TALLAHASSEE, Florida (LifeSiteNews) — Florida can continue to enforce its minimal limits on gender-confused adults getting surgically mutilated or injected with drugs, a federal judge ruled Monday.
Judge Robert Hinkle allowed the state to enforce Senate Bill 254’s requirements that gender-confused adults see a physician in person to receive chemical and surgical mutilation. Some gender-confused adults sued because their current clinics only have nurse practitioners. The state’s enforcement of its laws protecting kids from the dangerous procedures remains on hold.
Hinkle wrote that a ruling on Alabama’s similar legislation last month out of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Florida, lowered the plaintiff’s argument for a preliminary injunction.
Judge Hinkle ruled “the challenged statute and rules do not prohibit adults from obtaining treatments of the kind the plaintiffs seek. Two plaintiffs will be unable to obtain hormone treatment from their current providers. But despite the plaintiffs’ contrary assertions, they may be able to obtain the treatment from others.”
“Two other plaintiffs say their scheduled surgeries were canceled and that the surgeons said the challenged statute was the reason,” he wrote. “But even if the plaintiffs’ testimony about this is not inadmissible hearsay – an unlikely proposition – the surgeons’ statements, without a further explanation, do not tie their decision to anything a preliminary injunction would cure.”
“The record does not show that a preliminary injunction would affect the surgeons’ willingness to perform the surgeries at this time,” he wrote.
LGBT advocacy groups still criticized the ruling, which allows the state to enforce its law as the court case continues.
“Florida’s SB 254 is part of a broader landscape of laws that are hurting transgender people in Florida and across the country,” a coalition of LGBT groups involved in the legal challenge to the law wrote in a news release. “We will continue to challenge these dangerous bans that deliberately single out transgender people for discriminatory treatment and ignore well-established medical research until they are permanently overturned.”
The legislation is part of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ broader agenda to protect citizens from dangerous transgender drugs and surgeries and protect kids from being sexualized and mutilated.
He signed the bill as part of a package of laws aimed at the LGBT agenda. He also signed HB 1069, which prohibits schools from forcing students to state their gender pronouns, as previously reported by LifeSiteNews. Another bill prevented businesses from exposing kids to any “exhibition” or other type of presentation “which, in whole or in part, depicts or simulates nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or specific sexual activities.”