South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson announced that a federal court has blocked new federal rules that would have required doctors to perform gender-transition procedures and state Medicaid programs to pay for them. The ruling, issued Wednesday by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, struck down regulations from the Biden administration that implemented Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act.
Attorney General Wilson stated, “This is a big win for common sense and for constitutional limits on federal overreach. 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 court found that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) exceeded its authority with a rule issued in May 2024. The rule redefined Title IX’s prohibition against discrimination “on the basis of sex”—which is incorporated into the Affordable Care Act—to include gender identity. The court determined that when Congress passed Title IX in 1972, “sex” referred to biological sex, and federal agencies cannot change the meaning of laws decades later for political reasons.
The HHS rule would have prevented health care facilities from maintaining sex-segregated spaces, required some providers to perform procedures for gender dysphoria, and mandated that states fund these treatments through Medicaid. Judge Louis Guirola vacated the rule, stating that federal agencies do not have the authority to rewrite laws in this way.
South Carolina joined with Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Virginia, and West Virginia in challenging the rule in court.
You can read the decision here.
