US appeals court upholds Oklahoma law banning gender-affirming care for minors News
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US appeals court upholds Oklahoma law banning gender-affirming care for minors

The US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit on Wednesday upheld an Oklahoma law that bans gender-affirming care for minors.

The court affirmed the lower court’s ruling in favor of the law, finding no evidence that the bill was enacted with discriminatory intent towards transgender minors or their families. The court applied the “deeply rooted” analysis test used in Dobbs v. Jackson, and found that the ability of parents to obtain gender-affirming care for their children was not “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history or tradition.” The court relied heavily on the rationale laid out in the recent Supreme Court case, US v. Skrmetti, which upheld a similar Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for minors. The court stated the two laws from these two cases were “functionally indistinguishable.”

The appellate court concluded by stating: “While we respect that Plaintiffs disagree with the legislature assessment of such procedures’ risks, that alone does not invalidate a democratically enacted law on rational-basis grounds.”

The Oklahoma legislature passed Senate Bill (SB) 613 in 2023, prohibiting children under the age of 18 from receiving medical treatments like puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgeries related to gender-affirming care. Several rights groups originally filed the lawsuit in 2023 on behalf of transgender children, their parents, and a doctor, arguing that the bill “unjustly and unfairly targets them and gender-affirming health care in violation of their rights under [the] Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act.”

Advocates for transgender youth and families have demonstrated their opposition to the appellate court’s ruling. Lambda Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the Oklahoma ACLU issued a joint statement calling this decision a “devastating outcome.” The groups stated: “Oklahoma’s ban is openly discriminatory and provably harmful to the transgender youth of this state, putting political dogma above parents, their children, and their family doctors.”

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