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1 Elana Redfield, Understanding US v. Skrmetti: Does the Constitution Allow States to Deny Care to Transgender Youth? [1] (December 2024)

handle is hein.lgbtq/udrstusvsk0001 and id is 1 raw text is: School of Law Williams Institute AUTHOR: UNDERSTANDING Elana Redfield US V. SKRMETTI Does the Constitution allow states to deny care to transgender youth? ANALYSIS / DECEMBER 2024 On December 4, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in U.S. v. Skrmetti, a lawsuit challenging Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors. In nearly two and a half hours of energetic argument, parties hotly debated what legal standard to apply, whether the state had a persuasive justification for its attempt to ban the care, and the very nature and purpose of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Tennessee's law, SB1, prohibits medical practitioners from providing gender-affirming puberty blockers, hormones, or surgery for the purposes of enabling the minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity different than the minor's sex; or treating purported discomfort or distress from discordance between a minor's sex and asserted identity. The law permits the same treatments for minors whose gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth. Tennessee's law is one of 24 nationwide that comprehensively ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Two additional states have bans on surgical treatments alone. (See our 2024 analysis of the state laws.) Most of the bans have been challenged in either federal or state courts. WHAT STANDARD SHOULD THE COURT APPLY? U.S. v. Skrmetti is the first time the Supreme Court has directly considered how the Equal Protection Clause applies to gender-affirming care for minors. A central question the justices must decide is the standard of review the court should use-in other words, how skeptically the Court should look at the law. In Equal Protection cases, the standard of review is determined by the classification the government party is making. If the classification is one that the laws have found to be suspect, such as distinctions based on race, the Court is likely to treat it with skepticism. If the classification is one that isn't considered suspect, such as age, the Court will look more deferentially at the law-and it is likely to be upheld. Sex classifications have historically received intermediate scrutiny, which means that the Court will apply some degree of skepticism. However, the state could still justify its actions if they are deemed to be important enough. The crux of the argument this week by the U.S. Solicitor General and the original plaintiffs in the case (represented by Chase Strangio, the first openly transgender lawyer to argue before the Supreme Court) was that the law should be treated with skepticism, or heightened scrutiny, because it facially discriminates on sex. In fact, SB1 explicitly

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