Federal judge strikes down Biden-era transgender healthcare rule

A federal judge struck down a Biden-era rule that expanded federal anti-discrimination measures to transgender healthcare, writing that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “exceeded its authority by implementing regulations redefining sex discrimination and prohibiting gender identity discrimination.”

The ruling from Judge Louis Guirola Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi came after a coalition of 15 Republican-led states sued over the matter, according to The Hill.

“When Biden-era bureaucrats tried to illegally rewrite our laws to force radical gender ideology into every corner of American healthcare, Tennessee stood strong and stopped them,” Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said in a statement following the ruling. “Our fifteen-state coalition worked together to protect the right of healthcare providers across America to make decisions based on evidence, reason, and conscience.”

“This decision restores not just common sense but also constitutional limits on federal overreach, and I am proud of the team of excellent attorneys who fought this through to the finish,” he added.

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Skrmetti’s office said the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi held that HHS “exceeded its authority when it issued a rule in May 2024 redefining Title IX’s prohibition against discrimination ‘on the basis of sex’ — which Congress incorporated into the ACA through Section 1557 — to include gender identity.”

“HHS’s 2024 rule represented a disturbing federal intrusion into the States’ traditional authority to regulate healthcare and make decisions about their own Medicaid programs. Specifically, the rule would have prohibited healthcare facilities from maintaining sex-segregated spaces, required certain healthcare providers to administer unproven and risky procedures for gender dysphoria, and forced states to subsidize those experimental treatments through their Medicaid programs,” it continued. “In vacating the rule, Judge Louis Guirola determined that when Congress passed Title IX in 1972, ‘sex’ meant biological sex and that federal agencies cannot unilaterally rewrite laws decades later to advance political agendas.”

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The states involved in the lawsuit were Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Virginia, and West Virginia.

The rule was first created under the administration of former President Barack Obama in 2016, before President Donald Trump reversed it in his first term and then former President Joe Biden reversed it again, The Hill reported. 

Guirola’s ruling said HHS “exceeded its authority by implementing regulations redefining sex discrimination and prohibiting gender identity discrimination.” 

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The judge vacated the rule universally, but the rule had already been prevented from going into effect. It has been stayed since July 2024, according to Bloomberg Law.