Late last week, the Biden administration announced it had finalized federal rules protecting trans people from discrimination in health care facilities. It’s the latest move the White House has taken to try to stem the relentless attacks on access to gender-affirming care by red-state legislatures over the last few years.
The rule resets Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which protects patients from discrimination based on sex, to include gender identity. President Joe Biden’s version of the rule returns the protections to what they were when the law was initially implemented by the Obama administration in 2016. The restored rule brings the landmark health care law in alignment with how the conservative Supreme Court defined sex discrimination in Bostock v. Clayton County, a 2020 ruling that banned employment discrimination against LGBTQ people.
The 2024 US Trans Survey showed that 24% of all trans people did not see a doctor when they needed to in the last 12 months due to fear of mistreatment.
Biden’s decision is a small but important step in the fight back against the onslaught of right-wing attacks in conservative state legislatures. But it’s a far cry from the guaranteed protections trans people need.
In 2018, the Trump administration finalized its own rule to define sex as sex assigned at birth, ostensibly legalizing discrimination against trans people by medical providers. The back-and-forth between successive Democratic and Republican presidencies has left trans people in legal limbo on the federal level as the national political rhetoric against us has ramped up to extremes over recent years.
The renewed rule gives Biden’s Health and Human Services agency more leverage to punish health care providers and state health policies that discriminate against trans people. It also gives the agency and plaintiffs in federal lawsuits an additional basis to sue