(LifeSiteNews) — On Tuesday a federal judge punished three attorneys attempting to overturn Alabama’s ban on underage gender “transitions” for attempting to game the process to get the case before a sympathetic judge.
Enacted in 2022, Alabama’s “Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act” (SB 184) outlaws “prescribing or administering” hormones and puberty blockers to gender-confused minors under age 19 and also bans sterilizing “sex change” surgeries and other procedures to remove “healthy or non-diseased body part[s] or tissue” of a child, as previously reported by LifeSiteNews.
LGBT activists and their allies, including the Biden administration, sued over the law, though the Trump administration withdrew the Justice Department’s involvement after taking office. The U.S. Supreme Court is slated to address the matter indirectly by reviewing a similar law in Tennessee.
In the meantime, U.S. District Court Judge Liles Burke of the Northern District of Alabama has disqualified two attorneys from representing the plaintiffs and fined a third $5,000 for misconduct related to “judge shopping,” AL.com reports. They and eight other attorneys were found to have filed and withdrew cases in order to avoid Burke in favor of a more like-minded judge, Myron Thompson.
Attorneys Melody Eagan and Jeff Doss “intentionally attempted to manipulate the random case-assignment procedures for the Northern and Middle Districts of Alabama” through dismissal and refiling, the judge concluded. Further, Carl Charles of the pro-LGBT firm Lambda Legal (a “transgender man”) was found to have falsely denied calling Thompson’s chambers about the case; Charles maintained she had not intentionally lied, but had just “erroneously” misremembered.
“There is nothing more valuable in the legal profession than one’s reputation, and it is only with great reluctance that the Court would reprimand a young practitioner. But here the Court is left with no choice: after considering the evidence and evaluating Charles’s credibility, the Court finds that his bad-faith misrepresentations were flagrant, intentional, and calculated to mislead,” Burke wrote. “Charles stood before this Court and testified just as he testified before the Panel – with his pants on fire.”
As to why the other three attorneys were not sanctioned, “Most have accepted responsibility for their misconduct, shown genuine contrition for their misconduct, and require no further discipline. But the rest have not only refused to accept responsibility or apologize sincerely for their actions; they’ve also tried to shift the blame for their misconduct to the judiciary.”
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 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “transition” procedures fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who attempted to live under a different “gender identity” before embracing their sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé 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.”