Attorney General Alan Wilson announces victory against radical gender ideology in health care

(COLUMBIA, S.C.) – South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson announced a nationwide victory against rules forcing doctors to perform gender-transition procedures, with state Medicaid programs required to pay for them. On Wednesday, a federal court struck down the Biden administration’s new regulations implementing Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act.

“This is a big win for common sense and for constitutional limits on federal overreach,” Attorney General Wilson said. “This is another example of how South Carolina and other states fought back when Biden bureaucrats tried to illegally rewrite our laws to force radical gender ideology onto everyone.”

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi held that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) exceeded its authority when it issued a rule in May 2024 redefining Title IX’s prohibition against discrimination “on the basis of sex”—which Congress incorporated into the ACA through Section 1557—to include gender identity. HHS’s 2024 rule represented a disturbing federal intrusion into the states’ traditional authority to regulate health care and make decisions about their own Medicaid programs. Specifically, the rule would have prohibited health care facilities from maintaining sex-segregated spaces, required certain health care providers to administer unproven and risky procedures for gender dysphoria, and forced states to subsidize those experimental treatments through their Medicaid programs. In vacating the rule, Judge Louis Guirola determined that when Congress passed Title IX in 1972, "sex" meant biological sex and that federal agencies cannot unilaterally rewrite laws decades later to advance political agendas.

Joining South Carolina in fighting this in court, led by Tennessee and Mississippi, were Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Virginia, and West Virginia.  

You can read the decision here.