California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill Monday to ban school boards from rejecting textbooks based on their teachings about the contributions of people from different racial backgrounds, sexual orientations and gender identities.
Newsom called the measure “long overdue.”
“From Temecula to Tallahassee, fringe ideologues across the country are attempting to whitewash history and ban books from schools,” Newsom said in a statement. “With this new law, we’re cementing California’s role as the true freedom state: a place where families — not political fanatics — have the freedom to decide what’s right for them.”
The bill takes effect immediately.
The topic of banning and censoring books has become a U.S. political flashpoint, cropping up in statesaround the country. Many of the new restrictions enacted by conservative-dominated school boards have been over textbook representations of sexuality and LGBTQ history.
The California bill garnered heightened attention when a Southern California school board this summer rejected a social studies curriculum for elementary students that had supplementary material teaching about Harvey Milk, who was a San Francisco politician and gay rights advocate.
A 2011 state law requires schools to teach students about the historical contributions of gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.
Newsom threatened the school board with a $1.5 million fine and the board later voted to approve a modified curriculum for elementary students that met state requirements.
The new legislation bars school boards from banning instructional materials or library books because they provide “ inclusive and diverse perspectives in compliance with state law,” according to a press release from Newsom’s office.
The bill cleared the state Legislature after intense debates about what role the state should have in curricula approved by local districts and how lawmakers can make sure students are exposed to diverse and accurate portrayals of history.
Democrats in the Assembly Public Safety Committee blocked the proposal earlier this year. Some lawmakers initially opposed it because they were concerned it could inadvertently punish victims of child trafficking.
After it was blocked, Newsom weighed in with his disapproval of the bill’s failure to advance, and lawmakers revived it. Republican state Sen. Shannon Grove, who authored the bill, later amended the bill to protect victims from being criminalized.
A Montana law banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors is temporarily blocked, a state judge ruled Wednesday, just four days before it was to take effect.
District Court Judge Jason Marks agreed with transgender youth, their families and healthcare providers that a law passed by the 2023 Montana Legislature is likely unconstitutional and would harm the mental and physical health of minors with gender dysphoria.
The preliminary injunction blocking the law will remain in effect until a full trial can be held on the issue, but Marks has said he expects his decision will be appealed to the Montana Supreme Court.
“Today’s ruling permits our clients to breath a sigh of relief,” Akilah Deernose, executive director of the ACLU of Montana, said in a statement. “But this fight is far from over. We look forward to vindicating our clients’ constitutional rights and ensuring that this hateful law never takes effect.”
Montana is one of at least 22 states that have enacted bans on gender-affirming medical care for minors and most face lawsuits. Some bans have been temporarily blocked by courts, while others have been allowed to take effect.
All the laws ban gender-affirming surgery for minors. Such procedures are rare, with fewer than 3,700 performed in the U.S. on patients ages 12 to 18 from 2016 through 2019, according to a study published last month. It’s not clear how many of those patients were 18 when they underwent surgery.
In Montana’s case, transgender youth argued the law would ban them from continuing to receive gender-affirming medical care, violating their constitutional rights to equal protection, the right to seek health and the right to dignity.
Their parents said the law would violate their constitutional rights to make medical decisions for their children and two medical providers said it would prevent them from providing effective and necessary care to their patients.
“Montana’s ban is a direct assault on the freedom and well-being of transgender youth, their families, and their medical providers,” Malita Picasso, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberty Union, said in a recent statement.
The law sought to prohibit the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgical treatments for gender dysphoria, while still allowing cisgender minors to receive puberty blockers to treat early puberty or surgical procedures to treat intersex conditions.
Allowing the ban to take effect would cause irreparable harm to transgender minors who are receiving treatment, in part by exacerbating the anxiety and depression they feel because their body is incongruent with their gender identity, Picasso argued during a Sept. 18 hearing for the preliminary injunction.
The state countered that beginning the treatments put transgender children on a “path of no return.”
“A child cannot possibly consent to the treatment that permanently and irreversibly changes secondary sex characteristics, nor can a child consent to future infertility and sterilization, future sexual dysfunction and a lifetime of hormone treatments and other forms of medicalization and resulting complications,” Assistant Attorney General Russell argued.
As Republican-led states have rushed to ban gender-affirming care for minors, some families with transgender children found a bit of solace: At least they lived in states that would allow those already receiving puberty blockers or hormone therapy to continue.
But in some places, including Missouri and North Dakota, the care has abruptly been halted because medical providers are wary of harsh liability provisions in those same laws — one of multiple reasons that advocates say care has become harder to access even where it remains legal.
“It was a completely crushing blow,” said Becky Hormuth, whose 16-year-old son was receiving treatment from the Washington University Gender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital until it stopped the care for minors this month. Hormuth cried. Her son cried, too.
“There was some anger there, not towards the doctors, not toward Wash U. Our anger is towards the politicians,” she said. “They don’t see our children. They say the health care is harmful. They don’t know how much it helps my child.”
Since last year, conservative lawmakers and governors have prioritized restricting access to transgender care under the name of protecting children. At least 22 states have now enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors. Most of the bans face legal challenges and enforcement on some of them has been put on hold by courts.
All the laws ban gender-affirming surgery for minors, although it is rare, with fewer than 3,700 performed in the U.S. on patients ages 12 to 18 from 2016 through 2019, according to a study published last month. It’s not clear how many of those patients were 18 when they received the surgeries.
There’s more variation, though, in how states handle puberty-blockers and hormone treatments under the new bans. Georgia’s law does not ban those for minors. The others do. But some states, including North Carolina and Utah, allow young people taking them already to continue. Others require the treatments to be phased out over time.
These treatments are accepted by major medical groups as evidence-based care that transgender people should be able to access.
James Thurow said the treatment at the Washington University center changed everything for his stepson, a 17-year-old junior at a suburban St. Louis high school who is earning As and Bs instead of his past Cs, has a girlfriend and a close group of friends.
“His depression, his anxiety had pretty much dissipated because he was receiving the gender-affirming care,” Thurow said. “He’s doing the best he’s ever done at school. His teachers were blown away at how quickly his grades shot up.”
For its part, the center said in a statement that it was “disheartened” to have to stop the care. Its decision followed a similar one from University of Missouri Health Care, where the treatment for minors stopped Aug. 28, the same day the law took effect.
Becky Hormuth holds boxes containing testosterone in Wentzville, Mo., on Sept. 20, 2023. Jeff Roberson / AP
Both blamed a section of the law that increased the liability for providers. Under it, patients can sue for injury from the treatment until they turn 36, or even longer if the harm continues past then. The law gives the health care provider the burden of proving that the harm was not the result of hormones or puberty-blocking drugs. And the minimum damages awarded in such cases would be $500,000.
Neither state Sen. Mike Moon, the Republican who was the prime sponsor of the Missouri ban, state Sen. Justin Brown nor state Rep. Dale Wright, whose committees advanced the measure, responded immediately to questions left Thursday by voicemail, email or phone message about the law’s intent.
In North Dakota, the law allows treatment to continue for minors who were receiving care before the law took effect in April. But it does not allow a doctor to switch the patient to a different gender dysphoria-related medication. And it allows patients to sue over injuries from treatment until they turn 48.
Providers there have simply stopped gender-affirming care, said Brittany Stewart, a lawyer at Gender Justice, which is suing over the ban in the state. “To protect themselves from criminal liability, they’ve just decided to not even risk it because that vague law doesn’t give them enough detail to understand exactly what they can and cannot do,” Stewart said.
Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, the executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality, said it’s not just liability clauses that have caused providers to stop treatment.
Across the South, where most states have adopted bans on gender-affirming care for minors, she said she’s heard of psychologists who wrongly believe the ban applies to them and pharmacists who stop filling orders for hormones for minors, even in places where the laws are on hold because of court orders.
“It’s hard to overstate the level of kind of chaos and stress and confusion it’s causing on the ground,” she said, “particularly … for people who live in more rural communities or places where even before a law went into effect, it still took quite a bit of effort to get this care.”
Her organization is providing grants and navigation services to help children get treatment in states where it’s legal and available. That system is similar to networks that are helping women in states where abortion is not banned get care.
But there’s one key difference: gender-affirming care is ongoing.
For 12-year-old Tate Dolney in Fargo, North Dakota, continuing care means traveling to neighboring Minnesota for medical appointments. “It’s not right and it’s not fair,” his mother, Devon Dolney, said at a news conference this month, “that our own state government is making us feel like we have to choose between the health and well-being of our child and our home.”
Hormuth’s son is on the waiting list for a clinic in Chicago, at least a five-hour drive away, but is looking at other options, too. Hormuth, a teacher, has asked also her principal to write a recommendation in case the family decides to move to another state.
“Should we have to leave?” she asked. “No one should have to have a plan to move out of state just because their kid needs to get the health care they need.”
In the meantime, the family did what many have: saving leftover testosterone from vials. They have enough doses stockpiled to last a year.
Several Catholic priests held a ceremony blessing same-sex couples outside Cologne Cathedral on Wednesday night in a protest against the city’s conservative archbishop, Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki.
Their protest was triggered by Cologne church officials’ criticism of a priest from Mettmann, a town near Duesseldorf, who in March had held a “blessing ceremony for lovers” — including same-sex couples.
Officials from the Cologne archdiocese, which Mettmann belongs to, had reprimanded the priest afterward and stressed that the Vatican doesn’t allow blessings of same-sex couples, German news agency dpa reported.
The blessing of same-sex couples on Wednesday was the latest sign of rebellion of progressive believers in Germany’s most populous diocese with about 1.8 million members.
Several hundred people showed up for the outdoor blessing service for same-sex and also heterosexual couples. Waving rainbow flags, they sang the Beatles hit “All You Need Is Love,” dpa reported. A total of about 30 couples were blessed.
The German government’s LGBTQ commissioner called the service an important symbol for the demand to recognize and accept same-sex couples in the Roman Catholic Church.
“It is mainly thanks to the church’s grassroots that the church is opening up more and more,” Sven Lehmann said, according to dpa. “Archbishop Woelki and the Vatican, on the other hand, are light years behind social reality.”
Catholic believers in the Cologne archdiocese have long protested their deeply divisive archbishop and have been leaving in droves over allegations that he may have covered up clergy sexual abuse reports.
The crisis of confidence began in 2020, when Woelki, citing legal concerns, kept under wraps a report he commissioned on how local church officials reacted when priests were accused of sexual abuse. That infuriated many Cologne Catholics. A second report, published in March 2021, found 75 cases in which high-ranking officials neglected their duties.
The report absolved Woelki of any neglect of his legal duty with respect to abuse victims. He subsequently said he made mistakes in past cases involving sexual abuse allegations, but insisted he had no intention of resigning.
Two papal envoys were dispatched to Cologne a few months later to investigate possible mistakes by senior officials in handling cases. Their report led Pope Francis to give Woelki a “spiritual timeout ” of several months for making major communication errors.
In March 2022, after his return from the timeout, the cardinal submitted an offer to resign, but so far Francis hasn’t acted on it.
Germany’s many progressive Catholics have also been at odds with the Vatican for a long time.
Several years ago, Germany’s Catholic Church launched a reform process with the country’s influential lay group to respond to the clergy sexual abuse scandals, after a report in 2018 found at least 3,677 people were abused by clergy between 1946 and 2014. The report found that the crimes were systematically covered up by church leaders and that there were structural problems in the way power was exercised that “favored sexual abuse of minors or made preventing it more difficult.”
The Vatican, however, has tried to put the brakes on the German church’s controversial reform process, fearing proposals concerning gay people, women and sexual morals will split the church.
On Wednesday night, just across from the hundreds of believers celebrating the blessings of same-sex couples, there were also about a dozen Catholics who demonstrated against the outdoor service, dpa reported. They held up a banner that said “Let’s stay Catholic.”
A federal appeals court is considering cases out of North Carolina and West Virginia that could have significant implications on whether individual states are required to cover health care for transgender people with government-sponsored insurance.
The Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in cases Thursday involving the coverage of gender-affirming care by North Carolina’s state employee health plan and the coverage of gender-affirming surgery by West Virginia Medicaid.
During the proceedings, at least two judges said it’s likely the case will eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Both states appealed separate lower court rulings that found the denial of gender-affirming care to be discriminatory and unconstitutional. Two panels of three Fourth Circuit judges heard arguments in both cases earlier this year before deciding to intertwine the two cases and see them presented before the full court of 15.
Tara Borelli, senior attorney at Lambda Legal — the organization representing transgender people denied services in both states — said excluding the coverage is a clear example of discrimination outlawed by the 14th Amendment.
“The exclusion here is actually quite targeted, it’s quite specific,” Borelli said in court, arguing that a faithful interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and the equal protection clause ensures transgender people coverage.
“One of the most important things that a court can do is to uphold those values to protect minority rights who are not able to protect themselves against majoritarian processes,” she said.
Attorneys for the state of North Carolina said the state-sponsored plan is not required to cover gender-affirming hormone therapy or surgery because being transgender is not an illness. Attorney John Knepper claimed only a subset of transgender people suffer from gender dysphoria, a diagnosis of distress over gender identity that doesn’t match a person’s assigned sex.
Knepper said North Carolina’s insurance plan does not discriminate because it does not allow people to use state health insurance to “detransition,” either.
In updated treatment guidelines issued last year, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health said evidence of later regret is scant, but that patients should be told about the possibility during psychological counseling.
West Virginia attorneys said the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has declined to issue a national coverage decision on covering gender-affirming surgery.
Caleb David, attorney for the state defendants, said West Virginia’s is not a case of discrimination, either, but of a state trying to best utilize limited resources. West Virginia has a $128 million deficit in Medicaid for the next year, projected to expand to $256 million in 2025.
“West Virginia is entitled to deference where they’re going to take their limited resources,” he said. “They believe that they need to provide more resources towards heart disease, diabetes, drug addiction, cancer, which are all rampant in the West Virginia population.”
Unlike North Carolina, the state has covered hormone therapy and other pharmaceutical treatments for transgender people since 2017. “That came from a place of caring and compassion,” he said.
In June 2022, a North Carolina trial court demanded the state plan pay for “medically necessary services,” including hormone therapy and some surgeries, for transgender employees and their children. The judge had ruled in favor of the employees and their dependents, who said in a 2019 lawsuit that they were denied coverage for gender-affirming care under the plan.
The North Carolina state insurance plan provides medical coverage for more than 750,000 teachers, state employees, retirees, lawmakers and their dependents. While it provides counseling for gender dysphoria and other diagnosed mental health conditions, it does not cover treatment “in connection with sex changes or modifications and related care.”
In August 2022, a federal judge ruled that West Virginia’s Medicaid program must provide coverage for gender-affirming care for transgender residents.
U.S. District Judge Chuck Chambers in Huntington said the Medicaid exclusion discriminated on the basis of sex and transgender status and violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, the Affordable Care Act and the Medicaid Act.
Chambers certified the lawsuit as a class action, covering all transgender West Virginians who participate in Medicaid.
An original lawsuit filed in 2020 also named state employee health plans. A settlement with The Health Plan of West Virginia Inc. in 2022 led to the removal of the exclusion on gender-affirming care in that company’s Public Employees Insurance Agency plans.
Gender Justice on Thursday announced the state district court lawsuit in a news conference at the state Capitol in Bismarck. The lawsuit against the state attorney general and state’s attorneys of three counties seeks to immediately block the ban, which took effect in April, and to have a judge find it unconstitutional and stop the state from enforcing it.
State lawmakers “have outlawed essential health care for these kids simply and exclusively because they are transgender,” Gender Justice attorney and North Dakota state director Christina Sambor told reporters. “They have stripped parents of their right to decide for themselves what’s best for their own children. They have made it a criminal offense for doctors to provide health care that can literally save children’s lives.”
The bill that enacted the ban passed overwhelmingly earlier this year in North Dakota’s Republican-controlled Legislature. Republican Gov. Doug Burgum, who is running for president, signed the ban into law in April. It took effect immediately.
“Going forward, thoughtful debate around these complex medical policies should demonstrate compassion and understanding for all North Dakota youth and their families,” Burgum said at the time.
Tate Dolney, a plaintiff and 12-year-old transgender boy from Fargo, said gender-affirming care helped his confidence, happiness, school work and relationships with others.
“I was finally able to just be who I truly am,” the seventh-grader told reporters. “It has hurt me all over again to know that the lawmakers who have banned the health care don’t want this for me and want to take it all away from me and every other transgender and nonbinary kid who just wants to be left alone to live our lives in peace.”
Mother Devon Dolney said Tate was previously severely depressed and angry, but with the care “went from being ashamed and uncomfortable with who he is to being confident and outspoken,” a “miraculous” change.
North Dakota’s ban has led the family to travel farther for Tate’s appointments, now in neighboring Minnesota, she said. The family has considered moving out of North Dakota, she said.
Politicians “have intruded on our lives and inserted themselves into positions that they have no business being involved in,” father Robert Dolney said.
The law exempts minors who were already receiving gender-affirming care, and allows for treatment of “a minor born with a medically verifiable genetic disorder of sex development.”
But the grandfather clause has led providers “to not even risk it, because that vague law doesn’t give them enough detail of exactly what they can and cannot do” — an element of the suit, Gender Justice Senior Staff Attorney Brittany Stewart said.
North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley told The Associated Press he hadn’t seen the lawsuit’s filing, but his office “will evaluate it and take the appropriate course.”
Bill sponsor and Republican state Rep. Bill Tveit told the AP that he brought the legislation to protect children.
“I’ve talked to a number of people who are of age now and would transform back if they could, and they’re just really upset with their parents and the adults in their life that led them to do this, to have these surgeries,” Tveit said. He declined to identify the two people he said he talked to, but said one is a college student in Minnesota that he became acquainted with while working on the bill.
North Dakota’s law criminalizes doctors’ performance of sex reassignment surgeries on minors with a felony charge, punishable up to 10 years’ imprisonment and a $20,000 fine.
The law also includes a misdemeanor charge for health care providers who prescribe or give hormone treatments or puberty blockers to minors. That charge is punishable up to nearly a year’s incarceration and a $3,000 fine.
Opponents of the bill said sex reassignment surgeries are not performed on minors in North Dakota, and the ban on gender-affirming care would harm transgender youth, who are at increased risk for depression, suicide and self-harm.
At least 22 states have now enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, and most of those states face lawsuits. A federal judge struck down Arkansas’ ban as unconstitutional, and a federal judge has temporarily blocked a ban in Indiana.
Mexican transgender rights activists Kenya Cuevas and Andrea Luna sat in front of their longtime friend Paola Buenrostro’s pink grave in Mexico City.
“You don’t have to pay rent anymore. You will have your own home now,” Luna sadly joked to her late friend, a transgender woman slain in front of Cuevas in 2016.
Buenrostro will be the first woman to be moved to a mausoleum a short distance away entirely dedicated to transgender women that was inaugurated on Thursday. Many of the dead transgender women were victims of hate crimes.
Built in Iztapalapa, the most populous borough of Mexico’s capital, the burial site is the first one of its kind in the country. In some cases, no relatives claimed their bodies. Some died of natural causes, while others suffered violent deaths. Cuevas wanted them all to have a dignified resting place.
“Thank you Paola, because in your name we were able to reach an important milestone for the trans community,” Cuevas told a cheering crowd during the official inauguration.
A small altar with an image of trans woman Paola Buenrostr in the newly opened mausoleum for trans women in Mexico City, on Sept. 14, 2023. Eduardo Verdugo / AP
Mexico currently has the world’s second highest toll after Brazil for the killings of transgender people, with 25 transgender women slain from January to July 2023, according to the LGBTQ rights group Letra S.
From 2017 to July 2023, at least 586 murders of LGBTQ people were recorded by the group. More than 58% were transgender women.
Cuevas became an activist in 2016, when her friend Buenrostro, a fellow transgender sex worker got into a client’s car and was fatally shot multiple times.
Cuevas managed to grab the man and held him until police arrived, but despite multiple witnesses to the killing and a video that Cuevas took with her phone, the man was released from custody a few days later.
She soon quit sex work and founded the organization Casa de Muñecas to campaign for protections for transgender women. The organization founded the mausoleum.
The burial site will have space for 149 women, including Buenrostro and Indigenous transgender rights activist Guadalupe “Lupilla” Xiu, who died alone on Sept. 9 after having fled her native Oaxaca and suffered torture and kidnapping.
Of the 60 transgender women who Cuevas has accompanied after their deaths, 48 have already been handed over to their families. Twelve other bodies will soon be exhumed from graves with the help of the capital’s Attorney General’s Office and moved to the mausoleum.
“Today, after a long time, I feel this is an act of reparation,” said Cuevas.
A Missouri clinic will stop prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors for the purpose of gender transition, citing a new state law that the clinic says “creates unsustainable liability” for health care workers.
A statement released Monday by the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital said patients currently receiving care will be referred to other providers. The center will continue to provide education and mental health support for minors, as well as medical care for patients over the age of 18.
“We are disheartened to have to take this step,” the statement read. “However, Missouri’s newly enacted law regarding transgender care has created a new legal claim for patients who received these medications as minors. This legal claim creates unsustainable liability for health-care professionals and makes it untenable for us to continue to provide comprehensive transgender care for minor patients without subjecting the university and our providers to an unacceptable level of liability.”
As of Aug. 28, health care providers in the state are prohibited from prescribing gender-affirming treatments for teenagers and children under a bill signed in June by Gov. Mike Parson. Most adults will still have access to transgender health care under the law, but Medicaid won’t cover it. Prisoners must pay for gender-affirming surgeries out-of-pocket under the law.
Parson at the time called hormones, puberty blockers and gender-affirming surgeries “harmful, irreversible treatments and procedures” for minors. He said the state “must protect children from making life-altering decisions that they could come to regret in adulthood once they have physically and emotionally matured.”
Every major medical organization, including the American Medical Association, has opposed the bans on gender-affirming care for minors and supported the medical care for youth when administered appropriately. Lawsuits have been filed in several states where bans have been enacted this year.
Parson also signed legislation in June to ban transgender girls and women from playing on female sports teams from kindergarten through college. Both public and private schools face losing all state funding for violating the law.
Shira Berkowitz, of the state’s LGBTQ+ advocacy group PROMO, said in a statement that Parson, Attorney General Andrew Bailey and the state legislature “blatantly committed a hate crime against transgender Missourians.”
“We are working quickly with coalition partners to explore all possible avenues to combat the harm being inflicted upon transgender Missourians,” Berkowitz said.
The St. Louis clinic fell under scrutiny early this year after former case manager Jamie Reed claimed in an affidavit that the center mainly provides gender-affirming care and does little to address mental health issues that patients also faced. Republican U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley and Bailey announced investigations after Reed’s claims.
Missouri’s bans come amid a national push by conservatives to put restrictions on transgender and nonbinary people, which alongside abortion has become a major theme of state legislative sessions this year. Missouri is among nearly two-dozen states to have enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors.
In April, Bailey took the novel step of imposing restrictions on adults as well as children under Missouri’s consumer-protection law. He pulled the rule in May after the GOP-led Legislature sent the bills to Parson.
Georgia can resume enforcing a ban on hormone replacement therapy for transgender people under 18, a judge ruled Tuesday, putting her previous order blocking the ban on hold after a federal appeals court allowed Alabama to enforce a similar restriction.
Geraghty did not go that far, but she also said keeping her injunction in place was not possible after last month’s ruling on Alabama’s law by a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Georgia. She instead issued a stay, or hold, on her injunction in anticipation of a possible rehearing of the Alabama case before a larger panel of the court’s judges.
The Associated Press sent an email seeking comment to a spokeswoman for the Georgia attorney general’s office. Attorneys for the plaintiffs in the Georgia case said they would comment later Tuesday.
The 11th Circuit panel’s ruling last month said Alabama can implement a ban on the use of puberty blockers and hormones to treat transgender children. It came a day after Geraghty issued her preliminary injunction.
The Georgia law, Senate Bill 140, allows doctors to prescribe puberty-blocking medications, and it allows minors who are already receiving hormone therapy to continue. But it bans any new patients under 18 from starting hormone therapy. It also bans most gender-affirming surgeries for transgender people under 18.
The law took effect July 1. Geraghty granted a preliminary injunction blocking it on Aug. 20. The injunction was sought by several transgender children, parents and a community organization in a lawsuit challenging the ban.
In her August decision, Geraghty said the transgender children who sought the injunction faced “imminent risks” from the ban, including depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts. She said those risks outweighed any harm to the state from an injunction.
The 11th Circuit judges who ruled on Alabama’s law said states have “a compelling interest in protecting children from drugs, particularly those for which there is uncertainty regarding benefits, recent surges in use, and irreversible effects.”
Doctors typically guide children toward therapy or voice coaching long before medical intervention.
At that point, puberty blockers and other hormone treatments are far more common than surgery. They have been available in the U.S. for more than a decade and are standard treatments backed by major doctors organizations, including the American Medical Association.
At least 22 states have now enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors. Most of those states have been sued.
A judge on Wednesday halted a Southern California school district from requiring parents to be notified if their children change their gender identification or pronouns at school.
San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Thomas S. Garza ruled after California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the Chino Valley Unified School District for adopting a policy requiring schools to tell parents when their children change their pronouns or use a bathroom of a gender other than the one listed on their official paperwork.
“Today’s decision by the San Bernardino Superior Court rightfully upholds the state rights of our LGBTQ+ students and protects kids from harm by immediately halting the board’s forced outing policy,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement.
Garza’s order halts the district’s policy while Bonta’s lawsuit continues. Full details of the order were not immediately available.
During a court hearing Wednesday, Garza raised questions about why the policy came up in the first place and how it protected students.
The next court hearing on the issue was scheduled for Oct. 13.
Messages left for Chino Valley Unified were not immediately returned.
The district, which serves 27,000 students about 35 miles east of Los Angeles, is one of several that requires parents to be informed if their children are transgender. Two nearby districts have done the same, while at least two others in the state are bringing up similar measures this week.
Bonta argues the policy will forcibly out transgender students in violation of their privacy rights and threaten their well-being. Chino Valley contends the policy seeks to involve parents so they can provide support their children need.
During Wednesday’s hearing, Delbert Tran, a deputy attorney general for California, said students were already being affected by the policy and feared being themselves at school, and that risking the safety of one transgender student would be too many. “This policy needs to be addressed now,” Tran told the court.
Attorneys for Chino Valley Unified argued that the policy would not affect students who were holding private conversations with teachers, but would bring parents into the conversation in situations where students were making decisions on campus such as changing their name, pronouns or using bathrooms or joining sports teams of a gender other than the one on their official paperwork.
The district also questioned whether elementary school students as young as 4 and 5 years old should be treated the same as high school teens involved in confidential counseling.
The national conversation over transgender rights has intensified as other states have sought to impose bans on gender-affirming care, bar transgender athletes from girls and women’s sports, and require schools to “out” transgender and nonbinary students to their parents.
In California, parental notification policies cropped up after Republican state lawmaker Bill Essayli proposed a statewide bill on the issue, but it never received a hearing in Sacramento. He then worked with school board members and the California Family Council to draft the policy that was voted on in Chino Valley.
On Wednesday, Essayli said he hopes other school districts evaluating similar proposals will not be discouraged by the decision of a single judge.
“Today’s ruling does not impact our fight to protect parental rights,” Essayli said in a statement.
Many of the conversations about transgender students and LGBTQ curriculum are taking place in communities that elected more conservative school board members after the pandemic drove many parents who were angry about closures to political action. The districts are increasingly at odds with Gov. Gavin Newsom and fellow Democrats who dominate the state’s political leadership.
