The national ACLU and the U.S. Department of Justice’s legal team argued that transgender adolescents have a legal right to gender-affirming treatment on Thursday in St. Louis, while Arkansas’ deputy solicitor general argued that a state law prohibiting such attention was fair and non-discriminatory.
The 2021 Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act, which forbids doctors from treating patients under 18 years of age, including those who undergo hormone replacement therapy, puberty blockers, and sex reassignment surgeries, is in dispute.
Four Arkansas people and two surgeons, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, challenged the SAFE Act in federal court, where U.S. District Judge James Moody struck down the law in June 2023, saying, among other things, that the SAFE Act discriminated against transgender individuals and violated the U.S. Constitution’s First and Fourteenth Revisions.
In July 2023, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard that judgment on appeal. The state argues that there is no scientific proof that children benefit from receiving gender-affirming care and that the consequences can be negative and frequently continuous for them.
The state’s lieutenant solicitor general, Dylan Jacobs, asked by the appeals courts if the law would outlaw the use of hormones for conditions other than gender-affirming attention. The legislature wasn’t saying it has problems with testosterone.
Regarding the district court’s ruling to hit down the ban on transgender treatment in Arkansas, Jacobs said, “there are certainly challenges, including cleaning” in the therapy, and noted it was not up to the district court to establish its own policy decisions.
ACLU attorney Chase Strangio, assistant director for the group’s Gay & HIV Project, told the appeals court Thursday they should defend Moody’s decision, noting, in portion, that the state law undermines constitutional guarantees of equal protection and “usurps the judgment of parents and their abilities to determine health care”.
Griffin has said his office “is fighting to protect our state’s children from dangerous medical experimentation. In his 80-page decision to overturn the Arkansas statute, Moore backed the testimony of medical experts who testified for the plaintiffs and who claimed that minors should receive safe, gender-affirming care.
The State of Arkansas, Moody wrote, “failed to prove that its interests in the safety of Arkansas adolescents from gender transitioning procedures or the medical community’s ethical decline are compelling, genuine, or even rational.”
The Arkansas SAFE Act and related bills pending in several other states would enact the SAFE Act and force doctors to disregard clinical guidelines, according to a letter from the American Medical Association to the National Governors Association in 2021.
Gender-affirming care for minors, the AMA said, “must be sensitive to the child’s clinical situation, nurture the child’s short and long-term development, and balance the need to preserve the child’s opportunity to make important life choices autonomously in the future.”
The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals did not specify when it might rule on the Arkansas statute.
As of last November, similar laws had been enacted in 22 states, and legal challenges have been mounted in several of them. None of those cases has yet been heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.
This story was originally published by the Arkansas Advocate, a States Newsroom affiliate.
