The Supreme Court’s Trans Health Care Case is about normal things that make a difference
The Gender-Affirming Treatment of Minors is a Big Problem: A New U.S. High Court Decision in Tentative Tennessee
As I entered the legal profession, the fear was reinforced. One of my law school professors spoke to our class in Boston in 2007, and told them that we needed to follow traditional gender standards in court. She told me that I was too soft spoken to be seen as an effective male advocate, after she told me that women should wear skirts to appear before juries. Outside class, I found my appearance was regularly the subject of mockery. During an internship at a public defender’s office in New York City, some court officers and judges referred to me as “Doogie Howser” and asked my supervisors if it was take your kid to work day. I was considered to be too boyish to be an adult man. After one job interview, I later learned, staff members questioned whether I would be “taken seriously” in court. I stayed away from the courtroom for many years because I was scared my gender would distract me and that my clients would pay the price.
I’m also speaking to the nine justices who will decide the case and to the country that is not sure about trans health care.
NPR put the question to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which until the law was passed was the major center in Tennessee for providing gender-affirming care for minors. The center took three days to ponder the question, ultimately declining to comment.
More than twenty states have banned puberty blockers, hormones and other treatment for children seeking gender-affirming care in the last three years. The issue has become highly politicized, as anyone who watched election ads this fall can attest.
The language of the statute telegraphs the purpose of the ban, according to Strangio. Specifically, the statute encourages minors to “appreciate their sex” and bans treatments that “might encourage minors to be disdainful of their sex.”
Do we need to rely on drugs that aren’t prescribed to treat gender problems? The European perspective on women’s health care and gender dysphoria
The Sen says that Western Europe is far ahead of us in terms of these kinds of medications. “They are pulling back because they’ve had a longer runway, and they’re seeing that the adverse effects of some of these medications far outweigh any benefit that they have.”
Some Western European and Scandinavian countries have a national health care system that covers everyone, which is what the conservative Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom agrees with.
“They can track a patient from birth until death. And so if someone gets cross-sex hormones for the purpose of a gender change at age 15, they can look at how they’re doing at age 20,25, 45 65 and see what the outcomes were,” Bursch notes.
Drug access for anyone currently using the medications has not been stopped, even though the characterizations of European studies are highly controversial.
The law bars access to treatment for kids who want to transition from their sex assigned at birth, butallows that same medications to be used when treating kids with other conditions.
Vanderbilt does still provide gender-affirming care for adult patients. But lawyers for the trans kids argue that if states can ban gender dysphoria treatments for minors, the next step will be to ban such treatments for adults, too.
Comments on the Tennessee Children’s Medical Treatments Proposed by the First Openly Trans Lawyer – Sen. Jack Johnson and Justice Samuel Alito
“People make assumptions. They say it’s just a phase, because they don’t know what it’s like,” LW says of her experience. “How slow it is, it can feel pretty lost,” according to an article on the site.
In Tennessee, if you’re younger than 18 you can’t get a tattoo. You can’t have a cigarette. You can’t drink,” he observed to NPR. Tennessee regulates “a number of different types of medical procedures,” Johnson said, adding that “it felt like this was the best public policy to prevent kids form suffering from irreversible consequences, things that cannot be undone.”
Tennessee State Sen. Jack Johnson, who introduced the challenged bill, says the law is just another example of the state exercising its regulatory power.
ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio, the first openly trans lawyer to argue in front of the Supreme Court, represented the kids and their parents. He said that Tennesseebans them for only one purpose and that these are very commonly used medications.
There is a consensus that these treatments can be medically necessary for some adolescents, regardless of what source you look at, according to Prelogar.
Roberts cited what he described as scientific uncertainty about the longer-term implications gender-affirming medical treatments for minors and asked why the courts should get involved. Justice Samuel Alito said that Swedish data was contrary to the statement in the petition that the treatments have benefits that outweigh the risks.
She was questioning by the court’s conservatives. The justice who wrote a majority opinion in the case that granted employment protections to gay and transexual workers remained silent through the hours long arguments.
The conservative majority of the Supreme Court didn’t seem to think there was a chance of success in the challenge to the Tennessee law.
The US Supreme Court on Friday decided to hear Tennessee’s challenge to a state law prohibiting minors from receiving gender-affirming medical treatment. “We’re going to take a look at it,” Chief Justice John Roberts said. “I think we’re going to have to wait for a little bit of evidence,” Roberts added. Over twenty states and the District of Columbia have banned treatment for minors.