The two lawsuits – one on behalf of two families and another on behalf of two families and doctors treating their children – pose legal challenges to legislation signed Friday by Republican Gov. Kay Ivey. “Trans young people are part of Alabama and deserve the same privacy, access to treatment and data-driven healthcare as any other Alabama,” said Tish Gotell Faulks, legal director of the American Association for Civil Liberties in Alabama. , refers to an announcement. Faulks added that lawmakers are using children as “political pawns for their re-election campaigns.” Ivey and lawmakers face a run-off election next month. Unless ruled out by the court, Alabama law will take effect May 8, making it a felony for a doctor to prescribe adolescent inhibitors or hormones to help transgender people under the age of 19. Violations will be punished with up to 10 years in prison. It also bans sex reassignment surgery, although doctors have told lawmakers it is not performed on minors in Alabama. “The level of legislative transgression in the practice of medicine is unprecedented. “Never before has there been a legislative overrun in pediatric wards to silence parents’s voice in making medical decisions between a parent, their pediatrician and their child,” said Dr Morissa Ladinsky, a doctor and plaintiff in one of the lawsuits. The Associated Press in an interview. Ivey signed the bill into law Friday, a day after it was approved by the Alabama Legislature. During a campaign standoff Monday, the governor invoked religion when asked about her decision to sign the law. “If the good Lord made you a boy at birth, then you are a boy. “If the good Lord made you a girl at birth, then you are a girl,” he said. “We need to focus our efforts on helping these young people become healthy adults, just as God wanted them to be, not as medics. Asked if the law would survive a lawsuit, he replied: “We will wait to see.” Both lawsuits were filed by advocacy groups on behalf of families with trans children, as well as by two doctors. The children were not identified in the treatments due to their age, “I know I’m a girl and I always was,” said one of the 15-year-old plaintiffs in a statement issued by the Alabama American Civil Liberties Union. “Even before I learned the word ‘trans’ or met other trans people, I knew myself.” In one of the lawsuits, the parents described their fears that their transgender daughter, named “Mary Roe” in the suit, would hurt herself or try to commit suicide if she lost access to the adolescent inhibitors who began to gets last year. “Forcing Maria to go through male adolescence would be catastrophic. “As expected, it would result in him experiencing isolation, depression, stress and anxiety,” the lawsuit states. Similar measures have been pushed in other states, but Alabama law is the first to provide for criminal penalties for doctors. In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has instructed the state’s child care service to investigate allegations of child abuse that confirm gender. And a law in Arkansas prohibits sex-affirming drugs. However, this law has been blocked by a court. Ivey also signed a separate measure that requires students to use bathrooms that are in line with their original birth certificate and prohibits the teaching of gender and sexual identity from kindergarten to fifth grade.
