The Republican attorneys general of Mississippi and Tennessee announced Friday that they are part of a multistate lawsuit challenging a new Biden administration rule that redefines Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act’s prohibition against discrimination based on “sex” to include “gender identity.”

The rule change by the Department of Health and Human Services “is the latest effort by the Biden Administration to enshrine sweeping gender-identity mandates without congressional consent,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed Thursday at U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Mississippi.

The rule would require medical providers to perform surgeries and administer hormone drugs to children and adults for the purpose of gender transition, without regard for a doctor’s medical judgment as to whether that treatment was appropriate, according to a news release from the office of Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch.

The rule would further require medical providers to allow patients into sex-segregated spaces, such as parts of a hospital reserved only for women patients, based on their gender identity rather than their biological sex. It also would require every healthcare worker to use gender identity pronouns and punish providers for the use of biologically accurate pronouns.

“Injecting gender identity into our state’s medical system is a dangerous pursuit of a political agenda from the Biden administration,” Fitch said in the news release. “Under this new rule, doctors and medical providers are forced to perform surgeries and provide gender transition care, ignoring medical judgment completely.

Tennessee Attorney General Jason Skrmetti said in a news release the lawsuit is sending a message to the Biden administration that it has no legal authority to “impose this radical ideological agenda on American health care.”

“While countries across Europe are banning or drastically limiting irreversible transition treatments for kids after careful review of the medical evidence, the Biden administration wants to illegally force every healthcare provider in America to adopt the most extreme version of gender ideology,” Skrmetti said. “Neither the United States Constitution, nor Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, nor our long-established system for state regulation of the practice of medicine allow this.

“In America, the people’s elected representatives make the laws, and any effort by a federal agency to usurp that power is an assault on our constitutional order.”

Tennessee and Mississippi are joined in the lawsuit by Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Newsmax reached out to the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services for comment.

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