Alabama’s law protecting minors from gender transition procedures has finally emerged victorious from a three-year-long legal onslaught, after left-wing activists who challenged the law in 2022 agreed to dismiss their lawsuit “with prejudice” on May 1. In response, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall (R) celebrated the hard-earned victory, “We uncovered the truth. We exposed the scandal. We won. Alabama led the way, and now all families are safer for it.”

When Alabama first embraced this cause, the outcome was far from certain. Alabama numbered among the earliest adopters of legislation protecting minors from gender transition procedures, passing the Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection (VCAP) Act in 2022. The state could count on combined opposition from the Biden administration, national media, America’s professional medical organizations, and the left-wing lawsuit industry, with little guarantee of backup from other states.

In court, Alabama also faced an immediate setback. Only days after the law took effect, on May 13, 2022, U.S. District Judge Liles Burke, a Trump appointee, blocked the Alabama law for violating Substantive Due Process and Equal Protection under the 14th Amendment. At this time, Alabama’s only state ally was Arkansas, which was defending its own SAFE (Save Adolescents from Experimentation) Act in a losing battle against a hostile district judge and an unsympathetic appellate court. Gondor had no one to call for aid.

Yet Marshall saw this fight through from Valley Forge to Yorktown. On August 21, 2023, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit vacated the preliminary injunction against Alabama, denying that the law “amounts to a sex-based classification” and finding no “constitutional right to ‘treat [one’s] children with transitioning medications subject to medically accepted standards.’”

At this point, Alabama had turned the tide, and it never lost again. The left-wing activist coalition appealed to the full 11th Circuit, but to no avail. On January 11, 2024, the 11th Circuit allowed Alabama to enforce the law while the appeal proceeded. Then, in September 2024, the 11th Circuit declined to rehear the case. By this point, the challenge to a similar law in Tennessee had trickled up to the Supreme Court, and the legal challenge against Alabama’s law was put on ice — or, perhaps more accurately, life support — until the outcome of that case is released this summer.

DOJ Weaponization

Yet this case featured far more drama than this brief review of its record in court. In fact, the lawsuit against Alabama’s VCAP featured one of the worst examples of weaponization by the Biden administration Department of Justice (DOJ), which intervened in the case, apparently to bury local conservative nonprofits in spurious legal motions.

In one instance, the DOJ on August 9, 2022 demanded that Eagle Forum of Alabama (EFA) hand over 11 different document types stretching back five years. The EFA — with a whopping 1.5 full-time staff — was not even party to the lawsuit, and the manpower to even collect these records would likely have crippled their operations. On that basis, their (volunteer) legal representative got the judge to quash the Biden DOJ’s subpoena.

The Biden DOJ also appealed the 11th Circuit’s ruling to the Supreme Court. On February 20, 2025, the Trump administration DOJ withdrew that appeal and reversed the federal government’s position on the case.

WPATH Files

Perhaps in part due to the DOJ’s uncouth intervention, the Alabama Attorney General’s Office also conducted massive discovery in pre-trial proceedings, which blew open one of the biggest scandals of the Biden administration (which is saying quite a lot).

“We … conducted court-ordered discovery into the so-called ‘standards of care’ that these groups claimed were evidence-based,” Marshall explained in a press release. “What we found was devastating to the plaintiffs’ challenge: a medical, legal, and political scandal that will be studied for decades. Given the evidence we uncovered, it is no surprise the plaintiffs abandoned their challenge.”

“Discovery in the case revealed that key medical organizations misled parents, promoted unproven treatments as settled science, and ignored growing international concern over the use of sex-change procedures to treat gender dysphoria in minors,” the release added. “Contrary to their public claims, these groups had little reliable evidence to support the interventions they recommended.”

Most damning of all were “internal communications showing that the ‘standards of care’ were crafted with input from lawyers and activists to win lawsuits and influence policy decisions, even if those goals were at odds with the scientific evidence.” Early in the Biden administration, U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine and his assistant lobbied the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) to edit the upcoming Eighth edition of its “Standards of Care” for gender transition procedures.

In particular, Levine wanted WPATH to remove the recommended age minimums for various gender transition procedures, which recommended some surgeries for minors as young as 15. The purpose of this change was political: it would provide cover to pro-transgender activists opposing laws like Alabama’s, who argued in state after state that the laws were not needed, because these dangerous, irreversible procedures were never performed on minors.

This revelation not only damaged the Biden DOJ’s position in this case, but it also damaged Biden — then running for reelection — politically. When The New York Times reported on these “WPATH files” early in 2024, the White House declared its position that gender transition surgeries should only be available for adults. This provoked a backlash by the transgender lobby so fierce that the White House soon recanted and apologized for embracing the position held by most Americans.

Judge Shopping

Yet left-wing activist organizations ran into their own troubles during this prolonged campaign. Before the first court ever ruled on the case, their filing shenanigans prompted the federal courts in Alabama to investigate whether they “engaged in an abuse of judicial process known as judge shopping.” The lawyers filed two cases simultaneously in different federal districts. Then, once the cases were assigned to a judge, they voluntarily dismissed them and filed another case that was substantively identical, in hopes of receiving a judge they considered more sympathetic to their political leanings.

The investigation peered into the activity of 39 lawyers across three different cases, including representatives from the SPLC, ACLU, and other national groups. In October 2023, a judicial panel found that 11 of the judges had engaged in misconduct, enumerated 10 concrete examples.

By June 2024, the lawyers were still stonewalling the court by refusing to turn over documents, treating the judges like an opposing party in adverse proceedings instead of, well, the judges. Nothing further is known of what action will be taken against these lawyers or when. Like a recalcitrant toddler, these lawyers have managed to drag out their own discipline for longer than the now-dismissed case their misconduct was designed to aid.

Leftist Violence

Notwithstanding all the other factors, the Alabama attorney general’s office had to contend with one more pressure. On February 24, 2024, shortly after the 11th Circuit allowed them to enforce the VCAP Act, a bomb was planted outside their office in downtown Montgomery. Fortunately, authorities safely detonated it at 3:42 a.m. on a Saturday morning, and no person or property was injured. But the explosion drove home the very real risk of leftist violence in response to the office defending a law to protect children from irreversible hormones and surgeries.

Authorities arrested the man who planted the bomb by April. As it turns out, he identified on social media as “pansexual” with “they/she/he” pronouns, supported the transgender activist group The Trevor Project, and expressed pro-Antifa sympathies.

Well-Deserved Victory

Despite all these obstacles and dangers, Attorney General Marshall’s office persevered in defending the state’s right to protect minors from harmful gender transition procedures. The lawsuit has now been dismissed “with prejudice,” which means it cannot be filed again (for a fourth time).

It’s hard to overstate how much the national environment has shifted on gender transition procedures for minors since the Alabama legislature first debated and passed this law only three years ago. The widespread adoption of state SAFE Acts in 2023 means that Alabama now sits comfortably into the mainstream of 27 states with laws protecting minors from gender transition procedures, where they once blazed the trail. The pro-biology stance of the Trump administration means that the state no longer has to fear politicized persecution by the federal government, and the Supreme Court seems poised to issue a ruling that will likely further solidify the state’s legal position.

Much of this shift is due to Alabama’s own work in exposing WPATH for its viperish copulation with the Biden administration, which demolished the lie that so-called “gender-affirming” guidelines were based on science. Alabama has withstood the siege and emerged victorious because it relied on an unfailing spring, the well of truth.