Ban on gender-affirming care for youths struck down
Judge rules law violated rights of Ark. minors
ATLANTA — A federal judge in Arkansas on Tuesday struck down the state’s law forbidding medical treatments for children and teenagers seeking gender transitions, blocking what had been the first in a wave of such measures championed by conservative lawmakers in the US.
The case had been closely watched as an important test of whether bans on transition care for minors, which have since been enacted by 19 other states, could withstand legal challenges being brought by activists and civil liberties groups. It is the first ruling to broadly block such a ban for an entire state, though judges have intervened to temporarily delay similar laws from going into effect.
In his ruling, Judge James M. Moody Jr. of US District Court in Little Rock said the law both discriminated against transgender people and violated the constitutional rights of doctors. He also said that the state failed to substantially prove several of its claims, including that the care was experimental or carelessly prescribed to teenagers.
“Rather than protecting children or safeguarding medical ethics, the evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients and that by prohibiting it, the state undermined the interests it claims to be advancing,” wrote Moody, who was nominated by President Barack Obama.
“Further,” he wrote, “the various claims underlying the state’s arguments that the act protects children and safeguards medical ethics do not explain why only gender-affirming medical care — and all gender-affirming medical care — is singled out for prohibition.”
The challenge to the law, which was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas and named several transgender children and a doctor as plaintiffs, argued that the ban violated transgender people’s constitutional right to equal protection, parents’ rights to make appropriate medical decisions for their children, and doctors’ right to refer patients for medical treatments.
The decision was hailed as a significant victory for the LGBTQ+ community, delivering a dose of certainty for transgender youth in Arkansas who had worried for nearly two years about losing access to puberty blockers and hormones. The ruling applies only to the Arkansas law, which Moody temporarily blocked before it was set to go into effect in July 2021.
Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said he would appeal the decision.
The case in Arkansas has drawn widespread notice because the decision is a first on an issue that legal scholars say will be percolating through the courts for years and could rise as high as the Supreme Court.
The Arkansas law aimed to prevent doctors from administering hormone therapy or puberty blockers to transgender people younger than 18 and also barred gender transition surgeries. Doctors who provide transition care could lose their licenses or be subject to civil litigation under the law.
The law’s authors argued that it was necessary because “the risks of gender transition procedures far outweigh any benefit at this stage of clinical study on these procedures.”
But opponents said that reasoning defied the position taken by much of the medical establishment, which has criticized such bans as government intrusion into treatments that are medically necessary. Some experts say that withholding gender transition care can carry dangerous consequences, including worsening distress for young people who already have a heightened risk of mental disorders and suicide.
During the trial, there was testimony from transgender children and doctors who worked with them, who described the transformative benefit of care that was administered responsibly and with extensive medical evidence.
“I’m so grateful the judge heard my experience of how this health care has changed my life for the better and saw the dangerous impact this law could have on my life and that of countless other transgender people,” said Dylan Brandt, a transgender teenager and a plaintiff in the case, in a statement.