(LifeSiteNews) — A federal judge has ruled former President Joe Biden’s redefinition of sex discrimination to cover “gender transition” procedures violated the original intended meaning of the law.
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 provides a longstanding set of rules against sex discrimination in public education. In 2021, Biden’s Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) announced it would be interpreting both Title IX and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) to cover “gender identity” under the definition of “sex discrimination,” a restoration of an Obama-era policy that President Donald Trump had reversed in his first term.
The change provoked numerous lawsuits and rulings against the administration, and upon returning to power, the Trump administration restored a biology-based understanding of sex to Title IX, including threatening to withhold federal funding from states who cling to “transgender” policies that negatively impact youth and real females.
Yet the attorneys general of 16 Republican states continued their legal challenges to the Biden policy, and Just the News reports that, on Wednesday, Judge Louis Guirola Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi sided with them, ruling that Title IX’s definition of sex was never intended to encompass transgenderism.
“In the opinion of the Court, Congress only contemplated biological sex when it enacted Title IX in 1972,” the judge wrote. “Therefore, the Court finds that HHS exceeded its authority by implementing regulations redefining sex discrimination and prohibiting gender-identity discrimination.”
As a practical matter, the Trump administration is not enforcing the Biden administration’s interpretation of Title IX, but the ruling undermines lower courts and localities that may try to keep it alive.
“When Biden-era bureaucrats tried to illegally rewrite our laws to force radical gender ideology into every corner of American health care, Tennessee stood strong and stopped them,” responded Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti. “Our fifteen-state coalition worked together to protect the right of healthcare providers across America to make decisions based on evidence, reason, and conscience.”
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 on 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 suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “reassignment” procedures fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners 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 in favor of “transitioning.”
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”
