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.