Supreme Court allows states to restrict transgender treatments for minors

By a 6-3 vote, justices upheld a Tennessee law barring gender-transition treatments for minors, rejecting claims that the ban amounts to sex discrimination.

People participating in the Trans Day of Visibility rally in Washington in March. Picture: Getty Images via AFP

The US Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a Tennessee law barring gender-transition treatments for minors, rejecting claims that the ban amounts to sex discrimination.

The decision, which broke 6-3 along ideological lines, was the latest setback for transgender rights, which the Trump administration has targeted in policies that range from expelling transgender personnel from the military to halting funding for the University of Pennsylvania because it had a transgender female on a women’s swim team.

“This case carries with it the weight of fierce scientific and policy debates about the safety, efficacy, and propriety of medical treatments in an evolving field,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court.

“The voices in these debates raise sincere concerns; the implications for all are profound,” he continued, but the “Equal Protection Clause does not resolve these disagreements. Nor does it afford us license to decide them as we see best.”

That task, he wrote, was best left to the legislature.

Last month, the court issued an emergency order allowing the administration to implement its ban on transgender individuals serving in the military. The three liberal justices dissented from that order, as they did from Wednesday’s decision.

The decision broke 6-3 along ideological lines. Picture: AFP

The case demonstrated how quickly the tides had turned on transgender issues as a result of the presidential election. The Biden administration had joined the plaintiffs challenging the law — three transgender youths, their parents and a Memphis doctor — and a Justice Department attorney argued on their behalf at the court’s hearing in December.

The Tennessee statute, enacted in 2023, forbids prescription of puberty blockers, hormone therapy or other medical treatment allowing minors “to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.”

The law was challenged on constitutional grounds, and in June 2023 a federal district judge in Nashville, Tenn., blocked the measure, finding it was an unconstitutional form of sex discrimination. Judge Eli Richardson, a Trump appointee, reasoned that the law targeted transgender youths for disparate treatment because, for example, a girl could obtain hormone therapy to bolster feminine characteristics but a boy couldn’t.

The Sixth US Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati halted the lower court’s decision. Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton said the Constitution provided no clear direction on transgender rights, leaving such judgments to the legislature.

Next term, the Supreme Court is set to consider another case involving treatments for transgender minors. Colorado has banned so-called conversion therapy, which seeks to change a patient’s gender identity to conform to their birth sex. A therapist who says she is a practising Christian argues the state law violates her First Amendment free-speech rights. A federal appeals court in Denver rejected that claim, finding the law fell within the state’s power to regulate healthcare.

Wall Street Journal