“What we are practicing here is not voodoo,” said Katherine Mistretta, a family nurse practitioner who is one of the plaintiffs in the Montana lawsuit. “I think our justice system will see that there’s enough science to support this, that they will understand that this is appropriate care.”

A state district court judge in Missoula has blocked Montana’s ban on medical care for minors with gender dysphoria from taking effect while a lawsuit over its constitutionality continues, finding that the new law appears to have “no rational relationship to protecting children.”

“We are so thankful for this opportunity to protect trans youth, their families, and their medical providers from this baseless and dangerous law,” Malita Picasso, the ACLU staff attorney who presented the plaintiffs’ case at the Sept. 17 court hearing, said. “While this fight is not over, every day that transgender Montanans are able to access this care is a critical and life-saving victory. We will never stop opposing this ban and all others like it until every transgender person has the care and support they need to thrive.”

Although Judge Jason Marks said his findings are “not binding at trial,” he found SB 99 likely discriminates based on a person’s status as transgender and also found it likely tramples on the right to privacy guaranteed in the Montana Constitution.

“We’re not just talking about numbers or statistics, Your Honor, we’re talking about real people who are suffering real harms, and those people include people who are sitting in this room today,” said Malita Picasso, a staff attorney with the national ACLU.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs have argued that SB 99 bans “a wide range of medical treatments and procedures when, and only when, they are provided to transgender youth for the purpose of treating gender dysphoria.” In doing so, attorneys say, the law violates myriad constitutional rights, including equal protection under the law, privacy, dignity, parental autonomy and the right to seek health.

In some states, new laws banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth are dissuading health care providers from offering mental health services and other medical care that isn’t explicitly banned by those laws.

“When our Republican colleagues allege that gender-affirming care raises particular dangers or due process issues, that is fearmongering at its worst,” the top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania, said. “Picking on already vulnerable kids in order to stir up chaos that they hope to ride to success at the ballot box.”

The attorneys, which include the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Montana, Lambda Legal and Perkins Coie of Seattle have asked Marks to stop the law from going into effect, saying that it could irreparably harm the youth, force families out of state and force doctors to abandon part of their practice, or risk losing their medical license.

There is so much misinformation claiming that providers of gender-affirming care are permanently harming vulnerable children, Coles said. “Denying access to care harms transgender and gender-diverse kids,” she said. “Gender-affirming care is not new. It’s the attacks on care that are new.”

Some statehouse bills share similarities with Do No Harm’s model legislation and a 2021 Arkansas bill endorsed as a model by the Family Research Council. The model bills have similar preambles, including the assertion — rebutted by major medical organizations — that the risks of gender-affirming care outweigh its benefits.

The complaint, filed in state district court in Missoula by the national American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal, Washington state-based Perkins Coie LLP and the ACLU of Montana, argues the policy “represents vast government overreach and will cause untold harms” if allowed to take effect.

The bill signed on Friday, Senate Bill 99, was just one of a slate of measures focused on gender identity that the Montana legislature has been advancing this month, including one that would define sex in binary terms and one that would bar public school students from changing their pronouns without parental permission.

Flowers said the bill should never have been discussed in the first place while Montana deals with other issues needing to be addressed, like housing, child care, mental health and property taxes.

“These amendments do nothing to improve this bill,” Flowers said. “They do nothing to spare trans Montanans the pain and suffering we heard about in hearings for hours.”

A February 2023 poll showed that 75% of Montanans oppose changes to our constitutional right to privacy, a right that affirms our ability to make personal healthcare decisions about when or whether to have children. Yet our Montana Sexual & Reproductive Health Collective members continue to track 11 anti-abortion bills still under consideration — including two potential constitutional amendments.

“Let’s face it, we are here today because some of you are uncomfortable looking at transgender people. So you are trying to make it harder for them to exist,” said Jessica Vangarderen Weingarten, a Belgrade mother with a transgender daughter.

“This isn’t just about health care and counseling for transgender youth, as critical as that is,” said Sen. Christopher Pope, D-Bozeman. “It’s about health care for 300,000 Montana citizens paid in large part by the federal government in multi-billions of dollars … which is being put at risk by this unconstitutional, and in my opinion, misguided law.”

Roughly 150 people gave passionate testimony Friday morning on Senate Bill 99, a proposal to ban gender-affirming care for transgender minors and restrict the use of public resources for medical and social transitions. After more than five hours of commentary, opponents outnumbered proponents by more than two-to-one.