State judge set to hear arguments over Louisiana’s trans youth health care ban

An East Baton Rouge Parish judge is expected to rule as soon as this week on whether to dismiss a two-year-old lawsuit against the state of Louisiana over a 2023 law that bans medical professionals from providing transgender health care for minors, following a U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a similar law in Tennessee.

In January 2024, five Louisiana teenagers and their families sued the state to block Act 466, which had gone into effect after the state legislature voted to override then-Gov. John Bel Edwards’ veto of the legislation. In their initial complaint, they argued that the ban interferes with parents’ ability to make health decisions for their children and unlawfully denies trans kids access to necessary medical care on the basis of their sex, violating the rights of privacy and equal protection under the law that are guaranteed in the Louisiana Constitution.

But that was before the June 2025 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in U.S. v. Skrmetti, which upheld a Tennessee law banning the use of puberty blockers and hormone replacement in treating youth who have gender dysphoria. Transgender youth and adults, their friends and families and a variety of LGBTQIA+ and civil rights groups decried the ruling and many warned that it would result in a worsening in the mental health of trans youths and that it could lead to a nationwide ban on providing treatment to both minors and adults.

“Our plaintiffs, like a lot of people, were profoundly disappointed in the Supreme Court in their decision in Skrmetti,” said Nicholas Hite, a senior attorney at the LGBTQIA+ organization Lambda Legal. Despite the unfavorable ruling in Skrmetti — which addressed questions of federal constitutionality — the plaintiffs, who are listed in the suit under pseudonyms to protect their privacy, have continued their push to have Act 466 ruled unconstitutional as a matter of state law.

The case was originally filed in Orleans Civil District Court, but the state successfully argued in the months after the lawsuit was filed to have it transferred to the 19th Judicial District Court in Baton Rouge, whose jurisdiction includes the state capitol.

The case has been slowly moving through the pretrial process since, held up in part by a back-and-forth over discovery requests to Murrill’s office. When it was moving through the legislature in 2023, attorneys in the office — headed at the time by now-Gov. Jeff Landry — analyzed the bill, vetting it for whether it would pass constitutional muster. Plaintiffs’ attorneys sought to find out about those discussions, which Murrill claimed at first were not subject to disclosure.

Then last August, Murrill’s office filed a motion for dismissal, arguing that the case should be thrown out due to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Skrmetti, arguing that the court ordered lower courts to mind the ruling.

Hite told Verite News that despite the ruling in Skrmetti, the plaintiffs have a case against the state of Louisiana because they are making claims that rights granted to them by the state constitution — not the federal constitution, which is the purview of the U.S. Supreme Court —  are being violated. Ezra Young, a trans rights scholar and lawyer, said that was a smart move by the attorneys for the plaintiffs.

“They have a few state constitutional claims. So that would be wise, because the U.S. Supreme Court has no say on what the constitution of another state means or says. So that hasn’t been foreclosed by Skrmetti,” he said.

Judge Ronald R. Johnson, who is presiding over the case, delayed ruling on the motion so that both sides could finish discovery, but he’ll hear arguments on whether to dismiss the case on Thursday.

‘Unworkable in practice

In late July, after a year of repeated attempts to try to get the AG’s office to comply with their requests for information during the discovery phase of the case, Hite, on behalf of the plaintiffs in the case, asked Johnson to hold Murrill in contempt of court. Hite said at the time that the AG’s office had roughly 170 pages of documents that could be relevant to the case that they did not want to hand over to the plaintiffs.

According to court records, the AG’s office had been claiming for months that they had turned over all relevant records that they could, and that any records they hadn’t turned over were privileged and not subject to disclosure.

The plaintiffs’ legal team, which includes Hite and New Orleans local civil rights attorney William Most, were trying to understand the intent of public officials who were pushing to get the law passed while the bill was moving its way through the legislature.

“There’s not anything in there that I think either of us anticipate to be ultimately determinative in this case,” Hite said. “But they would still be useful so that we can get a full idea of what kinds of conversations were going on inside of our government as they were preparing and passing this legislation.”

The attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Although Johnson eventually denied the motion for contempt, he also ordered the AG’s office to release dozens of records over the following months Included in those exhibits are emails between staffers in the AG’s office, peer-reviewed studies on trans health care, and a copy of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s standards of care.

Among the documents was a previously confidential legislative analysis of the youth trans health care ban as it was moving its way through the state legislature. The analysis was completed by Joe Donahue, who was an assistant attorney general during Landry’s term as AG.

Donahue wrote that the bill, which mandates that professional licensing boards revoke the licenses of health care workers who provide trans health care to minors for at least two years, could make state medical licensing boards targets for federal civil rights claims.

“The statutes would also likely be unworkable in practice,” he wrote later, adding that implementation of the law “would create conflicts with existing standards of conduct imposed upon certain professions leaving practitioners with no clear means of compliance and potentially subjecting them to additional liability.”

Sisyphean task

Natalie Rupp, executive director of Trans Income Project, said that before the Skrmetti decision, it was promising to know that there was a legal challenge against Louisiana’s youth trans health care ban.

“It was exciting to have something at our state level that could help define and decide what the rights for trans youth were here,” she said.

But her optimism shifted after the Supreme Court’s ruling, which guaranteed that the legality of trans health care bans would have to be decided on a patchwork, state-by-state basis, similar to what has happened with abortion since the high court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

“It became very clear that while having a remedy for … this type of case could be helpful, this ‘return to the state’s model,’ the same way they did with abortion, really just disenfranchises anyone who lives in conservative states,” she said.

Still, she said, it’s important to try to stand up to bigotry despite the odds of losing.

“Being in trans politics right now is like being Sisyphus, where we are constantly pushing an uphill battle that we know we’re going to take huge losses on,” she said. “But we also know we’re going to keep pushing the boulder back up the hill every single time, because our lives matter, and it is essential that we keep doing the work.”

Hite took a similar long view of the work needed to try to secure rights not just for transgender youth, but all LGBTQIA+ people. Before joining Lambda Legal, he spent a decade in private practice fighting for the rights of LGBTQIA+ Louisianians.

“My entire legal experience has been devoted and built around the idea that the most marginalized among us deserve robust representation in court. Robust representation in court means that things don’t usually happen quickly. You know, when you’re fighting a whole system, when you’re fighting a whole government. It takes time.”

He said that if the judge rules in favor of the AG’s office on Thursday, the plaintiffs will likely appeal the decision.

This article first appeared on Verite News New Orleans and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.