Lying About Disabled People’s Welfare Is Wrong

By Meghan Schrader
Meghan is a disability activists and a member of the EPC-USA board.

Meghan Schrader

I’ve talked several times on this blog about the Texas vs. Kennedy lawsuit, because it threatens new protections against euthanasia and infanticide. It also contains critical new protections to help disabled people stay in their communities rather than institutions, as well as improvements to internet access, support for disabled parents, etc. These protections directly impact disabled people’s quality of life, declines in which contribute to euthanasia, suicide and/or medical neglect.

The Texas vs. Kennedy lawsuit takes the position that implementing the new community integration clarifications is “burdensome” to states. It asks the government to strike these regulations from the final rule and let disabled people shoulder the burden of being coerced into institutions for state convenience.

Alas, the Department of Justice, along with five other states, has joined a proposed resolution to the lawsuit in which the United States District Court Northern District of Texas would rule that the government must drop the community integration protections from the 2024 Final Rule. 

But I think that many EPC blog readers may not be aware of this.

To address this issue I have to mention the debate about whether the law should define gender dysphoria as a disability, but I’m also putting that issue aside for now, not because it isn’t something important that impacts vulnerable people, but to help EPC blog readers understand what the lawsuit actually says.

The original version of the lawsuit was partially precipitated by a section of the Final Rule that defined gender dysphoria as a disability and the lawsuit mentioned that, along with asking the government to vitiate all of the new protections in the Final Rule and Section 504 itself. Yet regardless of what one believes about whether Section 504 ought to define gender dysphoria as a disability, the President’s EO on gender identity issues specifically says that gender dysphoria is not a disability. That means that that provision of the Final Rule will not be enforced.

So, several states dropped out of the lawsuit and the lawsuit was amended to contest the rest of the Final Rule, especially its community integration mandate.

Since January of 2026, the lawsuit has not mentioned gender dysphoria at all; the text of the lawsuit makes this clear. Yet when agreeing to drop out of the amended lawsuit in May, Indiana’s attorney general wrote this on his Facebook page:

“With the Trump Administration’s swift action to reverse Biden’s unlawful expansion of Section 504, we have voluntarily dismissed our claims in a multi state lawsuit. Section 504 was never meant to advance a radical and woke agenda. It exists to protect Americans with real physical, intellectual, and developmental disabilities-not include gender dysphoria at the expense of those that need support.”

This statement is not accurate. The version of the Texas vs. Kennedy lawsuit that Indiana dropped out of in May 2026 says nothing about gender dysphoria.

Surely Indiana’s AG was aware of that, since it’s his responsibility to be apprised of the content of his own lawsuit.

Unfortunately, that statement seems like an attempt to hide the lawsuit’s contents from people in his political orbit who may agree that Section 504 shouldn’t define gender dysphoria as a disability, but might not be cool with coercing nonviolent disabled people into institutions.

Indiana’s AG is not the only government official erroneously claiming that the lawsuit was restricted to gender dysphoria; I’ve seen other AGs do it as well.

But aside from impacting disabled people who identify as all different genders and hold different beliefs about gender dysphoria-related policies, the lawsuit no longer has anything to do with gender dysphoria. 

It has to do with arbitrarily coercing disabled Americans of all socioeconomic backgrounds into institutions so that state officials can direct their energy and money to things other than community support. That’s it.

Lying is wrong, and lying about coercing disabled people into institutions for state convenience violates society’s moral obligations to persons with disabilities.