Nearly a month after the Supreme Court’s devastating anti-trans ruling in U.S. v. Skrmetti, lawyers for Florida are citing the decision in their efforts to get the state’s ban on Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care reinstated.

In 2023, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle struck down the ban, ruling that it violated the federal Medicaid statute, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Affordable Care Act. The state has appealed the ruling to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

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The justices ordered appellate courts to review cases involving gender-affirming care coverage and birth certificates.

As CBS News reports, following the Skrmetti ruling, the 11th Circuit directed attorneys on both sides to file briefs explaining how the Supreme Court’s decision would impact the case.

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Writing for the court’s conservative majority in Skrmetti, Chief Justice John Roberts said that a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming care for transgender minors does not discriminate on the basis of sex or on the basis of transgender status in violation of the Equal Protection Clause because the law only makes distinctions based on a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

In their July 11 filing, lawyers for Florida argued that because the state’s ban on Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care treatments is based on medical diagnoses, it also does not violate the Equal Protection Clause, and thus Hinkle’s decision should be struck down and the ban reinstated.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case, meanwhile, argued that the Skrmetti decision was “fairly limited in its scope and breadth,” according to CBS News. The Supreme Court’s decision, they wrote in their brief, “hinges on the Court’s finding that Tennessee’s law classified based on age and medical condition.” Florida’s ban, meanwhile, “irrationally” targets transgender Medicaid beneficiaries of all ages.

Florida’s Medicaid coverage exclusions, they wrote, “discriminate based on transgender status and therefore sex in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Skrmetti, the plaintiffs’ brief continued, “does not bless nor give license to such discrimination. To the contrary, the Fourteenth Amendment protects persons from governmental enactments, like the exclusions, that facially discriminate based on transgender status and/or are ‘designed to effect an invidious discrimination against transgender individuals.’”

Florida’s lawyers, meanwhile, argued that it “doesn’t matter” that the state’s ban targets adults as well as children.

Falsely characterizing gender-affirming care treatments as “experimental procedures,” the state’s lawyers wrote that such treatments “raise concerns for minors and adults alike, and the state gets to protect its minor and adult citizens from such procedures.”

In fact, every major American medical association and leading world health authority has endorsed gender-affirming care as evidence-based, safe, and in some cases lifesaving for both transgender adults and minors.

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