LGBTQ Rights

The fight over healthcare for transgender youth in Arkansas has taken a devastating turn.

As the dust begins to settle on the 2025 Arkansas legislative session, we salute all people and organizations who called, wrote, testified and supported good proposals while opposing the bad.

Today, in a resounding victory for free speech and intellectual freedom, a federal district court struck down key provisions of Arkansas’s censorship law, Act 372, as unconstitutional.

The ACLU of Arkansas has initiated a lawsuit against the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration (DFA) on behalf of five plaintiffs, contesting a recent emergency rule that restricts transgender and nonbinary individuals' ability to self-identify their gender on driver’s licenses.

Four families of transgender youth and two doctors have challenged an Arkansas law that would prohibit healthcare professionals from providing or even referring transgender young people for medically necessary health care. The law would also bar any state funds or insurance coverage for gender-affirming health care for transgender people under 18, and it would allow private insurers to refuse to cover gender-affirming care for people of any age. The lawsuit, filed in federal court, alleges that House Bill 1570 is a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

VICTORY! Cole v. Arkansas challenged Act 1 of 2008, a ballot initiative that prohibited fostering or adoption of children by unmarried couples; since Arkansas did not recognize the marriage of same-sex couples, this included not only unmarried same-sex couples, but same-sex couples married elsewhere. The intent of the law was to categorically ban same sex couples from consideration, without regard to the needs or relationships of the child to the potential foster or adoptive parents, or their suitability as parents.

Same-sex couples who had children before marriage equality was the law of the land filed suit in state court in July 2015 in order to amend their children’s birth certificates to include the names of both parents without having to procure a court order, as the state required, although non-biological fathers in opposite-sex marriages are added to Arkansas birth certificates upon request and without a court order. After a lower court ruled that the Department of Health’s refusal to amend the birth certificates violated the couples’ rights to equal protection, the state appealed to the Arkansas Supreme Court, which overturned the ruling.