A federal judge struck down a Biden-era transgender rule that had expanded federal anti-discrimination measures to include transgender healthcare. They wrote that the Department of Health and Human Services, under the rule, "exceeded its authority by implementing regulations redefining sex discrimination and prohibiting gender identity discrimination."
A coalition of 15 Republican-led states, including Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Virginia, and West Virginia, had challenged the rule in court. Judge Louis Guirola Jr., a George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, issued the ruling.
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, in a statement following the ruling, said, "When Biden-era bureaucrats tried to illegally rewrite our laws to force radical gender ideology into every corner of American healthcare, Tennessee stood strong and stopped them. Our fifteen-state coalition worked together to protect the right of healthcare providers across America to make decisions based on evidence, reason, and conscience."
"This decision restores not just common sense but also constitutional limits on federal overreach, and I am proud of the team of excellent attorneys who fought this through to the finish."
When Biden-era bureaucrats tried to illegally rewrite our laws to force radical gender ideology into every corner of American health care, Tennessee stood strong and stopped them.
— TN Attorney General (@AGTennessee) October 23, 2025
15-state coalition secures nationwide victory.
Read the release and order: https://t.co/ltV2E7igeW pic.twitter.com/pOdSAz2PH6
Skrmetti's office wrote:
HHS’s 2024 rule represented a disturbing federal intrusion into the States’ traditional authority to regulate healthcare and make decisions about their own Medicaid programs. Specifically, the rule would have prohibited healthcare facilities from maintaining sex-segregated spaces, required certain healthcare providers to administer unproven and risky procedures for gender dysphoria, and forced states to subsidize those experimental treatments through their Medicaid programs. In vacating the rule, Judge Louis Guirola determined that when Congress passed Title IX in 1972, ‘sex’ meant biological sex and that federal agencies cannot unilaterally rewrite laws decades later to advance political agendas.
The federal judge agreed.
The rule was originally issued under President Obama, reversed during the Trump administration, and later reinstated under President Biden.