In Blessing Youth Health-Care Ban, High Court Erases Transness
The power of identity has driven our nation’s civil rights movements. In the 1960s, Frank Kameny, the father of the gay rights movement was inspired by the decade’s “Black is Beautiful” campaign to create the slogan, “Gay is Good.” Women’s, disability, and poverty rights groups argued in the US Supreme Court that they were a cohesive and identifiable group, deserving of judicial protection.
Conservative religious movements have successfully reshaped statutes and legal doctrine in the last decades to suit their preferences. The law is built around the identity of various groups that form the American polity.
But on June 18, in denying that the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause protected access to pediatric gender affirming care, the Supreme Court scrubbed the case of transgender identity altogether. On its telling, the Tennessee ban on care only targeted certain medical diagnoses of biological boys and girls. The Supreme Court didn’t just deny trans people equality—it stripped them out of legal existence.
The case, United States v. Skrmetti, concerned a Tennessee law that prevents minors from accessing any medical care that enables a minor “to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” Sex, in turn, is “a person’s immutable characteristics … as determined by anatomy and genetics existing at the time of birth.”