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The justices heard arguments on Wednesday over whether Tennessee and more than 20 other states can ban some medical treatments for transgender youth.
- Dec. 4, 2024Updated 5:44 p.m. ET
Members of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed ready on Wednesday to uphold a Tennessee law denying transition care to transgender youth, with some of them saying that judgments about contested scientific evidence should be made by legislatures rather than judges.
“The Constitution leaves that question to the people’s representatives, rather than to nine people, none of whom is a doctor,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson responded that leaving the question to the states was an alarming abdication of responsibility. “I’m suddenly quite worried,” she said.
The Tennessee law prohibits medical providers from prescribing puberty-delaying medication, providing hormone therapy or performing surgery to treat what the law called “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.” But the law allows those same treatments for “a congenital defect, precocious puberty, disease or physical injury.”
More than 20 other states have similar laws. The court’s decision, expected by June, will almost certainly yield a major statement on transgender rights against the backdrop of a fierce public debate over the role gender identity should play in areas as varied as sports, bathrooms and pronouns.
The wide-ranging argument, which lasted two and a half hours, touched on the approaches of other nations, the relevance of a previous ruling protecting transgender workers from workplace discrimination and the rights of parents.
