The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday has agreed to hear a challenge to a Tennessee law that bans doctors from tinkering with the gender appearance of children with hormones, chemicals, and the surgeon’s knife.
The case is United States v Skrmetti, and it involves Tennessee Senate Bill 1, which prohibits all medical treatments that are intended to help a child “identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex” or to treat “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.” The plaintiff says the law violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution.
The case will be argued at the Supreme Court this fall. The next term for the court begins in October and it’s unlikely a decision will be delivered before June of 2025.
The American Civil Liberties Union is representing plaintiffs Samantha and Brian Williams of Nashville, and their 15-year-old son who believes he is a girl and who has been medically and chemically altered to appear as a girl. There are two other anonymous plaintiffs and transgender-services Dr. Susan Lacy also represented by ACLU, which says the entire medical community supports being able to alter a child’s gender appearance at the request of the families.
Chase Strangio, Deputy Director for Transgender Justice at the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, said, “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.”
Major U.S. medical groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association oppose laws against gender-chemistry treatments for children, which they call “gender-affirming care.”
This new area of medicine has become a major profit center for doctors and pharmaceutical manufacturers that are creating customers for life, as they hook children on hormone treatments that must be continued for the duration of their lives.
An Alaska House bill sponsored by Rep. Jamie Allard of Eagle River would clarify the liabilities that physicians have if a child who they transition later has buyer’s remorse and sues the doctors for malpractice. That bill, which created civil liability language for such physician decisions, failed to move in the Legislature this year.
