In Florida, a coalition of far-left groups is preparing to sue the state government over a directive that orders the state’s Medicaid regulator to ban coverage of so-called “gender-affirming” procedures.
According to Politico, the Southern Legal Counsel’s Transgender Rights Initiative announced on Wednesday their plans to file their case in federal court, where they will seek a preliminary injunction to prevent the ban from going into effect.
“We are trying to get this filed as quickly as we possibly can,” said Simone Chriss, a spokeswoman for the group. “We were expecting to have a little more time before this actually went into effect.”
Under the new rules enacted by Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), Florida’s Medicaid regulator, the Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA), will be prohibited from covering a range of treatments that allegedly help “transgender” people change their gender, including puberty blockers, hormone therapies, or gender mutilation surgeries. The AHCA finalized the rules on Thursday, and is set to put them into effect on Sunday. Florida will be the tenth state in the nation to initiate such bans on pro-transgender treatments by their state Medicaid regulators.
Chriss claimed that the ban will affect up to 9,000 people who identify as “transgender.”
“We really want to bring the best possible case and represent the interests of all of the folks who are going to be harmed by this discriminatory rule,” Chriss continued, while offering no specific details about the lawsuit itself.
In response, a spokesman for AHCA issued a statement declaring that “these attacks are clearly coming from an unscientific and partisan motivated organization posturing for a lawsuit against the rule,” and that the agency is “prepared to defend the integrity of our well established rule making process in court.”