DOJ joins with New York nuns fighting transgender law

Federal prosecutors planned to join a lawsuit brought by Roman Catholic nuns against a New York state law requiring the sisters’ hospice program to house biological men together with women. The state’s law violated the Constitution’s equal protection of religious groups, according to a Thursday statement from the Department of Justice.

What are the facts of the case? The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne operate a skilled nursing facility providing free care to indigent cancer patients in their final days, according to the DOJ. Rosary Hill Home has welcomed all patients and operated with the Catholic belief that biological sex is God-given. The sisters believe biological sex can’t morally be changed, and that identifying a person as another sex constitutes lying and is therefore religiously prohibited, prosecutors added. They filed their lawsuit in April 2026.

A New York public health law requires long-term care facilities to assign rooms to transgender residents based on their chosen gender identity rather than their biological sex. The law also required facility staff to use names and pronouns reflecting the residents’ self-identified genders rather than their biological sex, according to the DOJ.

Federal prosecutors took issue with the state law’s lack of a religious exemption. The law only allows a facility to refuse opposite-sex room assignments if a secular doctor judged that the assignment would cause psychological harm to the patient’s roommate, according to the DOJ.

The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have run a free hospice care program for over a century, noted DOJ Civil Rights Division Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon. Now, New York’s law would force religious women to choose between honoring their faith and having their license to serve the dying revoked, she said. States can’t force Americans to abandon religious beliefs for the sake of woke gender ideology, Dhillon added.