By Katelynn Richardson
Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) urged the Supreme Court Friday to move forward with a major case on state laws banning child sex change procedures, despite the change in administrations.
While the Biden administration challenged Tennessee’s law as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause, the Trump administration informed the court it would not take the same position, suggesting the court should keep the case to clarify such laws are constitutional.
“The Department has now determined that SB1 does not deny equal protection on account of sex or any other characteristic,” Deputy Solicitor General Curtis Gannon wrote. “Accordingly, the new Administration would not have intervened to challenge SB1—let alone sought this Court’s review of the court of appeals’ decision reversing the preliminary injunction against SB1.”
The DOJ still argued that the case, United States v. Skrmetti, should not be dismissed because the issues continue to come up in other cases and were also raised by private plaintiffs. (RELATED: SCOTUS Conservatives Seem Ready To Uphold Child Sex Change Bans — But One Justice Is A Wild Card)
“The Court’s prompt resolution of the question presented will bear on many cases pending in the lower courts,” Gannon wrote.
Tennessee lawmakers William Lamberth and Jack Johnson, who are behind the bill at the heart of today’s Supreme Court case, speak outside the court after oral arguments. @DailyCaller pic.twitter.com/axy3SLopRC
— Katelynn Richardson (@katesrichardson) December 4, 2024
When the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in December, a majority seemed inclined to uphold Tennessee’s ban. Justice Samuel Alito probed the government’s claim that overwhelming evidence shows puberty blockers and hormone therapy improve wellbeing for adolescents with gender dysphoria, pointing to European developments discrediting this position.
Giving minors sex-changes or puberty blockers does not seem to reduce suicides. The transgender lawyer challenging Tennessee’s ban on certain transgender treatments for minors, Chase Strangio, conceded to the Supreme Court that “completed suicide is thankfully and admittedly rare” among transgender youth, even those not given gender-affirming treatment, and that “there is no evidence…that this treatment reduces completed suicide.”
In his executive order cutting federal funding for child sex changes signed Jan. 28, Trump called the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) “junk science” and banned federal agencies from using its guidance.
The Biden administration cited WPATH standards in its briefs before the court. Meanwhile, former Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, who identifies as transgender, pressured WPATH to remove minimum age requirements on its Standards of Care 8 guidelines to further the administration’s policy goals.
Sex-change procedures come with serious side effects than can leave transgender people with lifelong pain and discomfort, as a transgender activist conceded in a New York Times op-ed, “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy.” That’s because of the physical pain and discomfort that result from a sex change, and the artificial, subpar nature of the sex organ that doctors create in sex-change surgery. As Andrea Long Chu wrote in that op-ed:
Next Thursday, I will get a vagina. The procedure will last around six hours, and I will be in recovery for at least three months. Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagina as a wound; as a result, it will require regular, painful attention to maintain. This is what I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don’t expect it to.
A gender transition can result in a lifetime of pain, discomfort, and medications, such as hormone therapy. As Britain’s National Health Service explains, hormones “need to be taken for the rest of your life, even if you have gender surgery.” The FDA notes that puberty blockers can cause brain swelling and vision loss, and an FDA official who supported giving minors puberty blockers conceded that they actually increase suicidality. Indeed, the “FDA knew ‘gender affirming’ puberty blockers increase ‘suicidality’ in 2017,” reported Just the News.
Jazz Jennings is the most famous kid to undergo a gender transition, with a long-running TV show celebrating Jazz’s gender transition. Health providers falsely said that a sex change would make Jazz happy, and falsely told Jazz’s mother that Jazz was at risk for suicide if she didn’t allow Jazz to transition. “Do you want a live daughter or a dead son?,” they asked Jazz’s mother, peddling a talking point that is often used on parents of transgender teens.
But by 2023, Jazz was miserable. Jazz’s penis was surgically removed at age 17, after Jazz was put on puberty blockers at age 11. Jazz became depressed, saying “I don’t feel like me, ever.” After Jazz’s sex change, Jazz experienced pain, constant reflux, a lack of sex drive, an inability to orgasm, rapid weight gain, and mental illness.
