Justice Sonia Sotomayor shared her “sadness” Wednesday that children would no longer be able to access experimental and irreversible transgender procedures.
The Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s law banning child sex change procedures in a 6-3 decision.
“By retreating from meaningful judicial review exactly where it matters most, the Court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims,” Sotomayor wrote. “In sadness, I dissent.”
Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, agreed with the Biden administration’s argument that Tennessee’s law violates the Equal Protection Clause.
“By depriving adolescents of hormones and puberty blockers only when such treatment is ‘inconsistent with’ a minor’s sex, the law necessarily deprives minors identified as male at birth of the same treatment it tolerates for an adolescent identified as female at birth (and vice versa),” she wrote.
She also drew parallels to the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia, which struck down state laws banning interracial marriage as unconstitutional.
“This Court, famously, rejected the States’ invitation in Loving to ‘defer to the wisdom of the state legislature’ based on assertions that “the scientific evidence is substantially in doubt,” she wrote. “What the Court once recognized as an imperative check against discrimination, it today abandons.”
Those searching for evidence of transgender discrimination “need look no further than the present,” Sotomayor wrote, referencing recent policies implemented by the Trump administration.
“The Federal Government, for example, has started expelling transgender servicemembers from the military and threatening to withdraw funding from schools and nonprofits that espouse support for transgender individuals,” she continued.
A report published by the Trump Department of Human Health and Services (HHS) in May found that the “gender-affirming” model of care lacks scientific support. Yet these medical interventions offered to children “carry risk of significant harms including infertility/sterility, sexual dysfunction, impaired bone density accrual, adverse cognitive impacts, cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders, psychiatric disorders, surgical complications, and regret,” according to the review.
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