On September 2, forty organizers, healthcare workers, and transgender residents packed the atrium of the John W. McCormack Building in Boston, home to Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell's offices. Some held syringes and vials of hormones as a speaker led chants over a megaphone. By the time the three-hour occupation ended, nine protesters had been arrested for refusing to leave.
A Care-In a Year in the Making
The demonstration was the latest and loudest move from Protect Trans Futures, a youth-led coalition founded last October specifically to respond to a wave of Massachusetts hospitals scaling back trans youth care. The group borrows its tactics, including the "care-in," from direct-action lineage running through ACT UP and the more recent Gender Liberation Movement: bodies in institutional lobbies, treatment made visible, discomfort as strategy.
Their target is deliberate. Campbell has joined 21 other state attorneys general in suing the Trump administration over Medicaid and CHIP cuts to gender-affirming coverage for minors, but organizers argue that federal litigation does nothing to reopen clinics that have already stopped seeing trans kids in Massachusetts itself.
We've tried genuinely almost every tactic we could to get the attention of this office... and every time, they say, 'We're fighting it federally. We don't need to do anything here.' And it's not enough.
Berry Andres, Protect Trans Futures
How the Hospitals Retreated
The rollback happened in stages. Fenway Health, one of the country's most prominent LGBTQ+ health centers, announced in October 2025 it would stop prescribing puberty blockers and hormones to patients under 19, citing fears of losing its status as a Federally Qualified Health Center. Outer Cape Health Services stopped care for the same age group that same month. Baystate Health, which serves Western Massachusetts, notified patients in February 2026 that it would cut off care to anyone under 18.
The retreats followed President Trump's January 2025 executive order threatening federal funding for hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to minors, later reinforced by proposed CMS rules and a Justice Department memo warning of investigations into providers. Courts have repeatedly blocked pieces of that pressure campaign, but the hospitals haven't reversed course.
The effect on the ground has been immediate. Families in Boston, the Pioneer Valley, and Cape Cod now have to travel farther or wait longer for care that used to be down the street. TransHealth, a private clinic in Northampton, has absorbed more than 200 new patients since Baystate stopped treating minors, but organizers say private clinics can't cover everyone the hospital systems dropped.
The Gap Between Law and Access
Massachusetts has some of the strongest legal protections for gender-affirming care in the country. State law bars discrimination based on gender identity and gender dysphoria in health treatment and coverage, and a 2022 law expanded protections for both reproductive and gender-affirming care. Boston and Worcester carry additional trans sanctuary city protections. None of that legally required a single hospital to keep its youth program open.
That's the gap Protect Trans Futures is trying to force into public view: a state can be a legal sanctuary on paper while its largest healthcare institutions quietly fold under federal pressure anyway. Founder Teddy Walker, who moved to Massachusetts from Texas as a teenager specifically to access care, has described watching the state's own hospitals abandon the systems that once brought people like him there.
It felt like a complete betrayal of what Massachusetts claims to stand for.
Teddy Walker, Protect Trans Futures founder
Organizers point to attorneys general in New York and California, who have threatened or pursued legal action against hospitals for violating state anti-discrimination protections, as the model they want Campbell to follow. Her office has so far framed the fight as a federal one.
The Bigger Picture
Massachusetts is one of the top destinations trans people named when surveyed by the UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute about where they'd move for safety and care, and it's easy to see why: the state legalized same-sex marriage first, in 2004, and added an X gender marker option for IDs in 2019. But that reputation was built for a different era. When the state's own flagship providers, including a health center as storied as Fenway, step back from care rather than risk a fight with Washington, the sanctuary label stops meaning what people who moved there for it assumed it meant.
That's the real stakes of this fight: not just whether Campbell files a lawsuit, but whether "sanctuary state" survives contact with federal intimidation, or whether it quietly becomes aspirational language that families discover, too late, doesn't guarantee them a prescription.
Sources: them., The Advocate
Cover photo: Lara Jameson / Pexels
