The Supreme Court said Monday that it will wade into the debate over whether states can ban gender assignment treatments for juveniles.
The justices granted a petition to hear a case next term involving Tennessee’s law, which bans administering puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex-transition surgeries to minors.
The case has become a major battleground. The Justice Department and the American Civil Liberties Union are fighting Republican-led states trying to halt what they say is a hasty embrace of unproven and potentially dangerous treatments for youths.
“It is undisputed that these hormonal and surgical interventions carry serious and potentially irreversible side effects, including infertility, diminished bone density, sexual dysfunction, cardiovascular disease, and cancer,” Tennessee told the justices in briefs.
The state won in a federal appeals court, and the Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court.
U.S. Solicitor Elizabeth Prelogar said Tennessee’s law, SB1, discriminates against transgender children because it restricts their care.
“Thus, for example, a teenager whose sex assigned at birth is male can be prescribed testosterone to conform to a male gender identity, but a teenager assigned female at birth cannot,” Ms. Prelogar told the justices in asking them to hear the case.
The federal government joined the legal battle launched by the ACLU and allied groups. The ACLU said the justices have the well-being of transgender youths in their hands.
“The future of countless transgender youth in this and future generations rests on this Court adhering to the facts, the Constitution, and its own modern precedent,” said Chase Strangio, deputy director for Transgender Justice with the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project.
“These bans represent a dangerous and discriminatory affront to the well-being of transgender youth across the country and their Constitutional right to equal protection under the law. They are the result of an openly political effort to wage war on a marginalized group and our most fundamental freedoms. We want transgender people and their families across the country to know we will spare nothing in our defense of you, your loved ones, and your right to decide whether to get this medical care,” he said.
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said the state’s law is intended to protect youths “from irreversible gender treatments.”
“This case will bring much-needed clarity to whether the Constitution contains special protections for gender identity,” said Mr. Skrmetti, whose office will defend the law before the justices.
The debate on transgender care is worldwide. European nations have adopted a more conservative approach but not outright bans.
The case likely will become one of the blockbusters of the court’s next term, which begins in October and runs through June 2025.
The justices previously rejected requests to hear challenges involving more than 20 state laws banning “gender-affirming” care for juveniles. The justices last month also rejected taking a case involving parents who challenged a policy in Montgomery County, Maryland, that allowed schools to hide their children’s gender transition from them.
Diagnoses of gender dysphoria have surged among juveniles, and so has the number seeking treatment.
Courts have generally blocked state laws that restrict treatments.
Lower courts have rejected state bans on medical treatment for transgender youths in seven other states: Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky and Indiana, according to the ACLU.
That weighed heavily on the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which allowed Tennessee’s law to take effect.
“Prohibiting citizens and legislatures from offering their perspectives on high-stakes medical policies, in which compassion for the child points in both directions, is not something life-tenured federal judges should do without a clear warrant in the Constitution,” Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in the 2-1 decision.
He said there does not appear to be a constitutional right to a new and potentially irreversible medical treatment for juveniles.
Judge Helene N. White, another Bush appointee, dissented. She said the states trampled on families’ constitutional rights to make medical decisions.
“Tennessee’s and Kentucky’s laws tell minors and their parents that the minors cannot undergo medical care because of the accidents of their births and their failure to conform to how society believes boys and girls should look and live,” she wrote. “The laws further deprive the parents — those whom we otherwise recognize as best suited to further their minor children’s interests — of their right to make medical decisions affecting their children in conjunction with their children and medical practitioners.”
The Tennessee case was brought by three transgender minors and their parents and a doctor who had 16 transgender youths as patients.
The case is U.S. v. Skrmetti.
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