Marshall backs Florida not using tax dollars for transgender procedures

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall is showing his support for a Florida regulation that bans using taxpayer dollars for transgender surgeries and other procedures.

Friday, Marshall filed an 18-state amicus brief before the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in support of Florida’s healthcare regulation that declines to use Medicaid funds.

“Healthcare authorities in the United Kingdom, Finland, Sweden, and elsewhere have all recently recognized that gender-transition procedures are experimental, if not pre-experimental,” Marshall said. 

The brief is a response to an Eleventh Circuit Court ruling saying that Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration violated the equal protection rights of transgender patients and forces the state’s Medicaid system to pay for these procedures.

“Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration came to the same conclusion,” Marshall said. “Yet the district court rejected that growing consensus and deferred instead to radical interest groups like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which advocates for gender transitioning procedures for gender dysphoric youth and ‘medically necessary’ castration for men self-identifying as eunuchs.

“Thankfully, the Constitution does not put WPATH in charge of the health and welfare of Florida’s citizens.”

This year, Marshall led the effort against an injunction on Alabama’s Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act, which bans transgender procedures for minors in the state.

This brief was led by Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Attorneys general from Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia signed on to it.

Marshall has also led similar briefs in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Oklahoma.

Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays 9-11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee