Lawsuit Over “Male” and “Female” Designations on Driver’s Licenses Formally Dismissed

Last month the Arkansas Supreme Court formally dismissed a lawsuit over Arkansas’ decision to limit gender markers on driver’s licenses to “male” and “female.”

The decision came at a time when many voters and pundits were focused on the election, so many people may not be aware of it.

Last spring the ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging the Department of Finance and Administration’s new rule that state-issued driver’s licenses and photo IDs list “male” or “female” as stated on the ID-holder’s birth certificate.

Arkansas’ new policy prevents ID-holders from changing the gender on their ID without documentation. It also eliminates the option of listing an “X” in place of “male” or “female.”

The ACLU argued the state made the change abruptly without following the normal rulemaking process. However, the Arkansas Supreme Court disagreed, and formally dismissed the lawsuit on October 16.

Arkansas law makes it possible to change a birth certificate — including the sex listed on a birth certificate, if the person’s name legally has been changed and the person has undergone a surgical sex-change procedure. Practically speaking, Arkansas’ driver’s license policy just ensures people follow the process outlined in state law if they want to change the gender listed on a driver’s license. There is nothing unreasonable about that.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.

14,000 Children Are Forever Harmed: Guest Column

We now have numbers for the push to transgender a generation.

According to the new bombshell report from the group Do No Harm, nearly 14,000 minors underwent transgender surgeries, took puberty blockers, or were given cross-sex hormone injections, between 2019 and 2023. This report directly counters a refrain often thrown at anyone who expressed concern for the wellbeing of children, that “it’s just not happening.” In fact, just three months ago, researchers at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health announced that “gender-affirming” surgeries were “rarely performed on transgender youth in the U.S.”  

Rare, however, is the wrong word for 14,000 youth. As Dr. Miriam Grossman, my guest on a Breakpoint Forum earlier this year, told Washington Watch,  

This release of data is really a nuclear bomb. … We are led to believe by politicians and by many groups that these interventions are very rare and hardly happening at all in this country. And that is simply not true. 

Indeed. According to the Do No Harm report, just under 14,000 children received transgender-related treatments. More than 5,700 of those treatments were “sex change” operations and more than 62,000 hormone and puberty blocker prescriptions were written in that time frame. These numbers do not include young people who underwent some form of “social transition.” 

When these treatments, which go under the misnomer “gender-affirming care,” are carried out on children, the consequences are severe, and often irreversible. As the Cass Review (a comprehensive report out of the U.K. on “gender services” for children) revealed, doctors who recommended and administered these “treatments” knew of the risks of complications. These risks include pelvic inflammatory disease, pelvic floor dysfunction, and pain during any kind of arousal or sexual intercourse. Others saw no issues continuing “treatments” on those who showed serious co-morbidities, including mental health issues. According to one doctor: “The mere presence of psychiatric illness should not block a person’s ability to start hormones.” Another “referred for genital surgery people diagnosed with major depressive disorder, c-PTSD, and who are homeless.” Most troubling is that clinicians and activists from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) have openly admitted that minors cannot fully understand what’s at stake in these “treatments,” especially the permanent damage done to their ability to have children in the future.  

In fact, for years, activists have pushed these chemical and surgical interventions on children and their parents by threatening them. “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son,” parents are asked, as if anything less than their full affirmation will lead their child to commit suicide. This is a manipulative myth. According to one study published earlier this year, those who undergo so-called “gender transition” surgery are over 12 times more likely to commit suicide than those who do not.   

Although the effects of surgery and puberty blockers on children can never be reversed, almost always a child with gender dysphoria grows out of those feelings by the time they hit their mid-twenties. Puberty, it turns out, is quite effective in aligning one’s internal sense of self with the realities of the body. As the authors of landmark research out of the Netherlands wrote, “Gender non-contentedness, while being relatively common during early adolescence, in general decreases with age and appears to be associated with a poorer self-concept and mental health throughout development.”

Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims. This report from Do No Harm reveals that there have been victims of trans ideology, and many of them have been children. This is an ideology with no basis in medicine, science, or observable realities. And yet, it is an ideology that has given birth to atrocities performed in doctors’ offices and hospitals by “experts” we were supposed to “trust.”  

We shouldn’t have. This ideology shatters the lives of young people and the lives of their parents. Until this report, we didn’t know how many.

Copyright 2024 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.

Federal Judge Rules Crawford County Library Cannot Separate LGBT Books from Children’s Section

Above: One of the pro-LGBT books at issue in Crawford County. The book is intended for children ages 5-9.

On Monday a federal judge in Fort Smith ruled the Crawford County Library cannot place pro-LGBT books in a “social section” separate from the library’s children’s section. The case underscores the growing division in Arkansas over public libraries being used to promote pro-LGBT material to kids.

In 2022 the Crawford County Library System removed LGBT-themed children’s books from the children’s section of the library at the request of the quorum court and placed the books in a separate area of the library.

To be clear, the library did not remove the LGBT books from circulation. It gave the books their own shelf space away from other children’s books.

However, three individuals sued Crawford County in federal court. On Monday U.S. District Judge P.K. Holmes, III ruled against Crawford County — meaning the books must be put back in the children’s section.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. The Jonesboro public library has been at the center of multiple controversies over its decision to place books with sexually-explicit images in its children’s section and for failing to adopt a policy that separates sexual material from children’s books.

The library in Jonesboro even went so far as to post on Facebook that it isn’t the library’s responsibility to protect kids from obscenity.

Other public libraries in Arkansas have failed to separate pro-LGBT books and sexual material from children’s material as well.

Families should be able to take their children to the library without worrying what their children might see, and taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize pro-LGBT library books or graphic novels that depict explicit images of children.

We trust our federal courts ultimately will agree and let local communities like Crawford County protect children from inappropriate material in public libraries.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.