This is just ugly.
Ramping up its fight over the rights of transgender people, Texas filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the federal government over a regulation prohibiting discrimination against transgender individuals in some health programs.
Texas, on behalf of Franciscan Alliance, a religious hospital network, and four other states are claiming the new federal regulation would force doctors to perform gender transition procedures on children and requested the court to block the federal government from enforcing the regulation. The federal rule on nondiscrimination in health care prohibits denying or limiting coverage for transgender individuals, including health services related to gender transition.
The lawsuit was announced by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is representing the Franciscan Alliance. It was filed Tuesday morning in the Wichita Falls-based District Court for the Western District of Texas.
The case was assigned to U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, who on Monday sided with the state and blocked the Obama administration’s guidelines to accommodate transgender students. Those guidelines say that schools must treat a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex for the purposes of complying with federal nondiscrimination statutes.
[…]
Among several legal claims, they argued that the new rule violates the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act because it compels religiously affiliated health organizations to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs. The federal government is “forcing them to choose between federal funding and their livelihood as healthcare providers and their exercise of religion,” the wrote in a court filing.
You can see a copy of the lawsuit here. Think Progress pulls out some of the highlights:
Essentially, this suit is akin to Hobby Lobby, except it objects to transgender care instead of birth control.
The complaint repeatedly refers to standards of care, and the need for states and physicians to be able to maintain “standards of care that rely upon the medical judgment of health professionals as to what is in the best interests of their patients.” Requiring doctors to perform procedures that they do not believe are in the best interest of the patient would turn “the venerable medical oath to ‘do no harm’ on its head.” Physicians should have the ability “to offer a contrary view” to HHS’s conclusions that transition-related treatments are no longer “experimental.” The plaintiffs in the suit believe that transition care is not only still experimental, but also “ethically questionable and potentially harmful.”
Building standards of care around this belief, the complaint assures, does not compromise patients’ respect:
Every person should be treated with dignity and respect, especially when in need of medical attention. The standard of care established in Texas, and around the country, enables patients to obtain quality healthcare as determined by medical professionals, and not those outside the doctor-patient relationship. The Regulation, however, usurps this standard of care. It discards independent medical judgment and a physician’s duty to his or her patient’s permanent well-being and replaces them with rigid commands.
Nowhere, however, does the suit acknowledge the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which has maintained research-informed standards of care for transgender people for nearly 40 years. The WPATH standards, first proposed in 1979 and updated several times since, are based on “the best available science and expert professional consensus.” They recommend affirming transgender people’s identities and recognize that gender transition improves their well-being.
The plaintiffs in the suit make no secret of the fact that they reject this science in favor of their own religious beliefs. For example, the suit cites CMDA’s “Transgender Identification Ethics Statement,” which takes the literal opposite position of the WPATH standards, because validating transsexual “desires” is “contrary to a Christian worldview:
In contrast to the current culture, CMDA believes that finding one’s identity within God’s design will result in a more healthy and fulfilled life. CMDA believes, moreover, that social movements which contend that gender is decided by choice are mistaken in defining gender, not by nature, but according to desire. Authentic personal identity consists in social gender expression that is congruent with one’s natural biological sex. CMDA recognizes that this traditional view has become counter-cultural; however, CMDA affirms that God’s design transcends culture.
CMDA’s statement also claims that affirming children’s gender identity and allowing them to delay puberty has “lifelong physical, psychological, and social consequences,” even though the available evidence says the exact opposite — that delaying puberty is safe and totally reversible.
Like CMDA, Franciscan similarly rejects the existence of transgender identities:
Franciscan holds religious beliefs that sexual identity is an objective fact rooted in nature as male or female persons. Like the Catholic Church it serves, Franciscan believes that a person’s sex is ascertained biologically, and not by one’s beliefs, desires, or feelings. Franciscan believes that part of the image of God is an organic part of every man and woman, and that women and men reflect God’s image in unique, and uniquely dignified, ways. Franciscan does not believe that government has either the power or the authority to redefine sex.
The suit claims that even providing “psychiatric support” as part of a medical transition would violate its “best medical judgment and its religious beliefs.” Even simply providing insurance coverage for such procedures would “constitute impermissible material cooperation with evil.”
I can’t even wrap my mind around this. Substitute “gay” for “transgender” in the paragraphs above, and ask yourself if this would come close passing legal muster, let alone common decency and medical ethics. And yes, this is the same judge who granted a national injunction in the bathroom case. Give Ken Paxton his due – he knows who the friendly judges are. The Current has more.
And what do you do about the male Hasidic doctor? Does he have to deliver medical care to women? Touch them, examine them naked? Or can he say, “very sorry, but you need to see another doctor, there are plenty other ones who can see you”?
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