The Supreme Court upheld the state of Tennessee’s ban on irreversible transgender procedures for minors, a major victory for parental rights advocates and those seeking to protect distressed children from harmful operations.
The justices ruled 6-3 in United States v. Skrmetti, with all of the conservatives justices opting to allow Tennessee’s ban to remain in place and the liberal justices dissenting. The ruling will likely allow similar bans in more than 20 other red states to be upheld in the face of legal challenges.
“Tennessee’s law prohibiting certain medical treatments for transgender minors is not subject to heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and satisfies rational basis review,” the court’s opinion reads.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, with justices Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito writing concurring opinions. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan filed dissenting opinions.
A group of plaintiffs including three minors claiming to be transgender brought the case, with the Biden Justice Department intervening in their favor. The American Civil Liberties Union, a left-wing legal activist organization represented the plaintiffs.
“Landmark VICTORY for Tennessee at SCOTUS in defense of America’s children!” Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said on social media.
The Supreme Court determined that Tennessee’s law did not violate the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause as the plaintiffs had argued. They also argued that Tennessee’s law made classifications based on sex, even though the ban is based on age and addresses the use of medical treatments for a specific purpose.
In his majority opinion, Roberts alluded to the growing body of scientific evidence coming out of advanced Western democracies — including the United Kingdom, Norway, and Finland — exposing the lack of evidence demonstrating that the benefits of transgender operations outweigh the considerable harms.
“The Supreme Court’s strong decision today is a massive win in the fight to protect children from harmful gender ideology. Transgender treatments for minors is experimental medicine not backed by reliable evidence,” said Kristina Rasmussen, executive director of Do No Harm, a medical watchdog organization opposed to transgender operations on minors.
The Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services recently reviewed existing medical literature on transgender operations and found little evidence to support activist claims that such treatments are an effective way of improving the mental health of minors. The HHS report adds to the growing body of evidence in the U.S. disproving claims from transgender activists who insist life-changing hormonal and surgical treatments are necessary for mentally unwell minors who identify as the opposite gender.
A growing number of detransitioners have spoken up about being rushed into transgender operations when they suffered from mental health issues as teenagers, only to regret it later on and switch back to their biological sex. Some of the detransitioners have filed lawsuits against the medical practitioners and institutions for allowing them to undergo the transgender treatments without obtaining informed consent.
The inability of children to fully comprehend the life changing transgender operations was known to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the leading transgender medical organization, according to bombshell internal documents released last year. The WPATH documents contradicted the organization’s public position in favor of transgender operations and hormone treatments for minors without any guardrails.