Montana judge strikes down law banning gender-affirming care for minors
A Montana court has struck down a 2023 state law banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, finding the measure's prohibitions unlawful and in conflict with the state's constitution.
In a 59-page ruling on Tuesday, District Court Judge Jason Marks ruled that Senate Bill 99, adopted by the state legislature two years ago along party lines, violates the Montana Constitution's rights to privacy, equal protection and free speech. A lower court had temporarily blocked the law from taking effect in 2023, a decision upheld by the state Supreme Court last year.
State Republican lawmakers argued in passing the bill that such a measure was necessary to protect children from taking drugs they said are experimental and making decisions they may later regret.
Marks wrote in his ruling Tuesday that Montana does not ban other medical treatments based on potential risks or inadequate evidence of efficacy, and a separate law also passed during the 2023 session expands adults' and minors' ability to receive medications that the Food and Drug Administration has not yet approved.
'The court is forced to conclude that the state's interest is actually a political and ideological one: ensuring minors in Montana are never provided treatment to address their 'perception that [their] gender or sex' is something other than their sex assigned at birth,' Marks wrote. 'In other words, the state's interest is actually blocking transgender expression.'
Phoebe Cross, a 17-year-old transgender boy who led the legal challenge to Senate Bill 99, said he was grateful for Marks's decision.
'I will never understand why my representatives worked so hard to strip me of my rights and the rights of other transgender kids. It's great that the courts, including the Montana Supreme Court, have seen this law for what it was, discriminatory, and today have thrown it out for good,' Cross said Tuesday in a statement released by his legal team at Lambda Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the ACLU of Montana.
Cross is joined in the lawsuit by his parents, two physicians and two unnamed plaintiffs.
'Today, the court saw through the state's vitriol and hollow justifications and put the final nail in the coffin of this cruel, and discriminatory, law,' said Lambda Legal staff attorney Nora Huppert. 'No parent should ever be forced to deny their child access to the safe and effective care that could relieve their suffering and provide them a future.'
In an email, Chase Scheuer, press secretary to Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen (R), said the state plans to appeal Tuesday's ruling, which he called an 'outrageous rejection of common sense.'
'Yet again, the Montana judiciary ignored the will of Montanans and went out of its way to advance the woke agendas of their political allies before the state could get a fair trial,' Scheuer said.
A spokesperson for Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte, whose nonbinary child had lobbied him to veto the bill, did not immediately return a request for comment.
In a post on the social platform Bluesky, Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr, a Democrat censured in 2023 for saying Republicans who voted to pass Senate Bill 99 would have 'blood on your hands,' said she was glad the law had been defeated and that the state's constitution 'continues to protect trans people from government overreach and animus.'
She wrote in a separate post that she would not seek an apology from House Republicans who voted to punish her for her remarks.
'I neither want nor care for their apology. They will simply be footnotes in the story of trans liberation,' Zephyr said.
The decision to strike down Montana's law comes as the Supreme Court prepares to rule this summer on whether such restrictions are constitutional. Half the nation since 2021 has adopted laws that ban gender transition-related care for minors, and President Trump has sought to end federal support for gender-affirming care for youth through an executive order that two court orders currently block.
Major medical organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, have said gender-affirming care for both transgender adults and minors is medically necessary and often lifesaving.
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