3,000 doctors sue Biden admin for right not to ‘transition’ gender-confused children

Thousands of doctors are suing the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) over its efforts to force health care providers into participating in the surgical or chemical “gender transitioning” of minors under the guise of civil rights “nondiscrimination.”

In 2021, HHS under President Joe Biden and Secretary Xavier Becerra announced that it would interpret and enforce federal health care and anti-discrimination law to apply to “sexual orientation and gender identity,” citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County that “sex discrimination” in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act should be interpreted to mean “sexual orientation and gender identity,” in addition to its original biological meaning.

Later that year, religious liberty nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed a lawsuit representing the American College of Pediatricians (ACP) and Catholic Medical Association (CMA), which together represent 3,000 medical professionals. The suit, which sought to ensure the rule could not be used to penalize anyone for refusing to subject minors to “gender-reassignment” procedures, was dismissed after the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a motion to dismiss, insisting that doctors’ conscience rights would be respected.

However, that case is now being revived and was recently argued before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, the Epoch Times reports.

“Outside of the courtroom, in their public statements, the administration has given every indication that they plan to enforce this gender-identity mandate as broadly as possible,” said ADF attorney Chris Schandevel, who is seeking an injunction that explicitly forbids the federal government from retaliating against those who refuse to “transition” minors. “They have given every indication that they plan to come after doctors, like our doctors, that we’re representing in this case.”

“We should be able to get a court to say that their rights are protected,” he continued. “Our doctors have every reason to fear that if they say no, that they’re not going to, that the federal government is going to try to take away their federal funding based on that conscientious practice of medicine.”

Among those indications is a March 2022 notice from the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) soliciting formal complaints from anyone who believes that they “or another party has been discriminated against on the basis of gender identity or disability in seeking to access gender affirming health care.”

Oral arguments before the Sixth Circuit took place on December 6. A decision is expected within the next three months.

Studies find that more than 80% 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.

This summer, the Biden administration’s own U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) released a since-deleted report that acknowledged “lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults are more likely than straight adults to use substances, experience mental health conditions including major depressive episodes, and experience serious thoughts of suicide.”

Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who attempted to live under a different “gender identity” before embracing their 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.

Some such physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an exposé last year 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.”

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