Civil rights advocates said Monday that the law violates the constitutional right to equal protection, and urged to justices to overturn it.
“It’s crucial to recognize that for trans youth and their families, this isn’t about politics — it’s about the fundamental freedom to access vital, life-saving healthcare,” Lucas Cameron-Vaughn, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Tennessee, said in a statement.
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Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti (R) vowed to continue to defend the law, which he said is aimed at “protecting kids from irreversible gender treatments.”
“This case will bring much-needed clarity to whether the Constitution contains special protections for gender identity,” Skrmetti said in a statement on X.
The court is expected to hear oral argument in the case during its next term, which begins in October. The justices are racing to finish their work for the current term, with 10 high-profile rulings still to come this week or next. Those cases will determine whether and when Donald Trump can be prosecuted for his actions around the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, access to emergency abortion care, the future of free speech on social media platforms and more.
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Legal experts have long thought the Supreme Court would eventually have to rule on whether state bans on gender-affirming care violate the Constitution, but the court has great flexibility in deciding when and how to take cases. The Tennessee case, along with a separate one from Kentucky, had been on and off the Supreme Court’s list of cases for consideration at its private conference for several months before the announcement Monday. The delay suggested that the justices were debating behind closed doors how the high court should handle the issue.
In a separate action in April, the high court allowed Idaho to broadly enforce its ban on gender-affirming medical care for minors while litigation continues before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. The Supreme Court’s brief order, which said the Idaho ban could not immediately apply to the two transgender teens who sued the state, did not address the overall constitutionality of prohibiting care. The court’s three liberal justices objected to the timing of the court’s intervention. The 9th Circuit is scheduled to hear the case in August.
Historically, the Supreme Court has taken cases when the issue at hand is of great significance and lower courts have issued contradictory rulings.
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Last June, federal district courts blocked bans in both Tennessee and Kentucky, just a few months after the laws were enacted. The 6th Circuit reversed those injunctions, finding that the state bans did not violate the equal protection clause or the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
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Also last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta ruled that an Alabama ban could take effect. In February, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Illinois temporarily allowed Indiana’s ban to take effect while litigation continues.
The Supreme Court has handed several wins to transgender rights activists in recent years. In 2020, in Bostock v. Clayton County, the court ruled 6-3 that federal employment law protections apply to millions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender workers. The court has also declined to review a number of cases where the lower courts had decided in favor of trans rights at school, in prisons and in disability protections. Last year, it also denied West Virginia’s request to allow its law barring transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams at public schools to go into effect while legal challenges to it play out.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
Tobi Raji contributed to this report.