Supreme Court upholds Tennessee law that bars gender-affirming care for minors - You mean kids will be able to keep their healthy bodies and not be mangled experiments? Are you daft?!

The U.S. Supreme Court
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

In a decision that plunged the Supreme Court into yet another culture war feud, the justices on Wednesday upheld a Tennessee law banning all gender affirming care for minors. In the last few years, fully half the states have adopted similar bans, leaving the other half, so far, allowing gender affirming care in the form of at minimum, hormone treatments prior to a teenager turning 18.


The vote was 6-to-3, along conservative/liberal lines.


Supporters of the bill were predictably elated over the win. As state Sen. Jack Johnson, the sponsor or the bill, put it in an interview with NPR late last year, the state bars minors from getting tattoos, or smoking, or drinking and, as he observed, "We regulate a number of different types of [medical] procedures, and we felt like this was the best public policy to prevent kids from suffering from irreversible consequences, things that cannot be undone."


The court fight over access to puberty blockers and other treatments for gender dysphoria was brought by three teenagers and their parents in Tennessee. They claimed that the ban on these treatments violated the constitutional guarantee to equal protection of the law by barring certain treatments only for kids who want to transition from their sex assigned at birth, while at the same time allowing the same medications to treat minors suffering from other conditions, everything from endometriosis to delaying the early onset of puberty.


The ACLU, which represented the challengers in the case, countered that the treatments that were at issue in Wednesday's case were endorsed as appropriate for teenagers by the major medical associations that deal with gender dysphoria, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinology, and the American Psychological Association.


But state Sen. Johnson points out that many countries in Western Europe have been dealing with this issue for much longer than the United States, and many of them in recent years have pulled back "because they're seeing that the adverse effects of some of these medications far outweigh any benefit they have."


Wednesday's Supreme Court decision was a big win for Tennessee and 24 other states, but there are many questions that remain unanswered. Can doctors continue previous treatments if taking kids off the medications is deemed too risky? And what about all the issues that have roiled institutions ranging from school boards to team sports. None of those has been resolved, so far anyway. Nor has the court yet tackled the question of parental rights to determine treatments for their kids.

Article.

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/v0B4y

 

[WelperHelper99]

Based. How do you win chayt? BY FUCKING WINNING! TTD!

 

[The Punished Mitch]

Reminder that by gender affirming care they mean such wonderful and life saving interventions as chemically castrating children, ensuring a lifetime of misery and chronic health problems and performing double mastectomies on ~13 year old girls.

Whenever someone in your life defends "gender affirming care" for children don't let the sanitized, kosher language fool you.

 

[Brenda Holiday]

Wonder if this will stop Californians from flooding the state like they've done to Texas

 

[break these cuffs]

Sorry everyone, I'm a doomer faggot and this didn't happen exactly the way I wanted it to or exactly the way some random person was making pie in the sky promises said it would, so I'm gonna count this as a loss.

j/k, I have a functioning brain.

 

[Rimanah]

Not a surprising tbh. The notion that being a tranny deserved intermediate or strict scrutiny under the equal protection clause was completely ludicrous, even given the courts somewhat murky precedent like Bostock or Lawrence.

 

[quaawaa]

Thomas destroyed the "experts" in his concurrence:

The Court rightly rejects efforts by the United States and the private plaintiffs to accord outsized credit to claims about medical consensus and expertise. The United States asserted that “the medical community and the nation’s leading hospitals overwhelmingly agree” with the Government’s position that the treatments outlawed by SB1 can be medically necessary. Brief for United States 35; see also Brief for Respondents in Support of Petitioner 5 (asserting that “[e]very major medical association in the United States” supports this position). The implication of these arguments is that courts should defer to so-called expert consensus.

There are several problems with appealing and deferring to the authority of the expert class. First, so-called experts have no license to countermand the “wisdom, fairness, or logic of legislative choices.” FCC v. Beach Communications, Inc., 508 U. S. 307, 313 (1993). Second, contrary to the representations of the United States and the private plaintiffs, there is no medical consensus on how best to treat gender dysphoria in children. Third, notwithstanding the alleged experts’ view that young children can provide informed consent to irreversible sex-transition treatments, whether such consent is possible is a question of medical ethics that States must decide for themselves. Fourth, there are particularly good reasons to question the expert class here, as recent revelations suggest that leading voices in this area have relied on questionable evidence, and have allowed ideology to influence their medical guidance.

Taken together, this case serves as a useful reminder that the American people and their representatives are entitled to disagree with those who hold themselves out as experts, and that courts may not “sit as a super-legislature to weigh the wisdom of legislation.” Day-Brite Lighting, Inc. v. Missouri, 342 U. S. 421, 423 (1952). By correctly concluding that SB1 warrants the “paradigm of judicial restraint,” Beach Communications, 508 U. S., at 314, the Court reserves to the people of Tennessee the right to decide for themselves.

The views of self-proclaimed experts do not “shed light onthe meaning of the Constitution.” Dobbs, 597 U. S., at 272–273. Thus, whether “major medical organizations” agree with the result of Tennessee’s democratic process is irrelevant. Post, at 5, n. 5 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.). To hold otherwise would permit elite sentiment to distort and stifled democratic debate under the guise of scientific judgment, and would reduce judges to mere “spectators . . . in construing our Constitution.” 83 F. 4th, at 479.

He also cited the Cass Review (which will cause immense troon seethe):

The Cass Review, published in April 2024, offers an influential example of the degree to which the debate over pediatric sex-transition treatments remains unsettled. See H. Cass, Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People: Final Report (Cass Review). After witnessing a 40-fold increase in the number of referrals to its centralized clinic for sex-transitioning services, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) commissioned this report to conduct a “thorough independent review of the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones” to treat children with gender dysphoria. 1 App. 333–334. The report concludes that “we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress,” and highlights the lack of reliable evidence to support the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in treating transgender kids. Cass Review 13, 32–33 (observing “insufficient/inconsistent evidence about the effects of puberty suppression,” and “‘a lack of high-quality research assessing the outcomes of hormone interventions in adolescents with gender dysphoria/incongruence’”); see also ante, at 23. Among other things, the Cass Review determined that the “evidence [the researchers] found did not support th[e] conclusion” that “hormone treatment reduces the elevated risk of death by suicide” among children suffering from gender dysphoria. Cass Review 33; see also id., at 187 (“[T]he evidence does not adequately support the claim that gender-affirming treatment reduces suicide risk”).

This shifting scientific landscape has forced governments to act quickly under conditions of uncertainty. In the months following the Cass Review’s publication, for example, NHS imposed new restrictions on the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for sex-transition treatments. See ante, at 23. And, just a week after oral argument in this case, the United Kingdom indefinitely banned new prescriptions of puberty blockers to treat children with gender dysphoria, except in clinical trials. See S. Castle, Ban on Puberty Blockers for U. K. Teens Is Settled, N. Y. Times Int’l, Dec. 13, 2024, p. A11. In areas with this much “medical and scientific uncertainty,” courts must afford States “wide discretion.” Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U. S. 124, 163 (2007).

To summarize:

This case carries a simple lesson: In politically contentious debates over matters shrouded in scientific uncertainty, courts should not assume that self-described experts are correct. Deference to legislatures, not experts, is particularly critical here. Many prominent medical professionals have declared a consensus around the efficacy of treating children’s gender dysphoria with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. They have dismissed grave problems undercutting the assumption that young children can consent to irreversible treatments that may deprive them of their ability to eventually produce children of their own. They have built their medical determinations on concededly weak evidence. And, they have surreptitiously compromised their medical recommendations to achieve political ends.

The Court today reserves “to the people, their elected representatives, and the democratic process” the power to decide how best to address an area of medical uncertainty and extraordinary importance. Ante, at 24. That sovereign prerogative does not bow to “major medical organizations.” Post, at 5, n. 5 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.). “[E]xperts and elites have been wrong before—and they may prove to be wrong again.” Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., 600 U. S., at 268 (THOMAS, J., concurring).

Full opinion:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/23-477_2cp3.pdf

 

[Robot Gentleman]

Congrats to Kate "Chase" Strangio for being the first pooner to LOSE at the Supreme Court.

 

[Pargon]

Sorry everyone, I'm a doomer faggot and this didn't happen exactly the way I wanted it to or exactly the way some random person was making pie in the sky promises said it would, so I'm gonna count this as a loss.

j/k, I have a functioning brain.

Ten points for preempting 89% of the average A&N responses

 

[Strangolapreti]

Audrey hale is revolting in her tomb.
GOOD

 

[majob]

Clarence Thomas does it again. Fuck I hope he lives another 50 years

 

[Dagoth AMOGUS]

I’ve been waiting months for this.

“the fire rises….”

 

[TowinKarz]

Thomas destroyed the "experts" in his concurrence:

At least he has the guts to say what we're all thinking out here in Flyover Land - the era of "Experts" has to end because basic law and order, let alone social cohesion, can't survive the constant social tinkering they do with full immunity granted to them because they're "too smart to fail" and any resistance from the public on logical or even personal grounds can be end run with a smarmy "got a source for that?".

Yeah, it's called "I don't want any" and that's democracy, as Justice Thomas said:

The views of self-proclaimed experts do not “shed light on the meaning of the Constitution.” Dobbs, 597 U. S., at 272–273. Thus, whether “major medical organizations” agree with the result of Tennessee’s democratic process is irrelevant.

TL : DR - I don't HAVE to scientifically prove I'm voting in my own interests or be disenfranchised, no matter how much the "experts" want that to be the case. If I don't want your treatment? I don't have to take it.


P.S. - The guy who came up with the lobotomy was an "expert" who said it worked and that any questioning of it was anti-science.

 

[frozen_runner]

Why can't I troons hold all these limes Ls

 

[Potion_Time]

"Gender affirming care" just means castration. That's literally all it means.

 

[linchan]

Can I really say TTD when this decision will actually lengthen their life spans?

 

[Ted's Cabin]

P.S. - The guy who came up with the lobotomy was an "expert" who said it worked and that any questioning of it was anti-science.

Here's an even better one, right from wikipedia.

In 1847, he proposed hand washing with chlorinated lime solutions at Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives' wards. The maternal mortality rate dropped from 18% to less than 2%, and he published a book of his findings, Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever, in 1861.

Despite his research, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. He could offer no theoretical explanation for his findings of reduced mortality due to hand-washing, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum, he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right hand that may have been caused by the beating.

 

[powdered toast]

They claimed that the ban on these treatments violated the constitutional guarantee to equal protection of the law by barring certain treatments only for kids who want to transition from their sex assigned at birth, while at the same time allowing the same medications to treat minors suffering from other conditions, everything from endometriosis to delaying the early onset of puberty.

"It's unfair that kids can get treatment for actual diseases by the drugs intended to treat those diseases but I can't use them off-label and inappropriately"

No shit. I can't walk into my PCP and demand chemotherapy either

 

[TowinKarz]

"Gender affirming care" just means castration. That's literally all it means.

Even more broadly? It ironically means disregarding those exalted experts by "affirming" you are sick instead of "diagnosing" you are sick.

You're LARPing with modern medicine.

You have no right to use doctors' opinions as a justification when the very first thing you are doing is coercing them to treat you.

 

[he who has thus come/gone]

Im glad Thomas pointed out how WPATH admitted its perverse motivations, but I wish he could also have pointed out the sexual degenerates at the core of the organization. I guess nobody felt brave enough to write a brief pointing that out for the record.