(LifeSiteNews) — A federal court has cleared Arkansas to finally begin enforcing its ban on “gender transition” procedures for minors, four years after it became law.
Enacted in 2021 when the legislature overrode a veto from former Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a liberal Republican, the Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act makes it illegal for doctors to prescribe puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or transgender surgeries for people under the age of 18, as well as to make referrals for such procedures. It was the first state law of its kind but quickly became tied up in legal challenges.
On Tuesday, however, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted 8-2 to overturn a lower-court ruling against the law, finding that banning procedures for minors did not violate gender-confused Americans’ equal-protection rights, as it “classifies based on age and medical procedure, not sex.” The ruling cited a June ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court upholding a similar law from Tennessee.
“The question is whether this Nation’s history and tradition, as well as its historical understanding of ordered liberty, support the right of a parent to obtain for his or her child a medical treatment that, although the child desires it and a doctor approves, the state legislature deems inappropriate for minors,” Judge Duane Benton wrote for the majority. “This court finds no such right in this Nation’s history and tradition.”
“I applaud the court’s decision recognizing that Arkansas has a compelling interest in protecting the physical and psychological health of children and am pleased that children in Arkansas will be protected from risky, experimental procedures with lifelong consequences,” Arkansas Republican Attorney General Tim Griffin responded. “Act 626 was passed by the Arkansas General Assembly in 2021 and was subsequently challenged in court. Today’s decision is the culmination of many years of tireless and skillful legal work by this office.”
A large 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 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “reassignment” procedures fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and 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 in favor of “transitioning.”
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 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.”
Under a more conservative governor than Hutchinson, Republican Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Arkansas has adopted other measures to push back on the LGBT agenda, including a law to ensure religious adoption and foster agencies do not have to place children in homosexual households or other places that conflict with their faith and an executive order requiring all government officials and departments to use biologically accurate, sex-specific terminology when referring to women.
