Judge Strikes Down Arkansas Law Banning Gender Transition Care for Minors

“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.

The criticism has not daunted lawmakers eager to cut off minors’ access to gender transition treatments; some states have included even more restrictive measures than Arkansas’s in their bans. Alabama, for instance, passed a law that criminalizes the administration of transition care, threatening providers with up to 10 years in prison.

The laws are part of a broader campaign by Republican legislators who have zeroed in on issues of gender and identity. The lawmakers have pursued legislation that excludes transgender students from participating in school sports, forces them to use restrooms and locker rooms that align with the gender listed on their birth certificates and restricts what can be taught in classrooms about gender identity and sexual orientation.

Last month, Nebraska became one of the latest states to add restrictions on transition care for minors, and in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott signed legislation to make the state the largest to ban hormone and puberty-blocking treatments, as well as surgeries, for transgender children. A law signed in May by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida went further, requiring adults seeking gender transition care to sign consent forms written by the state medical board and prohibiting nurse practitioners and physician assistants from prescribing hormone treatments for adult transgender patients.

But the legislation has prompted a corresponding flurry of legal challenges. In Alabama, a federal judge stopped the state from enforcing parts of a law that make it a felony to prescribe hormones or puberty-blocking medication while the court challenge continues. And in Florida, a federal judge recently issued a lacerating reproach of that state’s law, writing that the families suing over the ban were “likely to prevail” in their argument that it was unconstitutional and that “the rules were an exercise in politics, not good medicine.”