Five Louisiana transgender youths have asked a judge to block a state ban on gender-affirming medical care, setting up a court showdown over a law championed last year by conservative lawmakers.
The youths and their families alleged Monday in New Orleans state court that Act 466, which took effect Jan. 1, discriminates against transgender people, sets up barriers for parents trying to give their children the best possible health care and bars doctors from adequately doing their jobs.
“This health care has allowed me to be happy, healthy, and my true authentic self, the boy I know I am,” one of the plaintiffs, identified in legal documents as Max Moe, said in a statement. “I am terrified of what the health care ban will do and worry about how my mental health might deteriorate.”
The families are represented by national LGBTQ+ rights organization Lambda Legal, the Center for Health Law & Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School and Louisiana law firm Schonekas, Evans, McGoey & McEachin.
The lawsuit seeks to build on a growing body of legal cases where judges have sided with plaintiffs against other states with similar laws on their books.
Staff and one board member from the Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners, which is named as a defendant in the complaint, did not return an emailed message Monday. Also named as a defendant was Attorney General Liz Murrill, a Republican who took office on Monday. She could not immediately be reached.
Laws targeting gender-affirming care have passed in more than a dozen U.S. states with Republican-controlled legislatures in the last two years.
But by last summer, U.S. district judges had halted those laws in at least six of those states, Reuters reported at the time — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee. Many of those legal rulings determined that the laws infringed on the constitutional guarantee to equal protection under the 14th Amendment. Illustrating the fast-evolving legal landscape involving the health care bans, appellate courts have since upheld the laws in some of those states, though they could still be struck down by a higher court.
Louisiana’s law bans gender-altering surgical procedures as well as treatments including hormone therapy and puberty blockers for youths whose gender identity “is inconsistent with the minor’s sex” — language the plaintiffs argued directly targets transgender people.
The law allows transgender children to continue receiving counseling.
Act 466 became a flashpoint of the legislative session last year, ultimately drawing lawmakers back to Baton Rouge in July for special veto-override session after then-Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, wielded his veto pen against the measure.
Now-retired state Sen. Fred Mills, R-Parks, angered GOP party activists at the time by bucking his fellow Republicans and voting to kill the bill in the Senate Health and Welfare Committee. Mills, who was at the end of his term, chaired that committee at the time.
Driven by a groundswell of support for the bill from groups preaching conservative social values, lawmakers breached legislative decorum and resurrected the bill, sending it to a different committee and ultimately passing it in the full Senate.
When he vetoed the bill a few weeks later, Edwards wrote in a scathing six-page veto letter that it was “blatantly defective on so many levels.”
“This bill is entitled the ‘Stop Harming our Kids Act,’ which is ironic because this is precisely what it does,” the former governor wrote.
The Republican-supermajority House and Senate both went on to override Edwards’ veto, making the bill law.
Lawmakers in the House tried to override Edwards on two other anti-LGBTQ+ bills: one that sought to restrict students’ use of alternate pronouns and another that barred discussion of gender and sexuality from classrooms altogether. But the chamber fell short of the two-thirds votes needed to jettison those vetoes.
In a statement Monday, State Rep. Gabe Firment, a Pollock Republican who sponsored the gender-affirming care bill, said he expected the courts to side with his bill.
“The lawsuit challenging HB648 (Act 466) was completely expected, as lawsuits have previously been filed in several other states that passed similar legislation to protect their children,” Firment said. “It’s been very encouraging to see appellate courts recently uphold similar laws passed in Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee.”
