Steve Marshall sues Biden's HHS Department for mandating that taxpayer funds be used for gender-transition interventions

On Friday Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall (R) announced that Alabama was joining a 15-state lawsuit challenging a new rule by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that redefines the Affordable Care Act's prohibition against discrimination on the basis of "sex" to include "gender identity."

If allowed to take effect, the new rule would mandate that medical providers perform surgeries and administer hormone drugs to both children and adults for the purpose of gender transition without regard for a doctor's medical judgment as to whether that treatment is appropriate.

The new rule would further require that medical providers allow patients into sex-segregated spaces, such as parts of a hospital reserved only for women patients, on the basis of their gender identity rather than their biological sex.

Health care workers would also be required to use gender-affirming pronouns and would face punishment if they used biologically accurate pronouns.

This is part of the radical LGBTQ+ agenda that the Biden Administration is aggressively trying to force upon the country through a dramatic expansion of rulemaking authority and changing decades old rules by executive fiat.

"Despite repeated failed attempts, Biden's Administration continues to illegally mandate that medical providers provide gender-transition procedures or face harsh penalties," Marshall said in a statement. "Alabama and our coalition partners will not stand for this radical and unconstitutional behavior," said Attorney General Marshall. "In healthcare of all places, the reality of biological sex matters. The need to protect vulnerable children from sterilizing transitioning procedures matters. Of all the Biden Administration's misguided efforts, its campaign to replace biological sex with radical gender-identity theory may be the most pernicious because it is so obviously harmful and so obviously untrue."

The Mississippi and Tennessee Attorney Generals are leading this effort.

Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch and Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti announced the multi-state lawsuit challenging the new HHS rule that redefines the Affordable Care Act's prohibition against discrimination on the basis of "sex" to include "gender identity."

"Injecting gender identity into our state's medical system is a dangerous pursuit of a political agenda from the Biden Administration," said Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch. "Under this new rule, doctors and medical providers are forced to perform surgeries and provide gender transition care, ignoring medical judgment completely. I am proud to stand with Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti in pushing back on this reckless rule."

The Biden Administration's rule could have significant impacts on Alabama, Mississippi and other states that restrict the provision of gender-transition interventions to minors and decline to use public funds to pay for these procedures. Covered entities found non-compliant with this new HHS rule risk the loss of significant federal funding-including the loss of billions of dollars in state Medicaid funding designed to assist low-income individuals-and exposure to civil liability through private lawsuits. Mississippi enacted The REAP (Regulate Experimental Adolescent Procedures)Act, which prohibits a person from knowingly providing gender transition procedures to any person under 18 years of age and prohibits a person from aiding or abetting the performance or inducement of gender transition procedures to any person under 18. The bill also prohibits the use of public funds or tax deductions for gender transition procedures.

In 2016, the Obama Administration attempted a near-identical policy proposal prioritizing gender ideology over reasonable medical practices, even where medical providers believed gender-transition treatments or other procedures were not in the best interests of their patients. Eventually the federal courts declared that 2016 rule to be unlawful. The AG's office said that the States bringing this lawsuit expect the same result here.

Marshall's office warned that the Biden Administration's rule could have significant impacts on coalition states like Alabama that restrict the provision of gender-transition interventions to minors and prohibit the use of public funds to pay for these procedures. Covered entities found non-compliant with this new HHS rule risk the loss of significant federal funding-including the loss of billions of dollars in state Medicaid funding designed to assist low-income individuals-and exposure to civil liability through private lawsuits. The States sued the Biden Administration on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi.

Alabama joined the Tennessee and Mississippi co-led lawsuit, and was joined by the states of Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Virginia, and West Virginia.