A federal judge has ruled that Florida’s ban on gender-transition surgeries and medications for children violates the U.S. Constitution.
“Florida has adopted a statute and rules that ban gender-affirming care for minors even when medically appropriate,” U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle wrote in his decision. “The ban is unconstitutional.”
In his decision striking down Flordia’s legislation, Hinkley interpreted the legislation, and Desantis, as anti-transgender. “Transgender opponents are of course free to hold their beliefs. But they are not free to discriminate against transgender individuals just for being transgender,” the judge wrote.
Desantis’s “Let Kids Be Kids” legislation, which he signed into law last May, said physicians are not allowed to prescribe puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to children. It also prevented physicians from performing invasive, irreversible procedures, such as double mastectomies, and sex changes, including phalloplasty and vaginoplasty, on minors.
Desantis had characterized his legislation as a step toward protecting children from undergoing “permanently mutilating procedures” that they might later regret after growing out of turbulent and hormonal teenage years.
“The fact is, people go through a lot when they’re teenagers,” Desantis said during a press conference in January. “You grow out of it most of the time in these situations. [Eighty percent], 90% resolves by the time you get there. [They] say it’s healthcare to cut off the private parts of a 14- or 15-year-old. That is not healthcare. That is mutilation.”
Hinkley said otherwise in his ruling, stating in an injunction halting the law last month that gender-transition care must be given: “Those whose gender identity does not match their natal sex often suffer gender dysphoria. … Proper treatment … is followed in appropriate cases by GnRH agonists and cross-sex hormones.”
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One of the country’s top advocacy groups of pediatricians and other healthcare professionals disagrees with the Florida judge. The American College of Pediatricians is urging doctors to cease transformative surgeries, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones, saying, “These interventions do not improve the physical or mental well-being of adolescents with gender dysphoria.”
“It is time that these American medical institutions follow the science and the lead of our European professional colleagues and cease to promote protocols that harm children, including the promotion of social affirmation, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for children and adolescents who experience distress over their biological sex,” ACPeds wrote in its “Doctors Protecting Children Declaration.”
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