In an “anti-discrimination” rule change, President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) redefined “sex” to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as opposed to the word’s biological definition.
The new guidance reverses Trump-era rules defining “sex” as grounded in one’s gender assigned at birth.
“It is the position of the Department of Health and Human Services that everyone – including LGBTQ people – should be able to access health care, free from discrimination or interference, period,” said HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra.
The changes aim to expand gender-reassignment surgery and hormone therapy on the taxpayer dime.
“Make no mistake: the policy announced by HHS today is not about ‘fix[ing] a broken bone or screen[ing] for cancer risk,” said Terry Schilling, the president of the American Principles Project. “No American was being denied access to these treatments for identifying as ‘LGBTQ.’ Rather, this policy is really about forcing hospitals and medical professionals to adhere to leftist ideology regarding sexuality and gender – and in particular to provide sex-change procedures to all comers, including children.”
Becerra highlighted a 2020 court ruling that federal laws against discrimination applied to individuals’ basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
“That’s why today HHS announced it will act on related reports of discrimination,” Becerra said.
A federal judge ruled two months after the Supreme Court Trump’s HHS policies repealing Obamacare mandates to serve transgender individuals violated new case law.
Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center Roger Severino, former director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights under the Trump administration, said Biden’s new rules at HHS redefining sex to mandate services skipped the process for required rulemaking adhered to by both Democrat and Republican predecessors. The new rules also dismiss duel injunctions by judges in Texas and New York barring enforcement of a gender identity mandate.
Bypassing the rulemaking process leaves open questions of enforcement, and how many genders the government will recognize in pursuing its authority.
Surprised Becerra and Levine are being this aggressive in imposing transgender ideology on hospitals and doctors who treat sex as biological facts. They're ignoring an injunction & skipping all the required public rulemaking. It's a divisive, lawless move. https://t.co/v04TcIH4Nw
— Roger Severino (@RogerSeverino_) May 10, 2021
“Becerra is threatening to put doctors and hospitals that disagree with current transgender ideology out of business, including those with medical, religious or moral objections to conducting sex-reassignment surgeries on minors,” Severino said. “Becerra is trying to change the fundamental practice or medicine and science by the stroke of a pen, but will soon learn through lawsuits that sex as a biological reality won’t be so easily erased.”
