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New York City Hospitals Fold to Trump. Will Zohran Mamdani Defend Trans Care?

As a candidate, Zohran Mamdani made promises to New York City’s trans community. With two hospital systems ending trans youth care, he’s now facing his first test.

New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani attends the New York City Pride March on June 29, 2025, in New York City.

In mid-February, NYU Langone Health shuttered its transgender youth clinic under pressure from the Trump administration. Young people who relied on the clinic for counseling, puberty blockers, and hormones found themselves without care. Families scrambled to find alternatives before their children’s medications ran out. Hospital leadership shrugged; the “current regulatory environment,” they told reporters, had forced their hand.

Two days later, another major private healthcare system, Mount Sinai Health System, reportedly did the same. Though the Trump administration has proposed rules that would strip Medicare and Medicaid funding from hospital systems providing gender-affirming care, those rules likely won’t become law for months. Nonetheless, the hospitals complied in advance—and parents of trans kids, speaking under pseudonyms for fear of harassment, told local reporters they weren’t sure where to go.

A parent of a trans teen told Gothamist, she felt that “New York is one of those places where we’ll be safe.” Now, though, she’s not so sure. “I don’t feel so safe right now.”

This is the first major test of the campaign promises that Mayor Zohran Mamdani made to transgender New Yorkers. He pledged to dedicate $65 million to trans care through New York’s public hospital system, establish an office of LGBTQ affairs, and legally fortify the city’s trans population against federal attacks. During his campaign, he even stood up to NYU Langone.

In March 2025, when NYU Langone Hospital first threatened to take medical care away from trans kids in preemptive compliance with a Trump directive, Mamdani showed up at a rainy rally with trans kids and their families. “We have seen NYU Langone comply with illegal executive orders out of a fear of their so-called biggest donors,” Mamdani said at the time. “Let us remind them that the city is also one of their biggest donors. Let us remind them that they do not pay a dollar in property tax, [and that] we are a city that is ready to use every single tool to assure compliance with city and state human rights laws.”

Langone backed down. Mamdani supporters had reason to believe that they were working to elect a staunch defender of trans rights.

Trans people were involved in Mamdani’s campaign from its earliest viral-video days to the inauguration: Ceyenne Doroshow, a veteran of New York’s Black trans activist movement, met with Mamdani long before he became a household name. Doroshow is the founder of G.L.I.T.S., an organization providing long-term housing to Black trans people in need—and in 2021, she purchased a 12-unit building in Queens to do just that.

Doroshow and Mamdani met in March 2024. “It wasn’t a dressed-up meeting. It was in-person, at a little coffee place. The lady in the restaurant didn’t even know who he was at all,” she recalled.

This was during Ramadan, Doroshow remembered. “So I sat in that restaurant and ate, he sat in that restaurant and starved.” The first question she asked him was how he’d describe a person like her to........

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