OnMonday, The Becket Fund announced [advocacy site] it had filed suit [text, PDF] challenging a new Health and Human Services (HHS) regulation [text, PDF] on behalf of North Dakota and several Catholic organizations. The suit, filed in federal district court in North Dakota, alleges the new HHS regulation, which went into force July of this year, requires doctors to perform “controversial and sometimes harmful medical procedures ostensibly designed to permanently change an individual’s sex- including the sex of children.” The regulation changes the meaning of the term “sex” from a person’s biological sex at birth to “an individual’s internal sense of gender,” and Becket alleges that this change will require healthcare professionals to violate their “deeply held religious beliefs.” The National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) [advocacywebsite] maintains [US News report] that doctors will not be forced to administer procedures against their better judgment, but will be required to make sure that transgender people can get necessary treatment.

The challenge mirrors a suit [text, PDF] filed in August [JURIST report] on behalf of Texas, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Kentucky, and Kansas. Transgender issues have been a contentious objective of the Obama administration that has spawned legislation and litigation. In October, the Supreme Court accepted a case [JURIST report] concerning a transgender restroom policy in Virginia schools, and North Carolina garnered much attention when it enacted a controversial bathroom policy of its own [JURIST report]. In response, some states, such as Massachusetts [JURIST report], have signed bills into law affirmatively protecting the rights of transgender individuals, and the Justice Department has filed legal challenges [JURIST report] against the discriminatory laws.