Supreme Court will decide if states can ban doctors from providing gender transition treatments to minors

---

More than 20 states have passed laws protecting children from being subjected to drugs and surgeries that have been clearly shown to have lifelong and irreparable effects, but courts have disagreed on whether such bans are constitutional.

---

The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear a case brought against the states of Tennessee and Kentucky challenging their bans on the use of gender transition drugs on minors.

As the number of children and teenagers claiming to be transgender skyrockets and evidence continues to mount of the harm of gender transitions, many states have taken action to ban what they consider to be experimental and dangerous treatments.

More than 20 states have enacted laws restricting the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical mutilation of children who report feelings of discontent regarding their sex.

In response, numerous legal challenges have been brought and courts have handed down contradicting rulings, leading to a hodgepodge legal situation that leaves some laws in place and others blocked.

The Supreme Court will now likely deliver some measure of clarity as to whether states have the right to make laws restricting medical practices for minors.

Tennessee and Kentucky’s laws were challenged by minors and their parents. The Biden administration and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) joined the lawsuit on the side of the plaintiffs.

They argue that the law discriminates against transgender minors based on their transgender status.

Lower courts had issued injunctions against the restrictions but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit overturned those injunctions, allowing the laws to go into effect.

Chief Judge Jeffery Sutton wrote the opinion, ruling that the states had shown “considerable evidence” of the harms of gender transitions and affirmed their right to limit the treatments.

Sutton wrote that it was not for appointed judges to make decisions regarding state law, but the will of the people through their elected representatives.

“When the Constitution is neutral about an issue, legislatures have considerable discretion to regulate the matter. In that setting, the key premise of a democracy prevails—that the people’s electoral representatives will identify the strengths and weaknesses of any policy and presumptively be allowed to enact it, the antidote for mistakes being the passage of time and the good sense and self-interest of election-tenured public officials to fix them.”

The plaintiffs appealed the decision to the Supreme Court.

In a brief defending the law, Tennessee officials argued,

“In recent years, the number of minors receiving gender-dysphoria diagnoses have exploded. States have also seen a corresponding surge in unproven and risky medical interventions for these underage patients. 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.…Tennessee, like many other States, acted to ensure that minors do not receive these treatments until they can fully understand the lifelong consequences or until the science is developed to the point that Tennessee might take a different view of their efficacy.”

The Supreme Court will hear the case in the fall and is expected to deliver a ruling in June or July of 2025.

To bolster their case, the plaintiffs cite the beliefs of major American medical associations, which claim that gender transitions are medically necessary for minors who have distress regarding their sex. This includes the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which asserts that gender transitions significantly reduce mental health issues and suicidal ideation in minors.

That is not what the evidence says, however.

For example, one study showed that those who underwent gender transitions have a 12.12-fold higher risk of suicide than those who did not receive medical intervention.

Critics of gender transitions say that a startling percentage of those who claim to be transgender have preexisting co-morbidities, including autism, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Some of the children are victims of abuse, neglect, or molestation. They note that therapists and doctors ignore these other underlying mental health issues and are instead hurrying patients into gender transitions.

That’s what Dr. Hillary Cass, a pediatrician and former president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, found in her four-year review commissioned by the U.K. National Health Service (NHS).

Cass found that gender clinics were pushing children into gender transitions rather than treat them as individuals with other issues. She also found very weak evidence of any benefit to gender transitions. As a result of the findings, NHS has banned gender treatments and procedures in minors except for clinical research.

Several other nations have also halted gender transitions in minors.

The New York Times interviewed Cass and asked her why the American Academy of Pediatrics came to a different conclusion.

She said that the organization is “misleading the public.”

She also said that the AAP, while doing “massive good” for children, is a “fairly left-leaning organization” that is “fearful of making any moves that might jeopardize trans health care right now,” speculating that they are feeling “political duress” to simply go along with whatever the transgender movement demands.

By contrast, other medical groups are, rightly, calling out the major U.S. medical associations for coming to faulty conclusions and relying on treatment protocols that investigative reporting has exposed as anything but sound.

The fact is that gender transitions aren’t even experimental. We know for a fact that they do permanent, devastating harm to children. The medical establishment is abusing children with preexisting mental health issues or trauma by pushing them to undergo harmful medical intervention in a Frankensteinian attempt to turn them into a different sex.

States must have the right to ban such horrors.

The purpose of government is to advance the good and restrain evil. Government is commanded by God to protect the vulnerable, especially children, from those who would harm them. As such, states have an interest in making sure that doctors can’t exploit or manipulate a child’s immaturity or lack of cognitive ability and enable them to agree to a medical path with consequences they can’t possibly understand.

Already, states have a say in if and when children can participate in various consequential activities, whether it’s getting a tattoo or a nose job, being in an intimate relationship with an adult, buying alcohol or cigarettes, or dropping out of school.

Hopefully, the Supreme Court will uphold the moral and constitutional principle that governments do, in fact, have a responsibility to protect mentally ill and gender-confused children from medical professionals who are supposed to care for patients based on ethics and proven scientific realities, not an ideological agenda.

---

If you like this article and other content that helps you apply a biblical worldview to today’s politics and culture, consider making a donation here.