Penna Dexter

The Affordable Care Act, better known as ObamaCare, keeps on offering us new surprises. Throughout the ACA that Congress passed in 2010 was language granting the Secretary of Health and Human Services discretion to formulate rules to implement the law. In the years since, HHS has rolled out one radical implementing measure after another. The Department announced a doozie in May! This one forces doctors to perform gender transition surgeries on patients even if the doctor objects or sees such surgeries as physically and emotionally harmful.

This is a new HHS mandate that expands the definition of “sex” under ObamaCare to include “gender Identity.” It adds transgender people to the list of protected classes that must be offered certain federally funded health benefits on an equal basis.

HHS says that this means that a medical practice “specializing in gynecological services” who had previously declined to do hysterectomies on women presenting as men, would have to “revise its policy to provide the procedure for transgender individuals in the same manner it provides the procedure for other individuals.”

Five states plus a group of religiously-affiliated hospitals and physicians are suing the Obama Administration over this mandate.  They argue, first, that the Administration did not follow standard rule making procedures in issuing the mandate. Secondly, they contend that the rule violates doctors’ ability to exercise, not only their best medical judgment, but also medical scruples inspired by their faith.

The group filed their lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas. In recent days, this same court temporarily blocked the Obama Administration’s transgender bathroom mandate. The Administration cited that mandate when it issued this new one in May. Let’s hope and pray both of these decrees die swift and decisive deaths.

In forcing so-called “transgender rights” on doctors, schools, and the rest of the country, the Administration relies on a narrative that gender identity is sort of baked in and yet not necessarily the same as someone’s biological sex.. All kinds of policies are being forced on the rest of society to accommodate this way of thinking.    A blockbuster report has been released that gathers 200 peer-reviewed studies on this subject and has the potential to poke lots of holes in that narrative.

The report, published in The New Atlantis, is co-authored by two of the nation’s leading scholars on mental health and sexuality. Among its conclusions:

“The belief that gender identity is an innate, biologically fixed human property independent of biological sex—so that a person might be a ‘man trapped in a woman’s body’ or a woman trapped in a man’s body’—is not supported by scientific evidence.”

The timing of this report’s release could not have been better for this case. We should under gird this in prayer and be grateful that the great Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is leading yet another lawsuit against ObamaCare overreach.