A federal judge ordered that the state’s restrictions on puberty-blockers, hormone therapy, and other restrictions on gender-affirming healthcare for adults be overturned on Tuesday and that they not been put in effect.
The restrictions, which were signed into law by Republican governor of Florida in 2023, prohibit people under the age of 18 from receiving estrogen therapy or puberty blockers to address gender dysphoria. However, the law also made it possible for children who had begun receiving gender-affirming attention before May 17, 2023, to continue doing so with new regulations.
The law added new restrictions on adults receiving gender-affirming healthcare, which was one of a number of stringent laws introduced by Republicans in recent years to control the lives of trans people.
All of those factors were found to be infringing on the US Constitution’s assurance of equal protection under the law, according to US District Judge Robert Hinkle in Tallahassee, noting that some Florida legislators “plainly acted from old-fashioned unfair animus.”
He declared that discrimination against transgender people was illegal in his decision that “gender identity is real.” ” In day, prejudice against transgender people may diminish, just as racism and misogyny have diminished”.
DeSantis ‘ campaign spokesman, who signed the ban shortly before announcing his unsuccessful bid to become the Democratic candidate for the US presidential election, said the state may appeal the decision and referred to gender-affirming care as an element of “radical, new age’gender philosophy.”
” These procedures do continuous, life- changing harm to children, and story will look back on this trend in horror”, the spokeswoman, Julia Friedland, said in a statement.
The prosecutor noted that physicians who treat transgender people, numerous health organizations, and the US Department of Health have commonly accepted that the treatments Florida has banned are “well-established standards of care for treatment of female dysphoria.”
Numerous parents of transgender children who were defendants in the complaint testified to the court in support of the claim that gender-affirming medical was enabling their children to succeed and become successful. A transsexual man, another claimant, testified that Florida’s new limitations had interrupted his bringing of cortisol when his prescribed lapsed, causing stress, anxiety and depression.
Hinkle ruled that the laws unconstitutionally discriminated on the basis of gender because the rules allowed healthcare companies to continue providing puberty blockers or hormone therapy to children and adults who are not trans.
Physicians who broke the law could spend up to five years in captivity.
The judge noted that when Florida passed the law, Governor DeSantis openly expressed their spiritual condemnation of trans people. This prevented the state’s attorneys from effectively arguing that the law was an effort to regulate healthcare that was made in good faith and certainly motivated by illegal discrimination.
” The act and the laws were an exercise in politics, not great treatments”, the judge wrote. The overwhelming majority of medical opinion backs these procedures.
