The Tennessee Supreme Court Decision to End the Gender Dysphoria Exclusion Crisis for All Transgenders: A Case Study with the ACLU and the State of Tennessee
The ACLU, which represented the challengers in the case, countered that the treatments that were at issue in Wednesday’s case were endorsed as appropriate for teenagers by the major medical associations that deal with gender dysphoria, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinology, and the American Psychological Association.
Many countries in western Europe have dealt with this issue for a long time, and in recent years have pulled back because they know that the adverse effects of some of these medications are far outweighing the benefits.
Tennessee and a number of other states received a big win from Wednesday’s Supreme Court decision. If kids are taken off the medications, can they still be treated with previous treatments? What about the issues that have hurt institutions such as school boards or team sports? None of those has been resolved, so far anyway. Nor has the court yet tackled the question of parental rights to determine treatments for their kids.
People who supported the bill were overjoyed over the win. As state Sen. Jack Johnson, the sponsor of the bill, put it in an interview with NPR late last year, the state bars minors from getting tattoos, smoking or drinking, and, as he observed, “We regulate a number of different types of [medical] procedures, and we felt like this was the best public policy to prevent kids from suffering from irreversible consequences, things that cannot be undone.”
Not long ago, the idea that a major Supreme Court case would turn on medical care for transgender children might have seemed far-fetched. The number of adolescents who identify as trans doubled in the last decade, and it is now estimated to comprise around 3 percent of high school students. A small but growing portion of those young people has sought treatment for gender Dysphoria, a medical term for the distress people experience when their physical bodies do not align with their own sense of self. These treatments could help more trans people find happiness, because they were not only uncontroversial but helpful. Something had begun to shift when Arkansas became the first state to ban gender treatments for children. For the first time in the long history of L.G.B.T.Q. equality, the breaking point was children.
In private meetings of L.G.B.T.Q. legal-advocacy groups, many lawyers expected a loss almost from the moment the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, according to one person briefed on the conversations. The case was considered to be an “extraordinary risk” by many experts. There was no chance that the court would broaden constitutional protections for trans people, even if they did. “If you can’t win a challenge to strike down a gender-affirming-care ban, it’s going to be hard to win other cases around trans rights,” said Michael Ulrich, a professor of health law and human rights at Boston University.
Since taking office, he has sought to strip trans people of the right to choose the sex marker on their passports and bar them from the military, arguing that they inherently lack the integrity and moral fitness to serve — that their very identity is a dishonorable lie. He has threatened to stop federal funding from health care providers who continue to perform gender re-assignment surgeries. There are two genders, male and female, according to one executive order. The sexes are grounded in reality and not changeable.