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More than 100 people gathered outside Mount Sinai on the Upper East Side on Tuesday evening, and some of them made their point by doing something they’d normally do at home: injecting their daily prescribed medication right there on the sidewalk, in full view of the hospital. The rally was a response to an agreement Mount Sinai reached with the federal government late Friday, one that protesters argue puts it in violation of both city and state law.
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The crowd gathered outside the hospital’s campus and chanted for Mount Sinai to honor its oath. The U.S. Department of Justice announced Friday, right before Labor Day weekend, that Mount Sinai had agreed to stop providing gender-affirming care to minors in order to close out a federal investigation. According to the DOJ, the hospital system will also pay a monetary penalty (the amount hasn’t been disclosed) and set aside $2 million for free medical care for people the department describes as having been harmed by the gender-affirming treatment they received as children. The settlement itself remains under seal.The protest was organized by the Gender Liberation Movement and Act Up NY, and the plan called for transgender New Yorkers to do their regular hormone replacement therapy in front of the hospital: injecting themselves, then disposing of the used needles safely. One participant told the crowd there’s nothing shameful or unsafe about the treatment, which was the point of doing it in public.
Some of the most pointed comments came from patients and parents. Sam, a 17-year-old who had been receiving care through Mount Sinai’s youth program until it was halted, told the crowd that the treatment gave him a reason to keep going when he was 12. “It saved my life. It saves lives,” he said, per Hell Gate. Angelica Jadunandan, who moved to New York from Florida several years ago and says her daughter came out as trans at age four, told amNY that she’d done the reading and joined the parent groups, and what she learned was that “trans kids have better outcomes when they are loved and supported.” She had harsher words for the hospital’s leadership, accusing it of caving to the administration.
Mount Sinai isn’t the first New York hospital system to pull back. NYU Langone and NewYork-Presbyterian have already curtailed gender-affirming care for minors, and hospitals across the country have done the same since President Trump signed an executive order early in his second term targeting the treatment. The DOJ later began subpoenaing hospitals for patient records, a strategy protesters say is what pressured Mount Sinai into a deal. Parents had told Gothamist as far back as February that Mount Sinai had quietly stopped their children’s care, well before any settlement was announced.
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A second-year Mount Sinai medical student who attended the protest, and who asked not to be named for fear of repercussions, told Hell Gate that a message from the hospital’s president framed the settlement as a way to avoid handing patient records over to the DOJ, while downplaying the end of the program. She called that a betrayal of the patient-advocacy values the school teaches, and asked what group the hospital would give up on next. Eliel Cruz, co-founder of the Gender Liberation Movement, said the damage to Mount Sinai’s reputation among transgender New Yorkers is likely permanent, and that his group has been pushing for hospital systems that dropped this care to be barred from the NYC Pride March.Protesters called on Mayor Zohran Mamdani and State Attorney General Letitia James to sue Mount Sinai under city and state human rights laws. Taylor Brown, director of the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs, spoke at the rally but played down the city’s role in any lawsuit, saying the administration is focused on keeping care available at the city’s public hospitals, which have expanded their services for trans youth and adults even as private systems retreated. A spokesperson for James told Hell Gate that her office is reviewing the settlement. Separately on Monday, three LGBTQ political groups, the Stonewall Democratic Club of New York City, the Lambda Independent Democrats of Brooklyn and Equality New York, criticized the deal as a violation of the state’s Shield Law 2.0, and Congressmembers Jerrold Nadler, Ritchie Torres and Grace Meng also spoke out against the settlement.
The DOJ’s own announcement credited the hospital for cooperating with the investigation, and the deal reportedly includes a denial of any wrongdoing on Mount Sinai’s part.
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