(LifeSiteNews) — Indiana’s law protecting gender-confused minors from permanently damaging drugs and surgeries can stand, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Wednesday. The ruling overturns a district court’s injunction against the law.
These procedures are sometimes called “sex change operations,” although it is not possible to change one’s sex.
The victory comes just weeks before the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in U.S. v. Skrmetti, a case concerning Tennessee and Kentucky’s similar laws against the surgical and chemical mutilation of children. The Supreme Court will hear arguments on December 4.
The Indiana law prohibits medical practitioners from giving puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to minors or committing “gender reassignment surgery” or other “gender transition procedures” on them.
These drugs can leave individuals permanently infertile (as would be expected with drugs meant to stop normal pubertal development) and have been linked to bone density loss, suicide risk, and other major medical problems.
“A physician or other practitioner may not aid or abet another physician practitioner in the provision of gender transition procedures of a minor,” SB 480 states, as previously reported by LifeSiteNews. The bill passed in April 2023.
Challengers to Indiana’s law tried to argue it violated the equal protection rights of gender-confused minors and interfered with parental rights.
Physicians who assist in the mutilation of children also claimed the law violated their free speech rights.
The court dismissed the claims that the law violates on the basis of sex.
Writing for the majority, Judge Michael Brennan said Indiana’s law “bars gender transition procedures regardless of whether the patient is a boy or a girl: Nobody may receive the [so-called] treatment the state has chosen to regulate.”
“The law does not create a class of one sex and a class of another” and prohibit “gender transitions” for just one sex, Brennan added.
The court, citing Dobbs v. Jackson, ruled that Indiana only had to satisfy a “rational basis” for its law. Challengers claimed that the law discriminated on the basis of sex because boys and girls with certain sexual development disorders could receive hormones that gender-confused boys could not receive. But the judge pointed out the law “bans estrogen … for a class of, for example, boys with gender dysphoria, but preserves access for all girls and boys with disorders of sex development.”
Indiana, as the judge ruled, did not intend to discriminate against one of the sexes.
Activists also failed in their attempt to argue that the law discriminates against so-called “transgender” individuals as a class. The law does not prohibit genuine treatments, such as therapy, for individuals struggling with gender confusion.
The ruling again cited Dobbs to address the claims the law interferes with a parent’s right to make medical decisions for their children. This does not apply when the decision might be harmful to the child’s welfare, the judges stated.
“Appellees’ view may give parents immunity from child neglect claims if they decline to take their child to the hospital after a serious injury and the child’s injuries leave him permanently disabled,” the court ruled. “Or, it may allow parents to request and receive a prescription for a drug widely agreed to be dangerous because the parent believes it would benefit the child.”
The court concluded:
Indiana’s voters have decided, through their representatives, legislative and executive, that medical interventions are too risky and novel to be safe treatments for children with gender dysphoria. The people of Indiana have a substantial interest in the effectiveness of that decision. Because appellees have not shown a likelihood of success, and because their harms are not irreparable, we conclude that the balance of harms favors Indiana.
The decision drew praise from Alliance Defending Freedom, which filed an amicus brief in the case.
“Indiana rightly enacted a law that protects the health and welfare of all children—supporting their natural biological development and ensuring that children experiencing gender dysphoria have a chance for comprehensive healing and compassionate mental health support,” Senior Counsel Jonathan Scruggs stated in a news release.
Activists, Scruggs said, have pushed “bad science,” which has “devastated countless lives.”
Legal scholars: States can protect children from transgender procedures
The ruling adds to other legal analyses stressing that the prohibitions on mutilating children do not interfere with any constitutional right.
For example, Vanderbilt University legal scholar James Blumstein submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court highlighting that there is a deep legal history of allowing states to regulate medical procedures.
“The challenged law targets minors,” he wrote. “Distinguishing between adults and minors is quite routine and surely rational,” Blumstein told the Supreme Court.
In a 2022 law review article, Professor F. Lee Francis, now at Widener University, explained that states can, under the Constitution, prohibit these procedures. He compared the procedures, due to the possibility of permanent damage to reproductive capability, to eugenics.
Professor Francis is a former federal prosecutor and served as a legal advisor to the Army while on active duty.
He wrote in the Southern Illinois University Law Journal that “children are mentally incapable of understanding the full effect of transition and the consequences of gender transition” procedures.
“I further contend that permitting transgender youth transition [practices] is tantamount to eugenical practices,” Professor Francis wrote. “Additionally, this move requires the clear elucidation of an important distinction: the fundamental right to be limited is parental authority, not [so-called] reproductive rights.”
Meanwhile, medical experts have also asked the Supreme Court to uphold prohibitions on transgender procedures, as have parents harmed by gender ideology.