In an in-person hearing in Little Rock on Wednesday, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction to block an Arkansas law that criminalizes gender-affirming care for transgender kids.
U.S. District Judge James M. Moody Jr.’s bench ruling was made in response to a lawsuit from the ACLU, which argues that Arkansas’ law violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and the First Amendment right to free speech. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of four trans kids and their families in Arkansas, plus two physicians working in the state.
Still, legal advocates warn that a rare amicus brief signals that the battles over legislation targeting trans youth are not over.
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The legal battle over Arkansas’ ban — the only one of its kind to be passed in the United States — also attracted the interest of 17 state attorneys general, who filed an amicus brief last week to bolster support for Arkansas’ law. Nearly all of the states that backed the brief have introduced their own bills to ban gender-affirming care, bar trans kids from playing sports that match their gender identity, or prevent them from discussing their identities in school, according to a bill tracker by Freedom For All Americans.
Four of the states that signed the brief through their attorney general — Alabama, Mississippi, South Dakota and Tennessee — enacted legislation this year to ban trans youth from sports that match their gender identity. Idaho, which also counseled on the brief, signed its ban on trans kids’ sports participation in March 2020.
Two attorneys told The 19th that such a brief is largely unprecedented, although any weight it carried in Moody’s decision on Wednesday was unclear. It is not guaranteed that a federal judge would take a brief like this into account.
Ezra Ishmael Young, a civil rights attorney and founding board member of the National Trans Bar Association, did not recall a similar brief ever being filed about trans kids’ health care at the trial level.
“It’s very rare for an amicus brief to be filed by a bunch of states that have no stake in the actual issue at all,” Young said, adding that it takes time to coordinate a response from so many attorneys general.
“It’s not totally unusual for AGs to team up and push their state’s policy preferences in courts outside their jurisdiction,” he said. “What makes this tack odd here is that the AGs are pushing for policy preferences that have been soundly rejected by their legislature, sometimes repeatedly.”
Carl Charles, a Lambda Legal staff attorney, told the 19th that the brief — which also he sees as unprecedented, based on research undertaken by him and his paralegal — is concerning on another level.
“To write affirmatively in support of an outlier law in one state, where there are no related laws on the books in their respective states … they have nothing really to stand on in terms of, ‘We’ve passed these similar laws and we’re in support,’” he said.
“They’re essentially taking an inherently political position and one that’s outside the scope of their office, which is to say, ‘We have an interest in seeing this law stand because we too want to pass a law like this.’ Well, that’s not the AG’s job. The AG’s job is not to pass laws. The AG’s job is to enforce the laws on the books,” he said.
As we know, Greg Abbott is plotting some executive action to block this health care for trans kids, so this ruling is quite timely. Arkansas is not in the Fifth Circuit, so the ruling would not apply here, but it’s significant nonetheless. Also significant is that the state of Texas and its felonious AG Ken Paxton were on that amicus list, as I’m sure you’re not surprised to hear. None of this is going to stop Abbott from doing whatever he plans to do, but there will very likely be a legal roadblock in his way once he does do it.