(LifeSiteNews) — A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit has reversed a judge who blocked Florida’s law banning “gender transition” procedures on minors, allowing it to be enforced while the legal battle over its constitutionality proceeds.
In June, Democrat-appointed U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle struck down SB 254, Florida’s ban on transgender drugs and surgeries for minors enacted in 2023, declaring it an “unconstitutional” prohibition of “proper treatment” for gender-confused minors. The office of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis quickly denounced the ruling and confirmed it would appeal.
READ: Transgender hormones linked to ‘substantially’ higher risk of heart attack, stroke: study
Days later, DeSantis doubled down that “it’s wrong to mutilate minors. It is wrong to perform a ‘sex change’ on a 16-year old. You’re not allowed to get a tattoo, but somehow you can have your privates cut off? Give me a break.” He predicted SB 254 would be restored, citing the 11th Circuit’s upholding of an “almost identical” Alabama law and warned that “if you say that we shouldn’t [defend the law], you’re saying that any liberal judge should be able to veto the policy of the state of Florida, because they go to the same judges every time, we lose almost every time, and then we win on appeal almost every time.”
Last Monday, as predicted, the 11th Circuit panel sided with the state, Florida’s Voice reports, ruling they made a “strong showing that they are likely to succeed on the merits.”
The lower court “likely misapplied the presumption that the legislature acted in good faith when it concluded that the prohibition and regulation provisions, and the implementing rules, were based on invidious discrimination against transgender minors and adults,” the judges ruled. It further agreed there were “legitimate concerns” about proper medical care to motivate the law.
“The clerk’s office is directed to set an expedited briefing schedule and to place this appeal on the next available oral argument calendar,” the ruling concluded.
“Florida will always stand for sanity,” DeSantis responded to the win. “Let kids be kids.”
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 suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “transition” procedures, including “reassignment” surgery, 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,” 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 in favor of “transitioning.”