Biden administration reinstates health-care protections for transgender people

President Biden.
(Image credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The Biden administration announced Monday the U.S. will once again ban health-care providers from discriminating against LGBTQ and transgender people on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

The move comes as a sharp rebuke of Trump-era policies that narrowed the scope of anti-discrimination provisions in the Affordable Care Act by defining "sex" to mean gender assigned at birth, reports PBS News. Biden's Department of Health and Human Services now restores the Obama-era definition — "one's internal sense of gender, which may be male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female." The new interpretation applies to any healthcare organization that receives federal funding.

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Brigid Kennedy

Brigid Kennedy worked at The Week from 2021 to 2023 as a staff writer, junior editor and then story editor, with an interest in U.S. politics, the economy and the music industry.