By Katelynn Richardson
Daily Caller News Foundation
The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider Tennessee’s ban on child sex change procedures.
The case, United States v. Skrmetti, considers whether a Tennessee law that bans medical procedures intended to enable “minor[s] to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex ” — such as cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers and surgical procedures — violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The Department of Justice argued that laws like Tennessee’s 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,” the Department of Justice (DOJ) argued in its petition 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 noted in its Supreme Court brief 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.”
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals previously upheld the ban, writing that transgender people are not a “politically powerless” or “immutable” group.
“Unlike existing suspect classes, transgender identity is not ‘definitively ascertainable at the moment of birth,'” the judges wrote. “It is not necessarily immutable, as the stories of ‘detransitioners’ indicate and as plaintiffs do not dispute.”
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