The Supreme Court said Monday it will wade into the debate over whether states can ban gender assignment treatments for juveniles.
The justices granted a petition to hear a case next term involving Tennessee’s law, which bans administering puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex-transition surgeries to minors.
The case has become a major battleground, with the federal Justice Department and the American Civil Liberties Union on one side, fighting GOP-led states who say the country is rushing too fast to embrace unproven and potentially dangerous treatments for kids.
“It is undisputed that these hormonal and surgical interventions carry serious and potentially irreversible side effects, including infertility, diminished bone density, sexual dysfunction, cardiovascular disease, and cancer,” Tennessee told the justices in briefs.
The state won in a federal appeals court and the Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court.
U.S. Solicitor Elizabeth Prelogar said Tennessee’s law, SB1, discriminates against transgender children because it only restricts their care.
“Thus, for example, a teenager whose sex assigned at birth is male can be prescribed testosterone to conform to a male gender identity, but a teenager assigned female at birth cannot,” Ms. Prelogar told the justices in asking them to hear the case.
The feds had joined the legal battle first launched by the ACLU and allied groups. The ACLU said the justices have the well-being of transgender youth in their hands.
“The future of countless transgender youth in this and future generations rests on this Court adhering to the facts, the Constitution, and its own modern precedent,” said Chase Strangio, deputy director for Transgender Justice at the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project.
“These bans represent a dangerous and discriminatory affront to the well-being of transgender youth across the country and their Constitutional right to equal protection under the law. They are the result of an openly political effort to wage war on a marginalized group and our most fundamental freedoms. We want transgender people and their families across the country to know we will spare nothing in our defense of you, your loved ones, and your right to decide whether to get this medical care,” he said.
It is likely to become one of the blockbuster cases in the court’s next term, which begins in October and runs through June 2025.
The justices had previously rejected requests to hear challenges involving more than 20 state laws banning what’s known as “gender-affirming” care for juveniles. The justices last month also rejected taking a case involving parents who challenged a Montgomery County, Maryland, policy that allowed schools to hide their children’s gender transition from them.
The Tennessee case comes to the justices as the number of minors being diagnosed with — and seeking treatment for — gender dysphoria has surged.
Courts have generally blocked state laws that restricted treatments.
Lower courts have rejected state bans on transgender youth medical treatment in seven other states: Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky and Indiana, according to the ACLU.
That weighed heavily on the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which allowed Tennessee’s law to take effect.
“Prohibiting citizens and legislatures from offering their perspectives on high-stakes medical policies, in which compassion for the child points in both directions, is not something life-tenured federal judges should do without a clear warrant in the Constitution,” Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in the 2-1 decision.
He said there does not appear to be a constitutional right to a new and potentially irreversible medical treatment for juveniles.
Judge Helene N. White, another Bush appointee, dissented, saying the states trampled on the core constitutional rights of families to make their own medical decisions.
“Tennessee’s and Kentucky’s laws tell minors and their parents that the minors cannot undergo medical care because of the accidents of their births and their failure to conform to how society believes boys and girls should look and live,” she wrote. “The laws further deprive the parents — those whom we otherwise recognize as best suited to further their minor children’s interests — of their right to make medical decisions affecting their children in conjunction with their children and medical practitioners.”
The Tennessee case was brought by three transgender minors and their parents, as well as a doctor who had 16 transgender youths as patients.
The case is U.S. v. Skrmetti. Jonathan Skrmetti is Tennessee’s attorney general.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.