After oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said scientific evidence wasn’t on the side of those challenging state bans on transgender surgeries and medication for minors.
Marshall was at the Supreme Court to support Tennessee’s defense of its law imposing age restrictions on irreversible sex-change procedures. The Biden administration and the ACLU have challenged the law, arguing that it violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
“Alabama is proud to help defend Tennessee’s commonsense law protecting kids from powerful, often irreversible, chemical and surgical ‘sex-change’ procedures,” Marshall said. “Kids suffering from gender dysphoria deserve so much better than hormones and surgeries. Yet as we uncovered through court-ordered discovery while defending Alabama’s similar law, health officials in the outgoing administration teamed up with the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) to issue purported ‘Standards of Care’ that were intentionally crafted to mislead courts into believing, contrary to every systematic evidence review that has been conducted on the topic, that kids need these treatments. The ruse worked for a while: lawyers at the ACLU were able to convince some lower courts, acting on an emergency basis with a thin evidentiary record cherrypicked by the challengers, to defer to these self-interested, self-appointed ‘experts.’ But what Alabama uncovered through our litigation underscores why the Constitution places the authority to regulate medicine with the States, not with activists or judges.”
Recently unsealed documents in a lawsuit against Alabama's ban revealed the Biden administration lobbied against including minimum age requirements in the WPATH standards of care for surgeries.
“As we saw today, the Court seems rightly skeptical of such cynical antics by the ACLU and the Biden administration," he added. "The scientific evidence is not on the challengers’ side, and neither is the law. Treating a young boy’s endocrine disorder with testosterone is simply not the same thing as using that drug to treat a young girl’s mental health issue by making her appear as a boy. One treatment preserves fertility; the other treatment destroys it. And recognizing that obvious medical reality does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. Try as they might, neither the ACLU nor the Department of Justice could explain away that fundamental truth. I look forward to the high court’s decision.”
To connect with the story's author or comment, email caleb.taylor@1819News.com.
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