RICHMOND (LifeSiteNews) – A panel of federal judges has decided the federal Americans with Disabilities Act should be interpreted to accommodate gender dysphoria, in a ruling with potentially massive implications for Republican states’ efforts to curtail the “transitioning” of minors.
CBS 46 reports that a three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals sided 2-1 with Kesha Williams, a gender-confused man who sued the sheriff of Fairfax County, Virginia over being incarcerated with other males, treated as male, denied cross-sex hormones, and denied requests to have a female officer conduct his body searches. Williams, who had not yet had gender-reassignment surgery, named the sheriff, a deputy who allegedly harassed him, and the nurse who recognized him as male in the suit.
A district court initially rejected Williams’ complaints on the grounds that the ADA explicitly excludes “gender identity disorders.” But the appellate judges concluded there was a “meaningful difference” between “gender identity disorders” and “gender dysphoria,” citing the American Psychiatric Association’s replacement of the former term with the latter.
While the ruling is only directly binding on Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia (the states under the 4th Circuit’s jurisdiction), observers expect it to be cited in arguments against the country against state efforts to prevent minors from being surgically or chemically transitioned under the guise of “medical care.”
READ: Federal court says Biden admin can’t force doctors to commit abortions, gender mutilation surgeries
Other potential ramifications could include public accommodations such as restrooms and lockers, forced recognition of “gender identity” in the workplace, and mandatory coverage of transition-related treatments in private insurance plans.
Opponents of gender-fluidity theory argue that the the medical redefinition on which this ruling rests was a result not of evolving medical understanding, but of political ideology. University of Toronto psychiatry professor Ray Blanchard, a recognized expert who was a member of the team that wrote the the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association (APA)’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), has argued that “transsexualism and milder forms of gender dysphoria” should still be recognized as “types of mental disorder.”
Blanchard has endorsed so-called sex change surgery for “carefully screened, adult patients, whose gender dysphoria has proven resistant to other forms of treatment” but opposed it for anyone younger than 21 who has not “lived for at least two years in the desired gender role.”
“The sex of a postoperative transsexual should be analogous to a legal fiction,” he argues. “This legal fiction would apply to some things (e.g., sex designation on a driver’s license) but not to others (entering a sports competition as one’s adopted sex).”
Biological sex is rooted in an individual’s chromosomes and reflected by hundreds of genetic characteristics. Studies indicate that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that even full reassignment surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide, by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
On top of those issues, experts outside the medical establishment further warn that surgically or chemically reinforcing gender confusion imposes irreversible harm on children such as infertility, impairment of adult sexual function, and reduced life expectancy, as well as the psychological toll of being “locked into” physical alterations regardless of whether they change their minds when they mature, as attested to by many formerly-trans individuals who “detransitioned” back to their true sex.