Florida filed a lawsuit against President Joe Biden’s administration Tuesday after it released a rule barring healthcare providers from discriminating based on “gender identity” or “sexual orientation.”
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released the rule on April 26 as a part of the Affordable Care Act and bans healthcare and insurance providers receiving federal funding from denying care because of a patient’s gender identity or sexual orientation. Republican Attorney General Ashley Moody of Florida announced that her office had filed a lawsuit against the department for attempting “to force Florida to violate its own law “barring doctors from performing sex-change procedures on minors, according to a press release.
“Florida passed a law to protect our children from dangerous, irreversible gender-transition drugs and surgeries. Now, Biden and his federal bureaucrats are trying to go around our child-protection law to force the state to pay for puberty blockers and gender-transition surgery for children,” Moody said in the press release. “These rules trample states’ power to protect their own citizens and we will not stand by as Biden tries, yet again, to use the force of the federal government to unlawfully stifle Florida’s effort to protect children.”
Nearly half of the states in the country have passed legislation banning sex-change medical procedures for minors. In May 2023, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill barring the “mutilation” of minors through sex-change surgeries and the prescription of puberty blockers for patients under 18.
The lawsuit argues that doctors who “refuse to provide experimental, sterilizing, ‘gender-change’ interventions to persons suffering from psychological distress — including minor children” will be at risk of losing their jobs due to the administration’s new rule. If allowed to take effect, Florida claims that the guidance would also “override” the state’s laws on the matter and “go far beyond the limits of Section 1557 and Title IX.”
HHS did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
