The Supreme Court was the focus of the case of US v. Skrmetti
“Please do what you can”: defending a Tennessee legislature ban on gender-affirming care in my daughter (L.W.)
There is something incredibly surreal about finding your family at the center of a landmark Supreme Court decision, from the robes and the formality to the long, red velvet curtains behind the justices. No mother hopes that she would land there after a fight with her child.
L.W. came out late in the year 2020. She wasn’t too far shy of 13. Four and a half years later, she is thriving, healthy and happy after pursuing evidence-based gender-affirming care. But the very care that is improving her life became a primary political target of the Republican supermajority in our home state, Tennessee. When the legislature banned my daughter’s care in 2023, we fought back by suing the state. Today, we found out that we lost that case when the Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, to uphold Tennessee’s ban on such care.
I’m beside myself. Our heartfelt plea was not enough. The expert legal arguments made by our lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union were not enough. I had to tell my daughter that our hope is gone. The American system of democracy didn’t work to help her, she was angry, scared and hurt.
My family did not start their journey to Washington in that hall of justice. We ended up there through parental and civic duty. My and my husband’s demands in our lawsuit against the ban felt quite basic: Let us do our job as parents. Let us do what we can for our daughter in a way that we know how to do. Don’t let our child’s very existence be a political wedge issue. Being a teenager is hard. Being a parent of a teenager is hard enough.
Since taking office, he has tried to bar trans people from serving in the military due to his belief that they don’t have the integrity or moral fitness to do so. He has threatened to withhold federal funding from health care providers that continue to offer blockers, cross-sex hormones or transition surgery to minors. The United States has a policy of recognizing both genders, according to one executive order. “These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
After the US Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care, a lesbian woman said, “We had to tell my daughter that our hope is gone.” “The American system of democracy didn’t work to help her, she was angry, scared and hurt,” she added. “Let us do what we can for our daughter in a way that we know how to do,” she further said.