USA: Judge Strikes Down Arkansas Law Banning Gender Transition Care for Minors
USA: Judge Strikes Down Arkansas Law Banning Gender Transition Care for Minors
The case had been closely watched as an important test of whether bans on transition care for minors, enacted by more than a dozen states, could withstand challenges.
Judge James M. Moody Jr. of Federal 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 of Arkansas had failed to substantially prove a number of its claims, including that the care was experimental or carelessly prescribed to teenagers.
Gender affirming care bans haven’t had a great time standing up in federal court in the past decade or so.
Groups like the ACLU and Lambda Legal have gone to great lengths to establish precedent that gender doesn’t have to be defined at birth, gender dysphoria is a genuine medical condition, and that gender affirming care helps with dysphoria.
That, combined with the precedent in Bostock that sexuality and gender identity can be covered by bans on sex discrimination makes it look like these bans will continue to fail when challenged.
Granted, the Federalist Society ghouls and their friends know this too and are trying to push back. Also, the Supreme Court could rule on 303 Creative v. Elenis tomorrow and absolutely devastate LGBT protections in the name of religious freedom. That would make this comment irrelevant almost immediately. As for now, we’ll probably see a lot more bans fail in federal court though
People need to shift their perspective a bit to understand why conservatives keep fighting an obviously stupid war. It isn't about the specific group they're trying to demonize. It's about having something to fight, period. They lost on gay marriage - if they actually thought it was so terrible, they would still be fighting it. The same is true for Trans exclusionary laws. Anyone can do the math and realize that the societal harm caused if you assume even their wildest claims are true is dwarfed by the political money required to fight for and against these laws. And money, of course, is the root of the problem.
As long as they have an unlimited number of people to punch down at, they can keep riling up their bases. That means they have job security, and they can exploit these positions for "legal" bribes through cushy retirement jobs and conduct their real (economic) war on behalf of the rich.
The Economic Policy Institute in the US published a study at the beginning of 2023. They analysed a lot of data (highly recommended read) and concluded:
Abortion access, and the long-term consequences of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, are crucial economic issues. From labor market outcomes to financial security and earnings, and crucially, the fundamental right to bodily autonomy, abortion access is critical for women to be able to decide their own economic trajectories. This report details the association of detrimental economic policies with abortion bans, and argues that abortion bans are yet another economic policy that subjugates and disempowers workers.
Abortion bans as an economic policy have not appeared in a vacuum, or even as a narrowly tailored religious concern, since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1972. Rather, denial of abortion access is one additional policy that states have engineered over decades in a sustained project of economic subjugation, control, and worker disempowerment. States that have banned and restricted abortion have largely also kept minimum wages low, underfunded and complicated their unemployment insurance systems, declined to expand Medicaid, suppressed unionization, and preferred to over-incarcerate. These policies, in conjunction, keep working people economically disempowered.
Source: The economics of abortion bans
I think this is a pretty good analysis, but I want to add onto it a little.
From where I'm standing, it seems like the reason they care so much about riling up their base is because their actual policies and interests hurt the working class rust belt people that are their main constituency. So they have to come up with some huge overriding cultural battle for their base to get really invested in fighting, to make them feel like they have to vote Republican and oppose the Democrats no matter what, and to distract them from the underlying social and economic issues that are the source of their undirected frustration in the first place, and deflect their anger onto a scapegoat that they can blame for all society's ills without actually changing the system.
Because if they didn't, their base would continue going down their populist route. They might start actually realizing how bad capitalism is for them and fighting against it in their own weird way. Some might see the benefit of Medicaid and Medicare and food stamps to working class people, or taxing rich more and the middle class less, and go over to the Democrats. And that could actually be pretty unprofitable for the elites and their donors and lobbyists.
Not to say that this would be exactly a good option either, though, because I think there is still a ton of genuine nationalism, traditionalism, anti-intellectualism, conservatism, and so on among today's right wing, it isn't all trumped up by their leaders, and that's going to tinge their social and economic understandings, so even if they went down this latter route, it would still end up being a conspirational populism that looks disturbingly like fascism.
Too bad no judge did the same in FL
Yet. It has been blocked for a group of plaintiffs already. https://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/health-news-florida/2023-06-06/federal-court-pauses-florida-gender-affirming-care-ban-minors
Or Texas.
This will help establish precedent, but I'm not optimistic if it goes to the supreme court...
This is a summary of the posted article (I'm a bot).
Judge Strikes Down Arkansas Law Banning Gender Transition Care for Minors. The case had been closely watched as an important test of whether bans on transition care for minors could withstand challenges. It is the first ruling to broadly block such a ban for an entire state, though judges have intervened to temporarily delay it. The state’s attorney general said he would appeal the decision, charging that the judge had overlooked concerns that the treatments were risky and unproven.“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,” wrote Judge Moody.