A Florida judge deemed unconstitutional large swaths of a 2023 law that restricted hormone-therapy and puberty blockers for minors on Tuesday.
Judge Robert L. Hinkle of Federal District Court in Tallahassee said in support of so-called gender-affirming care and treatments such as hormone therapy that “the state of Florida can regulate as needed but cannot flatly deny transgender individuals safe and effective medical treatment — treatment with medications routinely provided to others with the state’s full approval so long as the purpose is not to support the patient’s transgender identity.”
“Gender identity is real,” Hinkle wrote in his decision. “Those whose gender identity does not match their natal sex often suffer gender dysphoria. The widely accepted standard of care calls for appropriate evaluation and treatment. For minors, this means evaluation and treatment by a multidisciplinary team. Proper treatment begins with mental-health therapy and is followed in appropriate cases by GnRH agonists and cross-sex hormones – referred to in this order as gender-affirming care. Florida has adopted a statute and rules that ban gender-affirming care for minors even when medically appropriate. The ban is unconstitutional.”
Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis enacted the law, S.B. 254. in 2023 to protect minors from receiving gender transition-related treatment. Hinkle invalidated parts of the law that specified only physicians were to administer such treatment to adults, allowing nurse practitioners and other medical professionals to provide transition-related treatment, and also struck down a provision that required adults to meet a doctor in person before starting gender transition.
Hinkle upheld the part of the law that bans gender-transition surgery for minors.
“We disagree with the court’s erroneous rulings on the law, on the facts, and on the science,” DeSantis’s press office said in a statement. “As we’ve seen here in Florida, the United Kingdom, and across Europe, there is no quality evidence to support the chemical and physical mutilation of children. These procedures do permanent, life-altering damage to children, and history will look back on this fad in horror.”
DeSantis’s office said that it would appeal the decision and “continue to fight to ensure children are not chemically or physically mutilated in the name of radical, new age ‘gender ideology.'”