Tennessee has banned sex change procedures on children which has been appealed all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The Court has now agreed to hear arguments to be the final decider.
A Tennessee law banning medical procedures on children has been challenged in the case United States v. Skrmetti where “minor[s] to identify with or live as a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex ” including hormones administered from the opposite sex, puberty blockers, and surgical procedures is supposedly violating the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. In this case, the United States Department of Justice has sued Tennessee arguing the laws are “creating profound uncertainty for transgender adolescents and their families around the Nation—and inflicting particularly acute harms.”
“[T]his Court’s intervention is urgently needed because Tennessee’s law is part of a wave of similar bans preventing transgender adolescents from obtaining medical care that they, their parents, and their doctors have all concluded is necessary,” read the petition by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to the Supreme Court. “Although such care has been provided to adolescents for decades, in the last three years eighteen other States have adopted categorical bans like Tennessee’s.”
Tennessee submitted a brief to the Supreme Court claiming that it is “undisputed that these hormonal and surgical interventions carry serious and potentially irreversible side effects, including infertility, diminished bone density, sexual dysfunction, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.”
Previously, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ban which has been appealed, but noted that transgender people or the community as a whole are not “politically powerless” or “immutable” together as a group.
“Unlike existing suspect classes, transgender identity is not ‘definitively ascertainable at the moment of birth,’” said the judges in their decision. “It is not necessarily immutable, as the stories of ‘detransitioners’ indicate and as plaintiffs do not dispute.”