Dominican Sisters Challenge New York State’s Transgender Mandates
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The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne and The Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer (Rosary Hill Home) have filed a legal challenge in federal court against requirements from the New York State Department of Health related to gender identity policies in long-term care settings. The sisters refuse to comply with gender ideology-inspired state mandates at the expense of their religious liberty and conscience rights. Mother Marie Edward Deutsch, OP, the religious superior of the sisters, prayed and sought counsel before embarking on this lawsuit, but she could not violate the truth and contradict Catholic teaching in caring for patients or ask her sisters or staff to do so. New York’s Department of Health insists on enforcing a recent state law, “The Long-Term Care Facility Residents’ Bill of Rights for LGBTQIA+ New Yorkers and People Living with HIV,” that requires assigning rooms in health care facilities based on the asserted “gender identity” of the patient. Similarly, bathrooms must be open to whatever gender a person claims to be, and staff must use “preferred” names and pronouns regardless of whether they correspond to the individual’s biological sex. The state law even requires facilities to allow “a resident's right to associate with other residents or with visitors, including the right to consensual expression of intimacy or sexual relations, unless the restriction is uniformly applied to all residents in a nondiscriminatory manner.”
New York’s Governor, Kathy Hochul, and the leaders of the New York State Department of Health are named defendants in the case. The sisters first requested an exemption from the requirements as was granted to the Christian Scientist Church, but they received no reply. As members of the Catholic Benefits Association (CBA), the sisters are being supported by attorney Martin Nussbaum in this dispute. The CBA has successfully defended the religious liberty and conscience rights of member Catholic entities and Catholic businesses since 2013. Catholic bioethics and moral teaching are clear that the core tenets of transgenderism and gender ideology are false and contrary to the true anthropology of the human person. Catholics have a religious duty in conscience to reject the claim that a person can legitimately assert they are a different gender from their biological sex and force others to speak and act accordingly. Already in 2016 there were 31 “genders” recognized by New York, but there is little doubt they would be open to expanding the list almost ad infinitum. It is hard to believe that bureaucrats can be deadly serious about such things, but they are.
Gender ideology is no joking matter. The Hawthorne Dominicans, who have for over 120 years given completely free care to patients dying of cancer, could have their 42 bed Rosary Hill Home shut down for refusing “to bend the knee to an ideology contrary to their faith,” said Nussbaum in explaining why this lawsuit is so important. The nursing sisters are consecrated to Christ and care for their patients, striving to see the suffering Christ in them. The apostolic work of the Hawthorne Dominicans is a fruit of their life of prayer. They refuse to be bullied by bureaucrats and ideologues into betraying their basic beliefs. Mother Marie Edward insisted: “And it is an untruth to say that a male should go into a female patient’s room. You’re just trying to contort things, for whatever reason. So we have to stand by the truth of what has been taught to us in the natural law. It is not to be changed.”
I am reminded of Pope Benedict XVI’s prophetic words about gender ideology. He said: “This is the age of sin against God the Creator.” He was the first pope to confront transgenderism philosophically and theologically. Pope Benedict also cited approvingly the Chief Rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, who said that “‘gender ideology’ undermines the fundamental understanding of what it means to be a human.”
It is actually a modern form of a very ancient heresy called dualism that radically separates the soul from the body. Transgenderism claims that a person’s soul can be in the “wrong body,” and therefore it is “gender affirming” to give people cross-sex hormones and even sterilizing surgeries to cosmetically reshape their bodies to resemble their desired gender. The Catholic Church utterly rejects this, and most recently in the 7th edition of the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services affirmed in Directive 28:
Since “creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift,” we have a duty “to protect our humanity,” which means first of all, “accepting it and respecting it as it was created.” In order to respect the nature of the human person as a unity of body and soul, Catholic health care services must not provide or permit medical interventions, whether surgical, hormonal, or genetic, that aim not to restore but rather to alter the fundamental order of the human body in its form or function.
Please pray for the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne as they courageously defend their right to care for the sick and poor in the same loving manner they always have. The National Catholic Bioethics Center will be at their side as they do so.
Joseph Meaney, PhD, KM
April 14, 2026
Joseph Meaney received his PhD in bioethics from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Rome. His doctoral program was founded by the late Elio Cardinal Sgreccia and linked to the medical school and Gemelli teaching hospital. His dissertation topic was Conscience and Health Care: A Bioethical Analysis. Dr. Meaney earned his master’s in Latin American studies, focusing on health care in Guatemala, from the University of Texas at Austin. He graduated from the University of Dallas with a BA in history and a concentration in international studies. The Benedict XVI Catholic University in Trujillo, Peru, awarded Dr. Meaney an honorary visiting professorship. The University of Dallas bestowed on him an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters in 2022.