Texas leads suit against transgender health rules
Ramping up its resistance to the federal government’s anti-discrimination rules regarding transgender people, the Texas attorney general’s office filed suit Tuesday to block a federal regulation prohibiting discrimination against transgender people in some health programs.
Texas, on behalf of the Franciscan Alliance, a religious hospital network, and four other states say a federal regulation implemented last month would force doctors to perform gender transition procedures on children. The suit asks the court to block the federal government from enforcing the regulation.
The federal rule on nondiscrimination in health-care prohibits denying or limiting coverage for transgender people, including health services related to gender transition.
The suit was announced by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is representing the Franciscan Alliance. It was filed Tuesday morning in the Wichita Falls-based District Court for the Western District of Texas.
The case was assigned to U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth, who on Monday sided with the state in a request for an injunction to block the Obama administration’s guidelines on accommodating transgender students in public schools. Those guidelines say that schools must treat a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex for the purposes of complying with federal nondiscrimination statutes.
Under the healthcare rule, protections against discrimination based on sex extend to gender identity. The rule applies to healthcare providers, including hospitals and doctors that accept federal dollars and insurance plans offered through the federal marketplace.
The healthcare providers and the state are claiming that the federal government is redefining the term sex to “thwart decades of settled precedent” and impose “massive new obligations” on healthcare providers.
“As the Obama Administration has attempted to do in other instances, this new rule interprets ‘sex’ as a state of mind, not a biological fact,” Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a news release Tuesday. “When it enacted the law, Congress used the term ‘sex’ as a biological category. The Obama Administration is now trying to redefine the law so that the term ‘sex’ means one’s ‘internal sense of gender which may be male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female.’ But the President does not have the power to rewrite law.”
The suit also argues that the new rule violates the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act because it compels religiously affiliated health organizations to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs. The federal government is “forcing them to choose between federal funding and their livelihood as healthcare providers and their exercise of religion,” the suit says.
The federal health rule does not include a blanket exemption for religiously affiliated healthcare organizations but indicates that those providers could claim exemptions under existing federal religious freedom laws.
A spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Department, which proposed the nondiscrimination rule in May, referred questions about the lawsuit to the Justice Department, where a spokeswoman declined to comment.
Transgender-rights advocates say that the assertions that the health rule prevents doctors from using sound medical judgment are unfounded.
The health rule “doesn’t force an individual to do anything in particular” but instead clarifies that healthcare providers can’t deny services or insurance to patients because they’re transgender, said Sarah Warbelow, legal director for the Human Rights Campaign.
“The example unfortunately used by individuals who oppose this is that this is going to force doctors to provide transition surgeries to children [but] this doesn’t take away a doctor’s ability to make informed decisions in the best interest of their patients,” Warbelow said. “What the doctor can’t do is say, ‘I won’t treat you because you’re transgender.’ ”
This story was originally published August 24, 2016 at 8:19 AM with the headline "Texas leads suit against transgender health rules."