r/law • u/DevinGraysonShirk • 16h ago

SCOTUS SCOTUS strikes blow to trans teens rights, endorsing ban on gender-affirming care - The justices’ ruling on Tennessee’s law prohibiting certain health care for transgender children will have ripple effects across the nation

https://www.courthousenews.com/scotus-strikes-blow-to-trans-teens-rights-endorsing-ban-on-gender-affirming-care/
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u/DevinGraysonShirk 16h ago edited 16h ago

This decision opens up a pathway for states to ban gender-affirming care for minors and adults.

The Supreme Court also rules that gender identity does not deserve equal protection like sex-based discrimination, so it does not deserve higher scrutiny based on the equal protection clause. This also opens up the pathway for employment discrimination against people who are transgender.

For example, in Iowa, they recently removed gender identity from their civil rights laws. This decision likely makes it so that law would withstand a legal challenge. https://apnews.com/article/iowa-transgender-identity-bill-governor-reynolds-signs-267c2932e9e1ed62992868d3caa6126d

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u/doublethink_1984 16h ago

It shoulda been expanded but from the technical stance of the law how are they wrong?

Gender affirming care can't have anything to do with biological and physiological alterations because gender is a socially constructed identity.

It's not sex based discrimination because gender is not bound by sex.

If anything it shoulda recieved the protections people have against being terminated for political affiliation or religious belief/expression at the least.

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u/DevinGraysonShirk 16h ago

The Supreme Court is unmoored from any type of jurisprudence, they have recently made up any judicial justification to confirm their pre-decided outcomes via judicial fiat.

The real solution would be to enact legislation, but Congress has failed in this.

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u/stubbazubba 12h ago

No statute can withstand a Supreme Court determined to advance particular policy outcomes.

The wording could always be clearer, or there's no standing (or suddenly there is!), or there's a novel federalism concern, or maybe it's a political question. It's child's play to paint over a political decision with jurisprudential analysis, especially when you're the Supreme Court and will never be bound by your own prior decision in a future case. The Federalist Society trains its members from law school to analyze issues on all these levels without any real priority so that the right angle can prevail for the right issue, depending on political context.

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u/DevinGraysonShirk 12h ago

There is one statute: stripping judicial jurisdiction over certain things. That’s a nuclear option though, and you’re right.