Summary
The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Indiana’s law banning puberty blockers and hormones for transgender minors, aligning with similar laws in 26 GOP-led states.
Plaintiffs argued the law discriminates based on sex and interferes with parental rights to direct medical treatment for their children, but the 2-1 ruling dismissed these claims.
The court stated the law applies equally to all minors and parents don’t have unrestricted rights to medical treatments.
This decision comes as the Supreme Court prepares to review a similar Tennessee case, potentially setting a nationwide precedent.
I think this one is more difficult than it sounds.
You are asking if someone should have the right to make a life long decision, before they have matured enough to make a life long decision. Tie that in with parents who can both have their child’s best interests at heart, or their own preconceived religion and views on it and there is no wide reaching decision that is best for everyone.
Saying that, they would have said no regardless of the discussions and best interests of the individual. These discussions need to be had, but quietly pretty fucking confident they won’t happen in the next 4 years.
The problem is that, in this situation, no decision IS a decision.
Up until puberty, boys and girls are quite similar. It’s puberty that causes the lifelong changes. We already know that delaying puberty doesn’t cause long-term issues. Puberty blockers are used to treat or help with other conditions. By blocking puberty, you are buying time. Time for the child to mature. Time for phycologists to assess. Time to practice the role before locking it in permanently. Time to grow, learn, and make the very decision you are talking about.
Puberty blockers are reversible - that’s not a lifelong decision. That information should have been in the article, and if we didn’t live in a dumbshit rightwing dystopia where press is owned by the conservatives and also fears retribution from the conservatives, that information would’ve been in there.
Surgery? Sure, let’s have that conversation - though I would certainly argue it’s not the state’s business what happens between a child, their parents, and their doctors, any more than it would be any other lifelong medical procedure. But it’s at least a little murky. But this decision isn’t surgery, it’s puberty blockers. Not murky. Just evil.
Republicans just want this fact suppressed. Everywhere you look, puberty blockers are presented as bad as genital surgery. They want to make it sound scary and overly artificial, like “toxic levels of hormones to go against the grain of the natural process”. This part they don’t actually say out loud but it is implied. Every outlet that fails to make clear that puberty blockers is a well established intervention for cis and trans kids alike, they are part of the TERF propaganda apparatus right enough.
Sure, there’s some tough discussions to be had, but puberty blocker access is pretty damn straightforward to anyone who has actually researched it for 30 seconds or more. Plus, minor healthcare requires parental consent. Maybe some conversations are required. If they are, we better fucking defer to the parents in the meantime.
I know what you say sounds reasonable at first. But parents and kids already make a huge amount of life long decisions already. You hit the nail on the head with religion. Circumcism is a life long unreversable (as far as I know) decision that is made without yhe childs consent and mainly for preconcieved religious reasons. So why is trans medical care any different. Simply because it is the minority.
And of course, when kids who really want that treatment don’t get it. Some resort to suicide. That is life long and unreversable as well.
All of the trans kids I know have parents who are trying to adjust to it. Not parents who pushed them into it. It’s a lot of work, doctor’s appointments, paperwork, and fear. I would speculate that the number of kids convinced by their parents to be trans is infantessimally small. And they almost definitely don’t live in red states. So laws like this protect almost no kids in their state while causing harm to significantly more kids who actually do live in their state.
Don’t act like you all give a fuck about kids. If you did something would be done about school shootings, like banning high capacity magazines. This is transphobia, period.
Trans erasure in action.
I hope denying healthcare to children was worth owning the libs.
We’re in Indiana. One of my daughter’s close friends is trans. The school system treats him like shit already. He has to change with the girls and use the girls’ bathroom. Once, a girl was being a bigot to him over and over and he finally lost it and slapped her. He got in trouble, she did not.
I wish I could help him somehow. He’s such a sweet kid.
Much like book bans in school libraries that have moved to city libraries and all the other bans that started in schools, this will soon move from bans on children getting healthcare, to bans on adults getting healthcare once they use the “save the children” rhetoric to make their followers comfortable with the prejudices in general.
Yeah, Missouri tried to include adults with autism from getting gender care.
Yeah, that’s one reason I’ll never get an official Autism diagnosis. The misinformation about autism that politicians work with is gross. I mostly blame the companies like Autism Speaks who present it as a disease to be cured so parents don’t feel bad about making their kids mask rather than most forms being simply a sociologically induced disability because people are too lazy to adapt and too many exploitative social practices exist that neurotypicals can adapt to easily, but many neurodivergent people can’t and they don’t want to give up the exploitation.
Like gender identity interacts with the chemistry of the drug somehow? Is it safe if the kid is cis and it is not when the kid is trans? Is there some (well) materialism in gender identity or is this philosophical dualism of some sort?
The prescribed use is to suppress the development of sex features by blocking sex hormones, so how is it different?
This is just fear mongering.
