The following is a statement from Resource Center, the LGBTQIA community center serving the greater North Texas area:
The Texas Supreme Court’s devastating ruling in the SB14 case, a challenge to the 2023 Texas Legislature’s anti-transgender healthcare law, is profoundly wrong. Transgender Texas youth will continue to be denied life-affirming, medically necessary, scientifically based healthcare in their home state, as they have been since last September. The judicial system is supposed to protect vulnerable populations from injustice, and this ruling runs counter to that basic principle.
To put it simply, the ruling validates the actions of capricious and cruel politicians. It brushes aside parental rights to seek medial care for their children, saying that the right to do so is “not absolute” while claiming that gender affirming healthcare consists of “novel treatments.” This contradicts decades of scientific research and evidence that transgender healthcare is both effective and necessary.
Furthermore, the judges found that the law was not written with discriminatory intent, and that the state legislature’s right to regulate the practice of medicine supersedes a doctor’s right to perform “medical procedures that the Legislature has rationally determined to be illegal.” The general issue of transgender youth healthcare now moves to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the justices will hear arguments in their next term on a Tennessee law fundamentally like SB14. Today’s ruling is not the last word on the issue.
But no court ruling, no matter how profoundly disappointing or short-sighted, can deny the existence of transgender people. Resource Center will continue to provide supporting and affirming programming and spaces, from YouthFirst and GenderBrave to advocacy and training. To the transgender and gender nonconforming youth of Texas and beyond: we see you, we celebrate you, we affirm you. And we won’t stop fighting for you and the future you are building.
