The Supreme Court has ruled that states can ban transgender medical interventions for minors. The 6-3 decision in United States v. Skrmetti upheld a Tennessee law forbidding the use of puberty blockers and hormones as treatments for gender dysphoria in children.
Twenty-six other states have laws similar to Tennessee’s. Last month, the highest court in the U.K. ruled that sex-based rights defined in the country’s Equality Act can only be applied to biological sex, thus protecting female spaces and services.
Editor Emily Yoffe has published an article for The Free Press entitled The End of Youth Gender Transition? She thinks that these rulings may mark the end of the transgender movement.
She quotes a think-tanker on the impact of the decision:
“The ruling effectively establishes a path forward for states to restrict practices their legislatures regard as harmful and inadequately regulated,” said Leor Sapir, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “A second-order effect, one can hope, is that the ruling will draw more attention to the flimsy evidence base, lack of reasonable clinical rationale, and ethical problems in the provision of these interventions to minors.”
Yoffe notes that gender dysphoria, the dissatisfaction with one’s own sex, used to be extremely rare, she notes. In less than two decades, 100 sex-change clinics for children opened up in the United States. Between 2017 an 2023, as many as 400,000 children were diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Before, the rare cases were of boys who wished to be girls. But most of this surge has come from adolescent girls who had never shown previous symptoms but who have seemed to be influenced by social media.
The idea that biological sex is not a fixed reality but a social construct took hold so quickly that, seemingly overnight, children in preschool were being instructed they could easily change their sex if they felt they were in “the wrong body.” . . .
Children who express gender distress often suffer from a host of other medical and psychological issues, such as autism, ADHD, depression, or anxiety, or have experienced various traumas. But to the gender doctors in their lucrative new clinics, there was only one answer to such childhood troubles: gender transition. This usually meant medically blocking a child’s normal puberty, then putting that patient on opposite-sex hormones: testosterone for girls, estrogen for boys. Sometimes complicated and painful surgeries were undertaken to try to create new genitals. Thousands of teenage girls, and some not even teenagers, have received double mastectomies, known euphemistically as “top surgery”—a surgical intervention normally reserved to treat breast cancer.
In the U.S., gender-distressed children and their parents were told that without the swift intervention of these radical treatments, the children were likely to commit suicide. It became a cliché for the reluctant parents of girls seeking to transition to be asked by the gender provider, “Would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter?” (And vice versa for parents of boys.)
In the Supreme Court hearing, the ACLU lawyer arguing against Tennessee’s law was forced by Justice Alito to admit that such suicides are, in fact, “rare.” Scientific evidence has piled up refuting the various medical claims that such treatments are necessary or even beneficial. Gender dysphoria ends with most children if they are allowed to go through puberty.
Much of Europe, for all of its liberal “tolerance,” no longer allows for sex change drugs or surgeries on children. President Trump issued an executive order declaring that the federal government would no longer “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another,” and that it would “rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.” Many hospitals have stopped these treatments and a number of the clinics providing them have shut down. Many schools are changing their policies of sending students to “gender-affirming” counselors. And the public is increasingly opposed to transgenderism, with 66% opposing men who identify as women competing in women’s sports and 56% opposing medical interventions on minors.
Nevertheless, major medical organizations, such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, continue to support the chemical sterilization and sexual mutilation of children.
Shouldn’t courts defer to such experts? No, said Justice Clarence Thomas in his concurring opinion. As reported by Katelynn Richardson,
Courts should defer to legislatures over experts, Thomas wrote, noting medical professionals “declared a consensus around the efficacy of treating children’s gender dysphoria with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.”
“They have dismissed grave problems undercutting the assumption that young children can consent to irreversible treatments that may deprive them of their ability to eventually produce children of their own,” Thomas wrote. “They have built their medical determinations on concededly weak evidence. And, they have surreptitiously compromised their medical recommendations to achieve political ends.”
“Detransitioners” who regret undergoing medical procedures raise another cause for concern, Thomas wrote.
“States have an interest in ensuring that minor patients have the time and capacity to fully understand the irreversible treatments they may undergo,” he said.
These legal findings may set up the basis for lawsuits. Some malpractice suits against doctors who sterilized and mutilated children would go a long way to ending these practices once and for all.
Photo: Panorama of the United States Supreme Court Building at Dusk by Joe Ravi, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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