Shortly after the Biden administration issued a health care rule last May to try to prevent discrimination based on gender identity, Florida filed a federal lawsuit challenging the measure.
And as recently as Jan. 2, federal goverment lawyers were defending the rule in a legal brief. But after President Donald Trump took office Jan. 20, his administration dramatically reversed course on issues involving gender identity and transgender treatment.
That resulted Thursday in a federal appeals court approving a request from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to dismiss the legal battle, effectively giving a victory to Florida.
The move by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals came after U.S. District Judge William Jung in July issued a preliminary injunction to prevent the rule from taking effect in Florida. The Biden administration appealed the preliminary injunction; the Trump administration last month moved to dismiss the appeal.
The rule was designed to help carry out a federal law that prevents discrimination in health care programs that receive federal money. The law prevents discrimination based on “sex,” and the rule sought to apply that to include discrimination based on gender identity.
The rule and the legal battle came after Florida and other Republican-controlled states in recent years have made controversial decisions to prevent or restrict treatments for transgender people diagnosed with gender dysphoria. That has included barring Medicaid coverage for treatments such as hormone therapy and puberty blockers and preventing the treatments for minors.
Florida contended in the lawsuit that the rule improperly sought to override restrictions on the treatments and threatened money for the state and managed -care plans that help operate state health-care programs.
In granting the preliminary injunction in July, Jung wrote that Florida had “shown that it faces an imminent injury.” Plaintiffs included the state Agency for Health Care Administration, which runs the Medicaid program, and the state Department of Management Services, which manages the state-employee health insurance program.
“The plaintiff agencies and the health care providers they regulate must either clearly violate Florida law, or clearly violate the new rule,” wrote Jung, who is based in Tampa.
The Biden administration appealed, and its brief filed Jan. 2 said the rule “properly recognizes that gender-identity discrimination is necessarily a form of sex discrimination.”
The 51-page brief also said the rule “draws a careful line between denying gender-affirming care as the result of reasonable medical determinations — which is permissible — and denying such care as the result of animus — which is not.”
But on Feb. 18, lawyers for the state and the Trump administration asked the Atlanta-based appeals court for an extension of dates to file additional briefs, citing “intervening executive orders and to allow new leadership at (the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) enough time to evaluate how to proceed” with the appeal.
In part, the request cited executive orders issued by Trump that were titled, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” and “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.”
Federal government attorneys followed March 14 by filing the motion to dismiss the case. A three-judge panel of the appeals court Thursday granted the motion and ordered that the case be closed.
