(LifeSiteNews) — West Virginia may enforce its ban on funding gender “transition” surgeries through Medicaid, a three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled Wednesday.
Reuters reports that the full court had struck down the law in 2024, calling it discrimination (with all three judges of Wednesday’s panel having dissented). In summer 2025, however, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s outright ban on gender-related procedures for minors, in the process ordering the 4th Circuit to reconsider its rulings against other laws on the subject, including West Virginia’s.
“It is not irrational for a legislature to encourage citizens to appreciate their sex and not become disdainful of their sex by refusing to fund experimental procedures that may have the opposite effect,” Judge Julius Richardson wrote in Wednesday’s reversal, which cited the Supreme Court’s directive extensively.
“Every dollar spent on these unproven procedures takes away funding that could be used to treat cancer, heart disease and diabetes,” responded West Virginia Attorney General John McCuskey, adding that so-called “gender transitions” are “non-essential.”
A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed upon them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically-transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners, individuals who attempted “transitioning” before regretting it and returning to live according to their biological sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution.
“Gender-affirming” physicians, i.e., doctors who confirm a person in his false gender identity, have also been caught on video admitting to more privately beneficial motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, in which Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”
Last May, West Virginia Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey strengthened the state’s posture against the “transitioning” of minors by signing a law to revoke the medical license of any physician that prescribes surgical or chemical “transitions” to any minor, as well as banning puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones from being prescribed via telehealth appointments.
