(LifeSiteNews) — North Dakota’s ban on “gender transition” procedures for confused children is constitutional and can be enforced, South Central District Court Judge Jackson Lofgren ruled on Wednesday.

In April 2023, then-Gov. Doug Burgum signed House Bill 1254, prohibiting transgender surgeries or hormones for minors. Violators could face up to 10 years in prison or $20,000 in fines. Opponents quickly sued, and Lofgren ruled that November that the law could remain in effect while the case made its way through the courts.

This week, the case was resolved on the merits, with Lofgren determining the law does not violate the North Dakota Constitution. His order recognized “legitimate ongoing debate regarding the safety and effectiveness” of youth “gender transitions” and that “[w]here there is uncertainty, deference is given to the Legislature to decide where the line should be drawn.”

“The North Dakota Legislature considered this matter thoroughly and determined that medical gender transition procedures and protocols cannot be appropriately undertaken for minors,” North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley responded. “The district court’s thorough and thoughtful decision makes it clear that our elected legislative body appropriately reached this medical health determination and passed legislation that is constitutionally sound.”

A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.

Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “transition” procedures fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.

Many oft-ignored detransitioners attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”

“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled this summer that the federal Constitution does not bar states from restricting child “transitions,” leaving pro-LGBT judicial activists’ only recourse to try their hand at convincing state judges that bans violate state constitutions.