It’s not medical care though

Some warped legal reasoning here from a University of Alabama law guy:

Laws that prohibit physicians from providing treatments such as puberty blockers and cross-hormone therapy to minors are bad public policy. Their advocates claim that these are efforts to protect kids, who they argue may later change their mind, from medical treatments they characterize as irreversible. But these arguments don’t hold up to scrutiny: The laws—such as the one Arkansas just passed and those that more than a dozen other states, including Alabama, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas, are actively considering—will certainly harm transgender children, denying them medical care that they need and causing them psychological pain. That should be reason enough to oppose these laws.

Wait a second though. It’s hotly disputed whether puberty blockers and cross-hormone “therapy” are “treatments” at all. What’s the disease they’re treating? There is no disease, there’s an idée fixe about being the “wrong” gender and wanting to “change sex” to correct the mistake. It’s a delusion, and it’s not at all clear that it’s in the patient’s best interest to treat the idée fixe as real and needing “treatment” in the form of fiddling with the genitals and breasts and hormones.

The most obvious, and compelling, constitutional objection to Arkansas’s Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act and laws like it arises from the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. That guarantee means, among other things, that a state government may not target one group of residents for discriminatory treatment arising from animus, dislike, or irrational fear.

Since the 1970s, the Supreme Court has consistently rejected moral disapproval of a particular group of individuals as a constitutionally legitimate basis for imposing targeted legal burdens on the group. Thus, when Congress attempted to, in the Court’s assessment, “prevent so-called ‘hippies’ and ‘hippie communes’ from participating in the food stamp program,” the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the ban for otherwise eligible “hippies.”

But this isn’t that. The laws are meant to benefit the putative trans teenagers over the long haul, because most adolescents who say they are trans desist as they get older.

It may also be true that some legislators find trans dogma irritating, but the rest of us out here in the big world are watching in horror as activists breezily dismiss all concerns about for instance what about this teenager’s future sex life and reproductive life? Is it really a good idea to destroy both forever just because the teenager claims to be this thing called “trans”? Isn’t it possible that the legislators – even Republican ones – are right to see that as a problem? Isn’t it possible that legislators who take the other view are being appallingly reckless with other people’s futures?

In clear contradiction of this constitutional rule, Arkansas’s SAFE Act singles out one group in need of medical care—transgender children—and makes the provision of that care within the state unlawful.

But it isn’t medical care. It isn’t medical care. It isn’t. Cutting off healthy breasts and penises isn’t medical care.

How do they not see this?

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