What about United States vs. Skrmetti are you aware of?
The ruling of the Tennessee Supreme Court upholds a constitutionally protected medical treatment for minors with gender dysphoria, and threatens to shut down medical transition for adults
The ACLU, which represented the challengers in the case, countered that the treatments that were at issue in Wednesday’s case were endorsed as appropriate for teenagers by the major medical associations that deal with gender dysphoria, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinology, and the American Psychological Association.
Many countries in western Europe have dealt with this issue for a long time, and many of them have recently stopped using some of these medications because of their adverse effects.
Wednesday’s Supreme Court decision was a big win for Tennessee and 24 other states, but there are many questions that remain unanswered. If taking kids off the drugs is deemed too risky, can doctors keep doing previous treatments? What about all of the issues that have arisen within schools, sports teams, and boards? None of those has been resolved, so far anyway. The court has yet to address whether parents have the right to determine treatments for their children.
The bill’s supporters were happy about the win. As state Sen. Jack Johnson, the sponsor of the bill, put it in an interview with NPR late last year, the state bars minors from getting tattoos, smoking or drinking, and, as he observed, “We regulate a number of different types of [medical] procedures, and we felt like this was the best public policy to prevent kids from suffering from irreversible consequences, things that cannot be undone.”
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court delivered a new, crushing blow, upholding Tennessee’s ban in a 6-to-3 decision. In allowing Tennessee to outlaw blockers and hormones, the court not only shielded similar laws on the books in some two dozen states. The door was closed when it came to extending constitutional protections to trans people. Some advocates fear that Skrmetti could open the door to banning medical transition for adults and perhaps other health care that some conservatives oppose, like birth control or in vitro fertilization — even vaccines. It is possible that the fate of the once-obscure medical treatment could have significant consequences for American law.
What makes the defeat all the more striking is the remarkable string of victories the broader L.G.B.T.Q. movement was winning until a few years ago. Tailoring its message to reach skeptical audiences, careful to ride near the crest of shifting public sentiment, it pursued incremental legal and regulatory wins that, ultimately, sparked deep social change. Beginning in the 2010s, gay people won the right to marry and, along with trans people, serve openly in the military. The movement defeated “bathroom bills” aimed at trans people in states like North Carolina and Texas, persuading even some Republicans that such measures were unnecessary and cruel. Five years ago, the Supreme Court decided that employees couldn’t be fired if they were gay or trans. The movement gambled its future on a controversial question of whether children have a right to treatments that interrupt their physical adolescence.
Since taking office, he has sought to strip trans people of the right to choose the sex marker on their passports and bar them from the military, arguing that they inherently lack the integrity and moral fitness to serve — that their very identity is a dishonorable lie. He has threatened to stop federal funding from health care providers if they continue to offer sex-reassignment surgeries. “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” one executive order asserted. “These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
The US Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a Tennessee law to prevent minors from undergoing gender dysphoria treatment. The court found that Tennessee was within its right to prohibit the treatment, stating, “We are satisfied that the state’s interest in public health is not outweighed by the privacy interests afforded to minors.” This is the 23rd case to be heard by the Supreme Court.