Trump Must End the Obamacare Sex Change Mandate on Day 1. Oh, You Didn’t Know About That?

Over the summer, without much notice at all from the national media, President Obama’s transgender agenda quietly crept out of the locker room and into your doctor’s office, thanks to a largely underreported Obamacare rule.

The Health and Human Services transgender mandate, which went into effect in July, forces doctors to participate in sex changes if they conduct procedures that can also be a part of a sex transition. It does this by following the example of other agencies by expanding the traditional definition of sex discrimination to include people suffering from gender dysphoria.

“We believe that it is important to ensure that civil rights protections are extended to transgender individuals to afford them equal access to health coverage, including for health services related to gender transition,” reads a section of the federal registry.

So what does this “Nondiscrimination in Health Programs and Activities” mandate mean in practice? It means that a great deal of doctors are going to be subject to much coercion, courtesy of Obama’s administrative state.

Have you ever performed a mastectomy for breast cancer? Congratulations: You now have to perform sex-change surgeries for women who want to look like men, according to executive fiat. Ever performed an orchiectomy because a patient had testicular cancer? Ditto.

And this applies to child patients, too. Indeed, under the new regulatory regime, any doctor who has ever prescribed hormone therapy but doesn’t want to help a teenage boy look like a girl now stands accused of sexual discrimination.

And the regulators in charge don’t want to allow any room for dissent, either.

“[W]e decline to adopt a blanket religious exemption in the final rule as any religious concerns are appropriately addressed pursuant to pre-existing laws such as RFRA and provider conscience laws,” the registry reads.

Wait, you mean the same laws that were invoked to protect Hobby Lobby and the Little Sisters of the Poor? Sometimes you have to wonder if there’s somebody in Obama’s HHS who just enjoys suing people with traditional beliefs.

Now the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty is helping represent multiple clients in lawsuits in Texas and North Dakota stemming from the mandate, which they say (in similar fashion to the abortion and contraception mandates) violates the conscience rights of religious health care providers.

“No doctor should be forced to perform a procedure that he or she believes will harm a child,” reads a statement from Becket senior counsel Lori Windham. “Decisions on a child’s medical treatment should be between families and their doctors, not dictated by politicians and government bureaucrats.”

The distinction is worth noting because the HHS created the rule despite the American College of Pediatrics calling transgender conditioning child abuse in a paper earlier this year. Other research also suggests that a vast majority of cases of gender dysphoria in children will naturally resolve by adolescence’s end — without permanently altering the child’s life and body. But hey, they say that is what “progress” looks like, folks.

But the good news for religious people is that this can all be reversed by close of business on Jan. 20, 2017. As Congress prepares for the upcoming legislative session, there’s already discussion among Republicans on whether Obamacare should be fully or partially repealed, and how that should be accomplished.

This could get ugly, but fixing this egregious problem — just like removing the abortion and contraception mandates that have proven to be equally as damaging to conscience rights — is that it can be undone with a single use of the “pen and phone” that created it in the first place.

In addition to the skyrocketing premiums, collapsing exchanges, and host of other problems associated with the law, Congress now just has one more reason to completely scrap the system before spring. But, even if some less-than-conservative Republicans manage to misread the struggles of the American people and stymie a full repeal of the Affordable Care Act, at least President Trump could (and should) quickly eliminate the madness that is the transgender mandate.

Do it for the kids … and the consciences. (For more from the author of “Trump Must End the Obamacare Sex Change Mandate on Day 1. Oh, You Didn’t Know About That?” please click HERE)

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