A federal appeals court has upheld a preliminary injunction stopping Arkansas from instituting a law that would ban doctors from administering gender-transition treatment to minors, writing that substantial evidence supports the district court’s findings, including that the act’s purpose is “not to ban a treatment [but] to ban an outcome that the State deems undesirable.”
In an Aug. 25 decision that focused largely on Arkansas’s contention that the district court failed to consider its expert medical evidence, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled there was no abuse of discretion in the 2021 decision by Judge James Moody of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas, who said the temporary injunction was due because the plaintiffs, one of whom was a transgender youth, had shown a likelihood of both success on the merits and irreparable harm.
