Supreme Court Hands CHILDREN and Common Sense a Huge Win!

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Score another one for keeping children SAFE from mutilation!

Score another one for common sense!

And surprisingly, score another one for the Supreme Court who seems to have righted their course in the last few months.

In a new 6-3 opinion, the Supreme Court just upheld Tennessee’s BAN on transgender surgeries and hormone therapies for minors:

Here’s a quick summary of everything you need to know:

  • SCOTUS Ruling: In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law banning puberty blockers and hormone therapies for minors identifying as transgender.

  • Majority Opinion (Chief Justice Roberts): The Court found that the law does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. Roberts emphasized that the ruling rests on legal grounds—not ideological views—and that policy matters are best left to elected state representatives and the democratic process.

  • State Authority Affirmed: The decision allows Tennessee—and other states with similar laws—to regulate or prohibit certain medical treatments for minors, particularly when states deem them experimental or potentially harmful.

  • Conservative Justices: All six conservative justices supported the ruling, though some added separate concurring opinions to elaborate their reasoning.

  • Dissent (Justice Sotomayor): She strongly objected, claiming the law unfairly discriminates based on sex and that the Court applied too low a standard of judicial scrutiny. She read her dissent aloud, underscoring her concern for transgender youth and their families.

  • Legal Impact: The ruling sets a significant precedent that may affect other legal challenges in the 26+ states that have passed similar restrictions.

  • Background of the Case: The Biden administration, along with several families and a medical provider, challenged the Tennessee law, arguing it violated constitutional protections.

  • Public Debate: The ruling touches on broader national debates around youth transgender care, medical freedom, and states’ rights to legislate healthcare practices.

  • Summary of the Outcome: The Supreme Court affirmed that states may regulate or restrict specific medical treatments for minors, as long as the law passes basic constitutional review. The Court deferred to legislative judgment rather than imposing its own views on an evolving and complex medical issue.

History will remember this well:

Here are more details of the nuances of the case, from SCOTUSblog:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender teenagers. By a vote of 6-3, the justices rejected an argument by three transgender teens (along with their parents and a Memphis doctor) that the law violates their constitutional right to equal protection and should be scrutinized using a more stringent standard than the one used by a federal appeals court in Cincinnati.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged that the dispute “carries with it the weight of fierce scientific and policy debates about the safety, efficacy, and propriety of medical treatments in an evolving field.” But the court’s only role, he said, is to ensure that the Tennessee law does not violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. “Having concluded that it does not,” he wrote, “we leave questions regarding its policy to the people, their elected representatives, and the democratic process.”

The court’s Democratic appointees dissented from the decision. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the court’s ruling “authorizes, without second thought, untold harm to transgender children and the parents and families who love them.”

According to KFF, more than half the states have laws similar to Tennessee’s. The decision also comes just under five months after President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders affecting the rights of LGBTQ+ people – and, in particular, transgender people. One such order, signed on Jan. 28, seeks to restrict the availability of certain medical treatment for transgender people under the age of 19.

The Biden administration joined the transgender teens in their challenge to the Tennessee law. But in early February, the Trump administration took a different position, telling the justices that it had determined that the law does not violate the right to equal protection. It “would not have intervened to challenge” the law, much less asked the Supreme Court to weigh in, it wrote in a letter on Feb. 7.

Tennessee’s legislature passed the law, known as SB1, in 2023. SB1 emphasizes that the state has a “legitimate, substantial, and compelling interest in encouraging minors to appreciate their sex, particularly as they undergo puberty.” It prohibits (as relevant here) the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender teens while allowing the use of the same treatments for other purposes.

U.S. District Judge Eli Richardson put the ban on hold. He concluded that the treatments at the center of the dispute are “safe, effective, and comparable in both risk profile and efficacy to many other forms of pediatric medicine that Tennessee permits.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit reversed Richardson’s ruling and upheld the ban. It relied on a less stringent standard of review, known as “rational basis” review, which asks whether the law is rationally related to a legitimate government interest.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court affirmed the 6th Circuit’s ruling. In a 24-page opinion, Roberts and the majority agreed with the court of appeals that the Tennessee law is not subject to heightened scrutiny, because it does not draw classifications based on sex. Instead, Roberts explained, the law “prohibits healthcare providers from administering puberty blockers and hormones to minors for certain medical uses, regardless of a minor’s sex.”

Roberts rejected the challengers’ contention that the law draws sex-based classifications because a transgender boy cannot receive puberty blockers or testosterone, while a teenage boy who is not transgender can receive those medicines. Such examples, Roberts stressed, “contort the meaning of the term ‘medical treatment.’” When “a transgender boy (whose biological sex is female),” Roberts reasoned, “takes puberty blockers to treat his gender incongruence, he receives a different medical treatment than a boy whose biological sex is male who takes puberty blockers to treat his precocious puberty.”

Roberts also rebuffed the challengers’ assertion that the Tennessee law, by “encouraging minors to appreciate their sex” and barring medical care “that might encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex,” “enforces a government preference that people conform to expectations about their sex.” Those interests, Roberts suggested, simply reflect the state’s “concerns” in light of the state’s “legitimate, substantial, and compelling interest in protecting minors from physical and emotional harm,” and its findings that treatments like the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy can be risky and lead to regret later in life.

Roberts similarly turned aside the challengers’ argument that the Tennessee law should be subject to heightened scrutiny because it discriminates against transgender people, who are a suspect or quasi-suspect class – that is, people who have historically been subject to discrimination. The Supreme Court has never held that transgender people are a suspect or quasi-suspect class, Roberts noted. And it does not need to reach that question in this case because the Tennessee law “does not classify on the basis of transgender status.”

Finally, Roberts disagreed with the challengers’ suggestion that the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, holding that federal employment discrimination laws protect LGBTQ workers, should apply to this case. The challengers had contended that the Tennessee law “discriminates on the basis of sex because it intentionally penalizes members of one sex for traits and actions that it tolerates in another.” The court, Roberts countered, had “not yet considered whether Bostock’s reasoning reaches beyond” federal employment discrimination laws, “and we need not do so here.”

Therefore, Roberts wrote, the law is subject to rational basis review, which it can meet as long as there are “plausible reasons” for the government’s actions: “Tennessee concluded that there is an ongoing debate among medical experts regarding the risks and benefits associated with administering puberty blockers and hormones to treat gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, and gender incongruence.” The Tennessee law’s “ban on such treatments responds directly to that uncertainty.”

Justice Clarence Thomas joined the Roberts opinion, but he also wrote a 23-page concurring opinion in which he pushed back against efforts by the challengers and the Biden administration to give what he characterized as “outsized credit to claims about medical consensus and expertise” surrounding medical treatments for transgender minors. Thomas dismissed the experts cited by the challengers and the Biden administration, contending that they “have built their medical determinations on concededly weak evidence” and “have surreptitiously compromised their medical recommendations to achieve political ends.” Thomas noted approvingly that the Supreme Court’s opinion upholding the Tennessee law had given “‘the people, their elected representatives, and the democratic process’ the power to decide how best to address an area of medical uncertainty and extraordinary importance.” “That sovereign prerogative,” he concluded, “does not bow to ‘major medical organizations.’”

Thomas joined another concurring opinion, by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, arguing that transgender status is not a suspect class. The test to determine whether a group is a suspect class is “strict,” Barrett emphasized, considering whether members of the group display “immutable” or “distinguishing characteristics,” whether the group has historically been subject to discrimination, and whether the group is “a minority or politically powerless.”

Transgender people, Barrett wrote, cannot meet this test. According to Barrett, transgender people do not have “immutable” characteristics, and they are a “large, diverse, and amorphous” group, rather than a discrete one.

And although the challengers and the Biden administration contend that transgender people have faced a range of discrimination, Barrett said, the key question is whether they have been subject to legal discrimination (as opposed to discrimination by private actors). Because transgender people are “an insufficiently discrete and insular minority,” Barrett stressed, “the question is largely academic,” but she observed that the evidence on this point is “sparse but suggestive of relatively little” legal discrimination.



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