Court must rule whether Florida’s anti-trans law is the work of ‘political bullies’

Opponents of a Florida law that bans medical care for transgender youth have told an appeals court that “political bullies”, including the hard-right Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, have stripped families of their right to determine their children’s future.

The claim came in a brief to Atlanta’s 11th circuit court of appeals that will issue a final rule in January on the constitutionality of DeSantis’s law prohibiting gender-affirming care for transgender minors and restricting such treatment for adults.

“I love my child and want to get her the healthcare she needs,” one of the plaintiffs, named as Jane Doe, parent of minor Susan Doe, said in the filing by an alliance of LGBTQ+ advocates and human rights groups.

“As a parent, it is heartbreaking to see my right to make healthcare decisions for my child taken away by political bullies, and the hurt and harm that [they have] caused my child.”

A federal judge struck down the law in June, finding after a lengthy trial that Florida lawmakers acted with animosity towards a minority group instead of considering science. DeSantis’s wider war against the LGBTQ+ community has included a bathroom bill, one banning transgender athletes from girls’ sports teams, and the infamous “don’t say gay” law that banned classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity.

“Transgender opponents are of course free to hold their beliefs. But they are not free to discriminate against transgender individuals just for being transgender,” Judge Robert Hinkle said in a forthright 105-page ruling.

The appeals court in August put a stay on Hinkle’s ruling pending its own deliberations, setting up what are expected to be lively oral arguments early next year as lawyers for the state attempt to defend one of the most extreme pieces of DeSantis’s culture war agenda.

“The evidence showed just so plainly that animosity towards transgender people [has been] driving these laws, from a number of truly extraordinary statements from the governor, the boards of medicine, from state legislators openly expressing their disapproval of transgender people, and some calling transgender people demons, imps, mutants,” said Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), one of the groups that sued the state of Florida and Joseph Ladapo, surgeon general, on behalf of the families.

“But also there was evidence showing the state health administration and boards of medicine departed radically from their ordinary processes to arrive at a predetermined result. If all the factors show there was deliberate discrimination at work, the law is unconstitutional.”

Hinkle agreed with that argument in his ruling, noting the state “was unable to present evidence of even a single patient who suffered adverse consequences or came to regret care”.

He also assailed Republican legislators who approved the law.

“The evidence that animus motivated at least some is overwhelming, indeed undisputed,” Hinkle wrote.

“Another called them ‘evil’, and a sponsor [of the bill] said ‘good riddance’ to any transgender individual who left the state. With legislators having loudly and proudly proclaimed their bias the defendants ought not be allowed to hide from it now.”

DeSantis signed the healthcare bill into law in May 2023, part of a wave of dozens of anti-trans and LGBTQ+ measures implemented by Republican administrations across the country, according to the Human Rights Campaign, another of the lawsuit’s signatories.

“They’re trying to do sex-change operations on minors, giving them puberty blockers and doing things that are irreversible to them. This will permanently outlaw the mutilation of minors,” DeSantis said at a bill-signing ceremony, reported by Reuters.

Gender reassignment surgery for minors, however, is rare and only takes place after a detailed and lengthy discussions involving medical professionals. In 2002, Politifact ranked as “mostly false” DeSantis’s claim that “they are literally chopping off the private parts of young kids”, after the state provided only two examples of teenagers in the US receiving transition-related surgeries: a 15-year-old in California, and reality TV star Jazz Jennings, who underwent gender reassignment in 2018, four months before her 18th birthday.

Despite what the groups see as “overwhelming” evidence in their favor, Minter is uncertain which way the appeals panel will lean, given what he sees as “mixed messages” coming from the court in recent transgender case rulings.

Last month, it reversed a lower-court ruling in Alabama that ruled it was unconstitutional for the state to require transgender individuals to undergo reassignment surgery before they could change their assigned sex on driver’s licenses.

“The 11th circuit said, ‘no, this law does not facially discriminate against transgender people; it’s just regulating a medical treatment,’ but it also held that if a federal judge found that a law like this was enacted for a discriminatory purpose, it would be unconstitutional,” he said.

“We argued the Florida law was based on a discriminatory purpose, Judge Hinkle issued his opinion and then the 11th circuit promptly stayed it, which was disconcerting, unusual and distressing.