Judge Strikes Down Arkansas Law Banning Gender Transition Care for Minors
The case had been closely watched as an important test of whether bans on transition care for minors, enacted by more than a dozen states, could withstand challenges.

Dylan Brandt stands outside in front of a lectern while speaking into a microphone. A group of men and women, most of whom are wearing face masks, are gathered behind.
Dylan Brandt, a transgender teenager who is a plaintiff in the case, outside the federal courthouse in Little Rock, Ark., in 2021. C
A federal judge in Arkansas on Tuesday struck down the state’s law forbidding medical treatments for children and teenagers seeking gender transitions, blocking what had been the first in a wave of such measures championed by conservative lawmakers across the country.

The case had been closely watched as an important test of whether bans or severe restrictions on transition care for minors, which have since been enacted by 19 other states, could withstand legal challenges being brought by activists and civil liberties groups. It is the first ruling to broadly block such a ban for an entire state, though judges have intervened to temporarily delay similar laws from going into effect.

In his 80-page ruling, Judge James M. Moody Jr. of Federal District Court in Little Rock said the law both discriminated against transgender people and violated the constitutional rights of doctors. He also said that the state of Arkansas had failed to substantially prove a number of its claims, including that the care was experimental or carelessly prescribed to teenagers.

“Rather than protecting children or safeguarding medical ethics, the evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients and that by prohibiting it, the state undermined the interests it claims to be advancing,” wrote Judge Moody, who was nominated by President Barack Obama.

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“Further,” he wrote, “the various claims underlying the state’s arguments that the act protects children and safeguards medical ethics do not explain why only gender-affirming medical care — and all gender-affirming medical care — is singled out for prohibition.”

The challenge to the law, which was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas and named several transgender children and a doctor as plaintiffs, argued that the ban violated transgender people’s constitutional rights to equal protection, parents’ rights to make appropriate medical decisions for their children and doctors’ rights to refer patients for medical treatments.

The decision was hailed as a significant victory for the L.G.B.T.Q. community, delivering a dose of certainty for transgender youth in Arkansas who had worried for nearly two years about losing access to puberty blockers and hormones. The ruling applies only to the Arkansas law, which Judge Moody had temporarily blocked just days before it was set to go into effect in July 2021.

Judge Moody, who was overwhelmingly confirmed by the Senate in 2014, repeatedly cited the scientific evidence outlined by the law’s opponents, as well as the hours of testimony from doctors and transgender children and their families that described the painstaking decision-making process before beginning transition care.

“There is no evidence that the Arkansas health care community is throwing caution to the wind when treating minors with gender dysphoria,” he wrote, adding that “the state has failed to prove that its interests in the safety of Arkansas adolescents from gender transitioning procedures or the medical community’s ethical decline are compelling, genuine or even rational.”

The legislation had initially been vetoed by the governor at the time, Asa Hutchinson, a striking rebuke from a Republican who dismissed it as “well intentioned” but “off course.” But the veto was overridden by the legislature’s Republican supermajority.

Mr. Hutchinson, now a Republican presidential candidate who has cast himself as a traditional conservative alternative to former President Donald J. Trump, has stood by the veto, arguing that the law interfered with parents’ rights to decide what was best for their children.