Transgender residents of North Carolina and Montana on Wednesday joined a growing list of lawsuits challenging the recent onslaught of Republican state laws targeting transgender people.
The family of a transgender boy in North Carolina is suing state health officials to block them from implementing restrictions on providing gender-affirming care that they say will force their son to undergo a traumatic, misgendered puberty.
A federal lawsuit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court alleges that North Carolina’s new law violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment by denying transgender youth access to treatment and undermining parents’ rights to make medical decisions for their children.
In Montana state court, transgender, nonbinary, intersex, and other plaintiffs are challenging a new state law that defines “sex” to mean only male or female, which they argue denies legal recognition and protections to people who are gender nonconforming.
The lawsuit argues that the law violates the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights to equal protection, individual privacy, and freedom of speech and expression. Kansas and Tennessee have similar laws on the books.
People who are intersex are born with genitalia, reproductive organs, chromosomes or hormone levels that don’t fit typical definitions of male or female.
The North Carolina suit closely follows the playbook of other successful court challenges to gender affirmation bans that have swept Republican-led states this year. Legal challenges have met with mixed results in at least 22 states that have enacted laws restricting or banning common treatments for transgender minors. But court victories in states like Arkansas, where a federal judge struck down a state ban as unconstitutional, outlined what Lambda Legal attorney Omar Gonzalez-Pagan sees as a winning strategy for the North Carolina plaintiffs.
