Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti warned leftist activists not to defy the Volunteer State’s protection of kids from transgender procedures after securing a major victory at the Supreme Court on Wednesday.
Skrmetti made the comments in an interview with Morning Wire just hours after the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of a Tennessee law that protects children from irreversible transgender medical procedures. In December, Skrmetti and his team defended the law before the court after the ACLU and the Biden administration sued to overturn it.
“It is a really important ruling,” Skrmetti told The Daily Wire. “It affects an increasingly large number of kids. And the evidence that keeps coming in shows more and more that there is a huge risk to kids from these procedures with very little, if any, benefit. So it’s really important that our legislatures be allowed to follow the evidence and do what they need to do to make sure kids are protected.”
Skrmetti added that any state with “shield laws” to protect people sending in transgender drugs into Tennessee would end up in court.
“The full faith and credit clause says that Tennessee’s laws are binding in Tennessee. Other states can’t get cute and try to find ways around that. We’ve seen a lot of states try to do this. I think it’s a bad idea. They shouldn’t do it and if they keep it up, they’re going to end up in court and they’re going to lose,” he said.
Opponents of Tennessee’s law claim that it violates the 14th Amendment because it would allow boys to be prescribed testosterone to address developmental issues but not allow girls to be given testosterone for a so-called transition.
Skrmetti said that this line of thinking was a “fatal flaw” in the arguments made by the law’s opponents.
“With any medical treatment, you’re not just handing someone a drug, you’re giving them a treatment to treat a specific condition. And different drugs have different effects on different conditions,” he said. “And we differentiate between those purposes all the time. So I thought that was a fatal flaw in the argument on the other side.”
Dozens of states followed Tennessee’s lead after Governor Bill Lee signed its ban into law in March 2023. That came after Daily Wire host Matt Walsh published an investigation into the Pediatric Transgender Clinic at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, showing it had removed the breasts of girls who identified as boys and prescribed cross-sex hormones to gender-confused children.
Portions of the interview were included in Morning Wire’s Thursday episode, and the full interview will air this Sunday.