Nearly two dozen healthcare groups are fighting Florida’s effort not to fund child sex-change procedures with taxpayers’ money.
But those same groups also refuse to release their internal standards of care and what studies they use to argue that “gender-affirming care” is necessary and effective.
According to the Daily Signal on Sunday, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the Endocrine Society, and 20 other healthcare advocacy groups recently filed court documents asking a judge to block Florida’s rule.
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The groups want “to ensure that all individuals, including those with gender dysphoria, receive the optimal medical and mental healthcare they need and deserve,” they say in court records. They also claim to represent “thousands” of healthcare providers who possess “specific expertise” with these issues.
The Daily Signal noted that they have lined up to oppose a rule issued last August by Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration, or AHCA.
AHCA announced that Medicaid would not cover “puberty blockers,” cross-sex hormones, sexual reassignment surgeries, or any other procedures that alter primary or secondary sex characteristics.
Then AHCA fired back.
The agency subpoenaed AAP, WPATH, the Endocrine Society, and the others to turn over documents that spell out their standards of care, what studies they used to support “gender-affirming care,” any considerations they cited of side effects and risks from these procedures, and communications with their members about these issues.
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“In a motion opposing the subpoena, the medical interest groups acknowledge that ‘there is no dispute that the WPATH and Endocrine. Society guidelines are relevant to this case,’ but they claim to have offered a compromise with AHCA, which the Florida agency refused,” Daily Signal reported.
“After some negotiation in which the medical interest groups offered publicly available documents to the Agency for Health Care Administration, the groups went to court trying to quash the subpoenas. They argued that they should not be forced to hand over documents, in part because they are not direct parties to the case.”
In its filing, AHCA argued, “Casting themselves in the underlying case as the standard bearers of the prevailing scientific view regarding gender dysphoria treatment … the non-parties now seek to shield their perspective from any scrutiny.”
“The non-parties refuse to answer whether their perspective is the result of careful study and debate among their memberships or the result of a handful of people dictating a result.”
Meanwhile, those same groups argue that the state should not be allowed to introduce testimony from “detransitioners.”
In its reply, AHCA argued that obtaining those records is the “only way” it can determine whether those groups “represent the established medical consensus regarding gender dysphoria treatment,” and defend its own rule.
“There is simply no reasonable basis for them to complain about having to explain the very gender dysphoria guidelines they themselves have sought to inject into the underlying case,” AHCA maintained.
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