What happened
A D.C. federal judge refused Friday to stop the Federal Trade Commission from pursuing a separate enforcement case against the World Professional Association for Transgender Health in Texas, finding the group had not made the showing needed for emergency relief.
Chief Judge James E. Boasberg denied WPATH’s request for a temporary restraining order after expedited briefing and a hearing, leaving the FTC and several states free, for now, to continue their Northern District of Texas case accusing the organization of violating the FTC Act’s prohibitions on unfair or deceptive trade practices and false advertising.
The ruling narrows the practical reach of Boasberg’s earlier May order, which had partially granted WPATH preliminary relief against an FTC civil investigative demand. In that earlier decision, the court found WPATH was likely to succeed on a claim that the CID was issued in retaliation for constitutionally protected speech, but limited the injunction to that specific demand.
WPATH argued the Texas case covered the same subject matter, would frustrate the D.C. injunction and should proceed, if at all, in Washington. Boasberg disagreed, writing that “WPATH has not demonstrated such a threat” to the D.C. court’s jurisdiction because the Texas action was not an effort to enforce the withdrawn CID.
The court acknowledged WPATH’s contention that the Texas suit targets statements resembling those covered by the CID and could lead to discovery of similar information. But Boasberg said the prior injunction did not protect WPATH from every information-seeking process, only from the CID the court had found likely retaliatory.
Boasberg was also skeptical that compulsory-counterclaim rules or anti-duplicative-litigation principles require the government to bring a later enforcement action in the forum chosen by a plaintiff’s pre-enforcement challenge. Letting plaintiffs bind agency enforcement suits to those earlier challenges, the opinion said, risks allowing them to choose the forum and pace of litigation.
The court further held that WPATH had not shown irreparable harm. It declined to treat the Texas litigation itself as a First Amendment violation and said the cost and burden of litigating two suits, while onerous, did not warrant emergency relief.
Boasberg noted that WPATH remains free to cite the D.C. court’s earlier opinion in Texas if it seeks to resist discovery there. The immediate result is that WPATH loses its emergency anti-suit bid in Washington while the FTC’s Texas enforcement action remains intact.