A federal judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked Kentucky Senate Bill 150, which would have prohibited transgender minors from receiving several forms of gender-affirming care. The ruling stops the law from taking effect while other courts hear challenges to the law.
“Based on the evidence submitted, the court finds that the treatments barred by SB 150 are medically appropriate and necessary for some transgender children… These drugs have a long history of safe use in minors for various conditions,” US District Judge David J. Hale said in his ruling.
The law banned healthcare providers from prescribing treatments like puberty blockers and hormone therapy to most minors. The law also barred gender-affirming surgeries on minors who have not been diagnosed with an intersex condition.
The plaintiffs in the case were seven transgender minors and their parents who sued the state over the law arguing that it violated the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Senate Bill 150 called for healthcare providers to end treatment for patients already receiving puberty blockers or hormone therapy. The bill also aimed to prevent schools from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity with students of any age and allowed educators to refuse to refer to transgender students by their preferred pronouns.
CNN previously reported that Kentucky Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear had vetoed the bill back in March but it was overridden by Republican lawmakers.
“Senate Bill 150 allows too much government interference in personal healthcare issues and rips away the freedom of parents to make medical decisions for their children,” the governor said in the statement in March.
Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron called the court’s decision “misguided” in a statement on Twitter. He was among the defendants named in the suit seeking to block the law from taking effect.
If you are a minor what kind of gender or transgender care do you need? The child that wants to be a different sex today could change their minds later. Keep in mind these kids are not of legal age. I know I sound like an idiot from the far right but who is it pushing these kids to change their bodies when they are underage children? Are we going to castrate some of the boys later so they can be a Eunuch?
The primary treatment in gender affirming care for minors are "puberty blockers", which prevent the onset of puberty. This allows a person to be sure, and go through all the psychological screening, without having their body going into (mostly) irreversible changes.
Nobody is pushing kids to change genders, but it is the kids themselves who are pushing their parents to let them.
It also is not always all that straight forward. I have a friend who is intersex, which means this persons was born with genital features that are neither male nor female, but somewhere in between. For a person born under those circumstances, puberty blockers would be needed in order to insure they do not develop gender traits at puberty that are other than the gender they identify as. In my friend's case, the doctors assigned them to be male shortly after birth, and the doctor was wrong, as my friend identifies as female, but at puberty developed distinct male physical characteristics, which cannot be reversed. Until republicans made all these stupid laws, it was becoming common practice for intersex kids to not be assigned a gender at birth by the parents or doctors, but to wait until the child was old enough to identify themselves as one gender or the other. In some cases the child chooses non-binary, meaning they don't feel that identifying as either male or female "fits" fro them.
In any case, I think the children involved know themselves better than politicians do, and if they are lucky enough to have patents who don't freak out, then they should be allowed to have gender affirming care.