A federal judge struck down a Biden-era rule that expanded anti-discrimination policies to include transgender measures.
According to Judge Louis Guirola Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “exceeded its authority by implementing regulations redefining sex discrimination and prohibiting gender identity discrimination.”
Because the word “sex” was not defined in the statute, the court said the rule “cannot be divorced from the circumstances existing at the time it was passed.”
“When it enacted Title IX, Congress’s concern was prohibiting sex discrimination in education. It was particularly concerned with inequality that female students experienced,” the ruling read. “It did not at that time contemplate gender identity, transgender status, or ‘gender affirming care.'”
The ruling is in favor of a group of fifteen Republican-led states that argued the HHS rule exceeded the agency’s authority because it “provides that sex discrimination includes gender-identity discrimination,” and “it unlawfully regulates the practice of medicine.”
“When Biden-era bureaucrats tried to illegally rewrite our laws to force radical gender ideology into every corner of American health care, Tennessee stood strong and stopped them,” Tennessee Attorney General Skrmetti said in a statement following the ruling. “Our fifteen-state coalition worked together to protect the right of health care 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.”
Skrmetti’s office said the Biden-era rule was a “disturbing federal intrusion into the States’ traditional authority to regulate healthcare and make decisions about their own Medicaid programs.”
States joining Tennessee in the lawsuit were Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Virginia and West Virginia.
