Texas ban on gender-affirming care for minors to take effect

A Texas law that prevents health care providers from administering gender-affirming care to transgender minors will take effect as planned this week after the state attorney general’s office filed to appeal a judge’s temporary injunction.

Texas District Judge Maria Cantú Hexsel on Friday temporarily halted the state’s ban on gender-affirming health care for minors, writing in a decision that Senate Bill 14 “infringes upon the Texas Constitution’s guarantees of equality under the law by enacting a discriminatory and categorical prohibition on evidence-based medical treatments for transgender youth.”

In response, the attorney general’s office filed an appeal with the Texas Supreme Court, automatically pausing Cantú Hexsel’s injunction and allowing the law to take effect Sept. 1. The attorney general’s office said in a Friday statement gender-affirming treatments, including puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries, are “experimental” and “unproven” and “emphatically pushed by some activists in the medical and psychiatric professions.”

Gender-affirming health care for transgender minors and adults is considered safe, effective and medically necessary by every major medical association. The American Medical Association during an annual meeting in June adopted a resolution that formally opposes “any and all” penalties against individuals seeking gender-affirming care, as well as their families and providers.

“Medical decisions should be made by patients, their relatives and health care providers, not politicians,” the Endocrine Society, which introduced the resolution, wrote in a June news release.

Texas’s attorney general’s office on Friday pushed back against the medical community’s support for gender-affirming health care, arguing there is a “lack of evidence demonstrating medical benefit.”

“The OAG will continue to enforce the laws duly enacted by the Texas Legislature and uphold the values of the people of Texas by doing everything in its power to protect children from damaging ‘gender transition’ interventions,” the attorney general’s office said Friday.

Friday’s appeal makes Texas the fourth state to have its previously blocked gender-affirming health care ban reinstated. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals last month accepted a request by Tennessee’s attorney general to lift an injunction issued by a lower court, becoming the first federal court to allow a ban on gender-affirming health care to take effect until a final ruling is made in the case against it.

The 6th Circuit last month also allowed Kentucky’s ban to take effect. A panel on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals last week lifted an injunction that had for more than a year prevented Alabama officials from enforcing a 2022 law that makes it a felony — punishable by up to 10 years in prison — for doctors to provide puberty blockers or hormone replacement therapy to transgender people younger than 19. 

The preliminary injunction blocking the enforcement of Alabama’s law will remain in effect, however, “at least for the next two to three months, and possibly longer,” the group representing the plaintiffs in Alabama said Monday.

Laws that heavily restrict or ban gender-affirming health care for transgender youths have been passed by 24 states since 2021, with a majority of bans enacted in the South.