Left-wing activists welcomed the new year with yet another challenge to the Trump administration. While most Americans enjoyed a quiet waffle brunch at home or tuned into the Rose Bowl Parade, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Foundation announced on January 1 that it had filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of federal employees, alleging that the Trump administration’s decision to cut gender transition procedures from federal health insurance plans constituted workplace sex discrimination.

On August 15, 2025, the White House Office of Personnel Management (OPM) informed health insurance carriers that “chemical and surgical modification of an individual’s sex traits through medical interventions (to include ‘gender transition’ services) will no longer be covered under the FEHB [Federal Employees Health Benefits] or PSHB [Postal Service Health Benefits] Programs.”

The notice sought to implement President Trump’s January executive orders “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” and “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.”

But HRC, writing in the voice of the federal employees, applied a far more sinister interpretation. “OPM’s categorical exclusion of certain gender-affirming medical care from insurance coverage is discrimination on the basis of sex,” they complained. “OPM’s policy that forces us and others to seek exceptions is further discrimination on the basis of sex.”

On its face, these contentions sound ridiculous. Applying the logic of the Supreme Court’s 2025 Skrmetti decision, the “exclusion of certain gender-affirming medical care” would discriminate on the basis of a medical procedure sought, not on the basis of an identity category. And admitting the existence of “exceptions” takes away the force of a “categorical exclusion.”

But hold your ridicule for the true culprit, because this challenge unfortunately does bear a sort of twisted logic of its own. For after years of fruitless transgender lawsuits, the left-wing litigants may have finally found favorable ground on which to fight: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

The reason why Title VII provides the most favorable legal ground to defend mutilating procedures is because this is the section of code whose text was mutilated by the infamous 2020 Bostock decision. In Bostock, six of the Supreme Court’s justices followed Justice Neil Gorsuch in finding that discrimination on the basis of transgender status constituted discrimination on the basis of sex. But they limited the effect of this patently absurd conclusion to Title VII. Lower courts have been less restrained, applying the same logic to other areas, with the effect of creating profound confusion.

It’s difficult to overstate the absurdity of the Bostock ruling, which FRC’s Senior Director of Government Affairs Quena Gonzalez likened to Roe v. Wade in its preposterousness.

“When Roe v. Wade was finally overturned after nearly 50 years, even pro-abortion liberals came out and said what pro-lifers had been saying all along, which is that Roe had been based on faulty legal reasoning and was a bad decision. Everybody knew it, but those who supported abortion couldn’t say so until it was overturned,” Gonzalez said in a comment to The Washington Stand. “Bostock is a similarly poorly-reasoned decision in which the court tried to have it both ways, by redefining ‘sex discrimination’ to include gender identity, but also only applying it only narrowly to employment law.”

The problem is, “Neither the legal questions spawned by redefining sex discrimination or the cultural forces pushing for that redefinition will ever rest,” Gonzalez guaranteed. “‘Gender identity’ is a purposefully vague and infinitely-expanding term that is designed to undermine the fundamental human truth that there are two sexes, male and female, so including this ticking time bomb in the legal framework for workplace sex discrimination can only have one of two outcomes: It will ultimately explode and overwhelm sex discrimination law, or it will ultimately be recognized as a huge mistake and excised from the law, just as Roe was.”

“The Biden administration demonstrated immediately the problems with Bostock by taking it over and applying it to many other areas of law,” he continued. “The Trump administration is pulling back some of those abuses of the law, and for that they are to be commended. But, ultimately, this is a question that will come before the court again and again, until they see the light and decide to side with reality.”

“As Deputy Health and Human Services Secretary Jim O’Neill said so eloquently last month,” Gonzalez concluded, “‘Men are men. Men can never become women. Women are women. Women can never become men. Children are innocent, and they need our protection. It takes organized efforts to deny these fundamental truths.’”

Once again, HRC is organizing such an effort.