A Mom and Her Daughter in Tennessee Can ‘not Have a Son’: A Lawyer’s Advocate Against a Supreme Court Ban on Gender-affirming Healthcare
There is something incredibly surreal about finding your family at the center of a landmark Supreme Court decision, from the robes and the formality to the long, red velvet curtains behind the justices. A mother doesn’t imagine that her fight with her child would bring her there.
L.W. came out as trans late in 2020. She was just shy of 13. She was thriving, happy and healthy after she started pursuing evidence-based gender-affirming care. In Tennessee, the Republican supermajority has made the care that is improving her life a primary political target. We sued the state when the legislature banned my daughter’s care. We lost that case when the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on such care.
I am beside myself. Our heartfelt plea was not enough. The legal arguments by our lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union weren’t enough. I had to face my daughter and tell her that our last hope is gone. She’s angry, scared and hurt that the American system of democracy that we so put on a pedestal didn’t work to protect her.
My family did not start this journey to land in Washington in front of that white marble hall of justice. We ended up there through parental and civic duty. My and my husband had asked in the lawsuit against the ban if we could do our job as parents. Let us love and care for our daughter in the best way we and our doctors know how. Don’t allow politics to affect our child’s existence. Being a teenager can be hard. Being a parent of a teenager is not easy.
He wants to bar trans people from serving in the military because they do not have the integrity or morals to do so, arguing that they are a lie. He wants to stop federal funding for health care providers who still offer blockers, cross-sex hormones and transition surgery to children. The policy of the United States is to recognize male and female, according to one executive order. “These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”