Children’s Hospital Colorado pleads not guilty to contempt allegation in gender-affirming care lawsuit 26%
By John Ingold28%
7/20/2026, 12:37:33 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 17 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Self-Serving Bias, and Representativeness Heuristic, with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 20.2% saturation with 110 hits. Analysis detected 529 faulty-reasoning hits from 544 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 37.9% and a BS Rank of 26% (16,236 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 74.20% of the article peer group.
Children’s Hospital Colorado on Monday pleaded not guilty to allegations it has violated a court order to resume gender-affirming care for transgender youth.
The plea came during a brief hearing in Denver District Court, during which Judge Ericka F.
H.
Englert scheduled a multiday trial in mid-September to determine whether Children’s should be held in contempt.
Children’s is being sued by four transgender youth and their families who say the hospital discriminated against them when it stopped writing prescriptions to patients under the age of 18 for the purposes of gender-affirming care.
The hospital has continued to offer mental health support to trans youth.
It has never performed gender-affirming surgeries for those under 18.
It’s been more than seven months since Children’s stopped providing the prescriptions for hormones or puberty blockers.
Without them, the families say their children will suffer irreparable harm from bodily changes that are inconsistent with their gender identity.
Children’s stopped the care for trans youth after a series of threats by the federal government to punish hospitals and doctors who provide the care.
The hospital argues that resuming the prescriptions could cause a cascade of federal sanctions that, in the extreme, would force the hospital to close.
Earlier this year, a divided Colorado Supreme Court ruled there is enough evidence that Children’s had violated a state antidiscrimination law for an injunction to be issued against the hospital.
The injunction, which Englert subsequently entered, prohibits the hospital from “refusing to provide medically necessary gender-affirming care to transgender patients pending resolution of this matter.”
In response, Children’s updated its “scope of services” statement to say the hospital offers gender-affirming care to youth.
But Children’s said the hospital’s doctors — who are not employed by Children’s but by the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine — have refused to resume writing the prescriptions, fearing that they could face civil sanctions or even criminal charges from the federal government.
Children’s says it cannot override its doctors’ professional judgment.
Attorneys for the trans patients filed a motion to Englert asking her to hold the hospital in contempt.
They argue that Children’s cannot evade responsibility for discrimination by passing the responsibility to its doctors, and they note that the doctors’ decision not to write prescriptions is not rooted in what’s medically best for the patients.
The allegation kicks off what Englert on Monday called a “quasi-criminal” process, including a trial with witness testimony and cross-examination.
An attorney for Children’s said Monday that the hospital intends to call expert witnesses to defend itself, and both sides said they expected that some witnesses would need to be subpoenaed in order for them to testify.
One difference is that there will be no jury.
At the end of the trial, Englert will make her ruling based on the preponderance of the evidence — a lower standard than a criminal trial’s requirement of deciding upon a verdict beyond a reasonable doubt.
If Children’s is found in contempt, the law allows Englert to sentence a responsible party to up to six months in jail.
But the plaintiffs in the case have asked for a fine of $50,000 per day against the hospital until care is fully resumed.
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