(LifeSiteNews) — The attorneys general of a bevy of Republican states filed an amicus brief April 7 in support of Florida’s regulation under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis prohibiting the use of state funds to bankroll mutilating transgender interventions for minors.
The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) last year determined that the Sunshine State’s $36 billion Medicaid program should not include coverage for so-called “gender transition” drugs and surgeries, such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and mutilating “sex change” operations, LifeSiteNews previously reported.
The AHCA concluded that transgender procedures lack evidence and don’t meet generally accepted professional medical standards (GAPMS), making them ineligible for Medicaid coverage. The restriction was implemented in August.
Transgender activists have since filed a lawsuit against Florida for the rule, along with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the Endocrine Society, and the radical World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). WPATH sets the guidelines that hospitals follow for transgender interventions. The organization recently signaled it would recommend lowering age limits for certain mutilating interventions, thereby green-lighting genital surgeries for minors.
In October of last year a federal judge rejected the pro-transgender organizations’ request for an injunction against the Florida Medicaid rule, allowing the state to continue enforcing it.
Now the Republican attorneys general of 17 states have filed an amicus brief in support of Florida in the ongoing legal action.
The Republicans that say they support the Sunshine State’s right to block Medicaid dollars from going toward funding for the experimental and destructive procedures, asserting that the authority of states “to regulate health and welfare is not beholden to the views of self-interested medical interest groups.”
“Plaintiffs challenge Florida’s Medicaid regulation based on its alleged inconsistency with ‘current medical opinion,’ which they define largely by relying on position statements of their preferred medical interest groups,” the attorneys general said. According to the filing, the Republicans therefore “have a strong interest in ensuring that the Court rejects Plaintiffs’ challenge.
The 17 states represented in the brief are Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia.
In the brief, the attorneys general pointed out that states like Florida that have curbed the interventions for kids join the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, and Norway which have also concluded “that transitioning treatments for minors are experimental.”
Florida has also taken additional steps to protect minors from the real physical and psychological dangers of transgender ideology. In October, the Florida Board of Medicine’s legislative committee voted to ban transgender drugs and surgeries for minors. This month, the state’s GOP-led Senate passed Senate Bill 254 to protect gender-confused children from harmful transgender interventions.
RELATED: Florida Board of Medicine votes to ban transgender surgeries, drugs for minors
Other states that have moved to enact in addition to Florida include Alabama, Tennessee, Texas, South Dakota, Kentucky, Mississippi, Georgia, and West Virginia. Far-left states like California, meanwhile, have reacted by enacting legislation to become sanctuaries for kids seeking permanently destructive transgender interventions.
LifeSiteNews has extensively reported that transgender surgeries and drugs, in addition to asserting a false reality that one’s sex can be changed, are linked to serious permanent physical and psychological damage, including cardiovascular diseases, osteoporosis, cancer, stroke, infertility, and drastically increased instances of suicidality.
Despite this, in recent years rising rates of transgender identification have been met with celebration and adulation in mainstream culture, and rates of surgical mutilation for minors have spiked. In many public school classrooms, young children are actively being encouraged to deny their biology and live as the opposite sex.
Ongoing revelations regarding LGBT indoctrination in the classroom and mutilating transgender interventions for kids have triggered a major cultural and political push to shield America’s young people from the ideological and physical dangers of transgenderism.