WASHINGTON—The Biden Administration has announced plans to interpret and enforce Obamacare rules that would force doctors and health care providers to provide puberty blockers and irreversible surgeries for patients identifying as transgender, including children. Emilie Kao, director of the Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, offered the following response:

“It is wrong to force a medical professional to do harm. Multiple federal courts have agreed and blocked this rule from going into effect. Medical professionals should be able to operate according to the scientific truth that there are two sexes and not be coerced into violating their professional judgment based on radical academic theories about gender. This decision by the Biden administration needlessly and dangerously politicizes medicine and threatens the conscience rights of medical providers.

“Litigation over this rule has involved treatment of gender dysphoria, not access to basic medical care like getting a vaccine shot, ‘fixing a broken bone or screening for cancer,’ as the Biden administration claims. Some of these lawsuits have come from the medical community who don’t believe that surgeries are sound medicine for treating gender dysphoria.

"The Biden administration’s actions are unlawful overreach, not health care protections. The Supreme Court in Bostock v. Clayton County did not rule on health care. But this transgender mandate will force medical professionals to administer hormones and even perform surgeries for sex reassignment that can be harmful to patients, according to the Obama administration's own panel of medical experts.”