Is it possible to provide gender care rights to minors?

Preventing harm to children is the goal that most people agree on. However, the widening gap between the red and blue states means that, in a range of regions, there is no consensus (actually, extreme), even the meaning of “hazardous”. Regarding gender treatment for trans children and adolescents, both parties claim to be a share in life or death. More than half of the states have laws limiting doctors to minors. The rest of the countries allow this care. On Wednesday, Tennessee banning the use of adolescence blockers and hormones to treat gender irritability in minors does not violate the constitutional equivalent protection clause. The decision would allow other states to leave dozens of similar restrictive laws.

It is a dream to have the Supreme Court beat the bid for those bans as they once had. But it is hard to imagine that legislation is more likely to comply with the court’s doctrine of equal protection than legislation enacted by the Tennessee Legislature. The regulation SB1 prohibits medical providers from using adolescence blockers, hormones or surgery to enable minors to be “inconsistent with identity that claims to be inconsistent with minors’ gender” but allows the same medical treatment to be used for other purposes, including supporting “normal development of minors.” One of the purposes explicitly designated by the law is to “encourage minors to appreciate their gender” rather than “innocence against their gender.” SB1 seems to be an obvious textbook example, the law is “categorized” by gender and should therefore be scrutinized by “intensified” or “middle” where courts ask whether gender classification is essentially related to achieving important government goals. If the answer is no, then the law is unconstitutional. As Judge Sonia Sotomayor noted in one objection, it was joined by two other liberals, “Gender decisions to get access to the drug coverage.” Sotomayor wrote that the state allows the use of puberty blockers and hormones to “help boys, but without daughters, look more like boys; and can help a daughter, but not like boys, look more like a girl,” Sotomayor wrote. If that’s not a gender classification, what’s in the world?

Like dissidents, many students of equal protection doctrine will immediately perceive gender classification here and conduct analysis under moderate review. But the majority opinion of Chief Justice John Roberts joins five other conservative judges as a masterclass designed to rearrange the issues to see something completely different. In his opinion, SB1 was almost unwilling to care about sex, “apparently not classified by gender.” Instead, he saw classification in the law only based on age and “medical use.” That is, when “a trans boy (whose biological sex is female) needs a pubertal blocker to treat his gender inconsistency, he accepts a boy with a boy who is a male, who is male, who is a male, who has a pubertal lockdown to treat his premature puberty.” Therefore, according to the court, the opportunity for medication is not turned to whether the patient is a boy or a girl, but based on the medical condition of the prescribed medicine. Drugs are prohibited to treat gender irritability, boys and girls are prohibited to be equal, and the same medications are allowed to treat precocious puberty. Roberts concluded that there is no gender classification. These gymnastics make a weird thing about whether any classification based on gender is OK, Presto Chango, and the result is not.

The court also stated the argument that SB1 discriminates against transgender people, saying that transgender people and cisgender minors are equally unavailable to receive medication to treat gender irritability. (For me, this logic is as flawed as a case where conservative judges rely on detailed reliance, Geduldigv. Aiello v. Aiello v. Aiello, 1974, basic discrimination based on pregnancy is not gender discrimination because some women are not pregnant because Roberts did not see the law as a state of transgender, whether he did not classify the law as a quality, whether he would verify the identity of the transgender person, whether this is targeting the problematic class of transgender (e.g. race, nationality, or gender), in which case the law would also be subject to a higher level of judicial scrutiny. (The court has not yet announced a new class of suspects for fifty years, because it found that sexual behavior is quasi-pursuing). Amy Coney Barrett and Samuel AlitoIn separate consent, redouble efforts have emphasized that they do not consider transgender people to be suspicious classes, and among other things, transgender people are not “an unchanging characteristic” like race, like race. Barrett added that the suspicious class must be a group embedded in the history of legal discrimination, not just a history of discrimination – and found that trans people do not meet that criteria.

At the conclusion of the Chief Justice, Skrmetti’s beating heart is the soft but obvious horror of the court in a state of scientific evidence about the efficacy and safety of pediatric gender therapy. In a 2023 petition to the court, Biden’s Justice Department made an exaggerated claim of scientific consensus, “a lot of evidence” supports the use of puberty blockers and hormones for pediatric gender dysphagia, and it is a habit in “overwhelming consensus in the medical community” and in the habit of hard work, it is a habit, and a habit in development, and a habit in publications, and a habit in hard work. Gender affirmation medicine. The common view of several justices demonstrates the lack of reliable research, as well as conclusive findings on long-term outcomes of puberty blockers and hormones in transgender minors, and cites the recognition of several European countries in the past few years regarding these evidence. The report of the National Health Agency of England on the subject, published in April 2024 and known as the Cass Review, concluded that there is no “no good evidence for the management of gender-related distress” among transgender people, “the findings exaggerated or misunderstood by people with good ideas to support their views.” (The consent of Justice Clarence Thomas seems to be tied up in opposition to the “expert class” and “elite emotions” operating “in the guise of scientific judgment”, and even quoted the favorite medical geek, eugenics.)

The current court told them that they cannot limit medical treatment for pediatric gender treatment, which is always difficult. But Neil Gorsuch, joined by Chief Justice Roberts Bostock v. Clayton Countyconstitutes the majority in 2020; in this case, the court concluded that employment discrimination against homosexual or transgender employees violates Chapter 7 “for the “gender” of an individual, which is because “it is impossible to discriminate against a person who is homosexual or thrastergen without discrimination against a person based on gender.”

Convincing two conservative judges to extend this highly formal reasoning into constitutional equal protections about pediatric affirmation medicine requires elaboration. However, the failure to fully acknowledge the uncertainty that medical uncertainty creates even the legal arguments of the courts seems unreliable. I think the petitioner’s legal argument is more correct than Tennessee given the sum of the past constitutional equality cases and the gravity forces of Bostock. The modesty about the status of scientific evidence will be in perfect agreement with a constitutional objection to gender classification, which deprives doctors of the ability to exercise medical judgment and determine appropriateness for a particular patient.

In any case, the majority led by Gorsuch re-inferencing Bostock’s reasoning did not come true. The court held that the SB1 Constitution was because the state had reasonable concerns about the possible risks of physical and psychological harm to minors, including irreversible infertility and regret. Faced with medical uncertainty, the court is unwilling to “submit” the legislature’s ruling. Justice Gorsuch remained silent and only signed the Chief Justice’s opinion.