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OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
6:30 AM – Saturday, October 25, 2025
A federal judge overturned a former Biden-era rule that protected transgender healthcare under anti-discrimination measures.
On Wednesday, Judge Louis Guirola Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi ruled in favor of a coalition of 15 Republican-led states.
The complaint was filed regarding Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which the Biden administration interpreted to include provisions for transgender-identifying people to receive so-called “gender-affirming care.”
The provision added gender identity to Title IX’s definition of discrimination “on the basis of sex,” which previously included discrimination based on sex characteristics and reproductive function. This rule prevented covered healthcare institutions from denying health care services and insurance coverage for treatment relating to gender transitions.
The group sued over the matter, arguing that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “exceeded its authority by implementing regulations redefining sex discrimination and prohibiting gender identity discrimination.”
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During President Donald Trump’s first term in office, his administration reversed the same rule made under President Barack Obama in 2016. Trump’s policy kept protections for race, color, national origin, sex, age and disability, but defined sex as “biological sex.”
This time around, Guirola ruled that a statute “cannot be divorced from the circumstances existing at the time it was passed.”
In the statute, the word “sex” is not specifically defined; therefore, it must interpret it according to its meaning in 1972, when the statute was first enacted, according to the court.
“When Biden-Era bureaucrats tried to illegally rewrite our laws to force radical gender ideology into every corner of American healthcare, Tennessee stood strong and stopped them,” Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said in a statement after the ruling. “Our fifteen-state coalition worked together to protect the right of healthcare providers across America to make decisions based on evidence, reason, and conscience.”
He continued, “This decision restores not just common sense but also constitutional limits on federal overreach.”
“In vacating the rule, Judge Louis Guirola determined that when Congress passed Title IX in 1972, ‘sex’ meant biological sex and that federal agencies cannot unilaterally rewrite laws decades later to advance political agendas,” Skrmetti’s office said.
The coalition included Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.
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