What the Trans Rights SCOTUS Case Is Really About

The Supreme Court could just choose to let doctors practice medicine. They won't.

Photo by Meg on Unsplash

A major trans rights case is currently before the US Supreme Court, and the outlook isn’t good. The case challenges a Tennessee law banning all medical treatment for transgender minors, and the Court appears ready to uphold it using similar logic to that in the Dobbs case that overturned Roe v. Wade: That the nine justices of the court are not medical experts, and that these questions are best decided by the public through their representatives in office, and should therefore be left to the states.

This “I’m not a doctor” reasoning makes sense: The nine justices of the court are not medical experts, and they probably shouldn’t be the people deciding what kind of care transgender people of any age should be able to access. But most elected officials also aren’t doctors, and none (that I know of) are clinicians with any experience in transgender care. Is the Tennessee legislature really any better suited to regulating healthcare for trans and gender non-conforming young people than the Supreme Court?

Of course not.