State Attorney General Alan Wilson said Monday, Feb. 2, 2026, the state is no longer challenging a 2024 Biden rule that added gender dysphoria to a 1973 law protecting people with disabilities. The photo shows Wilson in June 2025. (File photo by Jessica Holdman/SC Daily Gazette)
COLUMBIA — Republican states have dropped their challenge to a 2024 federal rule adding gender dysphoria to federally protected disabilities.
The moves from Attorney General Alan Wilson and other GOP attorneys general come as the Trump administration finalizes a rule to undo the changes.
Since the Trump administration is doing what the lawsuit sought, “South Carolina is pulling out of the lawsuit,” Wilson said in a statement Monday. Other states are continuing the challenge on other grounds.
South Carolina was among 17 Republican-led states challenging the Biden administration’s rule change as overstepping the intent of a half-century-old law. The GOP lawsuit was filed in Texas in September 2024, four months after the Biden administration issued its changes.
Disability rights advocates opposed the lawsuit, arguing it could jeopardize the entire section of law that protects people with disabilities from discrimination. They are known as Section 504 protections, as per the section of the federal Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
In a joint status report last February, amid a public backlash, the GOP attorneys general clarified they weren’t trying to take away Section 504 accommodations.
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And under the Trump administration, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported that it would not consider gender dysphoria, defined as the distress a person feels when their gender identity doesn’t match how they look, as a disability.
“Our sole intention in the original lawsuit was to remove gender identity disorders and restore Section 504 to what Congress passed originally, so our work is done here,” Wilson’s statement continued.
Able SC, a group that advocates for the rights of people with disabilities, praised Wilson’s withdrawal from the lawsuit, calling the original legal challenge “deadly to people with disabilities.”
Section 504 bars any group receiving federal funding, such as hospitals and schools, from discriminating against anyone with a disability. For example, that means a hospital can’t deny a person with a disability an organ transplant just because they have a disability.
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“By stepping away, South Carolina made the responsible decision not to participate in an effort that would weaken disability civil rights,” Able SC said in a statement.
The case went on hold in February 2025, soon after Trump took office, as the attorneys general waited for promised changes in the rule and clarified that they were not looking to overturn the entire section but just the inclusion of gender dysphoria.
“We never asked the court to throw out Section 504 entirely,” Wilson said in a statement at the time. “We were challenging the Biden administration trying to force states to adopt woke gender ideology by trying to attach it to Section 504 as a condition for federal funding.”
Along with South Carolina, the other states that dropped out of the case are Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Nebraska, Utah and West Virginia, according to court filings.
Nine of the original 17 states are still pursuing the lawsuit: Texas, Alaska, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana and South Dakota, according to filings.
The continuing lawsuit seeks to overturn a requirement in the Biden administration’s rule change that says people with disabilities who receive federal aid, including government-funded health insurance, can’t be institutionalized or placed in a home or program where they can’t interact with people without disabilities.
The remaining states argue that would be impossible in some cases, such as when people with disabilities require specialized care, and cost the states millions of dollars.
Courtesy of South Carolina Daily Gazette
