The US v. Skrmetti is about how the transgender rights movement bet on the Supreme Court

The Last Hope of Transgender Children: A U.S. Senator’s View of a Scale-Free Medical Treatment for Trans Gender Dysphoria

There is something very strange to find your family inside the long red velvet curtains behind the justices when they make a landmark Supreme Court decision. No mother imagines that her everyday fight to do right by her child would land her there.

It was not long ago that the idea of a major Supreme Court case turning on medical care for genderqueer children was very far off. As L.G.B.T.Q. groups gained ground, the number of adolescents identifying as trans doubled. It is estimated that 3 percent of American high school students identify as trans. A small but growing number of young people sought medical treatments for gender Dysphoria, a term used to describe the feelings people have when their physical bodies don’t match their sense of self. To many clinicians and L.G.B.T.Q. activists, these treatments were not only uncontroversial but transformative, an innovation that could set more young trans people on the road to happiness. Yet by 2021, when Arkansas became the first state to ban pediatric gender treatments, something had begun to shift. For the first time, the breaking point of wider acceptance was children.

I’m beside myself. Our plea was not enough. The compelling, expert legal arguments by our lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal were not enough. I had to face my daughter and tell her that our last hope is gone. She is scared and angry because the American system of democracy didn’t protect her.

My family did not start this journey to land in Washington in front of that white marble hall of justice. We were here through parental and civic duty. In our lawsuit against the ban, my and my husband demanded that we should be allowed to be parents. Let us love and care for our daughter in the best way we and our doctors know how. Don’t let our child’s very existence be a political wedge issue. Being a teenager is hard enough. Being a parent of a teenager is hard enough.

He has sought to prevent trans people from joining the military because they don’t have the moral fitness to do so and he believes that their identity is a 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. “These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”