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Yahoo
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Liberals Are Going to Keep Losing at the Supreme Court
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The Supreme Court delivered a string of major losses for liberal Americans in recent weeks. Two in particular stand out: In United States v. Skrmetti, the Court's conservative majority upheld a state law outlawing minors' access to puberty blockers and hormones to treat gender dysphoria. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the justices created a new constitutional entitlement for religious parents to shield their children from learning about LGBTQ people in public schools. Defeats like these have become the norm since Donald Trump jolted the Court rightward. For many progressives, the narrative is straightforward: Ambitious, doctrinaire, Republican-appointed justices are systematically dismantling liberal precedents over the impassioned but impotent dissents of their Democratic-appointed colleagues. This account accurately captures the speed, scope, and partisanship of the Court's conservative counterrevolution. Yet it obscures a difficult truth: Progressive lawyers paved the road to these losses. Rulings such as those in Skrmetti and Mahmoud are the predictable consequences of liberal litigation strategies that invite a hostile Court to codify an agenda that the Court's conservative majority was handpicked to establish. The Supreme Court cannot act without cases. It cannot initiate litigation. To reshape doctrine in the ways the justices want, they depend on litigants to bring suits to them. Both of these cases represent unforced errors; liberal lawyers chose to fight for ideas the justices were explicitly appointed to oppose. Poorly chosen liberal challenges are a gift to a conservative majority eager to recast constitutional law. [Paul Rosenzweig: The Supreme Court's inconsistency is very revealing] Progressive lawyers need a strategic recalibration, something I argue in a forthcoming Cornell Law Review article. They need to stop reflexively turning to federal courts, and especially the Supreme Court. Avoiding high-risk, high-profile litigation in inhospitable forums does not mean abandoning constitutional advocacy. It means redirecting that advocacy toward the democratic arenas of constitutional politics, such as legislatures, ballot initiatives, grassroots organizing, and the broader public square. In these spaces, progressives can build popular support, blunt the impact of adverse rulings, and shape the constitutional culture that, over time, influences judicial doctrine itself. The Skrmetti case began in April 2023, when the American Civil Liberties Union sued Tennessee to block the state from banning certain treatments of gender dysphoria for minors. (I'd worked at the ACLU as a legal fellow a year earlier but had no involvement in the case.) After an initial trial-court victory for the liberal plaintiffs, the state appealed the decision to the Sixth Circuit. That court overturned the lower court's decision and upheld the ban. The ACLU could have accepted this regional setback. The Sixth Circuit's decisions bind just four states—Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Although the outcome was surely painful for the plaintiffs, the ruling did not overturn other lower-court decisions protecting transgender rights that had been decided in other states. Declining to appeal need not constitute an endorsement of the decision. Rather, it would have reflected a pragmatic assessment that the Court's conservative justices were more likely to amplify than alleviate harm. Instead, the ACLU (later joined by the Biden administration) petitioned the Supreme Court to review the case. The Court's conservative majority obliged and accepted the case for full review in June 2024. The decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts earlier this month, which was joined by all of his fellow Republican appointees, is the unhappy result. In concrete terms, the decision allows states with previously blocked bans to seek their restoration, and emboldens states without bans to enact them, assured of constitutional cover. Yet when the Supreme Court adjudicates, it does more than resolve a dispute between two parties. It shapes the trajectory of constitutional interpretation and political contestation. Its rulings influence not just courts and legislatures but also public discourse and perception. By affirming the result and much of the rationale of the Sixth Circuit—and condoning the open animus toward transgender people voiced by Tennessee lawmakers—the Court didn't merely uphold one type of law. It radiated anti-transgender sentiment in explicit constitutional doctrine and the wider constitutional culture that shapes politics, law, and public dialogue. Legally, Skrmetti deprives transgender advocates of a key sex-discrimination argument and signals to lower courts that the highest court takes a skeptical view of transgender-rights claims made under equal-protection law. Politically, it encourages Republican officials to pursue even more restrictive laws targeting transgender people. Attorney General Pam Bondi and other Trump-administration figures praised the ruling and vowed to escalate their crackdown on transgender rights, including access to gender-affirming care treatments for minors in blue states. Justice Amy Coney Barrett's Skrmetti concurrence—joined in full by Justice Clarence Thomas and substantively endorsed by Justice Samuel Alito—goes further in inviting discrimination against transgender people. Before oral argument, some progressives had hoped that Barrett would serve as a swing vote to strike down the law. Instead, she staked out a position even more extreme than the majority opinion, writing that transgender people do not qualify as a suspect or quasi-suspect class under the equal-protection clause. Her reasoning, if embraced by lower courts, would uphold sweeping discriminatory policies targeting transgender adults—such as bans on receiving gender-affirming care and using public facilities—under the guise of 'legitimate regulatory policy.' And it telegraphs to lawmakers agitating for more aggressive attacks on transgender people that the Court will not stand in their way. Advocates should know that this is a risk they are taking. Supreme Court justices have little stopping them from addressing unraised issues and disturbing unrelated precedent. The Roberts Court has made something of a habit of doing so, with its conservative justices frequently reaching to decide questions not before them. In Skrmetti, instead of merely applying precedent on the appropriate standard for evaluating Tennessee's law and then remanding to the Sixth Circuit for further proceedings, the conservative majority decided the law's constitutionality outright—an aggressive and unnecessary move. That this was totally avoidable underscores that liberal advocates would be wise to refrain from channeling long-shot cases to unsympathetic courts—not just the Supreme Court but many federal appellate courts as well, which are filled with ideologically vetted conservative judges from the previous Trump term. Even if liberals do occasionally win at appellate courts, those victories can prove Pyrrhic, setting up conservatives with a fast track to the Supreme Court. Mahmoud v. Taylor offers a cautionary tale of initial liberal wins turning into bigger defeats. After adding books with LGBTQ characters and themes to elementary curricula, the public-school district in Montgomery County, Maryland, created a notice and opt-out system for parents who wanted to withdraw their kids from instruction with the materials. The district later removed the opt-out system following protests from LGBTQ families that found it stigmatizing and discriminatory. Then a coalition of Muslim and Christian parents with young children objected to the removal. By all accounts, these parents were sincere in their religious convictions. They sought accommodations that neighboring school districts had given similarly situated parents; none wanted to ban the books entirely from the school. Many of the objecting parents were comfortable with their kids reading the books at more advanced ages. Yet the district refused to compromise, dismissing hundreds of parental complaints requesting a restoration of the opt-out. What could have been resolved through negotiation transformed into a culture-war flash point and a lawsuit. From the outset of litigation, the school district should have seen the warning signs. The Becket Fund, a powerhouse religious-liberty organization that has won eight (and lost zero) Supreme Court cases in the past decade, represented the parents in their suit, and conservative media outlets regularly covered even routine procedural developments. That should have alerted the district that the stakes were far greater than local policy. A strategic retreat—restoring the opt-out and pursuing legal maneuvers to moot the case, including after the Court granted certiorari—would have shown prudence, not capitulation. Instead, the district pressed on. Its temporary wins at the trial and appellate stages then teed up the Supreme Court reversal that has now reshaped constitutional doctrine nationwide. In ruling for the parents, the Roberts Court extended a nearly unbroken streak of favoring free-exercise claimants, largely conservative Christians. Mahmoud imposes a rigid, nationwide rule that sharply limits schools' ability to balance inclusion with parental concerns. Discovering a new constitutional right for parents to opt out of teaching 'subtle' themes that conflict with their religious beliefs, the decision strips locally elected school boards of the power to make nuanced curricular judgments and hands it to federal judges. It saddles schools with new administrative burdens, inhibits the development of pluralistic curricula, and invites ideological censorship masquerading as religious accommodation. Ironically, a local effort to affirm LGBTQ dignity in a county of 1 million residents led the Supreme Court to inflict a blow to that dignity across a nation of 340 million. Much was lost in the crossfire. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her dissent, Mahmoud threatens the 'very essence' of American public education and democracy. For advocates in the progressive legal world, deprioritizing litigation will require a theoretical shift, a move away from the court-centric constitutional vision that has defined progressive legal thought since the Warren and early Burger Courts and has been sustained by occasional liberal victories in the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts. It will necessitate recognizing that the Court is not the sole or even primary engine of constitutional interpretation. The Court's pronouncements on constitutional law are important, of course. But other institutions and spaces—legislatures, referenda, classrooms, workplaces, media, even group chats and other parts of the public square—have a role to play in the articulation of constitutional ideas. De-emphasizing the courts as sources of legal interpretation and policy change can allow progressives to correctly conceptualize constitutional politics as a participatory, democratic project with institutional and noninstitutional dimensions, not a top-down one outsourced to nine people on the Supreme Court. The public's views should matter a great deal. No Court, however reactionary, operates in a vacuum or with impunity. Justices are shaped by the same gravitational social and political forces as everyone else. As Justice Benjamin Cardozo observed in 1921, 'The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by.' Polling shows that most Americans, including four out of every five Republicans, support restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors. Even in liberal Maryland, two-thirds of voters oppose LGBTQ-focused curricula for young students. Asking a conservative court to override that sentiment—to go where many Democratic voters have yet to go—was never viable. Without public opinion on their side, liberal litigators had little leverage or hope of winning. I saw this disconnect up close at the ACLU. My colleagues were smart and dedicated, carrying the immense emotional weight of fighting for the fundamental dignity of vulnerable people in a climate of growing prejudice and political attack. But many treated any doubts about transgender rights as simple bigotry. Although this approach foregrounded empathy for transgender people, it often failed to genuinely engage with the majority of Americans, who had questions about athletic competition and medical decisions for minors. [Leah Litman: The archaic sex-discrimination case the Supreme Court is reviving] Rather than speak directly to these concerns, liberal litigators sometimes scorned public opinion, confident in the righteousness of their views. As a recent New York Times Magazine feature revealed, the legal advocates behind Skrmetti operated from academic and activist theories of sex and gender that were out of the mainstream. While public support for transgender rights and the medical consensus on treatments for minors' gender dysphoria fractured, advocates such as the ACLU doubled down on rhetorical purity rather than persuasion. In one widely shared post, the ACLU declared, 'Men who get their periods are men. Men who get pregnant and give birth are men.' Another post dismissed as a 'MYTH' the near–universally held view that 'sex is binary, apparent at birth.' This kind of messaging garners engagement in insular, algorithm-driven online spaces but does not create a cultural foundation that moves skeptical voters and conservative judges. A political and legal strategy anchored in Judith Butler is not going to convince Brett Kavanaugh. This recalibration doesn't mean giving up on litigation altogether. But it does mean approaching it with greater realism, aiming for incremental change, not sweeping wins. It requires reading the judicial landscape honestly, studying conservative legal thinking carefully, recognizing when legal action may do more harm than good, and accepting some losses in order to preempt even bigger ones. For example, the Sixth Circuit's Skrmetti opinion, written by Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton, clearly foreshadowed where Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett were likely to land, given Sutton's influence on contemporary conservative legal thought and the intellectual proximity of his approach and their own. Ditto for Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr., a Trump appointee to the Fourth Circuit who dissented in Mahmoud. There's a revealing paradox in contemporary liberal legal advocacy at the Supreme Court. Many progressives describe the current Court as dangerously rogue and reactionary. Yet their actions suggest a lingering faith in the Court's legitimacy and potentiality as an agent of progressive change. This dissonance surfaces when an ACLU lawyer who calls the Supreme Court a 'vile institution' is the same person who brought Skrmetti to it. Ultimately, a Court that cannot be trusted to protect rights should not be empowered to undermine them. The path forward lies in organizing, legislating, and persuading, not in supplicating before an antipathetic bench. If they take this new path, progressives may find that they can cultivate constitutional power in places the Court cannot reach. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Fox News
24-06-2025
- Health
- Fox News
FBI launches probes into 3 children's hospitals for alleged genital mutilation of minors
FIRST ON FOX: The FBI has initiated criminal investigations of three children's hospitals after commitments from Attorney General Pam Bondi that the Trump administration would enforce federal statutes outlawing female genital mutilation to protect children from often irreversible sex-change surgeries. The investigations target providers who work at Boston Children's Hospital, Children's Hospital Colorado and Children's Hospital Los Angeles, according to a source familiar with the investigation who spoke to Fox News Digital on the condition of anonymity. These hospitals have been among some of the foremost providers of sex change procedures for minors in America over the last several years, according to the source. Just days after taking office, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing all federal agencies to work toward terminating the ability for children under 18 to receive "irreversible medical interventions" as a treatment for gender dysphoria. Part of that effort included Attorney General Bondi issuing a memorandum several weeks later, directing Justice Department personnel to enforce 18 U.S.C. § 116, which is a federal statute that makes female genital mutilation against the law. "I am putting medical practitioners, hospitals and clinics on notice: In the United States, it is a felony to perform, attempt to perform or conspire to perform female genital mutilation ("FGM") on any person under the age of 18," Bondi's memo said. "That crime carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years per count. I am directing all U.S. Attorneys to investigate all suspected cases of FGM — under the banner of so-called 'gender-affirming care' or otherwise — and to prosecute all FGM offenses to the fullest extent possible." Bondi also said in the memo that the Justice Department would be launching a new Coalition Against Child Mutilation, which will partner with state attorneys general to build cases against hospitals and practitioners violating federal or state laws banning female genital mutilation. The memo added that the Justice Department's Office of Legislative Affairs is drafting legislation establishing a private right of action for children and parents of children "whose healthy body parts have been damaged by medical professionals through chemical and surgical mutilation" so they can hold hospitals and providers retroactively liable. Amid the Trump administration's focus on banning irreversible transgender medical treatments for minors, numerous hospitals have amended their policies for who can obtain gender transition treatments and surgeries. Earlier this month, Children's Hospital Los Angeles announced it would permanently close its Center for Transyouth Health and Development, effective July 22, 2025. The decision was attributed to "significant operational, legal and financial risks stemming from the shifting policy landscape at both the state and federal levels," according to CBS News. Children's Hospital Los Angeles did not respond to Fox News Digital's repeated requests for comment. Children's Hospital Colorado initially suspended its transgender medical treatments for patients under 19 in response to the president's executive order directing hospitals to halt irreversible transgender treatments for minors. But after a judge's ruling blocking Trump's order, the hospital announced it would resume providing puberty blockers and hormone-based treatments to minors. In a statement to Fox News Digital, a spokesperson for Children's Hospital Colorado noted that it has "never" provided transgender surgeries for those under 18, adding that, two years ago, the hospital stopped providing these surgeries for patients over 18. Instead, starting in 2023, the hospital decided to begin referring patients to outside providers for such services, according to Colorado Newsline. Boston Children's Hospital continues to operate its Gender Multispecialty Service (GeMS) program, according to publicly available information. While the hospital only provides gender-change surgeries for patients over 18, its GeMS program does offer transgender hormone therapy, puberty blockers and social transitioning for patients under 18. It also provides referrals for gender-transition surgeries to minors as well. In a statement to Fox News Digital, Boston Children's said it had not yet received any notice from the FBI regarding alleged violations of federal law. The FBI said that, as a matter of policy, it "declines to confirm or comment on investigations."
Reuters
19-06-2025
- Politics
- Reuters
Transgender rights advocates gird for more fights after US Supreme Court loss
WASHINGTON, June 19 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a blow to transgender rights by upholding a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for adolescents, but legal experts said the ruling was narrower than it could have been and left open the door for challenges to the rising number of government restrictions aimed at transgender people. The court decided that Tennessee's Republican-backed law, which prohibits medical treatments such as puberty blockers and hormones for people under age 18 experiencing gender dysphoria, did not violate the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment promise of equal protection, as challengers to the measure had argued. The court's six conservative justices powered the ruling authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, with its three liberal members dissenting. Transgender rights advocates called the decision a major setback while the law's backers welcomed the Supreme Court's endorsement and urged other states to adopt similar restrictions. Gender dysphoria is the clinical diagnosis for significant distress that can result from an incongruence between a person's gender identity and sex assigned at birth. The ruling rejected the assertion made by the law's challengers that the measure was a form of discrimination - based on sex or transgender status - that should trigger tougher judicial review and make it harder to defend in court under 14th Amendment protections. Instead, the ruling concluded that the ban classified people based on age and medical diagnosis, and the court applied what is called a rational-basis review, a deferential analysis that merely requires a rational connection between a law and a legitimate state interest. Application of rational basis review by courts generally would make it easier to defend a broader array of measures curbing transgender rights, from bathroom use to sports participation. But Wednesday's ruling did not foreclose the possibility of courts in the future applying tougher scrutiny and finding unlawful discrimination in certain measures targeting transgender people. Karen Loewy, a lawyer with the LGBT rights group Lambda Legal, called the ruling heartbreaking for transgender youths and their families but saw some hope. "I think the court here went out of its way to confine what it was doing here to a restriction on care for minors," Loewy said, adding that it "left us plenty of tools to fight other bans on healthcare and other discriminatory actions that target transgender people." The court concluded that Tennessee did not create a sex-based category or specifically draw a line between transgender people and others, said Georgetown University law professor Paul Smith, who has argued many cases at the Supreme Court including a landmark gay rights victory in 2003. "Other statutes may not be viewed the same," Smith said. Roberts wrote that the "fierce scientific and policy debates" concerning the medical treatments at issue justified the court's deferential review of Tennessee's ban. Roberts added that questions about these treatments should be left "to the people, their elected representatives and the democratic process." Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a written dissent disagreed with that view. Judicial scrutiny, Sotomayor said, "has long played an essential role in guarding against legislative efforts to impose upon individuals the state's views about how people of a particular sex (or race) should live or look or act." The ban's proponents welcomed the ruling and the court's reasoning. "Voters, through their elected representatives, should have the power to decide what they believe on serious issues like this one," said Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, a Republican who signed the ban into law. Lee added that the measure protects young people from "irreversible, life-altering medical decisions." "This ruling sends a strong message to the country that states have a clear right and path forward to protect children from irreversible body mutilation," added Republican state legislator Jack Johnson, one of the lead sponsors of the Tennessee measure. The issue of transgender rights is a flashpoint in the U.S. culture wars. Tennessee's law is one of 25 such policies, opens new tab enacted by conservative state lawmakers around the United States, and various states have adopted other restrictions on transgender people. Donald Trump in particular has taken a hard line against transgender rights since returning to the presidency in January. Tennessee's law, passed in 2023, aims to encourage minors to "appreciate their sex" by prohibiting healthcare workers from prescribing puberty blockers and hormones to help them live as "a purported identity inconsistent with the minor's sex." In litigation brought by plaintiffs including transgender individuals and former President Joe Biden's administration, a federal judge blocked the law as likely violating the 14th Amendment. The Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals subsequently reversed the judge's decision. Lawyers for the challengers noted that the Supreme Court did not go as far as the 6th Circuit to decline to recognize transgender people as a class of people whose status requires courts to apply tougher judicial review to laws targeting them. The Supreme Court left that question unresolved. Future legal challenges may hinge on whether a law draws a line between transgender people and others, Smith said. "If a state refused to hire transgender people or excluded them from juries, for example, that might well lead the court to apply heightened scrutiny under a sex discrimination theory or under the theory that such a line itself warrants heightened scrutiny," Smith said. "Targeting transgender people out of animus, as other more-recent restrictions have done, still violates equal protection," said Pratik Shah, an attorney who also helped represent the plaintiffs. However, three conservative justices who wrote or joined opinions concurring in Wednesday's outcome - Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito - agreed with the 6th Circuit that laws based on transgender status do not merit tougher legal scrutiny like laws that divide people based on race or sex. Such a ruling "would require courts to oversee all manner of policy choices normally committed to legislative discretion," Barrett wrote. Though some transgender advocates had expressed concern that a ruling favoring Tennessee could bolster restrictions on transgender adults as well, Jennifer Levi of the LGBT rights legal group GLAD Law said Wednesday's decision was explicitly limited to care for minors and that challenges to restrictions on adults remain viable under existing precedent. The Supreme Court also did not rule on a separate argument made by the plaintiffs that laws like Tennessee's violate the right of parents to make decisions concerning the medical care of their children. Competent adults could similarly claim a right to make medical decisions about their own bodies, Smith said. In a previous major case involving transgender rights, the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that a landmark federal law forbidding workplace discrimination protects gay and transgender employees. Chase Strangio, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the Tennessee case, made history in the case in December as the first openly transgender attorney to argue before the Supreme Court. Strangio emphasized the narrowness of Wednesday's ruling, but acknowledged its practical impact. "Of course the most immediate effect is on our clients, other young transgender people in Tennessee and across the country who need medical care that the government has stepped in to ban," Strangio said. "And for them we are devastated."
The Guardian
19-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
The US supreme court just undermined gender equality
B y now, it is a ritual: every June, Americans endure several weeks of agonizing suspense, as we wait to hear how the supreme court will erode our freedoms, attack our dignity, undermine self-government and empower those who enrich themselves at our expense. The court, controlled by career politicians in robes who were hand-selected for their loyalty to the rightwing and their willingness to be wildly intellectually dishonest in pursuit of Republican policy objectives, has ended the right to abortion, desiccated the Voting Rights Act, made state gun regulations nearly impossible and declared the president functionally immune to criminal law. Many of us waited, with a mixture and terror and disgust, to see what cruelties the court would deliver for us in 2025. The justices decided to start by attacking vulnerable children. In a 6-3 split, the court's conservatives ruled on Wednesday that Tennessee's law banning transition-related healthcare for minors can remain in effect. The law prohibits hormone therapies and surgeries only for their use in treating gender dysphoria; cisgender minors retain access to these drugs. The statute is on its face sex-specific and designed to mandate certain forms of gender conformity: the care that it bans, it bans on the basis of a patient's sex. This is in straightforward violation of the 14th amendment's equal protection clause, which has long been interpreted to ban facially sex-discriminatory laws and those that encourage sex-role stereotyping. The court decided to ignore this precedent and the plain intent of Tennessee's statute, and in the process it both imposed a cruel and needless deprivation on trans children and their families, and also substantially weakened constitutional guarantees of equal protection of the sexes. The ruling in United States v Skrmetti is likely to shield other bans on transition-related healthcare for minors, which are now on the books in most states. That alone will have a devastating impact on trans children, whom studies consistently show fare best under an affirmative model of care that retains the option to delay puberty or pursue cross-sex hormones – options that the court has now removed from these children and their parents. But the opinion's reasoning suggests something broader, and darker, about the status of trans people under the law – with dire implications for queer people, women, and anyone else not interested in or suited to living a neatly gender-conforming life. For in seeking to uphold Tennessee's care ban, the court circumvented sex equality provisions in a way that seems to render moot much of the 14th amendment's applicability to sex discrimination cases. Facially sex-discriminatory statutes are now broadly permissible, the court suggests, so long as they impose gendered limits on the conduct of people of both sexes. The reasoning, such as it is, of the majority in Skrmetti is thus: because the Tennessee law does not allow either assigned-male nor assigned-female minors to access transition-related care, the law must therefore not be sex discriminatory. This logic is almost laughably bad-faith: Tennessee's ban explicitly prohibits patients from accessing medicine on the basis of their sex, prohibiting male-assigned patients from accessing estrogen while permitting female-assigned patients to access it, and barring female-assigned patients from accessing testosterone while allowing it to be prescribed to male-assigned ones. Sex is the sole determining characteristic: it is sex that, under Tennessee's law, licenses conduct for some individuals and prohibits the same conduct for others. Facial sex discrimination, then, is not impermissible, according to the court, and not even subject to heightened scrutiny. Rather, all that functionally remains of the constitution's protection against sex inequality is a bar on 'invidious sex discrimination', a subjective and difficult to prove standard that much functional mistreatment of people on the basis of their sex or gender identity will fail to meet. The court seemingly goes out of its way to ensure that the obvious and plain anti-trans malice that motivates this law will not meet that threshold – claiming, preposterously, that trans people are not distinct enough, and have not suffered enough as a class, to be identifiable as a targeted group deserving of legal protection. What results is a kind of separate-but-equal logic of sex discrimination, in which persons of all sexes and genders are barred from opportunities that only people of certain sexes or genders require. The court has elevated this plain discrimination into a kind of parody of equality. What's left of equal protection? Over the past few years, the court has embarked on a project of allowing greater and greater discrimination against LGBTQ+ persons, carving out vast exceptions to allow their mistreatment under frameworks such as public accommodations civil rights law and staggeringly expansive understandings of religious freedom rights. Now, it has licensed states, too, to target trans people, and in the process, it has given them further leeway to discriminate against cis women. Skrmetti, after all, would not be possible without Dobbs, the supreme court's most sweeping bigoted assertion that there is no sex discrimination in place when a medical procedure that is only needed on the basis of sex is prohibited to those who do and do not require it alike. Skrmetti, which erodes sex equality under the 14th amendment, does not take aim at Bostock, the 2020 decision that found that discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity were prohibited under the sex equality provision of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But it is hard to imagine that a court with so much hostility towards the civil rights claims of the historically marginalized will continue to find that gay and trans people can claim protection from discrimination under that law, either. It is not hard to imagine Skrmetti, along with Dobbs, being the opening salvos in a broader legal assault on the status of women and queer people – one that removes our rights one by one, making us more and more vulnerable, and sanctioning more and more of our derision, degradation and unfreedom. At the very least, this week, the court ruled that gender conformity can be enforced, at least on children, by the state. All queer people – and all cis women who aspire to be free – have had their dignity demeaned as a result. Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
Telegraph
16-06-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
US tells states: Follow Cass Review in treatment of ‘trans' children
The US government is pressuring states to halt funding for puberty blockers for children and follow the UK's Cass Review. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which provides health coverage to more than 160 million Americans, urged directors to adopt the findings of the report, which concluded children who think they are transgender should not be rushed into treatment they may regret. In a letter sent to medical directors, seen by The Telegraph, the agency said that Britain has 'diverged' from the United States and that the National Health Service's new approach is more effective. Under Donald Trump, the US has quickly moved to ban all 'destructive and life-altering procedures' associated with transitioning children. Some 27 states have enacted laws that ban or restrict gender‑affirming care for minors. But puberty blockers are still available in many others. 'Several developed countries have recently diverged from the US in the way they treat gender dysphoria in children,' the letter reads. 'The United Kingdom, Sweden, and Finland have recently issued restrictions on medical interventions for children, including the use of puberty blockers and hormone treatments. 'In particular, the Cass Review, an independent review of the evidence in the United Kingdom, noted that despite the considerable research in the field of gender dysphoria in children, 'systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.'' Led by Dr Hilary Cass, the review was prompted by concerns about the high rate of young people being referred to the Tavistock gender clinic in London, which referred children as young as 10 for treatment with puberty blockers. The final review, released in April 2024, concluded that too many children were being pushed towards medication with not enough mental health care. Dr Cass recommended that the most important treatment for the majority of children should be talking therapies instead of irreversible medical treatments such as puberty blockers. The letter went on to imply Britain is more effective in upholding the US government's commitment to 'do no harm to America's children'. 'In recent years, medical interventions for gender dysphoria in children have proliferated,' the letter added. 'These interventions include surgical procedures that attempt to transform an individual's physical appearance to align with an identity that differs from his or her sex or that attempt, for purposes of treating gender dysphoria, to alter or remove an individual's sexual organs to minimise or destroy their natural biological functions.' The letter also said medical interventions for gender dysphoria in children have 'proliferated' in America and the Cass Review, which is rumoured to be backed by Mr Trump, could be used by states to reduce cases. The move is a rare example of British policy influencing American direction under Mr Trump, who moved to ban puberty blockers almost immediately upon arriving in the White House. His administration has largely been critical of Britain's policies, repeatedly raising concerns about free speech. In May, The Telegraph revealed the president had sent a delegation to meet British anti-abortion activists who say their freedom of expression has been threatened. A five-person team from the US State Department spent several days in the country and interviewed campaigners. Trump has intervened on transgender issues Trans activists have long fought to retain puberty blockers as a treatment option for children with gender dysphoria. Democratic attorneys general in Washington, Oregon and Minnesota sued the Trump administration over its plans to pull funding from institutions that provide gender-affirming care. The US president has signed a number of executive orders targeting transgender people, claiming that it is a radical ideology driven to 'deny the biological reality of sex'. In January, he signed an order that aimed to restrict gender-affirming treatments for all young people below the age of 19 by asking federal agencies to stop endorsing interventions such as puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgery for minors. In July 2024, The Integrity Project at Yale Law School released a white paper which said the Cass Review had 'serious flaws'. It suggested that the review 'levies unsupported assertions about gender identity, gender dysphoria, standard practices, and safety of gender-affirming medical treatments'. The white paper concluded that the review 'is not an authoritative guideline or standard of care, nor is it an accurate restatement of the available medical evidence on the treatment of gender dysphoria'.
