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Connecticut Attorney General William Tong has found another “vulnerable population” that needs the assistance of some lawfare.
On Wednesday Tong announced he is leading 22 states in federal court to stop the Trump administration from ending Medicaid and CHIP reimbursement for so-called gender-affirming care for minors and some young adults. Tong said doctors should decide, families should choose, and Donald Trump is just a MAGA bully using “our tax dollars” to be cruel.
Consider reading the complaint the way a parent would. Tong is not asking Washington to stay out of medicine. He is asking Washington to keep writing checks for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and related interventions for use on low-income children — and to treat a refusal to fund that as an illegal “attack on healthcare.”
If this were only about “professional medical advice,” Connecticut could spend its own money. The fight is about federal reimbursement. Tong wants the rest of the country to subsidize a protocol his coalition calls “medically necessary.” Scientific research, including the Cass Report, has shown these procedures lack high-quality evidence, are largely irreversible, and represent the medicalization of distressed teenagers.
The December 2025 HHS proposal, now a final rule effective October 13, 2026, would stop federal Medicaid dollars for this care under 18 and CHIP dollars under 19. The same treatments would still be reimbursable when they are not being used to treat a gender-identity diagnosis in a child. Tong’s office calls that discrimination. A more ordinary reading is that HHS declined to treat contested, life-altering experimental procedures conducted on children.
Tong boasts that more than 90 percent of 30,000 comments opposed the rule, including his own. Public-comment piles are not randomized trials. Activist networks can flood a docket, but they cannot manufacture long-term evidence that chemically interrupting a child’s puberty is safe.
He also leans on “broad medical consensus” even thought that consensus has been cracking in Europe for years. Health systems that once led this work have tightened or reversed course for minors because the evidence was weak and the harms were not theoretical, including the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway. Tong’s press release does not mention that. It does not mention desistance, infertility, sexual dysfunction, or the girls who later say they were rushed.
Congress created Medicaid and CHIP as joint programs with statutory limits. States have wide latitude. They do not have a blank check to redefine “medically necessary” as whatever the gender activist-medical complex wants it to mean.
Connecticut families who actually use Medicaid for cancer, diabetes, pregnancy, and disability should notice the priority. Tong is not leading a 22-state coalition to fix DSS wait times or nursing-home quality. He is leading one to protect a niche, ideologically charged set of interventions on children who are not even old enough to understand the consequences of gender-altering procedures.
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