By Nate Raymond
BOSTON (Reuters) -A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Friday to restore articles by doctors and medical researchers that were removed from a government-run website focused on patient safety because they contained references to transgender people.
U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston sided with two doctors at Harvard Medical School whose patient-safety articles were scrubbed from the website after Republican President Donald Trump signed an executive order requiring agencies to remove all statements and policies promoting "gender ideology."
The articles had been published on the Patient Safety Network (PSNet), an online patient safety resource. It is run by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The judge agreed with the doctors that the removal of the articles was a "textbook example" of viewpoint discrimination that violated the free speech protections of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.
"This is a flagrant violation of the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights as private speakers on a limited public forum," the judge, an appointee of Democratic former President Barack Obama, wrote.
Sorokin ordered the administration to restore not just the two doctors’ articles to the PSNet but all other content authored by private parties that were removed from the website pursuant to Trump’s executive order following a word search for items that contained certain terms.
Rachel Davidson, a lawyer for Drs. Gordon Schiff and Celeste Royce at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, in a statement called the ruling "a victory for free speech and public health."
HHS did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump signed the executive order on his first day back in the White House on January 20, forcing the government to "recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male."
Among the articles that were removed from PSNet were ones co-authored by Schiff and Royce, who sued after articles they co-wrote focused on suicide risk and the disease endometriosis were removed because they included brief references acknowledging transgender patient populations.
Sorokin said even passing references to people who identify themselves as transgender were deemed contrary to Trump’s order, and deleting the offending words was a non-negotiable prerequisite for the articles to be reposted to PSNet.