A Court Just Issued a Nationwide Injunction Against the Biden Administration’s Mandate to Provide ‘Transgender Care’

A federal judge last Wednesday issued a nationwide preliminary injunction against a Biden administration mandate that hospitals provide “transgender” care.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) finalized the “Nondiscrimination in Health Programs and Activities” rule in May. The rule states that Section 1557 of Obamacare bars discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability in certain health programs and activities. The word sex is interpreted to include “gender identity.”

The 15 plaintiffs, including Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee, filed a lawsuit to stop the illegal mandate. They argued that federal law bars discrimination based on biological sex, not “gender identity.” From the court’s opinion (PDF):

“The Complaint alleges that HHS’s May 2024 Rule would require Plaintiffs to ‘use taxpayer funds to pay for unproven and costly gender-transition interventions through Medicaid and state health plans — even for children who may suffer irreversible harms.’…Plaintiffs further allege that the May 2024 Rule attempts to outlaw policy decisions ‘excluding insurance coverage for risky and costly gender-transition surgeries…”

The states also said the rule “unlawfully coerces [their] compliance by threatening to strip billions of dollars in federal funding that assists their most vulnerable populations.”

To justify illegal “transgender” mandates, the Biden administration usually cites Bostock v. Clayton County (2020). The three Trump-appointed justices voted with leftist justices to declare that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation and “gender identity.”

It does not, of course. In writing this law, Congress did not intend to give men walking around in dresses and makeup and claiming to be women the “right” to enter women’s restrooms and changing rooms or force doctors to perform genital mutilation procedures.

The court, agreeing with the 15 plaintiffs, said that it “cannot accept the suggestion that Congress, with a ‘clear voice,’ adopted an ambiguous or evolving definition of ‘sex’ when it acted to promote educational opportunities for women in 1972. Title IX and its regulations not only permit, but at times require, consideration of sex as well as separation on the basis of sex.”

Tennessee led the coalition of states. Jonathan Skrmetti, the state’s attorney general, is pleased with the decision.

“Today a federal court said no to the Biden administration’s attempt to illegally force every health care provider in America to adopt the most extreme version of gender ideology,” he said in a statement.