To uphold Tennessee’s ban on pediatric gender-affirming care, the court in United States v. Skrmetti hid from the specter of discrimination. The court’s opinion repeatedly highlighted statutory language (which appeared only once in the statute) that targeted certain diagnoses. Yet it all but ignored language that appeared several times in the statute that explicitly targeted minors based on sex. Thus, the court concluded that the law did not discriminate against people – it only discriminated against medical diagnoses. Such reasoning mischaracterized the arguments at issue, the court’s prior doctrine, and the medicine involved.
Citation
Craig Konnoth, The use and misuse of medicine in Skrmetti, SCOTUSblog (2025).