The Brief

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles is officially closing its gender-affirming care center today, ending a chapter for one of the oldest and largest clinics of its kind in the U.S. The hospital’s thousands of trans patients under 21 are now left to find a new provider to access therapy, hormones and surgeries.

The closure marks a turning point in the nationwide battle for transgender rights, as the Trump administration has sought to restrict access to gender-affirming care by withholding federal funding, even in deep-blue states with “shield laws” protecting such medical services.

Advocates organized by the Los Angeles LGBT Center had protested the shuttering of CHLA’s Center for Transyouth Health and Development at rallies outside the hospital.

"Gender-affirming care is protected by law,” said Maria Do, community mobilization manager at the L.A. LGBT Center, at a rally July 17. “CHLA’s compliance with political pressure and anti-trans fearmongering must be investigated and prevented from ever happening again.”

What were the federal forces behind the closure? 

In January, President Donald Trump issued an executive order seeking to restrict access to gender-affirming hormones and surgeries. The administration called the treatments “chemical and surgical” hormones.

Major medical associations — and a majority of people who receive this care, according to surveys — oppose these bans and describe healthcare for trans youth as potentially life-saving.

CHLA cited this executive order when announcing its Feb. 4 decision to pause gender-affirming surgeries, hormones and puberty blockers for new patients under 19. Following public outcry, CHLA then resumed the intake of new patients under 19 for these services about two weeks later.

Over the next months, CHLA said its leadership watched guidance from various federal departments, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Protesters have gathered weekly outside Children's Hospital L.A. since the closure of its gender-affirming care clinic was announced last month.

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Kevin Tidmarsh

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LAist

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These directives were cited by hospital administrators on June 12, when they announced the closure.

The hospital said it gave families six weeks’ notice before closing its gender-affirming care center. Many current and former patients who spoke at rallies said they thought this wasn’t enough time for youth — particularly for longtime patients who had built relationships with medical staff — to find new providers.

CHLA’s financial reality

About 65% of the hospital’s funding comes indirectly or directly through federal sources, and the hospital is more dependent on these funds than the state average, according to the hospital. The latest publicly available data shows an even higher percentage: just over 70%.

That federal funding largely comes from Medicaid, according to state data — which was cut by about $1 trillion under Trump’s signature budget package. According to a letter to patients announcing the closing provided to LAist, the hospital said it could only sustain operations for about 50 days if all federal funding were withheld.

The hospital said it was left with no choice but to shutter the center despite its decades of “evidence-based” care — especially as the prospect of securing funding from California grew more and more uncertain amid a statewide budget crisis.

A large crowd of people listens to a speech at a rally outside Children's Hospital L.A.

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Kevin Tidmarsh

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LAist

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What are patients and advocates saying?

Weekly protests have been held outside the hospital in support of gender-affirming care for trans youth.

A protest on July 17 saw around 100 protesters packed onto a cramped sidewalk on Sunset Boulevard across from the hospital. Protesters’ signs, chants and speeches called out a variety of actors, primarily the Trump administration and CHLA administrators.

Protesters held signs shaped like CHLA's butterfly logo with messages supporting transgender, gender diverse and intersex youth written on them.

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Kevin Tidmarsh

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LAist

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People at the rally, including a few wearing medical scrubs, held signs in the shape of CHLA’s butterfly logo with messages of support for trans, gender non-conforming and intersex people. Vehicles driving past — including some utility trucks and ambulances — honked in support of the rally, sharply punctuating speeches from local LGBTQ+ advocates and former patients in support of keeping access to gender-affirming care.

“Instead of protecting that care, CHLA caved,” said Sydney Rogers, a program manager at the L.A. LGBT Center and vice chair of the L.A. County LGBTQ+ Commission. “Instead of defending the youth they once promised to serve, they closed the doors and turned off the lights. Now families across L.A. are scrambling for crumbs in a healthcare system built on fear.”

What now for gender-affirming care providers?

For CHLA’s thousands of patients and their families, finding new doctors could prove difficult. Other providers in the state are restricting their services in an effort to shield themselves from federal attention.

For instance, Stanford Medicine paused gender-related surgeries on patients under 19 last month.

Protesters led chants at a recent rally, including some that directly targeted CHLA's policies.

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Kevin Tidmarsh

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LAist

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Attorney General Rob Bonta also advised the hospital earlier this year it may be violating state law by not offering gender-affirming care.

“Let me be clear: California law has not changed, and hospitals and clinics have a legal obligation to provide equal access to healthcare services,” Bonta said in a letter to CHLA.

However, in a statement provided to LAist on Monday, Bonta’s office said it would focus on “the source of this problem — and that’s the Trump administration's unlawful and harmful threats to providers.”

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains a provision that would remove gender-affirming care as an essential health benefit under the Affordable Care Act. Bonta filed a lawsuit Friday challenging that clause.

The $360 million effort to turn Exposition Park’s largest parking lots into green space won’t be completed in time for the 2028 Olympics.

State leaders announced the multi-million dollar investment into the park in 2024, planning to prep the park for an Olympic close-up by replacing the warren of asphalt lots on Expo Park’s southern edge with an underground lot and green park land.

Now park officials say the 6-acre project now won’t break ground until 2028, after the Olympic torch is extinguished.

Expo Park and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum will be a centerpiece of L.A.’s Olympic image in the summer of 2028. But for residents of the surrounding South L.A. neighborhoods, the park and its facilities help fill a serious need for recreation and green space.

Andrea Ambriz, general manager of the state-run park, said the park hasn’t had an investment of this kind since the 1984 Olympic Games, but that the inspiration and funding for the park project go beyond the 2028 games.

“Whatever we do now is intended in full to support the community. It’s not just for these games,” Ambriz said.

Ambriz said park officials hit pause on project planning after realizing it would not be completed before the Olympics.

State leaders are still angling to get at least some of the park freshened up in time for the Olympics, with officials announcing in January that Gov. Gavin Newsom planned to earmark $96.5 million in proposed funds for renovations in the park.

The funding, according to the governor’s proposed budget, will be used for “critical deferred maintenance” to meet code compliance and accessibility requirements.

Ambriz said the lion’s share of the money will go to rehabbing roadways, sidewalks and ramps throughout the park to ensure safe pedestrian and vehicle access.

“This is a part of what we know we need,” Ambriz said. “It is a really significant downpayment from the state.”

How will the park affect the neighborhood? 

John Noyola is a 42-year resident of the Exposition Park neighborhood who sits on the North Area Neighborhood Development Council. For him, any major overhaul of the park still feels like an abstract concept.

He’s seen news reports about the proposed changes, but heard little more.

“It hasn’t really affected us or the community,” Noyola said.

The 150-year-old Expo Park has one of the densest collections of cultural institutions in Los Angeles, said Esther Margulies, a professor of landscape architecture just across the street from the park at USC.

Four museums, including the under-construction Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, will soon share the park with the BMO Stadium and the Coliseum.

Margulies said Grand Park, in downtown Los Angeles, has begun to fill a role as a “living room for the city” in recent years, but that Expo Park is falling short of its potential.

“People should see Expo Park as a place to begin their journey of visiting Southern California and Los Angeles,” Margulies said. “This is where you should come and there should be this energy of, like, ‘Wow!’”

Changing Expo Park, Margulies said, starts with building a space that serves its community.

In its current design, the park’s best-kept green spaces sit behind the fences of its museums, Margulies said, and large asphalt expanses act as heat sinks. Major events often come at the community’s expense.

“There’s tailgating, day drinking in the park,” Margulies said. “People don’t come to the park on those days.”

Noyola, the Expo Park resident, said his family and others in the community frequent the park recreation center, pools and fields near the intersection of Vermont Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. He worries that construction could block parking or other access to the park spaces that are available.

He remains wary of the unintended consequences of a park remodel, especially after watching traffic spike in Inglewood when SoFi Stadium and the Intuit Dome were built.

“It would be nice,” Noyola said of the remodel. “Looking at the greater vision of LA 28, it’s needed. But at what cost?”

Southern California is in for a wet week, with the potential for what the weather service is calling "widespread" impacts.

Ahead of the heavy rain, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass has issued an evacuation warning for the Palisades, Sunset and Hurst burn scar areas due to the potential for mud and debris flows.

The warning is in effect from 9 p.m. on Sunday until 9 a.m. on Tuesday.

Storm details

When is the rain coming?

Rain is expected to arrive in Ventura and Los Angeles counties Sunday night, according to the National Weather Service.

When is the rain heaviest?

Weather forecast this week for Southern California.

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Moderate to heavy rain is expected early Monday, with significant snow and damaging winds starting at about 3 a.m. Heaviest impacts, including the possibility of widespread flooding and thunderstorms, are expected to last until around 9 p.m.

Rain continues all week

Light rain is expected to continue Tuesday through Friday.

Upcoming weather alerts for L.A.

• A Flood Watch will go into effect on Monday, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
• A Wind Advisory will go into effect Monday, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.
• A High Surf Advisory will go into effect Monday at 10 a.m. through Thursday, Feb. 19 at 9 a.m. for the Pacific Palisades, Playa del Rey, San Pedro and Port of Los Angeles areas. Angelenos are encouraged to avoid the ocean.
• A Gale Watch, which includes sustained surface winds near coastal areas, will go into effect Monday from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. for all inner waters near the Pacific Palisades, Playa del Rey, San Pedro and Port of Los Angeles areas. Angelenos are encouraged to avoid boating until the weather is calmer.

Today, millions of Angelenos use the Central Library downtown (which turns 100 this year) and over 70 branch locations to access the Los Angeles Public Library’s collection of over 8 million books.

But this juggernaut wasn’t created overnight. What started with just 750 books in 1872 was transformed in part because of city librarian Everett Perry, a visionary who wanted books to be easy to access. Here’s a look at how his influence can still be felt today.

A library in disarray 

Perry got the job as top librarian in L.A. after working at the New York Public Library, which opened a main building during his tenure. He was accustomed to growth.

But when he arrived in 1911, the Los Angeles Public Library was struggling. With no permanent location, it had moved several times into different rented spaces, the most recent being in the Hamburger's Department Store, where patrons had to ride an elevator to check out books in between women’s clothes and furniture.

Perry aired his grievances in a 1912 library report.

Everett Robbins Perry in 1911.

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Los Angeles Public Library Institutional Collection

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“The modern library aims to be a vital force in a community,” he wrote. “It can not perform this function, if its usefulness is limited by an inaccessible location.”

This is an early look into his ethos as librarian. Perry was part of a progressive crop of librarians, whose ideas were shifting about how books should be stored and used by the public.

His goal was to create a library system focused on great service and that rivaled the very best on the East Coast. With others, he pushed for a central library to be built, funded by a $2 million bond measure. Voters passed that in the 1920s, which led to the creation of the impressive Art Deco building that still stands downtown.

But what was perhaps even more impressive was how he infused the building with novel ideas about how to make reading more accessible.

One key example was his decision to set up subject departments. For decades prior, libraries stored books on fixed shelves (these couldn’t be adjusted), so they were usually sorted by size or acquisition date. Libraries had only recently moved to the not-very-user-friendly Dewey decimal system.

By grouping books under subjects, Perry made it much easier for people to find what they wanted. His idea was so successful that it eventually spread to other libraries across the country.

Another innovation was where you could read the books. Perry put the circulation and card catalog area in the center of the floor, which was surrounded by book stacks and reading rooms along the edges. That meant they were next to the windows and full of natural light, which according to LAPL, wasn’t customary at the time.

The reference room of the Main Library, seen circa 1913, was in an enclosed section on the third floor of the Hamburger Building, a department store.

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Los Angeles Public Library Institutional Collection

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Building a teaching program

Perry earned a reputation as a fair, iron-fist leader who wanted top-notch library practices.

He issued a rulebook for staff that covered everything from the janitor’s responsibility to make brooms last longer to requiring librarians to go with patrons to find books.

But Perry’s legacy also includes the next generation of librarians. In 1914, he revamped an aging LAPL librarian training program into a full-fledged, accredited library school that was known as the best in California.

Artist Dean Cornwell, left, shows his proposal for the Central Library rotunda murals to city librarian Everett Perry sometime in the 1920s.

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Los Angeles Public Library Institutional Collection

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The history department at the Central Library in 1926. This was one of the largest reading rooms of the library.

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Mott Studios

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Los Angeles Public Library Legacy Collection

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He aimed to professionalize librarianship by encouraging men to apply (it had commonly been women), urging all applicants to have at least some college-level education, and creating a formal internship program. The program covered technical librarian skills, as well new coursework that compared how other libraries functioned across the country.

Perry served for over two decades until his death in 1933.

His achievements were numerous. Aside from getting the Central Library built, he grew the staff from 98 to 600, helped the 200,000-book collection balloon to 1.5 million, and added dozens of more branch libraries.

In 2018 he was inducted into the California Library Hall of Fame.

Federal immigration agents have left a U.S. Coast Guard facility that's been a key staging area for them in the Port of L.A., according to U.S. Rep. Nanette Barragan who represents the area.

Since last summer, agents have been using the base on Terminal Island as a launch point for operations.

In a statement to LAist, Barragan, a Democrat, says she confirmed with the Coast Guard last night that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol have vacated the base. She says it's unclear at this time whether the move is permanent or if agents are moving to another location in L.A. County.

Local officials and community groups are celebrating the agents' departure from Terminal Island. Volunteers with the Harbor Area Peace Patrols have been monitoring agent activity for months, tracking vehicles and sharing information with advocacy networks.

Earlier this week, the group said it received reports of the department.