A federal judge has struck down a 2023 Florida law that restricted doctors from giving gender-confused children harmful puberty blockers and hormonal treatments.
Senior Judge Robert Hinkle said Tuesday it was unconstitutional when the state barred transgender minors from “gender-affirming” care with their parent’s permission.
“Some transgender opponents invoke religion to support their position, just as some once invoked religion to support their racism or misogyny,” Hinkle wrote in his 105-page decision. “Transgender opponents are of course free to hold their beliefs. But they are not free to discriminate against transgender individuals just for being transgender.
Governor Ron DeSantis blasted Hinkle’s ruling calling it “erroneous” and vowed to appeal the decision.
“The people of Florida acted to protect children in this state, and the court was wrong to override their wishes,” he said in a statement, adding “as we’ve seen here in Florida, the United Kingdom, and across Europe, there is no quality evidence to support the chemical and physical mutilation of children. These procedures do permanent, life-altering damage to children, and history will look back on this fad in horror.”
Last week, a coalition of pediatricians, health policy groups, and conservative organizations called on the American College of Pediatricians (ACP) to stop promoting transgender treatments to children and to stop promoting the idea that “children can be born in the wrong body.”
In a declaration issued by Doctors Protecting Children, physicians, and practitioners cited scientific evidence demonstrating that gender procedures “harm healthy bodies” and strongly urged the medical industry to “respect biological reality.”
“We have serious concerns about the physical and mental health effects of the current protocols promoted for the care of children and adolescents in the United States who express discomfort with their biological sex,” the declaration states.
As CBN News has reported, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) revealed in internal documents “that children and adolescents cannot comprehend the lifelong consequences of ‘gender-affirming care,’ and in some cases, due to poor health literacy, neither can their parents.”
Meanwhile, several European countries, including the U.K., Norway, Sweden, and Finland have halted these types of irreversible, gender-altering procedures that many U.S. gender clinics are still promoting.
Early last month, the 128th German Medical Assembly passed two resolutions to protect children struggling with gender confusion.
The assembly of 250 delegates from 17 German medical associations stopped the distribution of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for children under the age of 18 and restricted youth in the same age group from being allowed to “self-identify” into a chosen sex without a prior child and adolescent psychiatric diagnosis and consultation.
The resolution noted in part that there are “profound life-long consequences of youth transitions” and there is an “absence of reliable evidence in the area of youth transitions.”
Judge Hinkle also stopped the state from requiring that transgender adults only receive treatment from a doctor and he barred a ban on online treatment for transgender adults.
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