In a year that has seen many horrific attacks on transgender people, among the cruelest and most dangerous is Arkansas’ new law that bans gender-affirming care for trans youth. If it goes into effect in July, this law will cause catastrophic harms to transgender youth.

To prevent any further harms, four families with transgender children, along with two doctors who provide this care, filed suit today challenging the constitutionality of this new Arkansas law. The ACLU is proud to represent them. Because of the shocking nature of the harms this law would impose, this is the first lawsuit we are filing against any of the anti-trans laws that state legislatures passed this year — and more will be coming soon.

Brooke Dennis is 9 years old and is finishing up the third grade. She loves to read and write and wants to be a gymnast when she grows up. She’s also transgender, which means she was assigned \ male at birth but is a girl. As her mom put it, “Brooke has known exactly who she is since she was two years old.” Brooke has the support of her parents and the family has consulted with doctors who can provide gender-affirming care when puberty begins.

But Arkansas’ first-in-the-nation ban on gender-affirming health care for minors means that Brooke won’t be able to get puberty-delaying treatment, which is care she will soon need. If the law is not blocked, Brooke faces the prospect of going through a typical male puberty — growing facial hair, developing an Adam’s apple, seeing her body take on the fat and muscle distribution typical of boys, and hearing her voice deepen — all of which will cause her extreme distress.

Puberty delaying treatment, which pauses puberty so that young people can have time and space to confirm who they are without the permanent physical changes of puberty, is part of the well-established standards of care for treating many transgender youth. Puberty-delaying treatments have been used for decades to treat cisgender children experiencing precocious puberty, and are completely safe and totally reversible. are completely safe and totally reversable.

Brooke could start puberty at any time, and her parents plan to begin puberty-delaying treatment as soon as her puberty starts. Brooke is already anxious about puberty and recently told her mom, through tears, that she didn’t want to get an Adam’s apple. She has previously faced the anxiety, fear, and depression of not being seen and understood as who she is and fears going back.

While Arkansas’ new law prohibits the time-sensitive medical care that Brooke needs, the law allows cisgender youth to receive the same gender-affirming care, including both puberty blockers and hormone therapy, to help align their bodies with their gender, such as to address breast development in boys or facial hair in girls. The law bans the care only when provided to affirm the gender of transgender youth. Such brazen discrimination cannot be reconciled with the Constitution.

Every mainstream medical association — from the American Medical Association to the American Academy of Pediatrics — agrees that gender-affirming care is medically necessary and appropriate care for the transgender youth who need it. And the effects of withholding this care from transgender youth are chilling — self-harm and suicidal ideation are many times more common among transgender youth than among cisgender youth, especially when they cannot get the care and support that they need. Indeed, in just the week after the Arkansas House of Representatives passed this bill, Arkansas Children’s Hospital reported multiple suicide attempts by transgender youth distraught at what the new statute would mean for their future.

Arkansas’s Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson, vetoed this bill because he saw it as inappropriately overriding “parents, patients, and health care experts,” who are the ones who should determine the appropriate care for children. The state legislature overrode that veto, disregarding the consensus among the medical community and the harm to children like Brooke.

Transgender children in crisis shouldn’t have to turn to the courts to ensure that they can get the health care that their doctors and parents agree they need. But that’s the reality that anti-LGBTQ forces have created as part of their campaign of attacks on transgender youth.

Transgender youth and advocates fought against the over 75 anti-trans bills introduced in state legislatures this year. Whenever a bill was defeated, the voices of trans youth were instrumental in the victory. Tens of thousands of ACLU supporters acted by showing up at protests, sending emails to elected officials, and filling up governors’ inboxes urging vetoes on these discriminatory and harmful bills. We made a promise to take states that passed many of these bills to court, and today we are following through on that promise.

Brooke’s parents are anxious about what they will do if the law takes effect. They could travel out of state to get Brooke the care she needs, but that’s expensive and they don’t think it will be sustainable for long. The only other option is to move the family out of state, but Brooke’s grandparents live in Arkansas and need a lot of support, and Brooke’s parents help take care of them. If this law goes into effect, the Dennises will be forced to leave their aging parents behind to get their daughter the medical care she will need.

To keep their family together during Brooke’s medical care, Brooke and her parents, along with three other Arkansas families and two doctors, are taking this fight to court. The ACLU is proud to fight alongside transgender young people like Brooke, who are looking to protect not only themselves, but all youth who need this care.

Four and a half years ago, the use of surveillance technologies by local police and governments was growing exponentially. There were many factors behind this rapid growth, but the two most significant were (1) the ever-increasing pool of federal grant money that was being made available for surveillance tech purchases, and (2) that in almost every jurisdiction, local police were empowered to make decisions about acquiring and using surveillance technologies unilaterally and in secret. Because it is hard to oppose a specific local surveillance tech acquisition when you don’t know it’s happening, surveillance tech use by local police was turning into a runaway train.

While this trend was worrisome enough unto itself, another inescapable fact made it even more troubling: Namely, while police and government surveillance negatively impacts everyone, it does not impact everyone equally. Specifically, dating all the way back to New York City’s pre-revolutionary lantern laws, surveillance — like policing itself — has been used to disproportionately target people of color.

These realities raised a challenging question: If the ACLU was going to seek to disrupt the growing use of surveillance technologies on the local level, what would a new approach look like? Put another way, if we were going to take decisions about acquiring and using surveillance technologies out of the hands of the police, who then should be empowered to decide if and how surveillance technologies are used and how would the new model work?

The most just and equitable answer to that question is that the people and communities most impacted by surveillance should have the greatest influence over surveillance technology decisions.

Having arrived at that answer, the next question was how we could most effectively empower local communities to influence surveillance technology decisions. Having local communities vote on every proposed surveillance technology acquisition presented the most direct route to such empowerment, but such frequent ballot measures would be expensive, cumbersome, and open to manipulation by those who formulated the ballot language. The next best approach, which the ACLU arrived at after examining and building upon some innovative legislation from Santa Clara County, California and seeking advice from 17 national partner organizations, was to pursue local legislation that would shift the existing, secretive acquisition processes into one that is transparent and driven by community opinion.

Specifically, this new, transparent process would require that (1) the public be provided with substantial, detailed information about a proposed surveillance technology and how it is proposed to be used well before any funding, acquisition, and deployment decisions are made, (2) the public is given ample opportunity to form opinions, organize, and express those positions in public hearings before their local elected representatives, and (3) those democratically accountable elected officials — most often city councilmembers — would replace the police in having the final say on if and how surveillance technologies are used, knowing that if they take a position contrary to that of their constituents, it could cost them their jobs. While this approach was imperfect in the same way democracy is imperfect, it offered a powerful platform from which the people could question, limit, and even reject the local use of surveillance technologies. And that is how the Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) effort was born.

Today, we celebrate the adoption of our 20th and 21st CCOPS laws by the cities of Dayton and Detroit. This milestone was achieved by passing CCOPS laws at an astounding rate of one new law every 2.67 months. As a result, more than 17 million residents, along with countless visitors and undocumented persons, now have a meaningful say over, and real opportunity to reject, the use of intrusive surveillance technologies.

This achievement could not be more important as the ACLU, its members, and our allies embark on the fight for systemic equality in 2021 and beyond. Systemic equality does not permit around-the-clock monitoring of communities of color, so their residents feel like they live in open air prisons. Systemic equality does not accept the massive surveilling of communities of color so minor infractions, which would go largely unnoticed in whiter communities, regularly result in police interventions. Systemic equality does not permit faulty technologies, like facial recognition and predictive policing, to drive the false arrest and imprisonment of Black and Brown people, because doing so is considered acceptable (or even intended) collateral damage in the fight against crime. Finally, systemic equality rejects the disproven narrative that surveillance technologies prevent people from becoming crime victims when, in fact, it regularly victimizes persons of color.

In places where CCOPS laws exist and government surveillance tech secrecy has given way to transparency, impacted communities now have a meaningful chance to debate and push back against the deployment of surveillance technologies. (Most CCOPS laws, per the ACLU model bill, require existing techs to get council approval or have their use discontinued.) In some cases, as with San Francisco’s ban on government facial recognition, CCOPS laws have chosen to reject certain surveillance techs at their inception. We have even noticed police internally rejecting the use of a surveillance technology because they knew the blowback during a CCOPS review would be overwhelming. Such important protections should extend beyond those who live in one of CCOPS’ 21 jurisdictions.

We may have a long way to go before CCOPS laws protect every or even a majority of persons in America, but we are off to a strong start. Whereas CCOPS bills were once sold as a new approach to local surveillance oversight and community empowerment, they are now recognized as the prevailing gold standard. And while we once had to explain what CCOPS was and even how it’s acronym is pronounced (it’s see-cops), CCOPS has now been the subject of articles detailing how its laws are formulated and have spread, how we can most effectively center racial justice considerations during the CCOPS review process, and how the CCOPS campaign itself was developed and operates. By design, the CCOPS effort is decentralized, so over the years we have seen successful CCOPS efforts led by the ACLU and our affiliates, local CCOPS coalitions, and by local activists who discovered the CCOPS website’s resources and ran with them to victory.

At this milestone moment, we pause to celebrate our achievements and all those who help us reach them. After some COVID-appropriate high fives, however, we will turn our thoughts back to those who are not yet protected by CCOPS laws. CCOPS has come a long way, but there’s still a long way to go. Time to get back to work.

One week ago, the Supreme Court announced it would consider a major case about abortion. The case, which directly challenges Roe v. Wade, raises the question of whether states can ban abortion. The legal right to abortion is at stake.

Yet, missing from much of the conversation about this crucial case is an explicit reminder of why we care, and why preserving Roe is not enough. There is talk of what the country might look like in terms of the legality of abortion if the court holds there is no federal constitutional protection for abortion, but little talk about gender equality, fairness, and racial justice. These are all essential for any real discussion of abortion and the promise and limits of its legality today.

As we face this threat now because of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death and the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the court, it makes sense to consider what Justice Ginsburg had to say about why abortion — and access to it — matters.

Justice Ginsburg was direct about the importance of abortion. During in her confirmation hearings for appointment to the Supreme Court in 1993, Ginsburg stated: “Abortion prohibition by the State … controls women.” She went on: “[W]hen Government controls that decision for her, she’s being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”

Dignity and equality are at stake, and she made that clear: “[I]t is essential to a woman’s equality … that she be the decision maker, that her choice be controlling, and that if you impose restraints and disadvantage her, you are disadvantaging her because of her sex.”

For Ginsburg, the government perpetuated sex discrimination when it denied access to abortion. And it perpetuated sex discrimination when it pressed women not to have children, forcing them to decide between keeping a job or a pregnancy. And it went further, practicing eugenics when it forcibly sterilized women.

In 2007, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court, upheld a federal law outlawing certain abortion procedures. In the decision, he infamously speculated that some women might regret their choice to have such an abortion. His court’s solution? Ban the procedures to avert this hypothetical regret.

Justice Ginsburg, in turn, is famous for her response, which highlighted Kennedy’s archaic logic: “This way of thinking reflects ancient notions about women’s place in the family and under the Constitution — ideas that have long since been discredited,” including men’s role to serve as “woman’s protector and defender.”

Justice Ginsburg never spoke of the importance of abortion rights to transgender men and nonbinary people, and how pervasive and archaic notions of sex have thwarted even visibility for those who don’t conform to persistent gender norms. (She did vote in favor of every LGBT rights case to come before her.) But her analysis of dignity, of control, and of the harm of stereotypes points in only one direction: Restrictions on abortion constitute sex discrimination for nonbinary people and transgender men, as well as women.

Following the high court’s latest abortion-related news, the headline — “gender justice is at stake” — doesn’t run across the fold of any paper I’m reading.

Nor does the coverage in the major press always trumpet the truth: For many, abortion is already as good as banned. Hundreds of thousands could join their ranks. Even today, while the constitutional right to abortion still exists, people’s ability to get the care they need depends in large part on where they live and how much money they have. Ginsburg recognized this: She spoke of the economic realities that limit abortion, even where it is legal. She spoke of the “sorry state” where we have “one law for women of means and another for poor women,” where “poor women don’t have choice” and women of means do, and always will.

People of means will be able to travel the ever larger distances to get to an abortion provider, to take time off work, to secure child care, and to pay for the abortion — which the government bars insurance from covering in many places. The same is simply not true for many who are poor. These barriers to getting reproductive care will be felt most acutely by Black people, given the wealth gap that results from systemic inequality.

Even today, with abortion in every state protected by the Constitution, this care is as out of reach for many as if it were illegal. Too much talk focuses on legality; too little on the ability to actually get the care one needs. Too little on the federal government’s continued banning of abortion from insurance for the poor (Medicaid), for Native Americans, federal employees, and more.

This isn’t to say that legality doesn’t matter; far from it. The number of those unable to access abortion will increase substantially if abortion were to become illegal in a swath of states; the journey required will no longer be across Mississippi for example, but perhaps to Illinois.

The major press also aren’t centering what the court’s decision to hear the abortion case means for people of color. Women of color are more likely to have abortions than other women, because of longstanding disparities in access to contraception, discrimination in health care, and economic inequalities that make raising children more difficult for many, among other reasons. Any decision of the court to reduce federal protection for the right to have an abortion won’t address discrimination or increase resources for Black people and other people of color, it will simply erect more obstacles and add to injustice.

The court took a case about abortion, to be sure, but it also took a case about gender justice, racial justice, and economic justice. It took a case that calls on us to recognize the import and limits of the right we have now. It took a case that demands that we start talking about what’s really at stake, so we can fight for and secure something other than a “sorry state” where only some have access.