Ban on Gender-Affirming Care Ruled Illegal by Federal Court

While the attacks against trans folks continue to rage on in the U.S., it’s important to celebrate any and all wins as we continue fighting. On August 25, the three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling blocking the state of Arkansas from enforcing Act 626, a proposed law effectively banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth.

Act 626, in short, prohibits healthcare providers from offering puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, or surgeries to any person below the age of 18, as well as bans providers from referring trans youth to doctors who could actually deliver where they could not.

According to the Guardian, there are currently no doctors in the state that perform such surgeries or procedures on minors. With this being taken into account, lawmakers against Act 626 were outspoken about the fact that, if this bill was signed into law, laws banning discrimination on the basis of sex in a larger sense would slowly be chipped away at, eventually giving way to a slew of other anti-trans and anti LGBTQ policies.

The American Civil Liberties Union challenged the law on the behalf of four transgender youth, their families, and two doctors who provide gender-affirming treatments to those in need.

Chase Strangio, deputy director for transgender justice at the ACLU LGBTQ & HIV Project, says in a statement that “the state’s ban on care does not advance any important governmental interest and the state’s defense of the law is lacking in legal or evidentiary support… the state has no business categorically singling out this care for prohibition.”

Arkansas argues that the ban on gender-affirming care was actually in the better interest of the public health of the population, and that it is within the state’s authority to regulate medical practices. A key supporter of the bill is republican Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, whose spokesperson states that Rutledge was “extremely disappointed in today’s dangerously wrong decision by the three-judge panel.”

Arkansas’ republican Governor Asa Hutchinson vetoed Act 626 in April of 2021 upon its initial proposal, but the GOP overruled that veto. From then on, Hutchinson signed two other anti-LGBTQ bills: one banning trans student athletes from playing on school sports teams matching their gender identities and another providing healthcare workers the option to refuse to give care to something that they morally or religiously object to.

The federal ruling preventing this law from becoming official is not the end of the effort to push it toward its passage. After this pushback ruling, the lower courts will hear a case in October on whether the law truly violates the rights of trans youth, their families, and healthcare providers.