The Biden administration said Monday it will provide protections against discrimination in health care based on gender identity and sexual orientation, reversing a policy of its predecessors that had been a priority for social conservatives and had infuriated civil liberties advocates.
The reversal is a victory for transgender people and undoes what had been a significant setback in the movement for LGBTQ rights.
The shift pertains to health-care providers and other organizations that receive funding from the Department of Health and Human Services. Civil rights groups had said the Trump administration policy would allow health-care workers and institutions, as well as insurers, to deny services to transgender individuals.
The reversal is the latest step Biden officials are taking to reorient the federal government’s posture on health care, the environment and other policy areas away from the conservative cast of the Trump era, replacing it with a more liberal stance.
Senior HHS officials said in a statement Monday that a Supreme Court ruling last year – and lower court decisions since then – gave them grounds to extend an earlier definition, adopted by the Obama administration, in an anti-discrimination section of the Affordable Care Act. That section outlaws bias “on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age or disability.”
Since the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, was created in 2010, an ideological debate has raged over what forbidding discrimination based “on sex” means. Obama administration officials had interpreted it to include protections for people who are transgender. Because of court challenges and injunctions, that interpretation never went into effect.
The idea of broadening anti-discrimination safeguards to cover LGBTQ rights was vigorously opposed by religious liberties advocates and other social conservatives who were a crucial bloc in former president Donald Trump’s political base.
In 2019, Trump officials in HHS’s Office for Civil Rights proposed a rewrite of the definition in a way that omitted protections based on gender in federally funded programs run by the department. The altered federal rule became final last June.
