Medicaid Transgender Surgery Pay Order Wrong, West Virginia Says

West Virginia’s ban on Medicaid coverage for gender-confirming surgeries should be reinstated because a federal trial court improperly failed to defer to the state’s decision not to pay for the procedures, West Virginia told the Fourth Circuit.

The state’s refusal to pay for certain medical services for transgender people “is not an issue of federal concern,” West Virginia said in a friend of the court brief urging the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to overturn a lower court’s decision that the state’s blanket ban on paying for “transsexual surgery” is unconstitutional.

Judge Robert C. Chambers, of ...