In an emergency request that was made public Monday by one of the groups interested in the case, officials from Idaho requested the Supreme Court to allow the state to implement a severe ban on gender-affirming treatments for children.
Last year, Republican Gov. Brad Little signed a bill that criminalises the practice of providing transgender adolescents with medical treatment, including hormone therapy, some surgeries, and medications that halt the effects of puberty. Medical providers that offer such treatment might be fined up to $5,000 under the law.
The statute was temporarily stopped from taking effect late last year by an Idaho US District Court as the underlying case continues in federal court. This verdict was affirmed in January by the 9th US Court of Appeals.
The Human Rights Campaign reports that over 20 states have passed legislation prohibiting gender-affirming medical treatment for children, with some of these statutes being blocked by federal courts. For lower federal courts, the matter has created a great deal of confusion.
In November, a number of Tennessee families and medical professionals petitioned the Supreme Court to examine a restriction that was equivalent to this one in Tennessee. The 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the district court’s conclusions and undone a prior ruling by a federal judge in Tennessee that had temporarily banned a portion of the law last year.
The matter is still pending.
The conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom is helping Idaho’s case, which claims that the lower court rulings that blocked the statute were overly general and ended up preventing processes that the plaintiffs had not intended to continue.
The state of Idaho informed the Supreme Court in its filing that each day that the law remains blocked “exposes vulnerable children to risky and dangerous medical procedures and infringes Idaho’s sovereign power to enforce its democratically enacted law.”
No reply was quickly forthcoming from the American Civil Liberties Union, the legal organisation representing parents and teenagers who identify as transgender.
When the 9th Circuit Supported the Ruling to Block the Law in January, the American Civil Liberties Union praised the decision, saying it upheld “the rights of transgender youth and their families to access the medical care they and their doctors know is right for them without political interference.”
