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.
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.
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.