The Justice Department is indicating it will intervene in a lawsuit filed in New York by Catholic nuns after the state forced them to house biological men with women.

The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne allege that the New York law requiring the housing of biological men with women violates the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause, and the DOJ agrees.

“States should take notice that they cannot require Americans to abandon their religious beliefs in the name of woke gender ideology,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said in a statement Thursday announcing the DOJ’s involvement. 

“For more than a century, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have provided free palliative care to indigent cancer patients in their last days. New York’s law would force these religious women to choose between their faith and their license if they wish to continue serving the dying.”

The DOJ’s complaint alleges that New York Public Health Law § 2803-c-2 violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause by forcing religious facilities to violate their beliefs. The New York law requires long-term care facilities to provide rooms to transgender residents based on their “gender identity” rather than their biological sex, and forces facility staff to use preferred pronouns and names.

Catholic teaching says that biological sex is God-given and cannot be changed, and doing so is a form of lying. The nuns who run Rosary Hill Home place patients in single-sex rooms based on their biological sex, and in these rooms provide “very personal acts of care such as painting women’s fingernails, combing their hair, changing them into fresh nightgowns, and arranging flowers in their rooms.”