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A federal judge in Idaho ruled Tuesday that Idaho’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors violates families’ due process and equal protection rights under the 14th Amendment, and put the 2023 law on hold until a lawsuit against it is resolved. That’s a huge relief for trans young people and their families, since the law was set to take effect on January 1.
The 53-page decision, by US District Court Judge B. Lynn Winmill, finds that gender-affirming care is “safe, effective, and medically necessary” treatment, and, like several other federal court decisions, points out that the treatments are commonly used for cisgender minors, so prohibiting them for trans youth is discriminatory, you bigots in the Idaho Legislature.
Also too, as journalist Erin Reed point out in her dissection of the ruling, Judge Winmill charges full tilt at two earlier federal district court rulings that upheld bans on gender-affirming care passed by Tennessee and Alabama. We won’t hit every twist and turn of the arguments here, since Reed explains them quite clearly, but basically, Winmill says the judges in those two cases applied one of the insane new standards the US Supreme Court made up in the Dobbs decision (which overturned Roe v. Wade) too narrowly.
To meet the whims of the Alito Court, laws must be “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and traditions.” In the Tennessee and Alabama cases, judges in the 6th and 11th circuits, respectively, both accepted the states’ claims that banning gender-affirming care for trans youth was fine, because duh, Straight White Christian Patriarchal US America has no “history and traditions” of providing healthcare that lets trans people be their authentic selves, so the hell with ‘em, USA! USA! USA!
Winmill instead says, hey hold on a damn minute bigots and haters, the 14th Amendment is about protecting minority rights, and those decisions read even the new made-up rules too narrowly. We’ll just borrow Reed’s blockquote and her bold for emphasis here:
“As the Court sees it, the appropriately precise way to frame the issue is to ask whether parents’ fundamental right to care for their children includes the right to choose a particular medical treatment, in consultation with their healthcare provider, that is generally available and accepted in the medical community. And the Court has no difficulty concluding that such a right is deeply rooted in our nation’s history and traditions and implicit in our concept of ordered liberty.”
If you narrowly limit “history and tradition” to any particular treatment, Winmill reasons, then you “render the 14th Amendment largely meaningless,” because modern medical treatments like penicillin, corrective heart surgery, the polio vaccine, and boner pills certainly haven’t been around since the time the 14th Amendment was ratified, you fuckers (he did not add, and also I made up the part about boner pills, don’t trust me).
In a paragraph whose invocation of “original intent” would make Ketanji Brown Jackson smile, Winmill says it’s really a no-brainer: The Idaho law doesn’t protect due process or equally protect everyone:
In some senses, the answers to those questions are intuitive and obvious to lawyers and laypeople alike: Transgender children should receive equal treatment under the law. Parents should have the right to make the most fundamental decisions about how to care for their children. As it turns out, case law applying the Fourteenth Amendment tracks with our intuition. Time and again, these cases illustrate that the Fourteenth Amendment’s primary role is to protect disfavored minorities and preserve our fundamental rights from legislative overreach. That was true for newly freed slaves following the civil war. It was true in the 20th Century for women, people of color, inter-racial couples, and individuals seeking access to contraception. And it is no less true for transgender children and their parents in the 21st Century.
Winmill’s decision isn’t just a big win for trans folks in Idaho; it’s also a jurisprudential gauntlet laid down for the inevitable Supreme Court case that’s going to be necessary to resolve the tensions between narrow decisions like those in the 6th and 11th Circuits, and the more frequent federal court decisions finding — rightly, if you ask us, and you do — that the 14th Amendment protects the right of everyone to seek medical care.
You know, as long as they have the money and also aren’t people who have wombs, who have already been determined not to matter by the current Court. Oh, shit, yeah, that could be a problem going forward. Maybe just don’t bring that up as the case moves forward, ‘kay? I’m not even a lawyer, forget I said anything.
OPEN THREAD!
PREVIOUSLY!
[Erin In the Morning / Poe v. Labrador Memorandum Decision and Order / Idaho Capital Sun / Photo (cropped) by Ted Eytan, Creative Commons License 2.0]
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