The Skrmetti decision upholding Tennessee’s ban on transition-related healthcare for minors deprives children and batters the 14th amendment
By now, it is a ritual: every June, Americans endure several weeks of agonizing suspense, as we wait to hear how the supreme court will erode our freedoms, attack our dignity, undermine self-government and empower those who enrich themselves at our expense. The court, controlled by career politicians in robes who were hand-selected for their loyalty to the rightwing and their willingness to be wildly intellectually dishonest in pursuit of Republican policy objectives, has ended the right to abortion, desiccated the Voting Rights Act, made state gun regulations nearly impossible and declared the president functionally immune to criminal law. Many of us waited, with a mixture and terror and disgust, to see what cruelties the court would deliver for us in 2025.
The justices decided to start by attacking vulnerable children. In a 6-3 split, the court’s conservatives ruled on Wednesday that Tennessee’s law banning transition-related healthcare for minors can remain in effect. The law prohibits hormone therapies and surgeries only for their use in treating gender dysphoria; cisgender minors retain access to these drugs. The statute is on its face sex-specific and designed to mandate certain forms of gender conformity: the care that it bans, it bans on the basis of a patient’s sex. This is in straightforward violation of the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause, which has long been interpreted to ban facially sex-discriminatory laws and those that encourage sex-role stereotyping. The court decided to ignore this precedent and the plain intent of Tennessee’s statute, and in the process it both imposed a cruel and needless deprivation on trans children and their families, and also substantially weakened constitutional guarantees of equal protection of the sexes.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist