transgender

The case raised foundational constitutional questions: whether transgender people constitute a class triggering higher constitutional scrutiny, whether laws targeting them violate equal protection, and whether the Constitution guarantees their right to access medically necessary treatment. The Court sidestepped nearly all of those questions, instead issuing a narrower opinion that carves out an exception permitting medical discrimination based on “gender dysphoria”—a distinction it bizarrely treats as separate from discrimination against transgender people. The ruling effectively greenlights medical care bans across the country and may pave the way for broader restrictions, including for adults, while leaving lower court rulings on bathrooms, schools, sports, and employment remain intact—for now.

One of the more strained justifications in the majority opinion mirrors arguments once used to deny rights to same-sex and interracial couples: that the law does not discriminate against transgender people, but instead bars both cisgender and transgender people from receiving medication to treat gender dysphoria. It's a tortured rationale—functionally absurd given that transgender people will need the medical treatment for gender dysphoria, not cisgender people.

Sotomayor compares this rationale to that used in Loving v. Virginia, a ruling which struck down laws against interracial marriage:

“But nearly every discriminatory law is susceptible to a similarly race- or sex-neutral characterization. A prohibition on interracial marriage, for example, allows no person to marry someone outside of her race, while allowing persons of any race to marry within their race….

In a passage that sounds hauntingly familiar to readers of Tennessee’s brief, Virginia argued in Loving that, should this Court intervene, it would find itself in a “bog of conflicting scientific opinion upon the effects of interracial marriage, and the desirability of preventing such alliances, from the physical, biological, genetic, anthropological, cultural, psychological, and sociological point of view.” … “In such a situation,” Virginia continued, “it is the exclusive province of the Legislature of each State to make the determination for its citizens as to the desirability of a policy of permitting or preventing such [interracial] alliances—a province which the judiciary may not constitutionally invade.” Id., at 7–8.