By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) -A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld an Arkansas law barring doctors from providing gender-affirming care including puberty blockers, hormones and surgery to transgender minors.
The 8-2 decision by the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturns a lower court ruling. It also follows the U.S. Supreme Court’s June ruling holding that Tennessee’s similar ban did not discriminate based on sex or transgender status.
Citing that ruling, the 8th Circuit’s majority agreed with Arkansas’ Republican attorney general that the law did not violate transgender minors’ equal protection rights under the U.S. Constitution.
The 8th Circuit also went further than the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, by deciding an unresolved legal issue of whether such bans violate parents’ rights to provide appropriate medical care for their children.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs — a group of minors, parents and healthcare professionals — argued the Arkansas law violated parents’ due process rights under the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.
But U.S. Circuit Judge Duane Benton, writing for the majority, cited a lack of historical support for the argument that parents have a right to obtain medical treatment for their children that a state legislature deems inappropriate.
“This court finds no such right in this Nation’s history and tradition,” Benton wrote in an opinion joined by seven fellow appointees of Republican presidents.
U.S. Circuit Judge Jane Kelly, an appointee of Democratic former President Barack Obama, dissented along with another judge, citing a “startling lack of evidence connecting Arkansas’ ban on gender-affirming care with its purported goal of protecting children.”
“This is a tragically unjust result for transgender Arkansans, their doctors and their families,” said Holly Dickson, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, which represented the plaintiffs.
The decision overturns a ruling by a lower-court judge in 2023 who had declared the law unconstitutional after previously blocking it from taking effect in 2021.
That year, Arkansas became the first U.S. state to ban gender-affirming care for minors. The Republican-led legislature passed the ban over the veto of then-Governor Asa Hutchinson, also a Republican.
Since then, a slew of other Republican-led states have passed similar laws. Such policies are now in place in 25 states. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week upheld Oklahoma’s own ban, citing the Supreme Court’s ruling.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
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