The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Idaho can begin enforcing legislation that criminalizes ‘gender-affirming’ care for minors.

However, it’s uncertain how long enforcement of the law will last.

“The court granted Republican Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador’s request to narrow a preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Lynn Winmill, who ruled that the law violated the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantees of due process and equal protection under the law, while the state pursues an appeal,” Reuters reports.

WATCH:

Per Reuters:

The Supreme Court’s order allows the state to enforce the ban against everyone except the plaintiffs who challenged it.

Five of the court’s six conservative justices concurred with the decision to grant Labrador’s request. Its three liberal justices dissented. Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts did not publicly indicate how he voted.

Acting in a lawsuit brought by two transgender girls, 15 and 16, and their parents, Winmill blocked the Idaho law, called the Vulnerable Child Protection Act, days before it was set to take effect on Jan. 1.

The law, one of numerous similar measures passed by Republican-led states in recent years, targets medications or surgical interventions for adolescents with gender dysphoria, the clinical diagnosis for the distress that can result from an incongruence between a person’s gender identity and the sex they were assigned at birth.

Healthcare professionals under the law can face up to up to 10 years in prison for providing treatments such as puberty blockers, hormones and mastectomies that are “inconsistent with the child’s biological sex.”

Axios reports Justice Neil Gorsuch said in an explanation for why he allowed the law to go into effect is due to the lower court going “much further” than it needed to in preventing the state from enforcing the law.

“The state should have only been prevented from enforcing the law against the two plaintiffs in the lawsuit,” Gorsuch said, according to Axios. 

From Axios:

As such, the plaintiffs may receive care, but other minors will be prohibited from treatment once the law takes effect.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents the two teenagers, derided the decision in a statement, calling it an “awful result for transgender youth and their families across the state.”

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she believes the court’s decision amounted to “micromanaging the lower courts’ exercise of their discretionary authority in the midst of active litigation.”

“This Court is not compelled to rise and respond every time an applicant rushes to us with an alleged emergency, and it is especially important for us to refrain from doing so in novel, highly charged, and unsettled circumstances,” she wrote.

The Supreme Court may soon decide to directly weigh in on the constitutionality of laws like Idaho’s.

 

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