[RD] LGBTQ news

[EnglishEdward]

No, its the law.

I rather think that qualified immunity applies to action taken under a state law before that law is ruled unconstitutional.

I was referring previously to action taken after that state law has been ruled unconstitutional.

Sure. Won't stop them if the only relief for victims is for each individual victim to go through the long, grinding court process.

An appeal would need to be filed, but if SCOTUS has ruled that the law under which that individual was fined or imprisoned is unconstitutional, that appeal should be a simple process.

 

[choxorn]

However it would seem to me that if the supreme court has ruled a state law
invalid any arrests made under that law after that ruling, are unlawful arrests.

As if an arrest being unlawful has ever stopped a cop from doing it

 

[EnglishEdward]

I was discussing what is lawful.

I am not sure what the point of your post is.

I could equally well say that:

Murder is unlawful but that doesn't stop murderers.

 

[Gorbles]

I was discussing what is lawful.

I am not sure what the point of your post is.

I could equally well say that:

Murder is unlawful but that doesn't stop murderers.

Police are (ostensibly) meant to protect. Not sure comparing them to murderers was what you intended.

Or maybe you did! If so, kudos

 

[Manfred Belheim]

I rather think that qualified immunity applies to action taken under a state law before that law is ruled unconstitutional.

I was referring previously to action taken after that state law has been ruled unconstitutional.



An appeal would need to be filed, but if SCOTUS has ruled that the law under which that individual was fined or imprisoned is unconstitutional, that appeal should be a simple process.

I believe your starting assumption is incorrect. It doesn't appear that the law (or other similar laws in other states) have been definitively ruled unconstitutional. Presumably if it/they had then your point would have more strength, but at the moment I think it's moot.

 

[Klaus Hergersheimer]

I believe the purpose of getting the injunction was that the plaintiffs felt as though it might be unconstitutional. I haven't thought about it a great deal, but it seems that a law discriminating against children simply becomes invalid when they become 18 anyway. To that end, it at least makes sense to me that granting a universal injunction is simply a circumvention of a democratically enacted law (whether you think that law is lousy or not), without a class action suit that could be said to represent a more sizable sample of plaintiffs.

 

[EnglishEdward]

I believe your starting assumption is incorrect. It doesn't appear that the law (or other similar laws in other states) have been definitively ruled unconstitutional. Presumably if it/they had then your point would have more strength, but at the moment I think it's moot.

Quite so.

There is indeed a distinction between a definite SCOTUS ruling of the unconstitutionality of a law (where I was
picking up from the black and white argument), and the (otherwise referenced in this thread) injunction to stay.

However in the later instance I'd think that limiting its applicability to named plaintiffs is reasonable.
And if the final ruling is that the law is unconstitutional then that ruling might either include the
generality of such a class of plaintiffs, or enable others to follow through with simple law suites/appeals.

 

[schlaufuchs]

The purpose of a stay is to pause the execution of a law which may have unlawfully cause lasting or irrecoverable damage. If a state passed a law specifying that thieves were to be punished by removal of the hand, and then after 2 years once the law is ruled unconstitutional you may have hundreds or thousands of people who had their hands removed, who should not have had that done to them, and who will never be able to get that hand back. It is the same here. If a child who is on puberty blockers is ordered off puberty blockers while the case is settled, that child will experience puberty. That puberty will cause severe mental and emotional trauma, it will cause lasting physical changes which are either enormously expensive and time consuming to reverse, and in some cases are outright irreversible. I have a friend who this year is looking at paying somewhere in the ballpark of $170,000 out of pocket for two corrective surgeries to repair the effects undergoing cis puberty did to her. That’s just for the procedure and recovery, not including airfare, lodging or food. Those are expenses she would not have had to undergo if puberty blockers had been available to her at the appropriate age.

The issue here is that the court recognizes the clear harm that would occur to the plaintiffs in this case. That’s why the injunction was granted for them. The problem though is that if this law was harmful for the plaintiffs, then it would also clearly be harmful to the dozens or hundreds of other trans youth in the state who would likewise see their access to necessary medication cut off, but the court refuses to extend this injunction to them as well. In addition to this being a monstrous decision in isolation, its implications are extremely worrying, as this is to say if that corporal punishment law for thieves were instituted, then every person accused of theft would have to individually file suit and have it heard on a case-by-case basis. It is antithetical to the concept of justice itself as it is to declare that the law is not to be applied to everyone equally, but rather individually and subjectively.

 

[Arwon]

Guardian Australia explainer - What implications does England’s review of trans healthcare have for Australia?

(Very important that it's the Australian Guardian team here and not the British lol)

Australian experts, including clinicians, politicians and peak medical bodies, spoken to by Guardian Australia all said the trans and gender-diverse care provided by states and territories is substantially different from that in England, and is based on holistic, best-practice care with various levels of assessments.

Guardian Australia understands neither New South Wales or Victoria have plans to make changes to puberty blocker prescribing or accessibility as a result of the Cass review.

Victoria’s health minister, Mary-Anne Thomas, said: “Our gender clinics offer some of the most vulnerable young people in our community the support they deserve – we’re fiercely proud of the important work they do.

“We will continue engaging with trans and gender-diverse community and health service partners to ensure that trans and gender-diverse people can access the care they need.”

Associate Prof Ada Cheung, an endocrinologist with the Trans Health Research Group, said there are cases where “not providing, or delaying, wished-for and medically indicated treatment for transgender young people is emotionally distressing and is associated with poorer outcomes”.

“Doing nothing carries significant risk.”

Cheung said clinical guidelines elsewhere, including in Canada and Germany, support clinicians being able to confidently prescribe puberty blockers where appropriate. She is concerned the Cass review “downplays the risk of denying treatment to young people with gender dysphoria and limits their options by placing restrictions on their access to care”.

“The UK have one single clinic with ridiculously long waiting lists with thousands who can’t access care and their approach is different to the holistic gender-affirming approach in Australia,” Cheung said.

The Cass review has been criticised by some Australian clinicians and trans health experts for having an unrealistic threshold for high-quality evidence, effectively discounting moderate-quality observational studies that were not randomised control trials, considered the gold standard of scientific research.

Randomised control trials are not always feasible or ethical to conduct, the vice-president of the Australian Professional Association for Trans Health (AusPATH), Dr Portia Predny, said. Many areas of medicine, including perinatal care and paediatric care, lack randomised control trials, she said.

 

[schlaufuchs]

Gov. Greg Abbott Wants to 'End' Trans Teachers Expressing Their Gender in Texas

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott suggested that he wants to end transgender and gender nonconforming individuals from expressing their gender while teaching.

www.rollingstone.com

“Just up the street from where we are right now is Lewisville, Texas. In Lewisville, Texas, in the high school, recently — as in just a month ago — they had a high school teacher who was a man who would go to school dressed as a woman in a dress, high heels, and makeup. Now, what do you think is going through the mind of the students that’s in that classroom? Are they focusing on the subject that this person is trying to teach? I don’t know. What I do know are these two things: One is this person, a man, dressing as a woman, in a public high school in the state of Texas, he’s trying to normalize the concept that this type of behavior is OK. This type of behavior is not OK, and this is the type of behavior that we want to make sure we end in the state of Texas.”

 

[choxorn]

Now, what do you think is going through the mind of the students that’s in that classroom? Are they focusing on the subject that this person is trying to teach? I don’t know.

The answer to "are a group of teenagers focused on the subject of the class" is pretty much always no, regardless of what the teacher is wearing.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Federal appeals court rules in favor of transgender girl affected by West Virginia sports ban

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, a Republican who argued on behalf of the state, vowed to fight to keep the law in place.

www.nbcnews.com

A federal appeals court ruled in favor of a transgender teenager who sued West Virginia over the state's law barring trans athletes from competing on girls' and women's sports teams in public schools and colleges.

The federal appeals court, which is based in Richmond, Virginia, concluded that the state legislation violated Title IX, a federal civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools or education programs that receive funding from the federal government.

“Offering B.P.J. a ‘choice’ between not participating in sports and participating only on boys teams is no real choice at all,” Judge Toby Heytens wrote, using the plaintiff’s initials. “The defendants cannot expect that B.P.J. will countermand her social transition, her medical treatment, and all the work she has done with her schools, teachers, and coaches for nearly half her life by introducing herself to teammates, coaches, and even opponents as a boy.”