Conservatives are celebrating a significant win for parental rights and child protection after the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors in a 6-3 ruling on Wednesday, which halted the left’s push to normalize irreversible barbaric procedures on children under the guise of compassion.
This case, United States v. Skrmetti, marks a major win for sanity and a brutal loss for the transgender cult and its allies in the Democratic Party.
The court’s majority sided with Tennessee and 24 other states that have passed similar laws, acknowledging the obvious: Kids shouldn’t be subjected to life-altering hormones and surgeries before they’re old enough to drive, vote, or buy cough syrup. Predictably, the court’s three liberal justices — Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented, clinging to the same radical ideology that’s already wreaked havoc in schools, medicine, and law. But for now, sanity and common sense have prevailed.
Chief Justice John Roberts meticulously detailed the origins of the medicalized trans movement in his majority opinion, tracing it back to the 1979 formation of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). This is the same group that started pushing puberty blockers in 1989 and recently declared there should be “no age-based barriers” to irreversible procedures like hormone therapy and surgeries. Unsurprisingly, the Biden administration went all in supporting this insanity.
“In recent years,” Roberts explained, “the number of minors requesting sex transition treatments has increased.” That rise, he pointed out, has “corresponded with rising debates” over whether these treatments are effective or safe.
Roberts then methodically dismantled the ACLU’s absurd claim that Tennessee’s law discriminates on the basis of sex. As he put it, the law prohibits these drugs regardless of whether a child is a boy or a girl. “The law distinguishes based on diagnosis, not sex,” Roberts wrote. In other words, it bans a treatment, not a gender.
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Justice Clarence Thomas wrote his own concurring opinion, setting the entire expert class on fire. Thomas made it clear that the era of blind deference to medical elites pushing the mutilation of children in the name of “healthcare” is over.
In his scorching opinion, Thomas took direct aim at the so-called experts who have driven this entire debacle. The Biden administration and the ACLU clung to the talking point that “every major medical association” supports child sex changes. But why? Because those associations followed the lead of the scandal-plagued WPATH — an organization that has repeatedly pushed radical policies grounded not in science, but ideology.
“The implication of these arguments is that courts should defer to so-called expert consensus,” Thomas wrote, before slicing that notion to shreds. He laid out four devastating reasons why the Court should reject it entirely:
First, so-called experts have no license to countermand the "wisdom, fairness, or logic of legislative choices."
Second, contrary to the representations of the United States and the private plaintiffs, there is no medical consensus on how best to treat gender dysphoria in children.
Third, notwithstanding the alleged experts’ view that young children can provide informed consent to irreversible sex-transition treatments, whether such consent is possible is a question of medical ethics that States must decide for themselves.
Fourth, there are particularly good reasons to question the expert class here, as recent revelations suggest that leading voices in this area have relied on questionable evidence, and have allowed ideology to influence their medical guidance.
“Taken together, this case serves as a useful reminder that the American people and their representatives are entitled to disagree with those who hold themselves out as experts,” he said.
And then Thomas went for the kill.
“The views of self-proclaimed experts do not ‘shed light on the meaning of the Constitution,’” he wrote. “Thus, whether ‘major medical organizations’ agree with the result of Tennessee’s democratic process is irrelevant.”
Translation: The American people don’t have to bow to activists in lab coats.
This decision is a turning point. The Supreme Court told the expert class that they don’t get to play God with children’s bodies, and Justice Thomas reminded us all why we should never again trust ideologues who put radical gender ideology ahead of medical ethics and basic decency.
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