What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About SCOTUS’s Trans Rights Ruling

If anyone
pushed for too much too fast, it was these groups. They courted the state legislators to raise
questions about medical transition, offered model legislation banning hormones
and puberty blockers for minors, and defended the bans for them in court. They constructed the “misinformation to legislation” pipeline. In just five years,
they wielded their bans on gender-affirming care for young people as a proxy
war on trans people’s existence, passing them in 25 states. And then they pushed one all the
way to the Supreme Court.

They did
this. Trans people did not.

That a
case like Skrmetti made it to the Supreme Court so swiftly is evidence of
the success of the coalition of Christian-right, Christian nationalist, and far-right groups (to the extent that such distinctions are credible) that have been
working overtime to scapegoat transgender people. These are also not new
groups, for the most part, but they have been adapting to new political terrain.

Over the
past decade, Christian-right groups that saw Obergefell as a crushing
blow to their side have dedicated themselves to mainstreaming a new
twist on an old narrative: that children are in danger and the threat is transgender
people, who, by existing where children may perceive them, can make children
trans. The “solution” they offer is to prevent more trans people from existing,
including preventing young people from transitioning. They are very direct
about this: “Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,”
Daily Wire commentator Michael Knowles said in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2023. Even
when they wrap this campaign in concern for children, as those pushing the bans
on gender-affirming care almost always do, sometimes they slip and acknowledge
that the “endgame” is banning medical transition for
all trans people.

In terms
of this political project, the more revealing decision in Skrmetti was
the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling. It opened with several pages
offering a supposed history of medical transition, referring to the “novelty of
these treatments” for young people—hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and
surgery—and the “medical and unscientific uncertainty” surrounding them. But as was substantially detailed in a historians’ brief later filed
in support of the Skrmetti plaintiffs, “these gender-affirming medical
interventions are well-established, mainstream forms of health care.” Contrary
to the Sixth Circuit’s claim that such care was first offered to young
transgender people in the U.S. in the 1990s, young people have sought and
received those treatments from medical providers in this country since at least
the 1960s, while surgery and hormone therapy have been part of medical
transition going back nearly a century. What has changed since the 1990s is
there are more people providing that care, and that is what these bans are
meant to reverse.