Litigation regarding an Alabama law that bans minors from undergoing life-altering sex-change surgeries and hormone treatments has been resolved with a joint dismissal agreement filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama's Northern Division on Thursday.
The plaintiffs, who challenged Alabama’s ban on gender transition procedures for minors, agreed to dismiss their lawsuit “without costs or fees to any party.”
According to the office of Alabama’s Republican Attorney General, Steve Marshall, the lawsuit was initiated three years ago by multiple plaintiffs represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Southern Poverty Law Center, and some of the nation’s largest law firms. They challenged the law that aims to protect vulnerable children from procedures that can have profound and irreversible effects.
The discovery process associated with the lawsuit revealed that the “standards of care” employed by LGBT advocacy groups pushing for these procedures on trans-identified youth were found to be “not evidence-based.”
Marshall’s office stated that the discovery “exposed that ‘key medical organizations misled parents, promoted unproven treatments as settled science, and ignored growing international concern over the use of sex-change procedures to treat gender dysphoria in minors.’”
The resolution of this litigation comes less than two months after the federal government under the Trump administration withdrew from the lawsuit, which the Biden administration had previously joined in an effort to block the legislation in court.
Alabama was among the first states to enact a law banning trans-identified youth from using puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and undergoing gender-affirming surgeries, all aimed at changing gender. Shortly after the law was passed in 2022, a federal judge temporarily halted the provision banning puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones while upholding the ban on gender transition surgeries.
Several other states—such as Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming—have also enacted laws that ban some or all forms of gender transition procedures for minors out of concerns about their long-term effects.
The American College of Pediatricians has warned that puberty blockers can cause “osteoporosis, mood disorders, seizures, cognitive impairment and, when combined with cross-sex hormones, sterility.” They also list potential side effects of cross-sex hormones, including “an increased risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, blood clots and cancers across their lifespan,” emphasizing the risks associated with these treatments.
