When the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit restored the Arkansas Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act on Tuesday, it removed the last federal judicial block on state laws that protect minors from gender transition procedures. In so doing, it tied a bow in one of the few remaining loose ends from the nationwide movement that began almost four years ago. As it turns out, the loose end tied on Tuesday is the thread that started it all.

The movement began in early 2021, at a nadir for American conservatism. Fresh off their electoral sweep of the presidency and both chambers of Congress, Joe Biden and the Democrats seemed intent on pressing progressivism and government control into more and more areas of private life. The Biden administration imposed mask and vaccine mandates, scoffed at religious objections, and placed transgender ideology on every agency’s agenda. They openly talked about packing the Supreme Court and secretly colluded with social media companies to censor and suppress disfavored political speech.

It was in this dystopian atmosphere that the Arkansas legislature chose to paint a giant target on its back by passing a law to protect children from gender transition procedures. No other state had ever passed such a bill. And Arkansas legislators were guaranteed to be called hateful bigots by established powers. Yet children were being harmed by quack medicine, based on a false ideology, and Arkansas legislators knew they had to pass the Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act.

As expected, the blowback was swift, furious, widespread, and sustained. Professional medical organizations and the state’s largest hospitals lined up to testify against the bill in legislative hearings. Powerful national media outlets (like CBS News’ “60 Minutes”) swooped into the state like vultures upon carrion to film propaganda against the bill. Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson — from the same Republican Party as the legislative majority — vetoed the bill. When left-wing activist groups filed their inevitable lawsuit against the bill, the U.S. Department of Justice noticed and piled on.

For a time, Arkansas became the chief focus of the combined wrath of the entire national apparatus of transgender advocacy — which, at the time, included the federal government.

Arkansas fared no better in court. An unsympathetic federal judge suspended the law with a preliminary injunction, and that state lost its appeal to the Eighth Circuit. After a one-sided trial, the same judge issued a permanent injunction against the law, declaring it unconstitutional in June 2023. Such a ruling was effectively a death sentence for legislation.

But the Arkansas legislature had broken the ice. The next year (2022), two other states (Alabama and Arizona) enacted legislation with the same intention as the Arkansas SAFE Act. By the end of 2023, 19 more states had enacted some form of protection for minors against gender transition procedures. The movement has continued to advance, and a total of 27 states now have laws banning or restricting gender transition procedures for minors.

This nationwide movement to protect children scored judicial victories as well as legislative ones. Due to the sheer number of state laws to challenge, left-wing activist groups stretched themselves thin and made unforced errors. By filing, un-filing, and refiling a lawsuit against Alabama, a left-wing coalition earned itself a court-initiated, years-long investigation for improper judge shopping. Through an extensive discovery process, the Alabama attorney general’s office exposed the so-called “Standards of Care” for transitioning minors as both scientifically weak and politically motivated.

Left-wing lawyers had some initial success at blocking SAFE Act-style legislation, but the wheels soon fell off their wagon. Only a month after the permanent injunction on Arkansas’ law, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld laws to protect minors from gender transition procedures in Tennessee and Kentucky. The Sixth Circuit’s compelling reasoning — which defined “sex” as “sex” and rightly interpreted the law as an age-based distinction, not a sex-based distinction — soon influenced decisions in the Eleventh Circuit and Seventh Circuit.

Not even the intervention of the Biden administration could turn the tide, which was now in full flood for the states. The U.S. Department of Justice appealed the Sixth Circuit’s ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, but in U.S. v. Skrmetti (2025) the court handed down a 6-3 precedent that strongly vindicated Tennessee’s law. This set a controlling precedent that would justify virtually all SAFE Act-style laws.

All this time, the district court’s permanent injunction against the Arkansas SAFE Act was still active. Despite passing their SAFE Act first, Arkansas was one of the only states whose law was still blocked. Arkansas was like the first soldier through a breach in the wall — the lone casualty in an otherwise successful offensive.

With their ruling this week, the Eighth Circuit has eliminated the outlier and restored Arkansas’s SAFE Act to full operation, as Skrmetti requires. The only state whose SAFE Act remains blocked by a court is Montana, where left-wing activists brought a challenge in the state court system.

Courageous action by the Arkansas legislature in 2021 catalyzed a sea change in American cultural attitudes toward transgender ideology, especially as it pertains to gender transition procedures for minors. Only four years ago, no state had passed a law protecting minors from gender transition procedures, and now such laws have been passed in a majority of states. Instead of suppressing dissent against transgender ideology, the new Trump administration strongly opposes it and has successfully pressured hospitals to forgo gender transition procedures on minors. Now, members of Congress have introduced legislation to implement the same policy nationwide.

Arkansas struggled longer and harder than any other state in what was, at first, an uphill battle. That makes their final vindication all the sweeter. “Today’s decision is the culmination of many years of tireless and skillful legal work by this office,” Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin (R) responded to the Eighth Circuit’s ruling. While not every court case has reached its conclusion, the restoration of the Arkansas SAFE Act suggests that all that is left in this story is tying up the loose ends.