The case of U.S. vs. Skrmetti examines how the Transgender Rights movement bet on the Supreme Court
On the Supreme Court’s Decision to Order Gender-Affirming Treatment for Minors in Tennessee and the Legacy of a Demonstration
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.
But state Sen. Johnson points out that many countries in Western Europe have been dealing with this issue for much longer than the United States, and many of them in recent years have pulled back “because they’re seeing that the adverse effects of some of these medications far outweigh any benefit they have.”
Tennessee and 24 other states won the Supreme Court decision on Wednesday, but there are many unanswered questions. Can doctors continue previous treatments if taking kids off the medications is deemed too risky? The issues that have roiled the institutions include school boards, team sports, and more. So far, none of those have been resolved. Nor has the court yet tackled the question of parental rights to determine treatments for their kids.
The supporters were happy with 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.”
The decision by the Supreme Court to allow states to ban gender-affirming care for Minors was a blow to the trans rights movement.
The New York Times looked at the movement in the last decade and found that it was consumed by theories of sex and gender, which most voters did not understand or support. The decision to take Skrmetti to the Supreme Court by the American Civil Liberties Union was one of the biggest mistakes made by trans women, said a trans woman who serves on the board of a political action committee.
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 withhold federal funding from health care providers that continue to offer blockers, cross-sex hormones or transition surgery to minors. “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” one executive order asserted. The sexes are incontrovertible reality.
