Not content with challenging the right of transgender people to have safe use of public restrooms and the right of transgender students to have equal access to public education, religious conservatives have now filed suit challenging an Obama administration ruling that transgender people deserve equal access to medical treatment.

Five states, a Catholic health network and other Christian health-care providers sued the federal government on Tuesday, hoping to block a new rule they say could require doctors to provide gender-transition treatments and procedures that conflict with their beliefs.

Religiously affiliated hospital systems and doctors, the lawsuit’s plaintiffs said, could be required to perform gender-transition procedures that they find morally objectionable, including hormone therapies, gender-reassignment surgery or hysterectomies for transgender men.

The regulation leaves doctors and hospitals in a very difficult position.

--Luke Goodrich, Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which filed the suit

Transgender advocates say the antibias rules are necessary simply to ensure transgender patients are able to access basic care in some states.

The states of Texas, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Kansas and Kentucky all joined the suit, along with several religiously affiliated health-care organizations, including the Franciscan Alliance, a Catholic health-care network in Indiana.

Travis Weber, director of the Center for Religious Liberty at the Family Research Council, which isn’t involved in the suit, said the Obama administration’s push on transgender issues makes the matter a “top echelon concern” for social conservatives.

So their anti-Obama agenda just happens to be a full-on attack on the rights of transgender people.

The administration—in laying out guidelines for health care and bathroom access at schools—has said that existing civil-rights laws barring sex discrimination extend protections to transgender people as well.

Conservative groups have argued this is a misinterpretation of the law, which protects only against discrimination based on biological sex.

The Supreme Court's decision in Price Waterhouse v Hopkins is apparently null and void in conservative circles.

Harper Jean Tobin, policy director for the National Center for Transgender Equality, said transgender people face discrimination in health care, including frequent denial of care for everything from cancer to the common cold.

The lawsuit is an attempt to slander and attack transgender people and prevent them from having access to health care, while pretending that the plaintiffs are the victims.

--Tobin

The American Medical Association, along with other major medical organizations, has said gender-transition procedures are medically necessary in some cases, and can help transgender avoid depression and other medical problems.

Treatment is often literally lifesaving.

--Sasha Buchert, Transgender Law Center

Religious groups had lobbied for an explicit exemption from the nondiscrimination rules on the grounds that providers shouldn’t be compelled to provide care they believed to be inappropriate.

The administration rejected that request, saying in the final rule, “We believe that the government has a compelling interest in ensuring that individuals have nondiscriminatory access to health care and health coverage.”

Thing is, these so-called religious conservatives refuse to believe that transgender people really exist (we are, to them, a hoax)...and if we don't exist, we need no medical treatment whatsoever, transition related or not.

It’s a very clear warning signal that religious doctors and hospitals across the country, if patients come in and request these procedures, and they cannot perform these procedures because of their conscience and medical judgment, they can be sued and exposed to massive liability.

--Mr. Goodrich

Or they could, you know, stop accepting federal payments for what they do provide...or cease practicing medicine (if a doctor) or close their doors (if a hospital).

The point of all this is, of course, to sustain their "religious belief" that being transgender is not a real thing, and that interfering with our ability to live healthy, happy lives, will force us to abandon who we are in order to conform with those beliefs.

Transgender people only have freedom of religion in so far as we adapt to the beliefs of others.