Florida has quickly staked itself as where woke goes to die. Ron DeSantis isn’t letting up one bit.
And Ron DeSantis won this legal victory that has Democrats going mad.
Ever since Florida Governor Ron DeSantis took office in, the state has been in a golden age.
Thanks to his leadership, Florida stayed open during the COVID pandemic even in the face of Biden and the Democrats calling him a killer for doing so.
He has slashed taxes and made critical education reforms that take politics out of school and give power back to the parents.
And his track record keeps getting better thanks to a judge handing him this legal victory.
A federal judge has ordered a leading pediatric medical association to disclose records indicating why it favors sex reassignment for children to Florida officials.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) request was prompted by its involvement in a federal lawsuit against a new Sunshine State law that prohibits the use of Medicaid to cover sex transition surgeries.
The nonprofit is one of 18 that have received subpoenas from the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration for documentation and correspondence on standards and practices addressing child medical transition (AHCA).
The case also names the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the Pediatric Endocrine Society, the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine, and Yale University as defendants.
During an hour-long hearing last week, U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols limited the Florida agency’s request for “any” relevant records to those “sufficient to show” the AAP’s total membership, how it establishes guidelines and policy positions for child sex change treatments, and any “official communication” with their entire membership about the matter.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has until February 2 to comply.
The order was the latest move in the case, which was launched by transgender rights organizations with the support of medical groups and Yale. They are suing Florida, claiming that the state’s refusal to cover sex transition therapies violates the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution.
The plaintiffs requested a preliminary injunction against the Medicaid prohibition in October, but their request was denied. Judge Robert Hinkle concluded that the ban did not violate constitutional rights and would instead be governed by Medicaid law.
In a 2018 policy statement, Dr. Jason Rafferty, a single committee member, developed, authored, reviewed, updated, and authorized child sex change therapies.
According to Leor Sapir, a Manhattan Institute fellow, the AAP and other important organizations that support child sex modifications, dubbed “gender-affirming care,” lack evidence and are at odds with a growing international consensus.
“On the issue of medical treatment for youth gender dysphoria in particular, American medical organizations have demonstrated a preference for ideologically driven conclusions over cautious review of the available research,” Sapir said.
The AAP’s core conclusion, according to Sapir, is founded on poor logic and interpretations.
“Rafferty’s central claim in that article is that ‘watchful waiting,’ a therapeutic approach in which clinicians delay social and medical transition as long as possible in order to exhaust all efforts to help youth in distress feel comfortable in their bodies, is a form of ‘conversion therapy,’” said Sapir.
The citations given to support this assertion have nothing to do with gender self-identification and were all based on the now-defunct practice of attempting to “convert” gay and lesbian adults to heterosexuality.
Rafferty claimed that clinicians should always “affirm” their pediatric patients’ gender self-declarations. Dr. James Cantor of the Toronto Sexuality Centre published a comprehensive fact-check of Rafferty’s article in another journal in 2020.
The fact-check indicated that the AAP policy contains “egregious omissions and misrepresentations of the available research on youth gender dysphoria,” according to Sapir.
Florida is one of ten states whose state-sponsored insurance does not cover elective sex transition therapies. The state of Florida performed a systematic examination of the evidence supporting “gender-affirming” care and abandoned the practice after discovering that the costs greatly outweighed any alleged benefits.
Florida approved legislation in November prohibiting children from receiving puberty blockers, cross-sex medications, or gender-related operations.
Stay tuned to the Federalist Wire.
