Supreme Court permits Idaho to enforce ban on gender-affirming care for minors | CNN Politics:
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.
I can’t speak to the legal issues at play here, but “gender-affirming care” remains an idealogical term (at best). There’s nothing about puberty blocking drugs or elective sex-change surgery that is “gender-affirming.”
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 simply untrue, as anyone who has read The Cass Report knows. There is a reason that European countries are pulling back from the medical protocols that continue to be embraced in the US, and that’s because, by and large, the best we can say is that we don’t know if they work or what the long-term harms are. One take away from the Cass Report:
For most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress. For those young people for whom a medical pathway is clinically indicated, it is not enough to provide this without also addressing wider mental health and/or psychosocially challenging problems.
The US medical establishment is simply wrong in how they’re treating gender dysphoria, particularly in minors.