Alabama can continue to ban puberty blockers and hormones for children after an Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals panel vacated a judge’s temporary injunction against enforcing the law.
According to Alabama law, doctors who prescribe puberty blockers or hormones, or who perform genital surgeries on minors, face up to ten years in prison.
Judge Barbara Lagoa, who wrote the panel’s opinion, said that the district court which granted the preliminary injunction “abused its discretion” by applying the wrong standard of scrutiny.
“The plaintiffs have not presented any authority that supports the existence of a constitutional right to treat children with transitioning medications subject to medically accepted standards,” she wrote. “Nor have they shown that the law classifies on the basis of sex or any other protected characteristic.”
Lagoa added that “absent a constitutional mandate to the contrary, these types of issues are quintessentially the sort that our system of government reserves to legislative, not judicial, action.”
The judge also cited the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in the opinion, arguing that judges needed to weigh whether a right is found in the nation’s legal tradition when determining whether a law can be challenged under the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause.
Alabama Republican Attorney General Steve Marshall praised the panel’s decision in a statement, saying that the state would “safeguard the physical and psychological well-being of minors” even if the Biden administration and “radical interest groups” disapprove.
“Alabama takes this responsibility seriously by forbidding doctors from prescribing minors sex-modification procedures that have permanent and often irreversible effects,” he said. “This is a significant victory for our country, for children, and for common sense.”
LGBT activists groups, alongside the federal Department of Justice, have vowed to continue fighting the law in court. The Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the Human Rights Campaign, and GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders said in a statement that their clients are “devastated by this decision” to purportedly deprive them of the “medical care they have been receiving and that has enabled them to thrive.”
Alabama is the latest state to have injunctions on transgender procedures for minors revoked by district court panels. The Sixth Circuit annulled an injunction last month in Tennessee, followed by another Sixth Circuit judge suspending an injunction in Kentucky. The lawsuit determining whether Alabama’s ban can stay on the books is set to go to trial in the spring.
