TULSA, Oklahoma (LifeSiteNews) — U.S. District Judge John Heil issued a preliminary ruling on Thursday allowing Oklahoma to enforce its ban on gender “transitioning” drugs and surgeries for minors, on the assessment that the law’s challengers were not likely to succeed on the merits.

In May, Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt signed into law SB 613, which states that health care providers “shall not knowingly provide gender transition procedures to any child,” violators of which would face up to ten years in prison, $100,000 in fines, and/or loss of their medical licenses.

Exceptions would be permitted for rare cases of developmental disorders and physical injuries or diseases that threaten a minor’s life, and those already taking puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones are to be tapered off over a six-month period. 

The far-left American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Lambda Legal sued the state over the law on behalf of families who claimed it was “discriminatory” and violated the right of parents to seek their preferred medical treatment for their children, Reuters reports. But Heil found their arguments unlikely to prevail.

SB 613, “is not an outright ban on gender affirming care [sic]” because it does not restrict access to surgeries or doses of testosterone or estrogen for transgender adults, Heil wrote. “Nor is it a bill that has the intent or effect of enforcing stereotypical gender norms or discriminating against those who do not conform to those norms.” Rather, it “requires only that, to the extent an individual desires to utilize certain physiological procedures to treat the psychological condition of gender dysphoria, he or she must wait until a certain age to do so.”

“This an area in which medical and policy debate is unfolding and the Oklahoma Legislature can rationally take the side of caution before permitting irreversible medical treatments of its children,” he said.

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Oklahoma “continues to fulfill its duty to defend” the law and “has won a ruling that results in full enforcement of that law,” said a spokesperson for state Attorney General Gentner Drummond.

“I am pleased with the court’s decision to uphold Oklahoma’s common sense law protecting children from dangerous, permanent sex change surgeries,” said the governor. “Here in Oklahoma, we protect our kids. Plain and simple.”

The ACLU has vowed to appeal, the Washington Examiner reports.

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.

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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, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution.

Some such physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an exposé last year 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.”