Court Allows Alabama’s Trans Health Care Ban to Take Effect
Appeals court finds states have a "compelling interest" in preventing transgender minors from accessing gender-affirming treatments.
A federal appeals court reversed an injunction blocking Alabama from enforcing its law prohibiting doctors from prescribing gender-affirming treatments to minors suffering from gender dysphoria.
On Monday, a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a lower court’s injunction blocking the ban from being enforced.
The injunction will remain in place until the court issues an official mandate, which is likely to take days, reports The Hill.
The law will then continue to be enforced until a judge determines — if ever — that, based on the case’s merits, the law is unconstitutional.
However, given the 11th Circuit’s findings, any such judgment in favor of the plaintiffs challenging the law may ultimately be overturned by the circuit court, which may pave the way for the U.S. Supreme Court to become involved in the case.
The law, passed last year, bars minors from accessing puberty blockers and hormones, and threatens doctors who prescribe such treatments with potential loss of their license, monetary fines, and up to 10 years in prison.
Once it is allowed to go into effect, the law will likely intimidate physicians into refusing to treat transgender patients, especially minors, for fear of running afoul of the law’s provisions.
The judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Liles Burke, of the Northern District of Alabama, has set a trial date of April 2, 2024, at which point he will hear oral arguments for why the ban should be overturned or kept in place.
In their opinion, the 11th Circuit panel found that states have “a compelling interest in protecting children from drugs, particularly those for which there is uncertainty regarding benefits, recent surges in use, and irreversible effects.”
The court found that Burke, who had issued the injunction blocking the law, erred in issuing the injunction because he applied the wrong standard of scrutiny.
“The plaintiffs have not presented any authority that supports the existence of a constitutional right to ‘treat [one’s] children with transitioning medications subject to medically accepted standards,'” Circuit Judge Barbara Lagoa wrote on behalf of the court.
“Nor have they shown that [the law] classifies on the basis of sex or any other protected characteristic. … Because the district court erred by reviewing the statute under a heightened standard of scrutiny, its determination that the plaintiffs have established a substantial likelihood of success on the merits cannot stand.”
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, who is defending the ban, praised the 11th Circuit’s ruling as a “significant victory for our country, for children, and for common sense.”
“The Eleventh Circuit reinforced that the State has the authority to safeguard the physical and psychological wellbeing of minors,” Marshall said in a statement, echoing arguments made by proponents of restricting transgender health care treatments.
The National Center for Lesbian Rights, GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Human Rights Campaign, which are representing the plaintiffs in the Alabama case, issued a joint statement condemning the lifting of the injunction.
“This is a deeply disappointing decision that is difficult to reconcile with the 11th Circuit’s prior rulings and with the Supreme Court’s clear guidance that discrimination because a person is transgender is sex discrimination,” the groups said in their joint statement.
The court’s decision marks the second such one from an appellate court allowing restrictions on gender-affirming care from taking effect. Last month, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a lower court judge erred in issuing an injunction blocking Tennessee’s law prohibiting gender-affirming care from taking effect.
That ruling was subsequently applied to overturn an injunction blocking a similar Kentucky law from being enforced.
Due to the 11th Circuit’s jurisdiction over Georgia, the appeals court’s ruling likely will also be used to overturn a ruling, issued by a federal judge on Sunday, that temporarily blocked Georgia’s ban on gender-affirming care from enforced.
Nationwide, 22 states have passed nearly identical restrictions on transgender care, although only one ban — in Arkansas — has been overturned by a federal judge as unconstitutional at the present moment.
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