Nuns knock New York over transgender mandate

A group of Catholic nuns says New York state officials are threatening to shut down its ministry, although its members have cared for terminal cancer patients for about 125 years. The state says the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne must comply with state-issued LGBTQ mandates—which the nuns argue violate their Catholic faith—or face consequences.

“The penalties are not only dollar penalties,” said Martin Nussbaum, an attorney who represents the Catholic Benefits Association. “But the even more severe penalties for noncompliance are loss of licensure. … [Employees] would lose their livelihood.”

The order of nuns filed a federal lawsuit last week, claiming the state repeatedly demanded their compliance without responding to an exemption request, despite exempting another religious group. In the lawsuit, the nuns contend the mandates violate both their rights to free speech and to freely exercise their religion.

The Dominican Sisters operate Rosary Hill Home, a 42-bed nursing facility providing palliative care to low-income cancer patients for free. Around a dozen members of the order tend to patients in the New York facility. The order also staffs another nursing facility in Atlanta.

In March 2024, the Dominican Sisters received a letter from New York’s Department of Health warning them against failing to comply with the state’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Long-Term Care Facility Residents’ Bill of Rights. The law, passed in 2023, allows New York seniors to live their final days “free from discrimination of every kind,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul stated in a 2023 news release.

Under the law, long-term care facilities must assign patients to rooms based on their “gender identity” instead of their biological sex. Facilities must allow patients to use restrooms and wear clothes that align with their self-proclaimed gender identity. According to the nuns’ lawsuit, the state requires facility workers to refer to patients by preferred pronouns even when the patient is not present and use language to “create communities” affirming patients’ sexual preferences. The nuns say they must also post notices in Rosary Hill Home to affirm compliance with these requirements.

The sisters must also complete a training curriculum every two years. The training, developed by the New York Department of Health, gauges whether the nuns learned “cultural competency” in line with the state’s “gender ideology,” according to the lawsuit.

The state sent the ministry a total of three letters between March 2024 and January 2025. If the group doesn’t comply, it faces thousands of dollars in fines. According to Nussbaum, employees could also lose licenses and face jail time.

Nussbaum said the group had received zero complaints about such issues, so the letters from the state were surprising. The nuns haven’t even served a transgender patient, he added.

Last month, the Dominican Sisters wrote to the state asking for a religious exemption from these laws, requesting a response within two weeks. But the sisters have yet to receive any response, Nussbaum told me Thursday.

The Dominican Sisters told the state they can’t follow any of these mandates. The practices would violate their religious beliefs, they say, citing teachings from the Vatican that state sex can’t be changed or separated from gender. The state’s mandates require the “sisters to bend the knee to an ideology entirely at odds with their Catholic beliefs,” Nussbaum explained.

But the sisters emphasized they still treat all patients with respect and care. “We Sisters have taken care of patients from all walks of life, ideologies, and faiths,” Mother Marie Edward, general superior of the Hawthorne Dominicans, said in a statement. “We treat each patient with dignity and Christian charity.”

According to Nussbaum, the U.S. Constitution protects the Catholic ministry’s right to minister without the burden of these mandates in several ways. The First Amendment’s doctrine of church autonomy protects the group from government interference, he said, adding that the ministerial exception and free exercise clause further boost these protections.

Thus, the ministry has a religious right to be exempted from the mandate, Nussbaum said. According to the lawsuit, the state has already granted an exemption to institutions run by the Church of Christ, Scientist—a non-Christian religious sect that promotes metaphysical healing over medical intervention. The mandates don’t require compliance from organizations whose “teachings include reliance on spiritual means through prayer alone for healing.”

Because the state gives an exception to these mandates to one religious organization, Nussbaum said the state can’t have any reasonable justification to deny an exception to the Dominican Sisters.

WORLD reached out to the New York State Department of Health for comment on the lawsuit but did not hear back prior to publication.

Brad Jacob, an associate dean at Regent University School of Law, said the state has no legal defense for enforcing these mandates against the Dominican Sisters. The Supreme Court has upheld the religious and speech rights of Christian workers in multiple LGBTQ-focused cases, he noted, citing cases like Chiles v. Salazar and Mirabelli v. Bonta.

“There’s no way the nuns are going to lose this case,” Jacob said. “The idea that you could go after, for heaven’s sake, a bunch of nuns caring for dying people … because they refuse to use preferred pronouns is just silly.”

Sister Stella Mary, administrator of Rosary Hill Home, said in a statement that the nuns need the court to provide them with relief from the law so they can keep fulfilling their ministry’s “sacred obligation.” She said the Dominican Sisters’ foundress charged them to ensure that those who are dying are “as comfortable and happy as if their own people had kept them and put them into the very best bedroom.”

Nussbaum emphasized that the nuns don’t want to get tied up in a lawsuit but just want to be able to carry out their mission.

“They’re not culture warriors. They don’t want this,” he said. “They want to do their work. It’s a serious distraction from their work because they’re focused on being the healing ministry of Christ to people in their last days.”