A federal judge officially vacated another Biden-era Title IX regulation last month. Congress passed Title IX in 1972 to prohibit sex-based discrimination. Title IX has traditionally been used to provide equal opportunities for women and girls in education. However, the Biden administration twisted a provision that prohibited sex-based discrimination to include protections for “sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics.”

Many conservatives warned of the dangers of the Title IX rewrite as applied to education, but the rewrite also had implications for health care. In Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act of 2010, Congress prohibited sex discrimination as defined by Title IX. Thus, as Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti put it, “the [new HHS] 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.”

Tennessee and 14 other states sued to stop the regulation from taking effect. Last Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola ruled against the Health and Human Services Department rewrite. Guirola found that “HHS exceeded the scope of its statutory authority” in the Title IX rewrite. The HHS rule is now vacated nationwide.