A federal judge on Tuesday concluded “gender identity is real” in a ruling that partially strikes down Florida‘s new law banning doctors from prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors.
Judge Robert Hinkle issued a preliminary injunction against Senate Bill 254, which also criminalizes permanent mutilating surgical procedures and mandates that a healthcare practitioner’s license be terminated if they violate the law.
“The elephant in the room should be noted at the outset,” Hinkle wrote in a 44-page ruling. “Gender identity is real. The record makes this clear.”
“Despite the defense admissions, there are those who believe that cisgender individuals properly adhere to their natal sex and that transgender individuals have inappropriately chosen a contrary gender identity, male or female, just as one might choose whether to read Shakespeare or Grisham,” Hinkle continued.
Hinkle’s ruling centered around two 11-year-old girls and one 8-year-old boy whose parents filed the lawsuit against the state’s surgeon general, arguing that banning GnRH agonists known as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormone prescriptions violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
The parents also argued that Florida could not “demonstrate any rational basis, much less an important or compelling one, for the transgender medical bans which prevent transgender adolescents from getting safe and effective medically necessary healthcare.”
The temporary block from Hinkle allows the children to continue receiving puberty blockers.
Last year, GnRH substances received a warning from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), saying the drug could cause brain swelling, loss of vision, and serious risks for children injecting the hormone.
FDA Officials said a plausible association between using puberty blockers and pseudotumor cerebri, which displays symptoms similar to a brain tumor, was identified in six young girls between the ages of 5 and 12.
Such symptoms in the patients included visual disturbances, headaches, and vomiting. Other effects GnRH agonists caused were an increase in blood pressure and abducens neuropathy.
A spokesperson from the FDA told Formulary Watch that the cases were considered clinically serious and determined warnings should be added to all GnRH agonist products approved for pediatric patients.
However, Hinkle, who was nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida by former President Bill Clinton, ruled the benefits of treatment with GnRH agonists, and eventually with cross-sex hormones, would outweigh the risks.
“There are risks attendant to not using these treatments, including the risk — in some instances, the near certainty — of anxiety and depression and even suicidal ideation. The challenged statute ignores the benefits that many patients realize from these treatments and the substantial risk posed by foregoing the treatments,” Hinkle said.
Hinkle added that cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers also treat non-trans-identifying children for other conditions.
“The plaintiffs’ adolescent children will suffer irreparable harm — the unwanted and irreversible onset and progression of puberty in their natal sex — if they do not promptly begin treatment with GnRH agonists. The treatment will affect the patients themselves, nobody else, and will cause the defendants no harm,” Hinkle said.
Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’ office has not commented on the ruling.
DeSantis signed the legislation into law last month with four other bills to protect children from harmful leftist initiatives, including mutilating surgical procedures, radical gender theory in schools, and sexually explicit drag shows.
“Florida is proud to lead the way in standing up for our children,” DeSantis said in a news release while signing the Let Kids Be Kids bill package. “As the world goes mad, Florida represents a refuge of sanity and a citadel of normalcy.”
The law also requires adults receiving these surgeries and hormones to be informed about the irreversible nature and dangers, grants Florida courts temporary emergency jurisdiction to intervene and halt procedures for out-of-state children, and creates a pathway to recover damages for injury or death resulting from mutilating surgeries or experimental puberty blockers given to a minor.
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