The Supreme Court just agreed to take an appeal involving gender-affirming care for minors, setting up an important decision next term.
The justices took the case at the urging of the federal government, whose petition last year noted that states across the country have enacted laws that “categorically prohibit transgender adolescents from receiving medical care in accordance with evidence-based standards reflecting the overwhelming consensus of the medical community, but impose no restrictions when the same treatments are provided for any other purpose.”
The laws that classify people based on sex and transgender status “inflict profound harms on transgender adolescents and their families by denying medical treatments that the affected adolescents, their parents, and their doctors have all concluded are appropriate and necessary to treat a serious medical condition,” U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in the petition granted Monday.
The legal question presented in the case, United States v. Skrmetti, is:
Whether Tennessee Senate Bill 1 (SB1), which prohibits all medical treatments intended to allow “a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex” or to treat “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity,” Tenn. Code Ann. § 68-33-103(a)(1), violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
As we await the current term’s final crucial decisions, this new case with nationwide implications could be another pivotal one that comes this time next year. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for weekly updates on the top legal stories, including news from the Supreme Court, the Donald Trump cases and more.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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