to remove statements promoting “gender ideology”.
Reuters reports that their articles were published on the Patient Safety Network, a website that features news and resources on patient safety, and run by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality – part of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
The lawsuit argues that Trump violated the Constitution’s First Amendment by imposing a viewpoint-based restriction on the doctors’ participation in a government-provided forum open to private speakers.
The lawsuit also argues the administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act by removing articles without a reasoned basis.
“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.
HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump signed the executive order on 20 January, forcing the government to “recognise women are biologically female, and men are biologically male”.
A week later, the US Office of Personnel Management issued guidance directing agencies to scrub mentions of “gender ideology” from websites, social media accounts and other media.
The two doctors’ articles were soon after removed from PSNet.
One article, co-authored by Royce, focused on endometriosis and included a sentence about diagnosis in transgender and gender-nonconforming people, the lawsuit said.
Another article, titled “Multiple missed opportunities for suicide risk assessment in emergency and primary care settings”, was co-authored by Schiff and included a sentence concerning heightened suicide risk in LGBTQ communities.
A similar lawsuit by the medical advocacy group Doctors for America resulted in a federal judge in Washington on 11 February issuing a temporary restraining order forcing the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration to restore websites removed due to Trump’s order.
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