The “transgender medicalization” debate continues to heat up. Last week, the British government changed a “temporary ban” to an “indefinite ban” (which more than likely means “permanent ban”) on the use of puberty blockers for minors experiencing gender dysphoria.  A week earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court held oral arguments on a case that will have large-scale implications for children in the United States.  Alexis Tarkalson shares details of the oral arguments.

Although there have been some important “wins” in the arena of preventing the “transing of the kids,” the debate (and the effort to normalize transgender medicalization) continues within the UN system. United Families is currently preparing to engage in preventing a radical transgender agenda from rolling out around the world. We will be there in 2025 – educating and informing you, working to impact negotiations, training university students to navigate the issues and the UN, and we’re planning on sponsoring the second annual UN Conference on the State of Women and Children. We would love your support and your donation to these efforts! 

 

Help us make a difference,

Wendy Wixom, President

United Families International

 

Unpacking the U.S. Supreme Court Case on Transgender Medical Care

By Alexis Tarkalson

Dr. Miriam Grossman, in her book “Lost in Transnation.” wrote these controversial words, “Most things in life are nuanced, but this is not one of them. This is–and here’s a word you don’t expect from a doctor–evil. It’s evil to indoctrinate children and young adults with falsehoods and to drive a wedge between them and their loving parents. It’s evil to encourage them on a path that leads to harm. And it’s evil to describe it all as a journey to authenticity, and to entice children with glitter and rainbows.”

She speaks of the phenomenon of transgenderism in children, which is occurring in unprecedented numbers. She speaks on the pseudo science of gender-affirming care and its apparent malicious grooming of children who don’t understand what’s at stake. The state of Tennessee–among other states–shares her conviction that the transgender assembly line children are placed onto is dangerous and will be the black smudge in a United States history book fifty years from now.

On December 4th the Supreme Court of the United States heard the oral arguments for the U.S. v Skrmetti case. Unfortunately, the results of the day’s events will not be known for another six months. In the meantime, all one can do is wait in anticipation for what could be one of the most significant cases for both the LGBT community and detransitioners.

Background of U.S. v Skrmetti

Tennessee decided on March 22, 2023 that, “it must take action to protect the health and welfare of minors” when it passed the Senate Bill 1 (SB1 bill) banning medical procedures that have the intention to:

1. Enable a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex; or
2. Treat purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.

In essence, “Tennessee has prohibited the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries to treat gender dysphoria in minors.”

The categorical ban enraged those who support gender affirming care for minors and soon after lawsuits were filed, with the original case being between a transgender minor named “L.W.” and two other anonymous plaintiffs, and the State of Tennessee (represented by Tennessee’s Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti). Because Tennessee prevailed when it went to the Sixth Circuit court, the Biden administration picked up the charge and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Currently the case is being represented by the Biden Administrations U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and trans-identifying ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio for the parties who initially challenged the law. On the other side, in favor of the state of Tennessee, was their Solicitor General Matt Rice.

The Question at Hand

Listening to the back-and-forth between judges and lawyers can get a little confusing and tiring for those not familiar with legal jargon. But understanding this case and the implications of its decision will be paramount for the safety of our children.

The overarching question both parties presented was: Does Tennessee’s SB1 violate the Equal Protection Clause of the fourteenth amendment? The Equal Protection Clause reads as follows:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The clause, among other things, can be utilized to protect the two sexes from “invidious discrimination.” That is, discrimination that has no reason, no fairness, and is damaging to the sex it targets. There is also “permissible discrimination,” which is a necessary classification to achieve an important government interest.

The Petitioner’s Plea

Prelogar and Strangio repeatedly attempted to convince the judges that Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors constitutes sex discrimination. Prelogar asserts:

“SB1 regulates by drawing sex-based lines and declares that those lines are designed to encourage minors to appreciate their sex. The law restricts medical care only when provided to induce physical effects inconsistent with birth sex. Someone assigned female at birth can’t receive medication to live as a male, but someone assigned male can.”

Basically, the petitioner’s take issue with the fact that under this law, a minor cannot take medication with an intention inconsistent with their biological sex.

An example for this would be Linda, who thought she was a boy and wanted to take puberty blockers to delay the start of her puberty. The state of Tennessee tells her no, because taking those puberty blockers for that purpose would be inconsistent with her biological sex. But Linda’s best friend Johnny wants to take those same puberty blockers because he is experiencing precocious (early) puberty and would like to delay it. The state tells him yes, because the purpose of taking the puberty blockers is consistent with his sex.

For the petitioners, this is discrimination because Linda is being told no just because she wasn’t born a boy, whereas Johnny gets the puberty blockers because he was.

The petioner’s bid to label the case a sex discrimination case is their way of forcing the court to implement “heightened scrutiny.” Heightened scrutiny is a stricter level of review, a step higher than “rational basis review”  and a step below “strict scrutiny.” This would put the burden on the state of Tennessee to more thoroughly prove their governmental interest in restricting gender-affirming care for minors.

In addition, the petitioners made small but repeated requests to make transgender status a quasi-suspect group, in other words giving transgenderism all the protection that is afforded to a classification based on race and sex.

Of the justices, three seemed to show their preference for the petitioner’s claims. Justice Sotomayor, Justice Jackson, and Justice Kagan. Sotomayor and Jackson preferred to use their time questioning Prelogar and Strangio by pointedly asking questions that would help their case and clear up confusion where the petitioners might have appeared weak in their argument.

The Respondent’s Plea

In rebuttal to the Petitioner’s main argument of sex discrimination, Rice explained SB1 is a purpose-based law, not a sex-based law. The law applies depending on the purpose of your desire to take those medications. The crux of his argument is:

“…the only way that my friends can point to a sex-based line is to conflate the use of puberty blockers to address precocious puberty with the use of puberty blockers to transition. And those are fundamentally different treatments. They have different effects on the body. They’re used for different purposes.”

The law bans these medications depending on the purpose of their usage, not the sex of the user.

Rice goes on to explain his argument through the instance of using morphine. As he states, it is very different to use morphine to assist suicide as it is to use it to manage pain. He says, “It’s the same drug, just like it’s the same drug here. But they’re being used for fundamentally different purposes. They have different effects on the body.”

Testosterone would have a very different effect on a boy than it would a girl. Just for fun, let’s take a look at what exactly testosterone does to gender-confused girls.

For starters, girls on testosterone experience:

• Hair loss
• Loss of menstruation
• Severe acne
• High blood pressure
• High cholesterol
• Increased chances of Type 2 diabetes
• Uterine cancer
• Pelvic pain
• Cerebrovascular disease

Boys on cross-sex hormones also face severe consequences. Unfortunately, Justice Sotomayor attempted to equate these risks to the side effects of taking aspirin, she says, “Every medical treatment has a risk, even taking aspirin. There’s always going to be a percentage of the population under any medical treatment that’s going to suffer a harm.”

Are potential risks such as cancer and diabetes acceptable trade-offs to support the few who choose not to desist?

Seeming to agree with Mr. Rice on the supreme court bench were Justice’s Alito, Kavanaugh, and Thomas. Justices Barrett, Roberts, and Gorsuch appeared more neutral in their approach to questioning. 

Highlights from the Amicus Curiae Briefs

Going through the submitted briefs from different specialized groups, there were several that stood out. Two in particular brought out some important perspectives and illuminated key points.

The first was from Joseph Burgo, PhD,  an American clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst with 40 years of experience. His patients are typically gender-distressed individuals, especially men who have detransitioned.

His important points include:

• “Petitioner’s argument that SB1 stereotypes the sexes is circular, because SB1 regulates medical treatment of stereotyped beliefs about sex. SB1 does not hinder the free development of a child’s personality based on sex, rather it prohibits irreversible medical alterations to the body motivated by stereotyped beliefs about sex.”
• “Petitioner urges the Court to recognize transgender status as quasi-suspect (Petr.’s Br. 28) and thereby extend the same protections afforded on the basis of sex. Transgender status is rooted in the individual’s inner sense of self and subjective belief about the meaning of sex. Inner feelings are elusive, mutable, and unverifiable, while sex is an objectively definable and verifiable fact. Therefore, according quasi-suspect status to transgender status or gender identity would create conceptual disorder and violate the principles of the rule of law in judicial interpretation.”
• “The irreversible interference of gender medicine with the children’s free development is arguably a violation of their Constitutional protections.”

Throughout the oral arguments, the petitioners and justices like Sotomayor repeatedly argued that the harm associated with gender-affirming care is minimal and insignificant. Actual detransitioners would have to disagree with such inaccurate statements. An amicus brief from the larger detransitioners community wrote an impassioned response to this case and its implications.

They write:

• Amici in our group who have transitioned as minors or adults and then detransitioned were not fully aware that they would be medically experimenting with their bodies. As evident in their stories, amicus detransitioners were informed that medically transitioning was their only option for treating gender dysphoria and were ushered into the process without safeguards because medical transitioning is the “standard of care.”
• “As of October 2024, not a single U.S. detransitioner has been granted any adequate remedy in their lawsuits. A ruling that Tennessee Senate Bill 1 violates the Equal Protection Clause would diminish the chances that detransitioners might prevail in current or future lawsuits.”
• “This amici brief argues that access to pediatric gender affirming care should be determined by states because states have historically regulated healthcare; healthcare is innately and purposely discriminatory on the basis of sex for good medical reasons; and, regulating or prohibiting access to certain healthcare treatments is not a violation of anyone’s individual rights.”
• “Hence, the likelihood that someone will make the wrong decision in medically transitioning for themselves is high and there are no safeguards that exist for minors outside of statewide prohibitions. These statewide prohibitions work to protect minors from any peer, family, or medical pressures that might otherwise drive them to medically transition. It also ultimately prevents the worst case scenario–forced transitioning.”

The Amicus brief from the group Do No Harm did a superb job of going through the medical evidence that breaks apart the myth of no harm in sex-transitioning and exhibits just how dangerous these procedures really are for children. It is also an encouraged read.

SB1 Must Prevail

The U.S. Supreme Court will not announce their decision from the oral arguments until late spring of 2025. As frustrating as this is for those personally involved, it should also be a waiting period filled with anxious anticipation for the rest of us. Should SB1 fall to the ideologies of trans activists, many other states with similar laws will also fall. This means a lessening of protections for children who are vulnerable to the agendas of those around them.

The whistleblower from Missouri, Jamie Reed, already showed us how horrible and dangerous the transgender assembly line is for children.

The WPATH files (World Professional Association for Transgender Health) that were leaked earlier this year showed us doctors who specialize in gender-affirming care don’t know what they are doing. Throughout the entire files, questions were repeatedly asked like “What would happen if…” and “There isn’t enough literature on this topic…”

Gender-affirming care is an experiment. It’s not tested. It’s not safe. And there is no consensus. As Dr. Miriam Grossman said, allowing our children to be medically experimented on is evil. Tennessee’s law must prevail so that hopefully other states will feel emboldened to follow in line with the other twenty-four who have already taken a stand.

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Alexis Tarkalson graduated from Brigham Young University-Idaho with her degree in Political Science and an emphasis in American Government. She loves spending time with her husband and little boy, reading, hiking mountains, and learning new hobbies. The family unit is immensely important to her, as is protecting the associated rights, which is why she volunteers her time towards United Families International.