BOISE, Idaho (LifeSiteNews) — Idaho Republican Attorney General Raúl Labrador is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow his state to continue enforcing its law against “gender transitioning” minors while a legal challenge on the merits works its way through the courts.
Last April, Republican Gov. Brad Little signed the Vulnerable Child Protection Act, which prohibits any medical professional from “performing surgeries that sterilize or mutilate, or artificially construct tissue with the appearance of genitalia that differs from the child’s biological sex” or “administering or supplying” children with “puberty-blocking medication to stop or delay normal puberty,” “supraphysiological doses of testosterone to a female,” and “supraphysiological doses of estrogen to a male.”
The law was slated to take effect this January, but the state chapter of the far-left American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued, and near the end of December, Clinton-appointed U.S. District Court Judge B. Lynn Winmill issued a temporary block, claiming it violated the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, comparing refusing the mutilation of children to the practice of human slavery that the Fourteenth Amendment (along with the other Civil War amendments) was enacted to end.
Several federal courts, including the Sixth and Eleventh Circuit Courts of Appeals, have upheld bans on “gender transitions” for minors and ruled that they do not violate the Constitution, contrary to Winmill.
READ: Federal court upholds Tennessee law protecting kids from transgender drugs, surgeries
On Monday, Labrador’s office announced that it filed an emergency motion on Friday with the nation’s highest court, asking it to narrow the scope of the temporary block to the specific families represented by the ACLU and allow the law to be enforced in all other cases: “Although the activists have only challenged certain parts of Idaho’s commonsense law, the lower court stopped Idaho from enforcing its entire law state-wide, prohibiting the State from even protecting children under age five from drugs and surgeries that disfigure their bodies and stop their natural development.”
“I’ve witnessed firsthand the devastating consequences of drugs and procedures used on children with gender dysphoria, and it’s a preventable tragedy,” Labrador said. “The state has a duty to protect and support all children and that’s why I’m proud to defend Idaho’s law that ensures children are not subjected to these life-altering drugs and procedures. Those suffering gender dysphoria deserve love, support, and medical care rooted in biological reality. Denying the basic truth that boys and girls are biologically different hurts our kids. No one has the right to harm children, and, thankfully, we as the state have the power — and duty — to protect them.”
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80% of children who suffer from 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 — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Last summer, the Biden administration’s own U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) released a since-deleted report that acknowledged “lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults are more likely than straight adults to use substances, experience mental health conditions including major depressive episodes, and experience serious thoughts of suicide.”
Some physicians heavily involved in “transitioning” minors have been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an exposé last year about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”
As for the Idaho motion’s prospects, it remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court will step in. While the current majority has delivered conservatives major victories on gun rights, environmental regulation, affirmative action, and most significantly, abortion, with the overturn of Roe v. Wade, it has also refused to stop judicial activism in numerous state-level cases, including transgender ideology.