The Supreme Court on Monday allowed Idaho officials to temporarily enforce a strict statewide ban on gender-affirming care for most minors, in one of the first such cases to reach the nation’s highest court.
In an emergency request filed in February, Idaho asked the justices to block a lower court’s order that halted implementation of the law. Signed by Republican Gov. Brad Little last year, the law makes it a felony to provide medical treatment – such as puberty-blocking drugs, hormone therapy and certain surgeries – to transgender minors.
The high court’s decision, which came over the dissent of liberal justices, doesn’t resolve the underlying legal challenges raised by the case but instead allows the state to enforce the law against most people while the lower courts resolve those questions.
The justices have for weeks been considering three merits appeals over similar laws in Tennessee and Kentucky. An Indiana ban on transition care for minors was allowed to take effect in late February by an appeals court in Chicago.
Idaho, which is being represented in part by conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, argues that the lower court decisions to block the law were too broad because they swept in procedures banned under the act that the plaintiffs did not seek to continue.
Every day the law is blocked “exposes vulnerable children to risky and dangerous medical procedures and infringes Idaho’s sovereign power to enforce its democratically enacted law,” the state told the Supreme Court in its filing.
Attorneys for the transgender teenagers and their parents who are challenging the state law had asked the court to turn down the request from Republican state Attorney General Raúl Labrador, saying that for both minor plaintiffs, “gender-affirming medical care has dramatically alleviated their gender dysphoria and enabled them to become healthy, thriving teenagers.”
This is a developing story and will be updated.
