(LifeSiteNews) – A federal judge is allowing Georgia to enforce its ban on “gender-reassignment” surgeries and cross-sex hormones for minors in light of a federal appeals court weighing in on the legal question last month.

In March, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law Senate Bill 140, which bans physicians from prescribing “cross-sex” hormones and surgical procedures to individuals under age 18 for gender dysphoria. The law, less stringent than others of its kind, does not ban puberty blockers.

The Hill reported that last month that Judge Sarah Geraghty temporarily blocked the law from being enforced, writing that otherwise “the middle-school age plaintiffs will be unable to obtain in Georgia a course of treatment that has been recommended by their health care providers in light of their individual diagnoses and mental health needs.”

However, a day after Geraghty issued her ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a similar law in Alabama, with Judge Barbara Lagoa ruling that a lower court in that case had “abused its discretion in issuing this preliminary injunction because it applied the wrong standard of scrutiny,” and that challengers had “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.’”

Accordingly, Geraghty opted on September 5 to halt her previous injunction pending an outcome in the Alabama case, until which Georgia may resume enforcing SB 140.

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,” individuals who attempted to live under a different “gender identity” before embracing their sex, 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.