By K Walker
A transgender man – i.e., a person who was born female but identifies as male – is suing a Catholic hospital for refusing to perform a hysterectomy, citing “gender identity” discrimination. The lawsuit cites a recent Supreme Court decision that redefined sex to include “gender identity.”
The plaintiff, Jesse Hammons, 33, was seeking a hysterectomy as treatment for gender dysphoria. The hospital, University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center, argued that it would be unethical to remove a healthy, female reproductive organ and canceled the surgery, which had been scheduled for Jan. 6.
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Hammons claims that the hysterectomy would not have been canceled if it had been for a diagnosis other than gender dysphoria. He contends that the surgery would have helped eliminate the production of estrogen, thus drastically improving his mental health.
Unsurprisingly, the ACLU has added its two cents, the Catholic News Agency reports:
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland July 16, claims St. Joseph’s Medical Center violated the equal protection clause under the Fourteenth Amendment and anti-discrimination provisions in the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
The American Civil Liberties Union is involved in the case. It has been engaged in a decades-long crusade against Catholic hospitals, often objecting that they will not provide abortions, which Catholic teaching recognizes as killing the unborn child.
In recent years, it has backed efforts to force compliance with LGBT demands. As CNA has previously reported, the legal group is a beneficiary of a major patronage system seeking to classify religious freedom protections as illegally discriminatory where religion conflicts with LGBT or pro-abortion rights demands.
In June, the Supreme Court rules 6-3 that LGBT workers are protected from job discrimination. Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion which essentially denied that there were differences between men and women. In his definition of discrimination, Gorsuch gave this example:
… [T]ake an employer who fires a transgender person who was identified as a male at birth but who now identifies as a female. If the employer retains an otherwise identical employee who was identified as female at birth, the employer intentionally penalizes a person identified as male at birth for traits or actions that it tolerates in an employee identified as female at birth. Again, the individual employee’s sex plays an unmistakable and impermissible role in the discharge decision.
Josh Hammer, who teaches at the University of Chicago Law School and is Of Counsel for First Liberty Institute, slammed Gorsuch in a piece in the New York Post, writing:
In Bostock v. Clayton County, the majority informed us that the interpretation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, held unchallenged between its enactment and the year 2017, was, in fact, erroneous. The statute’s prohibition against employment discrimination on the basis of sex, Gorsuch told us, extends to “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”
This isn’t textualism. It’s ivory-tower liberalism. And it’s completely at odds with the Supreme Court’s longstanding dictum that Congress, in drafting statutes, won’t inscribe a hidden meaning in otherwise plain language: As Justice Samuel Alito sharply noted in dissent, “sex,” in 1964, meant biological sex — man and woman — not orientation and certainly not subjective gender identity.
Cross posted at ClashDaily
