US: Supreme Court to hear arguments in case involving doctors prescribing puberty blockers and sex hormone drugs to transgender minors

US: The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Wednesday in a dispute concerning physicians’ ability to provide gender hormone medications and puberty blockers to transgender kids.

Given that it concerns prepubescent children, it has sparked a great deal of debate and is probably going to rank among the most significant Supreme Court rulings of 2025, especially because the question of transgender rights played a significant role in the presidential election.

U.S. v. Jonathan Skrmetti is the case. After parents and transgender rights organizations filed a lawsuit against a Tennessee statute that prohibits transgender medications for kids, Skrmetti, the state’s attorney general, joined the case as a party.

The case may offer the same shock as the Dobbs case in 2022, which abolished the federal right to abortion, according to conservative author Matt Walsh.

“The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in U.S. v. Skrmetti on Wednesday of next week. On X, previously Twitter, he stated, “This is the pinnacle of our fight against the barbarism of child sex-changes, and it could be a Dobbs-style earthquake in terms of protecting children.”

“States with bans like Tennessee’s have heavily relied on the Supreme Court’s opinion Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed states to ban abortion,” states the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, one of the organizations defending the plaintiffs, says in its argument against transgender people and their families. A significant test of the court’s willingness to extend Dobbs to let states to outlaw additional medical services will be U.S. v. Skrmetti.

The prohibitions, according to the plaintiffs, infringe parents’ due process rights by restricting their freedom to direct their children’s medical treatment and violate the equal protection provision by discriminating against people based on their sex and transgender status.

Skrmetti states in the respondent’s brief that Tennessee’s ban should be assessed under the less stringent rational basis review, which requires the law to be rationally related to a legitimate government interest, similar to what the Mississippi law in Dobbs was. This is because Tennessee’s ban does not categorize based on sex or transgender status.

He bases this on the fact that the medications used in gender-affirming treatment are still in the experimental stage and that other nations have repealed or evaluated similar prohibitions to Tennessee’s.

The Supreme Court may even use the case to tighten its definition of the word, which may have far-reaching effects, according to a legal expert who told Newsweek that he does not anticipate the court to overturn the prohibitions on equal protection grounds.

The following are some of the case’s issues:

U.S. v. Skrmetti: What is it?

Senate Bill 1 (SB1), passed in Tennessee in 2023, prohibits medical professionals from “enabling a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex” or “treating purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.”

According to the statute, this includes “telehealth,” which includes sending hormone blockers or other medications to a person in another state by mail and video chats.

“That the minor, or a parent of the minor, consented to the conduct that constituted the violation,” the measure states, is not a defense against the law. Doctors may make an exemption if they are treating “congenital defect, precocious puberty disease, or physical injury.”

As soon as possible, the Biden administration supported parents and others in their efforts to repeal the Tennessee statute.

The U.S. Department of Justice included some of the remarks made by Tennessee legislators during the bill discussions in its court brief.

Among them was Representative William Lamberth, who sponsored the measure and informed the Tennessee lawmaker that “social media glorifying the process of transitioning” is one of the factors contributing to “a growing social contagion of gender dysphoria.”

Representative Paul Sherrell said at the same hearing, according to the Justice Department: “If you don’t know what you are—a boy or girl, male or female—just go in the bathroom and take your clothes off and look in the mirror, and you’ll find out.”

Based on the basic right of parents to make decisions about their children’s best interests, the federal district court for the Middle District of Tennessee consented to impose an injunction on the Tennessee statute.

In contrast, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals argued that the history of American law does not support such a right.

What Does This Mean for Care That Is Gender Affirming?

In the Justice Department’s court submission, the legislation will continue to prohibit “certain forms of medically necessary care for transgender minors with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria,” if Tennessee prevails in the case.

A adolescent known in court as L.W. is one of those minors. She is one of the main plaintiffs in the Supreme Court lawsuit since she is the daughter of the Williams family.

L.W. started taking hormone blockers at the age of 13 and female hormones almost a year later, according to her father, Brian Williams, who spoke at an ACLU news event on Tuesday.

In order to get therapy, L.W., who is now 16 years old, has had to go out of state, which he claimed is “a shrinking option as more states ban this procedure.”

Their “hearts break” for the families of other transgender adolescents who have not been able to afford to go outside of Tennessee, he said, adding that his family has been lucky to be able to visit other states.

Polls indicate that although Americans are divided on particular legislation, they typically favor prohibiting discrimination against trans individuals.

According to a June 2024 Gallup survey, although 53% of Republicans supported prohibitions on “psychological support, hormonal treatments, medical surgeries” for transgender youngsters, 61% of respondents were against them.

52 percent of respondents were against youth hormone treatment explicitly, while 28 percent were in favor of it, according to a February 2024 YouGov survey.

What Decision Would the Supreme Court Make in This Case?

Donald Trump’s reelection has been a significant milestone in the case.

Republicans spent $215 million on anti-trans advertisements this election year, according to ad monitoring firm AdImpact. Kamala represents they/them. One prominent advertisement said, “President Trump is for you.”

Chase Strangio, an ACLU lawyer who will be the first transgender lawyer to go before the Supreme Court, said Trump would probably order the Justice Department to change sides in the case.

He did, however, assert that the lawsuit has already been brought and that the Trump administration is unable to alter its basic principles.

“Nothing changes with respect to the underlying dispute in the case, regardless of what happens with the incoming administration,” he said.

It is doubtful that the Supreme Court would subject the Tennessee statute to “heightened scrutiny”—the very high standard that a law must achieve if it jeopardizes basic rights—according to Peter Shane, a law professor at New York University.

“The courts reserve so-called heightened scrutiny —that is, more intense judicial review—for statutory classifications that either burden the exercise of a fundamental right, such as voting, or that operate to the disadvantage of a ‘suspect class,’ such as race or sex,” according to Newsweek.

According to Shane, the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, has been hesitant to add new suspect classes—groups of people who have historically faced discrimination and are so granted particular protection—or new basic rights.

“In reality, the Supreme Court’s constitutional decisions that have given gay men and lesbians more rights have been based on what the court refers to as “minimum scrutiny,” which considers whether the statute is logically connected to a valid government purpose.

“All of the Supreme Court victories for LGBT plaintiffs, from Lawrence v. Texas, which forbade the criminalization of same-sex sexual intimacy between consenting adults, to Obergefell v. Hodges, the same-sex marriage case, have rested on the proposition that the laws challenged in those cases lacked a legitimate government interest,” he stated.

Greg Germain, a professor of law at Syracuse University, told Newsweek that the plaintiffs’ request for the Supreme Court to overturn Tennessee’s legislation on equal protection grounds is unlikely to succeed.

As per the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection provision, the government is not allowed to “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

“It’s true that the law treats underage transgender treatments differently from non-transgender treatments, but the law does not discriminate on the basis of sex: both male and female transgender treatments are barred for minors,” Germain said.

Germain thinks the Supreme Court will use the case to restrict its definition rather than expanding equal protection.

“The government is contending that transgenderism is a protected class, and lower courts are all over the place on equal protection issues. I believe the court decided this decision to restrict claims to equal protection to conventional inherent traits such as gender and race,” he stated.