Over the past two years, 19 deep red states have passed laws that either ban medical care to transgender minors outright or criminalize doctors providing such care. All but three of the laws were enacted this year.

In several states, legal challenges to those laws were initiated. The results of those challenges have begun to come in, in the form of court decisions, and they reveal just what a farcical charade those laws are. At this point in time, three state courts have blocked the enforcement of such laws: Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee.

Because most of the laws in question are essentially the same in their way of justifying themself, we now have court-presented evidence of the false premises upon which they have been based, and their mistaken allegations regarding the medical procedures designed to treat gender dysphoria, as well as the evident violations of constitutional rights that they entail. We can only hope that Idaho’s law, which is also under legal challenge, will receive a similar court judgment.

What these laws propose as justification for their banning of the primary medical techniques now used to treat gender dysphoria is a long list of assertions that totally mis-characterize current practices and their outcomes. The laws would have you believe that these treatments are still experimental and doctors are employing them irresponsibly with insufficient recognition of their harmful and often-irreversible consequences. The laws also often assert that birth genitalia are entirely sufficient to determine sex identity; that dysphoria usually vanishes with puberty, and that, in any case, the treatments for it are ineffective.

It is not the case that gender dysphoria treatments are experimental. They have developed over the past decade, primarily in Europe, and become standard procedures over that time. There is an international guide for these treatments that was initially published in 2012, called the “WPATH Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People.” Contributing to that document has been the Endocrine Society. The guide for doctors is now in its 7th edition.

In the court decision in Arkansas, a finding of fact was that “the WPATH Standards of Care and Endocrine Society Guidelines for the treatment of gender dysphoria are recognized as best practices by the major medical and mental health professional associations in the United States, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Academy of Child Development.”

Proponents of the laws banning treatment often cite the fact that prepubescent children who complain of gender dysphoria usually cease doing so after puberty, thereby suggesting (to them, at least) that dysphoria is nothing more than a phase of childhood development. According to the “findings of fact” in the Arkansas court decision, while it is true that “no medical interventions are indicated or provided for the treatment of gender dysphoria in prepubertal children,” it is also true that “gender dysphoria can increase with the onset of puberty and the development of secondary sex characteristics that do not align with one’s gender identity,” and that “research and clinical experience show that when gender incongruence continues after the onset of puberty, it is very unlikely that the individual will come to identify with their sex assigned at birth later in life.”

The laws uniformly claim that serious harm is being done to minors receiving transgender care because side-effects of the treatments are being ignored. The Arkansas judgment reports, however, that “adverse health effects from gender-affirming medical care are rare when treatment is provided under the supervision of a doctor,” and “there is no evidence that (Arkansas doctors are) throwing caution to the wind when treating minors with gender dysphoria.” In fact, the court judgment concludes that “risks associated with gender-affirming care for adolescents are no greater than the risks associated with many other medical treatments that are not prohibited by (the law being challenged).”

Furthermore, the transgender care technique as currently practiced, utilizing puberty-blockers and hormone therapy, “improves the health and well-being of many adolescents with gender dysphoria.” Those techniques “are effective to treat gender dysphoria and the benefits of the treatments greatly outweigh the risks.”

Moreover, the law under scrutiny not only violates the traditional rights of parents to exercise decision-making control over their minor children’s health care, it also clearly fails to meet the Constitutional requirement of the “equal protection clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment.

That clause “is essentially a direction that all persons similarly situated should be treated alike.” It is violated when a law “creates ‘arbitrary or irrational’ distinctions between classes of people out of ‘a bare ... desire to harm a politically unpopular group.’” (Quoting a Supreme Court decision.) In other words, “it protects against intentional and arbitrary discrimination.”

In the opinion of the Arkansas court, therefore, the Arkansas law banning “gender-affirming” care for minors, targets a specific subset of the state’s young who suffer from a desire to become, insofar as possible, members of the opposite sex, and strives to deprive them of access to medical/psychological treatment that will alleviate their suffering and enable them to live lives reasonably in accord with what they firmly believe to be their true sexual identities.

It’s worth noting, in the case of Idaho’s law, that it mandates no ban on using puberty-blockers and hormone treatments for any other medical purpose other than the care of those with gender dysphoria. Clearly, then, the real aim of the law is not “protecting children” it is preventing the formation of transgender adults.

But why so? What does it matter if a small percentage of the earth’s human population manages to sustain a sexual identity that differs from their birth identity? What harm are they doing? More to the point, why are there people who feel morally obligated to see to it that transgender humans don’t exist.