A classic strategy of bureaucratic activism is to create new rules by redefining terms in existing law. It’s very efficient. Instead of having the people’s representatives pass new laws, the people are simply informed of what their laws now “mean” — regardless of what they meant when they were passed.
Nowhere is this more evident or more dangerous than in the recent rush to include gender identity in the legal definition of sex.
In a reversal of Trump-era policy, President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services announced suddenly that it would interpret existing laws on sex discrimination to include sexual orientation and gender identity. Under the new rules, doctors will be required to provide gender transition drugs or surgeries to any patient suffering from gender dysphoria, whether the doctor thinks that action is the right course or not. Even suggesting alternate approaches could be forbidden for showing “hostility.”
Doctors who refuse to comply will face massive fines and may be compelled to cease practicing medicine altogether. This signals an ideological attack on the consciences of countless physicians, on the right of free speech, and on biology itself.
Doctors often disagree with each other about what treatment is right for a patient. That’s normal within the field of medicine. What is unheard of are laws that force doctors to administer treatments they don’t agree with. If two heart surgeons disagreed about an operation, the government would not force the dissenting surgeon to perform the surgery. Yet in the case of gender dysphoria, HHS is doing exactly that.
It’s a policy that tramples on physicians’ sacred right, honored in older and higher laws, to care for patients according to the doctors’ best medical judgment and the dictates of their conscience. Many doctors have taken an oath to “do no harm.” Only authoritarians could punish them for refusing to break that vow, and only ideological zealots could bar them from practicing medicine altogether just because they opt not to participate in a controversial procedure.
The policy also puts patients at risk. Physicians must speak and write about patients by their chosen identity, not their biological sex. This includes not only using their chosen pronouns but also rewriting biology in their medical records. Falsifying medical records can lead to life-threatening results, as treatments, procedures, and dosages often vary between men and women.
There have already been cases where patients who presented orally and on paper as a different gender received disastrous care because hospital staff didn’t realize what they actually needed. In one case, a child was lost during labor because the hospital didn’t realize the patient, who identified as male, was actually a pregnant woman. Such tragedies will proliferate if physicians are forced to turn patients’ records into cultural propaganda.
There can be no medical justification for such coercion. Rather, it is the product of ideological tunnel vision that can brook no dissent. Now, tragically, it is wielding the force of law.
Instead, we need dissent — now more than ever. The West is facing an explosion of gender dysphoria, particularly among adolescent girls. What our response should be is far from settled in the medical field. Already, though, evidence indicates that immediate and unquestioning transition is a dangerous course. Story after story is surfacing of girls who were rushed to transition and now regret the life-altering procedures medical providers didn’t hesitate to perform.
If HHS makes it illegal for doctors to question the speed and trajectory of this crisis, many of our most vulnerable patients might drive straight off a psychological cliff.
Fortunately, brave doctors are stepping forward to stop that from happening. Medical groups, encompassing thousands of physicians and represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, are challenging Biden’s HHS on its redefinition of sex and the disastrous consequences that flow from it.
Their argument to the court is clear and vital: Having bureaucrats mandating diagnoses is no way to practice medicine. It’s illegal, it’s dangerous, and it must be stopped.
Matt Bowman is senior counsel and director of the regulatory practice team with Alliance Defending Freedom (@Alliance Defends).
