A federal district court in Mississippi overturned Biden-era regulations that sought to extend mandates under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to include transgender health care. Known as Section 1557, the regulations extended protections against sex discrimination to include gender-affirming health care.
U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola, Jr., in a brief, two-page ruling, sided with Tennessee and Mississippi, which brought the lawsuit, Kansas, and a dozen others in finding the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) exceeded its authority in its May, 2024 rule.
“HHS exceeded its statutory authority when (1) it interpreted Title IX, as incorporated into Section 1557, to prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity, and (2) when it implemented Section 1557 regulations concerning gender identity and “gender affirming care.”
The rule was originally enacted in the Obama Administration, reversed in the first Trump term, then brought back under Biden. It declared that no organization receiving federal health funding, nor any insurer doing business with the federal government, could refuse to provide health care services for gender-affirming care.
Judge Guirola reasoned that when Congress passed Title IX in 1972, it intended sex discrimination to apply only to biological sex, and that federal agencies were not entitled, decades later, to rewrite rules to advance a political agenda.
In joining the lawsuit in 2024, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach said ideology had overtaken legal precedent:
“Instead of focusing on the true mission of Title IX, which is to protect women and girls from discrimination in education and to protect and promote women’s and girls’ sports, the lawsuit argues that the Biden administration is attempting to completely rewrite the measure to institutionalize the left-wing fad of transgender ideology in our K-12 system and tie school funding to it.”
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, who brought the case, celebrated the court’s decision:
“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.”
This is one of many attempts by Kansas Governor Laura Kelly and the Kansas Department of Education to expand the definition of sex discrimination to include transgender females and force biological girls to share facilities with biological boys.
