CV NEWS FEED // The Department of Justice filed legal documents this week stating that state bans on “transgender” medical procedures for children are unconstitutional. The DOJ also argued against state efforts to protect girls sports from having to include biologically male competitors.
The DOJ’s legal briefs confronted lawmakers in two states in particular: Arkansas and West Virginia.
“Rather than rely on the judgment of medical professionals and evidence-based treatment guidelines, Arkansas has inserted itself within one of the most confidential and personal of relationships: the physician-patient relationship,” said one brief, as reported by the Huffington Post’s Ryan Reilly.
The DOJ wrote that an Arkansas law that “prohibits the provision of or referral for ‘gender transition procedures’ for any individual under eighteen years of age” runs afoul of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
The legal brief also cited nondiscrimination clauses contained in the Affordable Care Act, as well as an Executive Order from Joe Biden “that recognizes the right of all persons to ‘be treated with respect and dignity,’ ‘to access healthcare …without being subjected to sex discrimination,’ and to ‘receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation.'”
In its legal brief regarding West Virginia lawmakers’ effort to protect women’s sports, the DOJ stated that “Title IX of the education amendments of 1972 … and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment do not permit West Virginia to categorically exclude transgender girls from participating in single-sex sports restricted to girls.”
In a footnote, the Biden Justice Department explained what it meant by “transgender girls:”
The term “transgender” describes a person whose gender identity differs from the person’s sex assigned at birth. For example, a transgender girl is a person who identifies as a girl but whose sex assigned at birth was male. The term “cisgender” describes a person whose gender identity is the same as the person’s sex assigned at birth.
The two documents, coming from the highest law-enforcement agency of the United States, will likely add fuel to ongoing debates about the adoption of far-Left language in official Biden administration procedural settings.
As CatholicVote reported, President Biden replaced the ordinary word “mothers” with the term “birthing people” in his recent budget proposal — a choice of words that many women’s advocates found offensive.
Another source of controversy is the so-called “field of transgender medicine” itself, especially when applied to children.
Joe Biden’s Assistant Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine shocked many during his nomination hearings when he refused to back down on his support for prescribing puberty-blocking drugs and genital surgeries to minor children.
In fact, Levine did not yield even when Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY, confronted him with examples of doctors discussing “gender transitions” with children as young as three years old.