The LGBT rights organization Lambda Legal filed a lawsuit on Monday in an effort to halt the implementation of the Louisiana moratorium on gender-affirming practices for transgender children.
The petition was prepared on behalf of five Louisiana adolescents and their families by the civil rights organization, along with the Center for Health Law & Policy Innovation of Harvard Law, and a Louisiana law company. Act 466, also known as the Health Care Ban, which forbids Louisiana from providing transgender minors with gender-affirming health care, is the subject of the petition.
After Louisiana politicians overrode then-governor John Bel Edwards’ reject, the Health Care Ban went into effect on January 1. The law forbids hormone therapy, sex change, and another gender-affirming medical procedures for children. In a statement, Lambda Legal asserted that the ban violates the state constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law by discriminating based on sex and transgender status, removes parents’ rights to direct their children’s healthcare, and illegally interferes with minors who have the right to receive or refuse medical care.
According to Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, Counsel and Health Care Strategist for Lambda Legal, the wellness care restrictions single out trans children by stating that it should only be provided to adolescents who are trans, even though it is evidence-based, healthy, and successful. He argued that it is “unlawful and inhumane” to deny health care to minors simply because they are transgender, especially when the same care is also accessible to all other minority patients.
Soe, et cetera, filed a complaint. The defendants are five adolescents between the ages of 9 and 16, along with their respective parents and guardians, who filed v. The Louisiana Board of Medical Investigators, et al. in the Civil District Court for the Parish of Orleans.
Louisiana is not the only condition that has difficulty providing transgender minors with gender-affirming attention. A federal prosecutor rejected a challenge to an Alabama law that made for treatment of adolescents illegal in December. The government of Ohio vetoed a bill that would have prohibited gender-affirming attention for adolescents that same month.
One of the 21 states to outlaw gender-affirming drugs and medical treatment for transgender children is Louisiana. In the past few years, the state has introduced and/or passed a number of bills focusing on LGBTQ+ rights. Louisiana passed a law in 2022 that forbids trans children from playing sports that are consistent with their sex identity. By then-governor Edwards, the state government was unable to supersede two vetoes next month. The debate of sexual orientation or gender identity in public schools would have been outlawed under one of those bills, and until the child’s family gave their consent, school staff were required to speak to students by titles and pronouns that matched their birth certificates even if they did not match their gender identities.
Trans activists have predicted that the two charges will be reintroduced in 2024 and signed into law by Jeff Landry after he won Louisiana’s presidential election in October and supported the state’s restrictions on gender-affirming care for transgender adolescents.
