State Laws Banning ‘Experimental Sex-Change Treatments’ for Children To Remain in Force, Appeals Court Rules
The court rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that transgender people are “politically powerless,” citing broad support, and dismissed their parental rights argument: “becoming a parent does not create a right to reject democratically enacted laws.”
A federal appeals court refused to block two state laws banning “gender-affirming care” for minors. The court declined to issue a preliminary injunction blocking the Kentucky and Tennessee laws restricting the use of puberty blockers, hormone therapies, and surgical procedures in cases of gender dysphoria in minors.
The decision allows these laws to remain in effect while challenges continue in the lower courts, both of which had issued preliminary injunctions blocking the laws, and comes less than a month after another federal appeals court rejected a similar challenge to an Alabama law.
The ACLU and other groups representing the plaintiffs decried the ruling as “a devastating result for transgender youth and their families in Tennessee and across the region.”
Daily Wire personality and conservative commentator Matt Walsh praised the decision as a “devastating blow to the trans cult”:
Impossible to overstate the importance of the 6th Circuit court upholding child mutilation bans in Tennessee and Kentucky. Absolutely devastating blow to the trans cult. The ruling tears their agenda apart piece by piece. Another major sign that we are winning this fight.
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) September 29, 2023
Earlier this year, the same court rejected emergency appeals asking the court to block the Kentucky and Tennessee laws. The court ordered an expedited review of the matter before making a final decision on the preliminary injunction, as Legal Insurrection reported.
The court’s final decision yesterday provided a more thorough analysis of the legal issues, which included due process, parental rights, equal protection, and allegations of sex-based discrimination.
Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron praised the decision as a victory “in his fight to protect Kentucky children from experimental sex-change treatments.”
Due process and parental rights
The court rejected the argument that due process rights supported the plaintiffs’ challenge. The court noted that regulation of medical treatments is commonplace at the federal and state levels and does not ordinarily trigger due process concerns.
Courts, the majority argued, owe deference to medical regulatory bodies and legislatures, particularly where novel treatments are concerned.
The court rejected the plaintiffs’ parental rights argument, too: “becoming a parent does not create a right to reject democratically enacted laws” concerning “reasonably banned treatments.”
The court also distinguished what the plaintiffs sought—”an affirmative right to specific treatments”— from the more widely recognized “right to refuse treatment,” noting the latter comported with “longstanding traditions” while the former did not.
Equal protection and sex-based discrimination
The plaintiffs argued a ban on “gender-affirming care” necessarily implicated sex-based discrimination because such bans restrict care by reference to sex. The court rejected this argument, noting sex discrimination does not occur merely because a law regulates a procedure “unique to one sex or the other.”
Moreover, the court found the laws at issue restricted the same procedure—”gender-affirming care”—for both sexes, further weakening the claim of sex discrimination.
The court continued its equal protection analysis by noting that transgender people are not part of an immutable group because transgender status cannot be definitively determined. The presence of “detransitioners,” the court found, also cut against the immutability claim.
The court then rejected the argument that transgender people are “politically powerless,” noting they had the support of President Joe Biden, the Department of Justice, more than 20 states, and major medical organizations. Others highlighted this conclusion at odds with the conventional marginalization narrative:
tonight, in addition to upholding TN's law against child castration, the Sixth Circuit told trans activists that they are not 'marginalized'. they are, in fact, backed by the feds, big Pharma, and medical orgs. And they were told: none of that overrules the will of people. pic.twitter.com/OZSdfDnBvX
— Gregg Re (@gregg_re) September 29, 2023
The court also found a lack of animus motivating the laws, finding Kentucky and Tennessee had “legitimate concerns in mind” and “[a] fair-minded legislature could review the evidence in the area and call for pause, demanding more proof that these procedures are safe.”
The court highlighted the fact that the challenged laws only applied to minors, an unlikely limitation if animus toward transgender people motivated the legislatures.
Rounding out the analysis, the court found the laws drew rational lines “because banning puberty blockers and hormones for some purposes,” such as protecting children, “and not for other purposes,” like treating congenital defects, was rational.
One judge dissented from the decision. The judge argued the law was clear “discriminat[ion] based on sex and gender conformity” that “intrude[d] on the well-established province of parents to make medical decisions for their minor children,” who are “assigned a sex, either male or female” at birth.
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I cannot imagine how any ethical person could come up with any kind if excuse to allow, let alone support, the widespread “gender affirming care” for children. It is a clear statement of how far we have fallen as a society that we would even consider this.
Dr. Mengele and his kind were not, and ARE not, as scarce as people want to believe. And as for Lupron, I went through two years of it, every three months. Fine, My prostate cancer has not recurred. But things in “that department” are a total mess and it often causes me some sadness.
“transgender people are not part of an immutable group because transgender status cannot be definitively determined. The presence of “detransitioners,” the court found, also cut against the immutability claim.”
Are you “born that way” or are you “free to choose?” Both, obviously, whichever serves their purposes at the moment.
Another important win. Running away from the trans ideology confrontation that the trans folks and their ideological allies insist upon prevailing is not the answer. Pushback against it and what was universally accepted common sense until ten minutes ago will prevail.
I went to my first meeting of Moms for Liberty yesterday
Dear God, the things I heard happening in this once very conservative county
It will simply take everything we have to roll back the evil
Everything
I guess they didn’t kill enough children with the fire
Hawaiian Judges Block Anti-Castration/Masectomy Bill From Taking Effect, and Claim That the First Amendment Demands that Children Be Expoed to Raunchy Drag-Queen Shows Featuring Simulated Anal Sex
—Disinformation Expert Ace
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/montana-judge-temporarily-blocks-ban-transgender-surgeries-medical-intervention-minors
https://nypost.com/2023/09/26/us-judge-throws-out-texas-ban-on-drag-acts-calls-it-unconstitutional/
Evil is everywhere, how the hell sid we not notice?
“t has never, ever been claimed before that pornographers had a right to sell porn to children. This “judge” just claimed that.
Adults have right to porn, yes.
Children do not.
…
The office of the Texas attorney general defended the law, which, among other restrictions, banned “the exhibition of sexual gesticulations using accessories or prosthetics that exaggerate male or female sexual characteristics” in public, or in venues where people under 18 may see it.
Violations could be punished by fines and a jail sentence of up to one year.
Texas lawmakers said the law was needed to protect children from seeing “sexually explicit” content.”
Aceofspadeshq
It’s going to take everyday, ordinary Citizens becoming aware and then involved in fixing the issues of their own municipal govt, county govt and State govt. All the wailing and moaning about DC doesn’t get a damn thing done to fix what’s wrong in our own backyards. Very glad to see you have come to this realization or at least on the precipice of it if not yet fully embraced.
All of us need to keep this truth in mind and focus on doing the maximum we can do locally to personally pushback against the Cray Cray policies of the leftist totalitarians. Then if we have time, energy and funding left over when we have defeated the local dragons we can devote the remainder of our time, energy, money and focus towards defeating the DC swamp.
I’m so old, I remember when even the Left was against FGM.
That’s when they cared about women; real women have been sold out for the transgender cult.
The vile Dhimmi-crats got off that bandwagon when they realized that African Muslims are the biggest practitioners of FGM. They’re incapable of criticizing Muslims for any behavior, much less black Muslims.
Parental Rights to permanently damage your kids with irreversible drugs, shots and surgery but no parental right to keep groomers out of schools, porn from the library, know if your kid changes pronouns or wants an abortion.
I’m not that smart but I’m even more confused than normal at these contradictions
You’re confused because you ARE normal…
Sex is observed at birth, not assigned.
Or… the Court could have simply asked if body parts do not affirm a gender then how does mutilating those parts affirm a gender?
But that kind of thinking fits right in with demanding people be vaccinated to protect the vaccinated from the thing that the vaccine is supposed to protect against.
I don’t care what parts you want cut off: your DNA still determines your sex (or gender, or whatever new word the Socialist-Progressives would like put into Webster’s).
Exploiting, indoctrinating, manipulating and mutilating/chemically damaging emotionally vulnerable and impressionable kids and teens via the “trans” ideology and the euphemistically and dishonestly characterized “gender-affirming care” are what are fairly called “child abuse” and “assault,” by rational and morally upright people. The vile and evil Dumb-o-crats have descended into an abyss of moral and cultural rot. They appear beyond reason and moral probity. It’s up to the rest of us to defend kids and teens from this evil.
The “gender affirming” mutilations are a part of the Democrat socialist War on Children: abortion, child sex trafficking, abysmal schools, wide open borders with fentanyl pouring into the country and undermining the rights of real girls with trans “girls” at the altar of “virtue” signaling.
This is vice signaling at best…