Skip to content

Edmund LaCour, Jr. vs. transgender people

Edmund LaCour, Jr. is an American lawyer and anti-transgender activist. LaCour represented the defendants in Boe v. Marshall, a case challenging Alabama’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors.

In July 2025, LaCour was a speaker at the 2025 US Federal Trade Commission anti-trans workshop.

Background

According to a bio provided to the FTC:

Edmund LaCour is the current solicitor general of Alabama. In that role, he oversees the state’s appellate and constitutional litigation. He has argued three times before the US Supreme Court and dozens of times before other courts. Before joining the Alabama attorney general’s office, Edmund was a partner at the DC office of Kirkland & Ellis where he represented numerous clients before the Supreme Court, Courts of Appeals and trial courts. Before joining Kirkland, he practiced at Bancroft PLLC in Washington,
DC and Baker-Botts LLP in Houston, Texas. Upon graduating from law school, Edmund clerked for the Honorable William H. Pryor, Jr. of the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. Edmund earned his bachelor’s degree from Birmingham Southern College, his master of philosophy from Trinity College Dublin, and his JD from Yale Law School.

2025 FTC workshop

LaCour outlined how opponents of state bans on gender affirming care for minors would seek injuctions:

In Alabama’s case in particular, the district judge really relied on WPATH in his preliminary injunction order, but we saw that as a great opportunity because the WPATH guidelines had essentially been constitutionalized in the case. And we said, “Well, judge, that makes them the most relevant thing for this litigation. And so we should get discovery into how these things were made. Were these the product of dispassionate science or impassioned advocacy?” And what we revealed was really a political, medical and legal scandal beyond what we had even imagined at the beginning of the litigation.

LaCour saw an opportunity after WPATH published the Standards of Care Version 8 (SOC-8) online in 2022, then removed and republished it with unexplained changes in the section on care for youth. The primary change was the removal of age limits for starting treatments. LaCour then subpoenaed all of the communication about the development and the revision around age limits, which showed that Biden Administration official Rachel Levine and the American Academy of Pediatrics raised concerns about how age limits might be weaponized by opponents of this care.

LaCour also criticized WPATH for not adhering to the Delphi process, a form of structured communication about a healthcare topic that WPATH was using.

LaCour suggests that one angle of attack on trans healthcare may be medical necessity, a term of art from insurance. LaCour characterizes WPATH’s SOC-8 section on youth healthcare as a child-driven model where “wants are being treated as needs.” LaCour also brings up the SOC-8 section on eunuchs, a population documented since the dawn of recorded history. LaCour says that because “no diagnostic manual recognizes eunuch as a medical or psychiatric diagnosis,” their care is not medically necessary.

Resources

Federal Trade Commission (ftc.gov)