UPDATED: With statement from Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin.
In 2021, Arkansas became the first state in the nation to ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth. On Tuesday, a federal judge in Little Rock struck down that 2021 ban, ensuring the state’s transgender young people can continue to receive the medical treatments they need.
U.S. District Judge James Moody determined Arkansas’s law to ban the medical treatments violates the Constitutional rights of transgender youth, their families and doctors. Arkansas’s ban violated the Equal Protection Clause, the Due Process Clauses, and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, Moody found.
Moody issued a stay on the ban in July of 2021, meaning the law has never gone into effect, but today’s ruling scraps it entirely.
Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said he plans to appeal Moody’s decision to the Eighth Circuit.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the four transgender youth and their families in the suit, sent a press release about the ruling, with statements from plaintiffs and attorneys.
“I’m so grateful the judge heard my experience of how this health care has changed my life for the better and saw the dangerous impact this law could have on my life and that of countless other transgender people,” said Dylan Brandt, a 17-year-old transgender boy from western Arkansas. “My mom and I wanted to fight this law not just to protect my health care, but also to ensure that transgender people like me can safely and fully live our truths. Transgender kids across the country are having their own futures threatened by laws like this one, and it’s up to all of us to speak out, fight back, and give them hope.”
“We’re relieved and grateful that the court has ruled in favor of these brave Arkansans and their rights, protecting life-saving care that should be available to all trans youth,” said Holly Dickson, Executive Director of the ACLU of Arkansas. “This decision sends a clear message. Fear-mongering and misinformation about this health care do not hold up to scrutiny; it hurts trans youth and must end. Science, medicine, and law are clear: gender-affirming care is necessary to ensure these young Arkansans can thrive and be healthy.”
The now-defunct bill passed in the spring of 2021 despite then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson‘s heartening but ultimately fruitless veto, which the legislature then overrode.
“This ruling offers an enormous relief to transgender youth and their families across Arkansas and across the country,” said Chase Strangio, Deputy Director for Transgender Justice at the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project. “In state after state, transgender people are being forced to fight for our most basic rights, including access to the health care many of us need to live. This victory shows that these laws, when tested by evidence, are indefensible under any standard of constitutional review. We hope that this sends a message to other states about the vulnerability of these laws and the many harms that come from passing them. We’re so thankful for the bravery of our clients and the tireless work of advocates in Arkansas.”
The law, now bound for the garbage heap, would have blocked insurance coverage for gender-affirming care for transgender youth.
Similar laws in Alabama, Florida, and Indiana are blocked by preliminary injunctions from federal courts, but more red states are passing similar measures.
Moody’s decision arrived months after the end of a trial to determine the constitutionality of Arkansas’s so-called SAFE (Save Adolescents from Experimentation) Act.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and the Endocrine Society all support protecting transgender youths’ access to gender-affirming care. But the Arkansas legislative roster of 2021 did not and set their sights on attacking the state’s tiny and already marginalized transgender community. Trans people have become a popular punching bag for the right in recent years.
Indeed, trans Arkansans took it in the teeth again in 2023, as a series of new laws passed that will police what bathrooms, names and pronouns they can use in schools. Another law passed in 2023 increases liability for doctors who provide hormone therapy, puberty blockers and other medical gender-affirming care so much that those providers can likely no longer afford the malpractice insurance they’d need to stay in practice.
In his announcement that he will appeal Tuesday’s ruling, Griffin repeated some demonstrably false talking points popular among conservative Republicans:
I am disappointed in the decision that prevents our state from protecting our children against dangerous medical experimentation under the moniker of ‘gender transition.’ Unfortunately, Judge Moody misses what is widely understood across the United States and in the United Kingdom and European countries: There is no scientific evidence that any child will benefit from these procedures, while the consequences are harmful and often permanent. I will continue fighting as long as it takes to stop providers from sterilizing children.
In fact, mainstream medical associations support access to medical gender-affirming care. The American Medical Association, the Endocrine Society, American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Urological Association, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the American College of Physicians, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinology and GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQ+ Equality all signed on last week to a resolution stating that gender-affirming care is backed by scientific evidence and can be lifesaving.
“As political attacks on gender-affirming care escalate, it is the responsibility of the medical community to speak out in support of evidence-based care,” the Endocrine Society said in a public statement shared last week. “Medical decisions should be made by patients, their relatives and health care providers, not politicians.”