(LifeSiteNews) – LGBT activists penalized for attempting to game the process to get a sympathetic judge to hear their challenge of Alabama’s youth “transition” ban have agreed to drop the case.
Enacted in 2022, Alabama’s “Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act” (SB 184) outlaws “prescribing or administering” hormones and puberty blockers to gender-confused minors under age 19 and also bans sterilizing “sex change” surgeries and other procedures to remove “healthy or non-diseased body part(s) or tissue” of a child, as previously reported by LifeSiteNews.
LGBT activists and their allies, including the Biden administration, sued over the law, though the Trump administration withdrew the Justice Department’s involvement after taking office (the U.S. Supreme Court is slated to address the matter indirectly by reviewing a similar law in Tennessee).
According to a stipulation statement filed May 1 with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, the plaintiffs formally agreed to the “dismissal of this action with prejudice and without costs or fees to any party,” meaning the case cannot be refiled.
“Three years ago, multiple sets of plaintiffs represented by the ACLU, SPLC, and some of the nation’s largest law firms filed suit against Alabama to challenge our law protecting vulnerable kids from life-altering sex-change procedures,” Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall responded. “We fought back. We defeated a preliminary injunction and conducted court-ordered discovery into the so-called ‘standards of care’ that these groups claimed were evidence-based. What we found was devastating to plaintiffs’ challenge: a medical, legal, and political scandal that will be studied for decades. Given the evidence we uncovered, it is no surprise the plaintiffs abandoned their challenge. We uncovered the truth. We exposed the scandal. We won.”
“Across the globe, we’re seeing a refreshing return to sanity after radical gender ideology devastated far too many young lives,” said Jonathan Scruggs, Alliance Defending Freedom’s senior counsel and vice president of litigation strategy. “Alliance Defending Freedom has been honored to support Alabama and the leadership of Alabama Attorney General Marshall to protect children and families. We applaud Alabama and the 24 other states that are following the science, protecting children, and working to stop an unsafe medical experiment that has gone on far too long.”
In February, LifeSiteNews reported that U.S. District Court Judge Liles Burke of the Northern District of Alabama disqualified two attorneys from representing the plaintiffs and fined a third $5,000 for misconduct related to “judge shopping.” They and eight other attorneys were found to have filed and withdrew cases in order to avoid Burke in favor of a more like-minded judge, Myron Thompson.
Attorneys Melody Eagan and Jeff Doss “intentionally attempted to manipulate the random case-assignment procedures for the Northern and Middle Districts of Alabama” through dismissal and refiling, the judge concluded. Further, Carl Charles of the pro-LGBT firm Lambda Legal (a “transgender man”) was found to have falsely denied calling Thompson’s chambers about the case; Charles maintained she had not intentionally lied but had just “erroneously” misremembered.
“There is nothing more valuable in the legal profession than one’s reputation, and it is only with great reluctance that the Court would reprimand a young practitioner. But here the Court is left with no choice: after considering the evidence and evaluating Charles’s credibility, the Court finds that his bad-faith misrepresentations were flagrant, intentional, and calculated to mislead,” Burke wrote. “Charles stood before this Court and testified just as he testified before the Panel — with his pants on fire.”
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution.
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with a 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”
