The Texas Supreme Court ruled on Friday to uphold a Lone Star State law that effectively bans gender experimentation on children.
In an 8-1 decision published on Friday, the highest court in the state confirmed the legislature’s May 2023 law prohibiting health care professionals from castrating and mutilating minors does not violate the state constitution, as a trial court had previously concluded.
In fact, Justice Rebeca Aizpuru Huddle, joined by Chief Justice Nathan Hecht, Justice Jeff Boyd, Justice John Phillip Devine, Justice Jimmy Blacklock, Justice Brett Busby, Justice Jane Bland, and Justice Evan Young, affirmed in her majority opinion that the state has a vested interest in protecting children.
“Indeed, we have never held that a fit parent’s interest in caring for her child free from government interference, though weighty, triggers heightened scrutiny of every statute that restricts any asserted right connected to that interest,” Huddle wrote.
Huddle confirmed that the court believes kids, including those struggling with their sex, “deserve the most appropriate treatment together with support, love, and empathy.” She stopped short, however of pinpointing “the most appropriate treatment for a child suffering from gender dysphoria.”
Justice Blacklock, joined by Justice Devine, was far more hard-hitting about the parents and practitioners prescribing irreversible damage to kids as a solution in his concurring opinion.
“We are men and women, irreducibly and inescapably, no matter how we feel. Proceeding from these moral and philosophical premises, the Traditional Vision naturally holds that medicinal or surgical interference with a child’s developing capacity for normal, healthy sexual reproduction is manifestly harmful to the child, an obvious injustice unworthy of the high label ‘medicine,’” Blacklock wrote.
The justice claimed the case, which was joined by several self-proclaimed LGBT activist physicians, “is moral and political, not scientific and medical.”
“We have become accustomed in recent years to seeing such morally loaded verbiage presented as uncontroversial fact in what were once trusted sources of authority, like medical journals and newspapers,” Blacklock wrote. “But from outside the Transgender Vision, neologisms like ‘sex assigned at birth’ and ‘gender identity’ — while intelligible as theoretical concepts — simply do not correspond to reality. Our ability to conceive of them, and even to believe in them, does not make these concepts real.”
The ruling and scathing concurrence come just 10 days after President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice indicted a doctor who blew the whistle on Texas Children’s Hospital, which continued to offer body-butchering services to pediatric patients after claiming it had ceased to do so. Attorney General Ken Paxton later announced an investigation into the Houston-based medical center.
Paxton celebrated the court’s judgment and swore that no one would harm Texas’ children with “puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and mutilative surgeries” on his watch.
“We will always defend children in Texas from these irreversible procedures. My office will use every tool at our disposal to ensure that doctors and medical institutions follow the law,” he said in a statement posted to X.
