Judge blocks rule on transgender health care

WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a new regulation that would roll back health care protections for transgender people.

Finalized days after the Supreme Court barred sex discrimination against LGBT workers, the regulation from the federal Department of Health and Human Services was to have taken effect Tuesday.

Monday’s preliminary injunction from U.S. District Judge Frederic Block in Brooklyn, N.Y., bars the administration from enforcing the regulation until the case can be heard in court and decided. Block indicated that he thought the Trump administration’s rule is invalid in light of the Supreme

Court’s ruling in June on a case involving similar issues in the context of job discrimination.

“When the Supreme Court announces a major decision, it seems a sensible thing to pause and reflect on the decision’s impact,” Block wrote in his order. “Since HHS has been unwilling to take that path voluntarily, the court now imposes it.”

Block was nominated to the federal bench by former President Bill Clinton.

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in June was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, who was nominated by President Donald Trump.

“An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex,” Gorsuch wrote. “Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what [civil-rights law] forbids.”

The Health and Human Services Department rule sought to overturn Barack Obama-era sex discrimination protections for transgender people in health care. Similar to the underlying issues in the job discrimination case before the Supreme Court, the health care rule rests on the idea that sex is determined by biology. The Obama-era version relied on a broader definition shaped by a person’s inner sense of being male, female, neither or a combination.

The lawsuit against the Trump administration rule was brought by an advocacy group, the Human Rights Campaign, on behalf of two transgender women. One of the plaintiffs is an Army veteran, and the other is a writer and activist.

The department said it was disappointed by the judge’s decision.