This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I-Heart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

And I'm Holly Fry.

Today's episode was inspired by some stuff that's been going on here in the United States for a while now.

Honestly, hard to figure out exactly when to start the clock on this one.

But in September of 2024, 17 states filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

HHS had issued its final rule implementing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

And those 17 states were challenging language from the preamble of that rule, and that language

indicated that gender dysphoria could be considered a disability under the law.

This lawsuit also argued that Section 504 as a whole was unconstitutional.

We ran a Saturday classic related to this in February of last year when it was in the news.

That was six impossible episodes from sippins to fishins, which talked about the 504 sit-ins,

which pressured what is now known as the Department of Health and Human Services to establish

the policies that would

implement Section 504 back in 1977. When all this was happening in the news, I also wanted to

find a new episode that was related in some way, but I wound up just focused on other topics.

That lawsuit was effectively dismissed in October of 2025.

Among other things, the 17 states that filed it dropped their argument that Section 504

was unconstitutional, and HHS issued guidance calling that preamble that mentioned gender dysphoria

...