(LifeSiteNews) – Seven states along with a group of doctors are filing a lawsuit against the Biden administration’s threats to withhold federal funding from healthcare providers that refuse to perform or cover “transgender” procedures.
In May, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) finalized a rule announced the previous month defining “sex” in federal health law as encompassing “gender identity,” making it discriminatory not to provide so-called “gender-affirming care” to those who identify as other than their actual sex.
Several lawsuits have since arisen between the Biden administration and health workers unwilling to take part in practices they see as wrong and harmful, and Catholic News Agency reported that this week the attorneys general of Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Utah along with the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) are suing as well.
The plaintiffs contend that the rule is illegal on multiple grounds, including violating physicians’ rights, overriding state authority, and rulemaking without statutory authority.
“Joe Biden is once again exceeding his legal authority in order to force his radical transgender ideology onto the American people,” said Missouri Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who is leading the charge. “I am filing suit because I will not allow out-of-touch federal bureaucrats to force Missouri health care providers into performing experimental and dangerous gender-transition procedures on the taxpayer dime.”
“(D)octors should never be forced to violate their sound medical judgment and perform life-altering and sterilizing interventions on their patients,” ACPeds executive director Dr. Jill Simons added. “Our doctors take an oath to do no harm, but the Biden administration’s rule forces them to violate this oath and perform procedures that are harmful and dangerous to our patients — vulnerable children. What the Biden administration is calling for is wrong and unlawful.”
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”
Yet the Biden administration has given uncompromising support to all major aspects of the LGBT agenda, including reopening the military to recruits afflicted with gender dysphoria, promoting gender ideology within the military (including “diversity” and drag events on military bases), holding White House events to “affirm transgender kids,” condemning state laws against underage transitions as “close to sinful,” promoting underage transitions (potentially at taxpayer expense) as a “best practice,” and trying to force federally funded schools to let males into female athletic competitions and restrooms.