The Gender Liberation Movement brought nearly 100 people to three New York City hospitals on Wednesday to protest limits on gender-affirming care for transgender youth, turning Pride season into a fight over who gets to march and who gets to decide. The group also renewed its push to keep hospitals that have cut back that care out of the 2026 NYC Pride March and festival.
The protest followed an open letter released earlier this week that was signed by 20 current and former parade marshals, along with other LGBTQ leaders, families of trans kids and national groups including the Campaign for Southern Equality and the Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network. Heritage of Pride chooses the marshals each year, and this year’s lineup includes Bowen Yang, Miss Peppermint, Dominique Jackson and Jay W. Walker.
The letter said several New York City hospital systems, including NYU Langone, Mt. Sinai and New York Presbyterian, have chosen to preemptively end gender-affirming care for young people. It called on NYC Pride to bar any hospital system that has ended, restricted or suspended that care from marching in the 2026 NYC Pride March and festival, and from future prides, unless those systems restore the care and publicly commit to protecting trans youth and their families.
Eliel Cruz, speaking after the Wednesday picket, said if one group of people’s health care can be targeted this way, it opens the door for any group’s health care to be cut off under federal government attacks. His warning landed as the movement pressed a simple demand: if Pride is meant to stand with trans people, the institutions limiting trans youth care should not be part of the celebration.
New York Presbyterian sits at the sharpest edge of that argument. The hospital has not explicitly announced that it halted care, but it has stripped references to youth gender care from its website and continues to avoid questions about the status of its GAC programs. That leaves NYC Pride being asked to draw a line against systems that have moved away from care even when some have not said so plainly.
The fight now turns to whether Heritage of Pride will follow through on the pressure. The group has been asked to keep those hospital systems out of the 2026 NYC Pride March, but the broader issue is already larger than one parade: trans families are watching to see whether Pride season will reward institutions that protect them or give cover to ones that do not.
The conflict arrives in a city where hospitals across New York have been pausing or sunsetting gender-affirming care for trans people, including in some cases legal adults, despite years of political promises in New York to defend trans health care rights. The protest on Wednesday made clear that for Cruz and the other signers, the question is no longer whether the pressure exists. It is whether NYC Pride will answer it by keeping those hospitals off the march.
