A federal judge on Tuesday struck down Arkansas’ ban on gender-affirming treatment for transgender youth, dealing the strongest blow yet to a state prohibition on such care.
Obviously, wish we were in a reality where this never got passed. But still, a great outcome for this!!!!!! So thrilled to see it 🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🏳️⚧️🎉🎉🎉💖💖💖
This is the right outcome for this court case. There is no conceivable way to interpret the equal protection clause that supports a ban on gender affirming care, especially in light of analysis that targeting trans people is specifically gender discrimination. If the care is available for a person, but for their gender, it seems plainly obvious that the discrimination is based on gender and doesn't, in my view, even meet a rational basis analysis, let alone the slightly heightened analysis for gender discrimination.
I think I can confidently say that every single modern procedure in the umbrella of "gender-affirming care" was developed for use on non-trans people. Most of them, for cis people, or for intersex people in order to make them present cis according to their assigned-at-birth gender.
And it isn't HRT that is the most common medical gender-affirming care. It's breast augmentation. Which regularly gets done to cis women as young as 16.
When you ban these procedures ONLY for trans kids, you are 100% banning the procedure on the basis of sex. It's without question a violation of US law.
It's a good decision and it was definitely unconstitutional, but Alejandra also detailed how they already passed a law circumventing the courts so I wouldn't celebrate too much.
These charades will be consistently overturned because they are obviously unconstitutional, but passing these broken laws isn't their point - they just want the LGBTQIA+ community to live in constant fear.
People are also simple though, so the longer they can repeat the lie, the more people start to accept it as the status quo. They make a lot of noise in "passing" initially and then the reality follow-up (like this) gets a fraction of the attention typically - that makes it a "win" for the bad guys overall.
Non-westerner here so I'm very much out of the loop. I'm a bit confused when I read headlines like this one. Does "allowing gender-affirming treatment" mean that transgender minors are allowed to have HRT or surgeries? to me it seems like a bad idea giving a minor (trans or cis) access to surgeries and/or hormone therapy. Does the ban have other ramifications that I don't understand? Can someone explain please
trans youth gender-affirming treatment doesn't use hormones. it uses puberty blockers, so that the child doesn't go through puberty, and when they turn 18 they can state HRT with a better outcome. the therapy is reversible, so when the child stops taking puberty blockers, they undergo normal puberty process, and it's a recommended treatment for trans youth by multiple pediatrician and psychologist societies and associations.
Trans youth can access HRT, and in some cases surgeries. The only age-related requirement in WPATH v8 is that puberty has started, there's no need to wait until 18.
For reference cis people typically start puberty around age 11, though 8-14 is the starting range.