The Department of Health and Human Services on Friday proposed a new rule that civil rights groups warn may be used to deny care to transgender patients.
HHS director of the Office for Civil Rights Roger Severino said the change will bring the regulations in line with what lawmakers originally intended, before the definition of gender was broadened under the Obama administration.
“When Congress prohibited sex discrimination, it did so according to the plain meaning of the term, and we are making our regulations conform,” Severino said.
Members of Congress, state governors, medical associations and civil rights groups immediately vowed to fight the proposed regulation.
“It’s about the right of every American to be treated with dignity when they walk into an emergency room, meet a new doctor or find the right insurance plan. If permitted, this rule will promote ignorance and hate that no American should have to face while seeking care,” said Mara Keisling, executive director for The National Center for Transgender Equality.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the highest ranking Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, called the change “blatantly harmful, discriminatory, and wrong.”
“Patients don’t need the ideological judgment of President Trump, Vice President Pence or anyone else for that matter — they need to know that when they seek the health care they need, they won’t be turned away because of who they are,” she said.
The proposal is part of a broader effort by religious conservatives in the Trump administration to define gender restrictively. The result has been a weakening of protections for transgender people.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development on Wednesday proposed a new rule that would allow federally funded shelters to turn away transgender people for religious reasons or force them to use bathrooms and sleeping areas that do not conform to their gender identity.
A March 12 memo from the Defense Department outlined a new policy that bans individuals with a gender dysphoria diagnosis who are taking hormones or who have transitioned to another gender to enlist. In addition, troops already in the military would have to serve according to their sex assigned at birth.
Under the Obama administration, HHS had redefined protections against discrimination on the basis of sex to include one’s internal sense of being “male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female,” as well to cover termination of pregnancy.
The Heritage Foundation’s Emilie Kao, director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, said that under that interpretation physicians could have to provide sex reassignment procedures and abortions, and that Friday’s proposed change undoes the federal “overreach.”