No, Donald Trump did not take away discrimination protections for LGBT patients

Presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris recently claimed “if Donald Trump wins in November, he will once again implement policies that target the LGBT community.” Specifically, Harris asserted that during President Trump’s first term he “took away protections against discrimination for LGBTQ patients under the Affordable Care Act.” 

Harris appears to be taking her talking points from a 2020 dossier published by the Human Rights Campaign, a leftwing and Democrat-aligned LGBT group, on the Trump Administration’s supposed record on LGBT issues.

But, like many other claims from the Human Rights Campaign about President Trump’s record with the LGBT community, this one isn’t true. Let’s look at the facts.

Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare, prohibits discrimination within the law on the basis of “race, color, national origin, sex, age or disability in certain health programs and activities.” In 2016, six years after the law was passed, the Obama Administration issued a sweeping new rule redefining ObamaCare’s language on “sex” to include gender identity. The Trump Administration then reversed that rule in 2020 to return to the law’s original biological definition of “sex.” 

The context is important, as the rule was part of a broader effort by the Trump Administration to protect biological women and stop the legal reinterpretation of the word “sex” that has been used to justify a variety of controversial issues, such as housing women with biologically-male transgender inmates in prison or in homeless shelters and allowing biological men to compete in women’s sports.

Trump’s reversal of that Obama-era rule is what Harris appears to be citing when she claims he “took away” protections for LGBT patients in the Affordable Care Act. Yet there are two problems in Harris’ logic. 

First, it’s important to note that the language in the Affordable Care Act never specifically included discrimination protections for sexual orientation to begin with, nor did the Obama Administration’s expansive 2016 rule add them. The protections Harris is claiming Trump took away never actually existed when it comes to lesbian, gay, or bisexual Americans.

Harris thus appears to be specifically referring to transgender Americans, arguing that by reverting back to the biological definition of sex in the Affordable Care Act, Trump opened the door for discrimination against trans individuals. 

But that’s misleading. First, the Trump Administration’s rule was directed at protecting biological women as a legal class, not green-lighting discrimination for transgender Americans. Many Americans support both protections for transgender Americans and preserving the traditional biological definition of “sex” within the law. Secondly, LGBT Americans already have health care protections in other areas of the law. For example, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, also known as HIPAA, already grants broad privacy protections and rules between a patient and their doctor that make discrimination extremely difficult. 

That’s why much of the Left’s hysteria of “discrimination” centers around doctors denying hormone replacement therapy or sex-reassignment surgery to patients diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Not all physicians agree this is the best treatment, as there’s no evidence that medical intervention lowers suicidality in transgender patients. 

A doctor refusing to provide a service that in their professional opinion is not in the best interest of the patient may be upsetting to the patient, but it is not discrimination. 

Conclusion: Harris’ claim that President Trump took away Affordable Care Act protections for LGBT patients is false. Protections for sexual orientation never existed in the ACA. President Trump did reverse an Obama-era rule that expanded the definition of “sex” in the law to include gender identity, but that did not open the door for discrimination against transgender Americans.