Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit on Monday against the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) over a new rule forcing state Medicaid and healthcare providers to pay and perform “gender transition” surgeries.
The new rule would strip federal funds from healthcare providers that refused to perform gender reassignment surgeries. Paxton alleges that the rule is unconstitutional in overriding state law, asking the court for injunctive relief to keep the law from being enforced, he announced in a press release Tuesday. (RELATED: Trans Medicine Whistleblower Speaks Out Against DOJ’s Felony Charges, Says Hospital Was ‘Lying To The Public’)
“This is yet another example of Joe Biden trying to sidestep the Constitution and use agency rulemaking to advance unpopular, unlawful, and destructive policies,” Paxton said in the press release. “We are suing to stop the Biden Administration from withholding federal healthcare funds to force medical professionals to perform these experimental and dangerous procedures.”
🚨BREAKING: I’m suing Biden Administration for adopting a new rule that forces states to pay for “gender transition” procedures through their Medicaid programs & requires healthcare providers to perform these procedures even when doing so would violate state law.
This is yet… https://t.co/kiLaLtHZmo
— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) June 11, 2024
The State of Montana joined Texas in the lawsuit, with the defendants being the HHS, HHS Secretary Xavier Becarra, Director of the Office for Civil Rights Melanie Fontes Rainer and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, according to the court filing.
Another consequence of this rule is potentially forcing religious hospitals and doctors to perform these gender transition surgeries on children, according to legal experts who previously spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation. The rule also would compel healthcare providers to fill prescriptions for puberty blockers, according to Paxton’s court filing.
In 2016, the HHS under former President Barack Obama issued a rule that interpreted that discrimination in healthcare “on the basis of sex” would also include gender identity. It also extrapolated the clause to include requirements that those hospitals “provide and ensure abortions,” according to the court filing.
In 2020, the Trump administration reversed this rule to not include gender identity, which drew pushback from federal Judge Frederick Block blocked the reversal. The Biden administration reinstated the rule in 2021.
The new rule expands “discrimination on the basis of sex” to include discrimination on the basis of, “sex characteristics, sexual orientation, pregnancy or related conditions, gender identity, and sex stereotypes,” says the court filing.
The court filing also argues that healthcare providers, under this new definition, “cannot decline to provide a lactation consultation on the basis that the individual requesting it is a biological male.”
The HHS did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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