Supreme Court to hear case on gender-affirming care for trans youth

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to enter the national debate surrounding gender-affirming care for transgender youth.

The justices will review the constitutionality of a Tennessee law, enacted last year, that bans hormone therapy and puberty blockers for transgender minors. The court’s decision will affect a wave of other state laws passed in recent years that restrict gender-affirming care for minors.

The justices will likely hear the case in the fall, close to the November presidential election.

Families and a doctor, with the support of the Biden administration, challenged the Tennessee law. They argued that the law violates the 14th Amendment by discriminating on the basis of sex. After a federal appeals court upheld the law, the challengers and the Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to weigh in.

Laws like Tennessee’s “inflict profound harms on transgender adolescents and their families,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in her petition to the high court last November. The laws deny medical treatment that families and doctors have determined “are appropriate and necessary to treat a serious medical condition,” Prelogar wrote.

The Tennessee law, known as SB1, bans hormone treatments or surgeries that are intended to allow a minor “to 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.”

Twenty-five states have passed bans or restrictions on such care, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Other states such as Illinois, Colorado and Minnesota have passed bills protecting health care for transgender youth.

Medical organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics have come out in support of gender transition care and say that gender-affirming care for children rarely, if ever, includes surgery.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has signaled support for state efforts to ban transgender treatment for children and has vowed to use the power of the federal government to block such care if he wins.

“The left-wing gender insanity being pushed at our children is an act of child abuse,” Trump said in a video released in January.

In April, the Supreme Court granted an emergency application to allow Idaho to begin broadly enforcing a new state law barring many forms of gender-affirming care for minors. However, the opinions the justices issued in the case explained that they were not resolving whether such laws are constitutional.

Now the court will weigh in directly on the constitutional question. It will be the first time the court hears arguments in a case on transgender rights since Bostock v. Clayton County , the landmark 2020 ruling in which the court found that LGBTQ+ people are protected by a federal law that bars workplace discrimination on the basis of sex.