As Massachusetts hospitals bow to Trump, these organizers are fighting to protect trans futures

This story originally appeared on Them.On September 2, forty organizers, healthcare providers, and concerned transgender people gathered inside the John W. McCormack Building, home to the offices of Democratic Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell. The members of Protect Trans Futures, a youth-led direct action coalition in Massachusetts fighting to expand access to gender-affirming care across the state, stood in the atrium of the art deco building, many with hormones and syringes in hand, ready to make a statement.“When trans rights are under attack, what do we do?” a speaker chanted on the megaphone as several protestors injected themselves with HRT. “Act up, fight back!” After three hours occupying the building, organizers tell Them that nine protestors were arrested that day for refusing to leave until Campbell heard their demands (Eyewitness reporting by The Guardian corroborates this account.). The “care-in,” a common direct action strategy used by grassroots organizations like the Gender Liberation Movement and ACT UP, marks the latest escalation in a series of meetings, phone bank campaigns, and other forms of intervention Protect Trans Futures has organized since its founding last October. Organizers tell Them that their goal is to push the state’s attorney general, who assumed office in 2023, to pursue legal action against hospitals that have ceased providing gender-affirming care to trans youth in the wake of President Donald Trump’s second term in office. Following mounting pressure from the Trump Administration on hospitals across the country, over the last year, Fenway Health, Outer Cape Health Services and Baystate Health, and have all ended their gender-affirming care programs for trans people under 19 in the case of the first two, and 18 in the last, meaning that trans youth across wide swaths of Massachusetts cannot get access to HRT. Trans young people in Boston, Western Massachusetts, and Cape Cod will now have to work m