Paul Goyette (CC BY 2.0)
A protest in support of trans health care outside UI Health in Chicago, Illinois, February 2025.
It all began way back when Joe Biden was President. Shortly before the 2024 election, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) updated its regulations for Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. That’s the law which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance, as well as in programs and activities conducted by any federal agency.
In response, attorneys general from seventeen states joined in a federal lawsuit that sought to have the regulations overturned because the text of the updated regulations said that gender dysphoria could be considered a possible disability under Section 504. The lawsuit went for the legal jugular when it argued that Section 504 itself was unconstitutional.
Then, when the squatter currently occupying the White House moved back in on January 20, 2025, he brought with him an aggressive anti-transgender agenda. He also appointed the legendary doofus, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to be Health and Human Services Secretary.
What could possibly go wrong?
In December, HHS issued proposed rules intended to clarify the Section 504 regulations released by the Biden Administration. The Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), an organization whose mission is to “advance the civil and human rights of people with disabilities,” characterized this action as “the latest assault in this administration’s coordinated campaign against the transgender community.”
DREDF also said, “HHS is exploiting the regulatory process to advance a cruel and unlawful anti-trans agenda that this administration has sought to implement since Inauguration Day.”
A notice issued last December sets forth the government’s intent to stop recognizing gender dysphoria as a protected disability under federal law. DREDF says the new rules “would allow recipients of HHS funding to discriminate against people with gender dysphoria on the basis of disability.” They would also “prevent the use of federal funds to pay for essential health care for trans youth” and “bar trans youth from receiving needed care from hospitals that receive Medicaid or Medicare dollars—essentially all U.S. hospitals.”
Eventually, eight of the seventeen states withdrew from the lawsuit. But Alaska, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, and South Dakota joined Texas as it led the way again in the lawsuit of Texas v. Kennedy. The lawsuit says the Biden-proposed regulations exceed the “statutory authority” of HHS. It says states should be “free to decide how best to care for their disabled citizens.”
In other words, these states want the federal government to keep giving them money, such as Medicaid funds, but they don’t want the federal government to have a say in how that money must be spent.
If laws like Section 504 and the Americans with Disabilities Act don’t protect disabled people from being shut out of our communities because of the stupid, selfish, and uninformed decisions of those who make public policy, those laws are rendered pretty much useless. And that appears to be the point of this lawsuit.