Ten­nessee AG Says SCOTUS Could Pave Way To End­ing Child Sex Changes And Sav­ing Women’s Sports With Just One Rul­ing

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Tennessee AG Says SCOTUS Could Pave Way To Ending Child Sex Changes And Saving Women’s Sports With Just One Ruling

The Supreme Court’s forth­com­ing rul­ing on state child sex change bans could impact a range of issues relat­ed to gen­der iden­ti­ty, Ten­nessee Attor­ney Gen­er­al Jonathan Skrmet­ti told the Dai­ly Caller News Foun­da­tion.

The jus­tices heard oral argu­ments Wednes­day on Tennessee’s law ban­ning med­ical pro­ce­dures intend­ed to help a child live as an iden­ti­ty “incon­sis­tent” with their sex, which the Biden admin­is­tra­tion argues vio­lates the Four­teenth Amendment’s Equal Pro­tec­tion Clause.

“There’s been no con­sti­tu­tion­al analy­sis of gen­der iden­ti­ty issues from the court pri­or to this,” Skrmet­ti told the DCNF on Thurs­day. “In the Bostock case, they were look­ing at statu­to­ry lan­guage.”

In the high court’s 2020 Bostock v. Clay­ton Coun­ty deci­sion, the major­i­ty held that dis­crim­i­na­tion based on sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion and gen­der iden­ti­ty equates to sex dis­crim­i­na­tion in the employ­ment con­text. (RELATED: SCOTUS Con­ser­v­a­tives Seem Ready To Uphold Child Sex Change Bans — But One Jus­tice Is A Wild Card)

“So poten­tial­ly, there could be lan­guage in the opin­ion that sig­nif­i­cant­ly impacts not just the pro­tec­tion for kids from gen­der relat­ed pro­ce­dures with life-alter­ing impact,” Skrmet­ti said. “There could be an impact on lit­i­ga­tion about women’s sports teams, about bath­room pri­va­cy, poten­tial­ly oth­er areas of law.”

Skrmet­ti believes his team did a great job defend­ing the case before the court but acknowl­edges “you nev­er want to pre­dict” what is going to hap­pen. Win or lose, the court could opt to issue a nar­row rul­ing, or some­thing broad­er and prece­dent-set­ting.

“The court asked a lot of bril­liant ques­tions,” he said. “It was a long argu­ment because I think they rec­og­nize this could be a sig­nif­i­cant case prece­den­tial­ly, and they have months now to think about it and work through it, so there’s a long way to go before we get a deci­sion.”

Sev­er­al con­ser­v­a­tive jus­tices point­ed to Euro­pean coun­tries lim­it­ing gen­der tran­si­tion pro­ce­dures for chil­dren. Jus­tice Samuel Ali­to ques­tioned why the gov­ern­ment claimed that over­whelm­ing evi­dence sup­ports the use of puber­ty block­ers and hor­mone ther­a­py while fail­ing to acknowl­edge stud­ies indi­cat­ing oth­er­wise, such as the Cass report com­mis­sioned by the Nation­al Health Ser­vice (NHS) Eng­land.

Mean­while, Jus­tice Ketan­ji Brown Jack­son drew a par­al­lel between ban­ning child sex changes and bans on inter­ra­cial mar­riage. “I’m wor­ried that we’re under­min­ing the foun­da­tions of some of our bedrock equal pro­tec­tion cas­es,” she said.

Ten­nessee con­tends its law does not draw lines based on sex, but based on med­ical pur­pose. Giv­ing testos­terone to a girl will have vast­ly dif­fer­ent effects than giv­ing it to a boy, the state argues.

Near­ly half of all U.S. states have passed laws like Tennessee’s. Skrmet­ti is cer­tain that this won’t be a deci­sion of “no con­se­quence.”

“The risks to kids are pro­found. You’re talk­ing about poten­tial life­long loss of the abil­i­ty to have chil­dren, the life­long loss of the abil­i­ty to have sex­u­al func­tion, a life of deal­ing with tumors and blood clots, bone den­si­ty dis­or­ders, cog­ni­tive impair­ments,” he said. “So it’s not some­thing to be tak­en light­ly.”

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