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Federal Judge Blocks DeSantis Attack on Trans Youth Healthcare
"Today's ruling is a powerful affirmation of the humanity of transgender people, the efficacy of well-established, science-based medical care, and of the rights of parents to make informed healthcare decisions for their children."
Jun 06, 2023
In a rebuke to Florida's Republican-controlled Legislature and its far-right governor and 2024 presidential candidate, Ron DeSantis, a federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked the enforcement of certain anti-trans rules recently adopted by state medical boards as well as specific provisions in Senate Bill 254, a new state law that criminalizes gender-affirming healthcare.
U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle's 44-page ruling prevents Florida from applying its ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth to three children whose parents are plaintiffs in an ongoing lawsuit against the state.
Hinkle argued that Florida's moves to prohibit doctors from providing and minors from receiving so-called "puberty blockers" and other hormonal treatments constitute "purposeful discrimination" against transgender people and are likely to be found unconstitutional.
"Nothing could have motivated this remarkable intrusion into parental prerogatives other than opposition to transgender status itself," wrote Hinkle, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton. "The statute and the rules were an exercise in politics, not good medicine. This is a politically fraught area. There has long been, and still is, substantial bigotry directed at transgender individuals."
"Common experience confirms this, as does a Florida legislator's remarkable reference to transgender witnesses at a committee hearing as 'mutants' and 'demons,'" Hinkle continued, referring to disparaging comments made in April by state Rep. Webster Barnaby (R-29).
Hinkle added that the families who joined the emergency motion for a restraining order and preliminary injunction would suffer "irreparable harm" if their adolescents were denied access to "medically necessary" care consistent with the guidance of every major medical organization in the United States.
"My husband and I have been heartbroken and worried sick about not being able to care for our daughter in the way we know she needs," one of the plaintiffs, who is identified as Jane Doe and has a daughter named Susan, said in response to the ruling. "Today my entire family is breathing a huge sigh of relief knowing we can now access the treatment that we know will keep Susan healthy and allow her to continue being the happy, confident child she has been."
The civil rights groups representing the plaintiffs said that "today's ruling is a powerful affirmation of the humanity of transgender people, the efficacy of well-established, science-based medical care, and of the rights of parents to make informed healthcare decisions for their children."
"The court recognized the profound harm the state of Florida is causing by forcing parents to watch their kids suffer rather than provide them with safe and effective care that will allow them to thrive," the groups continued. "We are incredibly relieved that these Florida parents can continue to get healthcare for their children while we proceed to challenge these bans and eventually see them fully overturned."
As Politico reported, "The preliminary injunction does not apply to other minors who may wish to obtain treatment, but the ruling suggests that a key part of the law itself could get knocked down as the legal challenge proceeds."
Florida's boards of Medicine and Osteopathic Medicine adopted rules prohibiting doctors from offering gender-affirming care to trans youth in March. That ban was codified into state law when DeSantis signed S.B. 254 on May 17, one week before announcing his bid for the GOP's presidential nomination.
But S.B. 254 goes much further than formalizing the state medical boards' discriminatory rules. Among other things, it empowers Florida officials to take trans children away from their parents if they receive gender-affirming care. In addition to authorizing kidnapping, the law limits the ability of trans adults to start or continue receiving gender-affirming care and threatens to put doctors who violate the new restrictions behind bars.
S.B. 254 is one of several anti-trans laws that Florida Republicans and DeSantis have approved this year. Progressive advocacy groups issued a travel advisory for the state in April.
It is also one of 70 anti-trans laws enacted nationwide during the current legislative session. More than 525 bills attacking LGBTQ+ individuals, including over 220 that target trans people, have been introduced across the U.S. in recent months.
Before Hinkle issued his ruling on Tuesday, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), one of the groups representing Florida parents, took the unprecedented step of declaring a "state of emergency" for LGBTQ+ people in the U.S.
Regarding the narrowly focused ruling, HRC and the other groups said it indicates that "the plaintiff parents are likely to succeed in their claims that S.B. 254 and the boards of medicine rules unconstitutionally strip them of the right to make informed decisions about their children's medical treatment and violate the equal protection rights of transgender youth by denying them medically necessary, doctor-recommended healthcare."
The groups added that "the challenge to the boards of medicine and S.B. 254 healthcare bans is likely to proceed quickly to trial."
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Setting Our Sights on the Equality of Women
On the victories won and the ground we've lost as women fighting for our bodies, our dignity, and our rights.
Mar 08, 2023
A month ago, I heard on the news that Boston public schools would be closed on February 3 because of the severe Arctic cold and wind chill forecast for that day and the next. My first thought was: what if the students’ mothers are working single mothers, what if they cannot take off or cannot afford to lose the pay—given inflation of food, energy and rents and the impoverishing impact of Covid?
Boston is a severely unequal city with an extremely segregated public school system: 80 percent of children in public school are low-income; 90 percent are students of color, mainly Latino and Black; higher income families with children leave for suburbs when their children become of school age, according to the Dorchester Reporter. Almost all new residential buildings are high-income; and the city is referred to as “two Bostons.”
In one of these “two Bostons” live low-wage women workers, a wage that consigns them to poverty compounded throughout their lives and in old age. “Nearly two-thirds of all low-wage workers in the United States are women,” an inequality worsened by racial inequality. Consider, too, the persistent “motherhood penalty”—whereby mothers are further set back financially by lack of paid parental leave and government-funded child care.
But, my worry today for these working mothers and their children that day concerned only one dimension of the arduous reality facing many women—most egregiously women of color—as we mark International Women’s Day, March 8, a day founded on the fact of women’s inequality. Female textile workers launched the first march on March 8, 1857 in protest of unfair working conditions and unequal rights for women—one of the first organized strikes by working women, during which they called for a shorter work day and decent wages.
Women have gained considerable rights since that and subsequent marches, through our own organizing, protests, and arrests: the right to vote, to own property, to inherit, to education, to have once-legal rape in marriage criminalized. A revolution for human rights without weapons, fists or a drop of blood spilled. Yet, only a handful of countries are nearing full equality for women; and ours is not even close. Indeed, U.S. women's progress in gaining equality has both stagnated and lost ground.
Worst of all, violence against women by men in all its forms: pornography, rape, prostitution, physical beating, murder increased during Covid. Women’s reproductive rights have been trampled by the 2022 Supreme Court decision to void the right to abortion; and many states are sponsoring a plethora of regulations to deny women access to abortion and birth control. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that domestic abusers can own guns – a “death sentence for women and their families,” given “abusers are five times more likely to kill their victims if they have access to firearms.”
From 2001 to 2019, approximately 7,000 U.S. soldiers died in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, a period of time in which more than 18,000 US women were killed—nearly 3 per day—by current or former intimate partners. (For those who assume male violence and war are inevitable, don’t waste your time on a doomed view. Consider this: during thousands of years in Neolithic Europe women and men lived in egalitarian, peaceful societies, according to respected archeologist Dr. Marija Gimbutas.)
In that same period of U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, an estimated 14,400 US women died before, during and just after childbirth—more than twice the number of US soldiers killed in these wars. Thousands of memorials commemorate those who gave their lives for their country in war; name one for women killed by men or who lost their lives giving birth to the next generation.
The injustice of women’s inequality ripples out to national governments. Peace and the security of nations are powerfully linked with the equality of women. Comparing the security and level of conflict within 175 countries to the overall security of women in those countries, researchers have found that the degree of equality of women within countries predicts best how peaceful or conflict-ridden their countries are. Further, democracies with higher levels of violence against women are less stable and more likely to choose force rather than diplomacy to resolve conflict.
So, if you care about turning back from the warpath the U.S. is on and eliminating nuclear weapons, consider the words of the revered Ghanian statesman and former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan:
“There is no policy more effective in promoting development, health, and education than the empowerment of women and girls … and no policy is more important in preventing conflict or in achieving reconciliation after a conflict has ended.”
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To Strengthen Women's Resilience to Disasters, Make the Wealthiest Pay Their Fair Share
Gender inequality exacerbates the impact of natural disasters, and the consequences of natural disasters compound gender inequality. States must introduce progressive taxation to finance the expansion of rights such as universal access to health care and education, and strengthen women's resilience to natural hazards, including climate change.
Mar 08, 2023
She will be called Aya. This is the name that nurses gave to the infant baby pulled from the rubble of a five-story building in Jinderis, northern Syria. A miracle. Beside her, the rescuers found her mother, dead. She had given birth within hours of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria on the night of February 6, 2023. Like her, more than 50,000 people died in the earthquake. As tragic as it is hopeful, this story has moved the international media. It also reminds us that over 350,000 pregnant women who survived the earthquake now urgently need access to health care, according to the United Nations. And this is only one aspect of women's vulnerability to natural disasters.
Floods, droughts, earthquakes, and other extreme events are not gender-neutral, especially in developing countries. Evidence shows that women and girls die in greater numbers and have different and uneven levels of resilience and capacity to recover. Of the 230,000 people killed in the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, for example, 70% were women. Because of gender barriers, they often have fewer survival skills: boys are taught to swim or read first. This makes it difficult for them to access early warnings or identify safe shelters.
In addition, it is more difficult for women to escape from danger, since they are most often responsible for children, the elderly, and the sick. Heightened tensions and fear, as well as the loss of income provoked by disasters, drive increased domestic violence against women and girls. They are also the first victims of sexual violence and exploitation when entire populations are displaced—this was one of the first concerns in Pakistan when more than 8 million people had to leave their homes because of the terrible floods in June through August of 2022.
Progressive taxation—making the richest people and multinationals pay their fair share—is one of the most powerful tools for reducing inequality of all kinds.
Natural catastrophes negatively impact everyone economically, but women and girls are disproportionately affected. World Bank data show that female farmers suffer much more than male ones in rural areas. Assigned to domestic tasks, they are more dependent than men on access to natural resources and are, therefore, the first to suffer when these become scarce. In every region, food insecurity is higher among women than men. In 2020, it was estimated that nearly 60% of the people who go hungry are women and girls, and the gender gap has only increased since then. Their lack of access to bank accounts also means that women's assets are less protected than men's.
And, of course, recovery from any crisis builds on societal expectations related to gender roles. Consequently, women bear the brunt of the increased domestic burden after a disaster at the cost of missing out on other income-generating activities. We know that women spend, on average, 3.2 times more time than men on unpaid care work, and the COVID-19 pandemic—another human-induced natural catastrophe—made evident how unequally unpaid care and domestic work is shared, and how undervalued and underrecognized it is. This is a major constraint on women's access to education, an obstacle to their entry into and advancement in the paid labor market, and to their political participation, with serious consequences in terms of social protection, income, and pensions.
Gender inequality exacerbates the impact of natural disasters, and the consequences of natural disasters exacerbate gender inequality. This is an unacceptable vicious cycle. With the world already facing a growing number of climate-related tragedies, governments must take immediate and long-term action to invest in universal access to health care, water and sanitation, education, social protection, and infrastructure for gender equality and the full enjoyment of women's human rights.
As the world celebrates International Women's Day, let's keep in mind that it is impossible to build more resilient societies without fighting for gender equality.
Even in times of crisis, when state coffers are nearly empty, there are equitable solutions to raise revenues to fund the investments needed to strengthen women's resilience: to make those who profit from the crises ravaging the planet, including from those natural disasters, pay, as recommended by the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT), of which I am a member alongside, among others, Joseph Stiglitz, Jayati Ghosh, and Thomas Piketty. Instead of implementing austerity programs that devastate the most disadvantaged, states can increase their fiscal space by taxing companies and the super-rich more.
It starts with taxing the super profits made by multinationals, and several countries in Europe and Latin America have already begun to do so. This is particularly true for the pharmaceutical giants that have made a fortune selling vaccines against Covid-19, which they were able to develop due to public subsidies. This is also the case for multinationals in the energy or food sector: Oxfam estimates that their profits increased by more than two and a half times (256%) in 2022 compared with the 2018–2021 average. For the same reasons, it is urgent to tax the richest, who get away with paying hardly any taxes these days. One cannot accept that, as Oxfam reminds us, a man like Elon Musk, one of the wealthiest men in history, is taxed at 3.3%, while Aber Christine, a market trader in Uganda who sells rice, is taxed at 40%.
Progressive taxation—making the richest people and multinationals pay their fair share—is one of the most powerful tools for reducing inequality of all kinds. As the world celebrates International Women's Day, let's keep in mind that it is impossible to build more resilient societies without fighting for gender equality. Continuing to ignore it is a political choice, and an even more perilous threat to development than natural disasters themselves.
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