AUSTIN (LifeSiteNews) — The Texas Supreme Court upheld a 2023 law making it illegal to subject minors to puberty blockers, transgender hormone interventions, and “gender transition” surgeries.
In its 8 to 1 ruling, the court found that “the Legislature had a rational basis for concluding that the risk of providing [transgender interventions] to children solely for the purpose of physically transitioning from their sex at birth was not outweighed by the benefits.”
“We have never held that a fit parent’s interest in caring for her child free from government interference, though weighty, triggers heightened scrutiny of every statute,” wrote Justice Rebeca A. Huddle. The legislature made “a permissible, rational policy choice to limit the types of available medical procedures for children,” especially given the novelty of gender dysphoria and interventions for it.
“This is a significant victory for Texas children, protecting them from puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and the cutting off of healthy body parts, all of which are irreversible,” said Texas Values (TV) in a statement following the court’s decision.
READ: ‘It almost killed me’: Ex-trans teen slams ‘gender transitioning’ in powerful speech
“No child deserves a false sense of hope from the unscientific idea that they are not really the sex they are born,” said TV’s director of policy, Jonathan Covey. “Today, the Texas Supreme Court agrees! This decision affirms what we already know, that doctors cannot mutilate children in the name of healthcare.”
The case had been brought by several Texas parents of children who were already undergoing or who intended to undergo dangerous, irreversible transgender interventions at the time that Senate Bill 14 (SB 14) became law last year. Health professionals who have a vested interest in advancing “LGBTQ+” ideology also joined the case.
The ruling is of particular significance because of the strong legal protections in the Lone Star State for the inviolability of the rights and authority of parents over their children. At the outset of its decision, the court took pains to reaffirm “that fit parents have a fundamental interest in directing the care, custody, and control of their children free from government interference.”
“A half century ago, we recognized that this ‘natural right’ between parents and children is ‘one of constitutional dimensions,’” said the court in its decision, while also asserting that government authority to place limits on those rights is “deeply embedded” in Texas law, such as the state’s prohibition on child labor.
“The Texas Supreme Court found that SB 14 does not infringe on the parental right to make medical care decisions for their children because that right competes with the interest of protecting children from harm,” noted Jurist News’ Aabshar Ghassi. “Furthermore, the Texas Legislature has the constitutional authority to regulate medical practice, and parents can choose only among legal medical procedures.”
READ: Transgender hormones linked to ‘substantially’ higher risk of heart attack, stroke: study
Justice Jimmy Blacklock saw the issue as a moral conflict between “traditional vision” and “transgender vision,” concerning the nascent transgender “transition” industry.
“The divergence is unbridgeable,” wrote Blacklock: “By and large, those who hold the traditional vision proceed from a sincere conviction that the transgender vision is, in the end, make-believe.”
Late last month, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to add to its docket for next year a similar case out of Tennessee challenging a new law protecting minors from receiving so-called “gender-affirming” interventions.
Currently, 25 states have laws in place to ban surgical mutilation of a minor in the name of “gender transitioning,” while 24 of those also restrict hormone interventions. Alabama, Florida, Idaho, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Carolina have made committing transgender surgical or hormonal procedures on children a felony.
A large body of evidence shows that transgender interventions cause serious, even life-threatening, injuries, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, stroke, infertility, bone density loss, emotional problems, and permanent damage to reproductive organs.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners have attested 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 support of “transition” procedures.
So-called “gender transitioning,” Dr. Peter McCullough told Jeanine Pirro on the Ingraham Angle last week, “is disfiguring, sterilizing, increases the burden of psychiatric disease, and raises all-cause mortality.”