When the Supreme Court hears U.S. v. Skrmetti on Dec. 4, trans youth and LGBTQ+ advocates across the country will be watching with bated breath.
The case, which centers on a Tennessee law, will allow the U.S. Supreme Court Justices to decide whether gender-affirming-care bans for minors are unconstitutional under the basis of sex discrimination.
The case, which centers on a Tennessee law, will allow the U.S. Supreme Court Justices to decide whether gender-affirming-care bans for minors are unconstitutional under the basis of sex discrimination.
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NewsTranscript
00:00We think the court here just needs to recognize the sex-based classification in this statute and send the case back.
00:06If the court wants to go ahead and look at what's happening in Europe,
00:09the UK has not categorically banned this care.
00:12Sweden, Finland, and Norway, the other jurisdictions that my friends point to, have not banned this care.
00:18And I think that's because of the recognition that this care can provide critical,
00:22sometimes life-saving benefits for individuals with severe gender dysphoria.
00:26If you prevail here on the standard of review, what would that mean for women's and girls' sports in particular?
00:32Would transgender athletes have a constitutional right, as you see it, to play in women's and girls' sports?
00:39If it's evolving like that and changing, and England's pulling back and Sweden's pulling back,
00:45it strikes me as pretty heavy yellow light, if not red light,
00:50for this court to come in, the nine of us, and to constitutionalize the whole area
00:56when the rest of the world, or at least the countries that have been at the forefront of this,
01:02are pumping the brakes on this kind of treatment because of concerns about the risks.
01:08In Loving, those same kinds of scientific arguments were made.
01:11So I'm reading here where the court says,
01:15the argument is that if the Equal Protection Clause does not outlaw miscegenation statutes
01:20because of their reliance on racial classifications,
01:23the question of constitutionality would thus become whether there was any rational basis
01:28for a state to treat interracial marriages differently from other marriages.
01:32On this question, the state argues, the scientific evidence is substantially in doubt,
01:38and consequently the court should defer to the wisdom of the state legislature
01:42in adopting its policy of discouraging interracial marriages.
01:46My understanding is that the Constitution leaves that question to the people's representatives
01:51rather than to nine people, none of whom is a doctor.
01:56You cannot get the puberty blockers if you're going to use them to transition.
02:00That is not a sex-based line. That is a purpose-based line.
02:04So our fundamental point here is not that you can discriminate against both sexes in equal degree.
02:09Our fundamental point is there is no sex-based line here,
02:12and the only way to get to a sex-based line is by equating fundamentally different treatments
02:17that defy medical reality and defy how the statute itself sets out what is a treatment.
02:23When you're 1% of the population or less,
02:26very hard to see how the democratic process is going to protect you.
02:31You blacks were a much larger part of the population and it didn't protect them.
02:37It didn't protect women for whole centuries.
02:41Are there individuals who are born male, assigned male at birth,
02:48who at one point identify as female but then later come to identify as male,
02:57and likewise for individuals who are assigned female at birth,
03:02who at some point identify as male but later come to identify as female?
03:11Are there not such people?
03:13There are such people. I agree with that.
03:15So it's not an immutable characteristic, is it?