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Two more state bans on providing gender-affirming care were temporarily blocked by federal judges Wednesday, this time in the states of Tennessee and Kentucky. (Yr Wonkette suspects that the judges colluded to issue their rulings on the same day, knowing full well how we always brainfart and mix up the two states’ names. Not today, Satan!) As Reuters notes, the rulings bring to seven the number of states where bans on gender-affirming care are now blocked, out of the 20 states where such bans have passed. (Forbes adds that 18 of the hateful things have been passed just this year). Every single one of them will be the focus of lawsuits, although some challenges haven’t yet been filed.
And every single one of them should fall, as plain violations of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. In pretty much all the injunctions so far, judges have found that banning medications for trans youth that remain available for cisgender youth is discrimination on the basis of sex, and no you cannot do that even for Republican Jesus.
As the Washington Post explains (gift link), the judges’ rulings in Tennessee and Kentucky block only the portions of the bans outlawing the most common treatments for gender dysphoria in trans youths, the parts of the two laws that
would have prevented transgender minors from receiving hormone therapy and puberty blockers, which the Kentucky court described as “appropriate and medically necessary” in some cases. In Tennessee, the judge did not go as far as blocking a ban on surgeries for minors; in Kentucky, the case did not directly discuss surgeries.
Since the vast majority of trans people don’t seek surgical care until they’re 18 or older, the injunctions will allow trans kids in both states to get the care they do need. In fact most of the rightwing panic over gender-affirming care has depended on deliberately conflating all forms of gender-affirming care with surgeries, when in reality the relatively small number of “top” surgeries performed for minors have been for older teens, and even those cases are rare.
Previously:
Adult Kentucky Lawmakers Really Stick It To LGBTQ Kids
The Trans Bans Keep Getting Sh*tcanned In Court!
In Tennessee, US District Judge Eli Richardson, a Trump appointee, wrote in his ruling yesterday that
To the Court’s knowledge, every court to consider preliminarily enjoining a ban on gender-affirming care for minors has found that such a ban is likely unconstitutional. […]
If Tennessee wishes to regulate access to certain medical procedures, […] it must do so in a manner that does not infringe on the rights conferred by the United States Constitution[.]
In Kentucky, where the ban on gender-affirming care was passed in March when the Lege overrode a veto by Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, US District Judge David Hale wrote that puberty blockers and hormone treatments are
“medically appropriate and necessary for some transgender children under the evidence-based standard of care accepted by all major medical organizations in the United States,” adding that “these drugs have a long history of safe use in minors for various conditions.”
Hale also added that the Commonwealth of Kentucky’s arguments attempting to rebut the claim that the law was unconstitutional presented “a number of superficial arguments to the contrary, none of which are persuasive,” and that its filing had employed “unnecessarily inflammatory language.” Imagine that!
Without Hale’s injunction, Kentucky’s ban on puberty blockers and hormone therapy would have gone into effect today.
Just to illustrate why these treatments are so important to trans kids’ health, the Post highlights the experiences of two of the seven Kentucky kids whose families sued:
For one minor in the case, a 14-year-old transgender girl, taking estrogen provided a “comfort and joy that her parents had never seen in her before,” court documents said.
Another child, a 12-year-old transgender boy, became depressed and suicidal when he started menstruating, “because of the mismatch between his body and his sense of himself as a boy,” the filing said. According to court documents, his parents fear that the ban — which would prohibit him from gender dysphoria treatment, including menstruation suppressants — will once again cause his mental health to deteriorate.
The second example is heartbreaking, and it’s precisely what Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr had in mind when she said that forcing trans kids to experience puberty with the sex they don’t identify as is “tantamount to torture.”
Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who’s running against Beshear this year, offered some of his own inflammatory language in response to Hale’s decision, claiming that the ban was merely a “a commonsense law that protects Kentucky children from unnecessary medical experimentation,” which of course gender-affirming care is not.
Both court decisions only block the bans while the lawsuits against the laws go forward, but such injunctions are only supposed to be issued when a federal judge is convinced that the party seeking to block enforcement of the law is likely to prevail in the case.
We don’t know how long this run of federal judges smacking down laws intended to hurt trans kids will last, but it’s certainly encouraging. We won’t be the least bit surprised if one of the states being sued manages to shop around for a compliant federal judge like the idiot who invented reasons to ban Mifepristone, but for now, the Constitution seems to be coming through for trans kids and their families.
[Reuters / WaPo (gift link) / NYT / Ted Eytan, Creative Commons License 2.0]
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