The United States Supreme Court has ruled the State of Idaho is allowed to temporarily enforce a ban on all medical interventions related to changing a child’s gender. The legislation, put forward by Republican Gov. Brad Little in 2023, deems it a felony to provide transgender-related treatment for minors. In February, Republican lawmakers made an emergency request to the Supreme Court to override a lower court’s order that blocked the law going into effect. The law can now be enforced in the state, the Supreme Court decided Monday, criminalizing puberty-blocking drugs, hormone therapy and life-altering gender transition surgeries for children (with some exceptions).Conservative members of the Supreme Court, in ruling the state is allowed to enforce a ban on these medical interventions for kids amid dissention from their Democrat counterparts, said the decision curbs the power of lower courts to temporarily block the state from enforcing a law, according to CNN. Justices Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito noted that the decision the lower court made was an overreach — not just blocking the law for the people involved, but blocked its enforcement for every person in the state. “A return to a more piecemeal and deliberative judicial process may strike some as inefficient. It may promise less power for the judge and less drama and excitement for the parties and public,” Gorsuch wrote. “But if any of that makes today’s decision wrong, it makes it wrong in the best possible ways.”Attorneys for the State of Idaho argued in the filing with the Supreme Court the lower court’s attempt to block the law was too broad because it included procedures banned under the act that the plaintiffs in the particular court case in question did not seek to continue. Every day the law is blocked “exposes vulnerable children to risky and dangerous medical procedures and infringes Idaho’s sovereign power to enforce its democratically enacted law,” wrote the state. Democrat Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson described the majority’s decision as “micromanaging the lower courts’ exercise of their discretionary authority.”Jackson and Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in an opinion lower federal court “determined that a never-before-in-effect Idaho law is likely unconstitutional” and that court temporarily blocked the law’s enforcement while it considered the legal challenges involved.”“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.”Similar laws are before the Supreme Court concerning Tennessee and Kentucky. Indiana was allowed to enforce a ban on transition interventions in February by the Chicago Appeals Court.
