REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
Parents of gender-distressed children are following the Supreme Court case US vs. Skrmetti with great anxiety.
The case raises the question of whether a Tennessee law banning puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for purposes of changing a minor’s sex characteristics is unconstitutional.
Oral arguments are set to take place Wednesday, though a decision is not expected until summer of 2025.
The incoming Trump administration will inherit the case from Team Biden, which vigorously defended pediatric sex “changes” and the industry that supplies them.
Trump’s folks can rescind the Justice Department’s appeal, potentially killing the case and leaving the question unanswered, or let it persist and have the court rule.
Killing it would be a mistake. With a 6-3 conservative majority on the court, a compelling legal ruling from the Sixth Circuit where the case originates and an evidentiary record that shocks the conscience, a victory for Tennessee seems likely.
That would be a huge victory for child welfare, as well.
A ruling for Tennessee would not only effectively end constitutional challenges to the relevant child-protection laws in two dozen states; it would also have ripple effects directly touching the lives of millions of American families.
Gender ideology has infiltrated not just medicine but K-12 education and child protective services as well.
Parents who live in blue states and refuse to “affirm” the gender confusions of their children live in fear of child protective services.
One of us, Erin Friday, knows this firsthand: CPS showed up at her doorstep following a contentious call with her daughter’s school, which insisted on calling her daughter by a male name, despite Erin’s contrary instructions.
Doctors insisted Erin simply accept her daughter’s desires to be a boy.
Yet Erin resisted, and two years later, her daughter embraced being a girl again, after avoiding medical intervention.
Yet convinced that they are following evidence-based practices, schools across the country are socially transitioning children on demand — if necessary, behind parents’ backs.
If the court so much as peeks behind the curtain of “gender-affirming care,” it’ll discover a medical scandal.
Numerous briefs, including one by each of us, summarize how the medical profession went off the rails in this area.
The leading organization promoting hormones and surgeries is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which is neither professional nor concerned about health in any meaningful sense.
As court documents have revealed, WPATH commissioned evidence reviews — and then suppressed them when they did not support its preferred medicalized approach.
It consulted “social-justice lawyers” who felt that the disappointing findings could place WPATH “in an untenable position in terms of affecting policy or winning lawsuits.”
The lead author of WPATH’s most recent “standards of care” confessed that he knew “most” of the authors had conflicts of interest due to personal involvement in, advocacy for and benefit from administering these procedures.
WPATH’s former president, Marci Bowers, one such author, admitted in a deposition to making over $1 million performing gender surgeries in 2023, for example.
Nor did WPATH include more cautious and evidence-based perspectives on its guideline committee. Bowers admitted it was “absolutely” important for someone to be an advocate for [gender transition] treatments to participate in the guideline’s development.
The “standards of care,” Bowers privately confessed to colleagues, reflect “a balancing act between what I feel to be true and what we need to say.”
Within days of publishing “standards of care” in 2022, WPATH issued a correction eliminating age minimums for hormones and surgeries.
As it turns out, it did so under pressure from Rachel Levine, the Biden administration’s assistant secretary for health and a transgender pediatrician, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
WPATH’s own leaders privately complained they were letting politics trump science.
It’s a compelling record, especially since a minimum of 14,000 children underwent gender interventions between 2019 and 2023, according to the group Do No Harm.
A Manhattan Institute analysis of “top surgery” — double mastectomy — found evidence of at least 5,200 such procedures on minors between 2017 and 2023.
This includes 50 to 179 surgeries on girls ages 12½ or younger.
Americans are fed up with “gender identity” extremism.
According to a recent YouGov poll, 54% of American voters believe minors should not have access to puberty blockers, compared to only 19% who say they should.
A reckoning has already begun within the Democratic Party.
The years ahead represent a unique window of opportunity to put the gender industry, with its pseudoscience and perverse incentives, on the defensive.
Leon Sapir is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Erin Friday is an attorney and a leader at Our Duty USA.