Throughout the entire electoral campaign Donald Trump used to get some of the biggest applause from his followers when he made the promise to “take out the madness transgender of schools and keep men out of women sports”. At rallies, and then on social media, he began to show a video where images of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Full Metal Jacket’ and the word “then” were juxtaposed with images of people defending the rights of the LGBT community and in drag and the phrase “the armed forces of Biden and Harris.”
The lderogatory languagethe dehumanization and the false representations of transgender people became common in their speeches and messages, showing opposition to rights of that community. The last two months of the campaign launched the final fireworks, dedicating one in five ads to attack the Democratic candidate with the transgender issue.
According to data from the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, 335 million inhabitants of the United States, 1.6 million people identify as transincluding some 300,000 minors between 13 and 17 years old. Son less than 0.5% of the populationbut Trump placed them in a role as central to his campaign as the economy, immigration or crime. And in total, according to AdImpact data, he, his allies and Republican candidates in other races spent 250 million dollars in ads of this theme.
An extended controversy
The president-elect was moved by signals sent to him by his own internal polls and general polls, in which eight in 10 Republicans, and half of Americanshave expressed the opinion that the support for transgender rights in the government and society of the United States has gone “too far”. It also fueled a fire that conservatives have spread throughout the last four years. school boards, institutes, libraries and legislatures across the country.and that has now also reached the Congresswhere after the election of the first trans congresswoman, Sarah McBride, the president of the Lower House, Mike Johnson, has restricted the use of bathrooms that do not correspond to the sex assigned at birth.
In recent years, Republicans have presented hundreds of legislative initiatives and only in the last year have approved in 16 states 47 laws restricting trans rights, whether in use pronounsof bathrooms or changing roomsregarding literature in libraries or teachings in classes or participation in sports y medical treatments.
This last question, especially in the case of minors trans, is one of the most conflictive. Trump has defined it as a “act of child abuse and has portrayed it as a “physical, emotional and chemical mutilation of youth” that he has promised to end, threatening to impose a national veto and withhold federal funds from doctors who offer that care. But before he settles into the White House, it is an issue that now comes to the fore. Supreme Court in the case of the most important moment of this legal course.
The case
This Wednesday at the High Court the oral hearing of USA against Skrmetti, a case that should decide the constitutionality of SB 1, a law of 2023 that has vetoed these treatments for transgender minors in Tennessee. This is one of the 26 states controlled by Republicans that, since South Dakota and Arkansas gave the starting signal in 2020 and 2021, they have restricted this care, which has left without access to more than 118,000 adolescents.
Three trans minors from Tennessee, their families and a doctor from Memphis who offered this medical care filed a lawsuit against the organization with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). normawhich prohibits that those who have not reached the age of 18 receive puberty blockers, hormone therapyother medical services or surgery if it is to treat the gender dysphoria (not in other cases). The law establishes fines of $25,000 to doctors for each treatment, disciplinary measures and makes them susceptible to civil lawsuits.
Although a judge appointed by Trump initially ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, two of the three judges of an appeals court (all three also appointed by Republicans) reversed the decision. And both the original plaintiffs and the US Department of Justice Joe Biden government They appealed to the Supreme Court.
The High Court accepted the government’s request, which unlike the ACLU excluded the question of whether parents have a constitutional right to make decisions for their children minors and the case goes hereenter exclusively into resolving whether the law discriminates based on sex.
Discrimination
The law expressly says that it intends “encourage minors to appreciate their sex” and prohibit treatments that could “encourage minors to despise their sex.” It allows other adolescents access to the same treatments that are denied to trans adolescents. And that is why, according to the government and the plaintiffs, violates the equal protection clause contained in the 14th Amendment to the Constitutionwhich prohibits discrimination based on sex.
These are arguments that this Wednesday, together with the government’s main lawyer, the ACLU and the plaintiffs will defend. Chase Strangio, the first openly transgender lawyer who intervenes before the Supreme Court.
In front of them a lawyer will defend the position of Jonathan Skrmetti, the attorney general of Tennesseewhich ensures that its law is not discriminatory since the veto on treatments affects both boys and girls minors.
In the case before the Supreme Court, more than 80 opinions and documents, including those of the main US medical associations who claim that the treatments banned in Tennessee are crucial to alleviating the pressures and psychological disorders suffered by many transgender youth.
On the part of the state government there is talk of the uncertainty science and the role of the state in protecting minors. Furthermore, the example of european countries that they have stopped offering puberty blockers and other treatments in their public health systems, an argument to which the government lawyer has responded by writing that none of the countries mentioned (Sweden, Finland, Norway and the United Kingdom) has imposed such a veto. categorical like Tennessee’s and that individualized treatments remain available.
Supreme Earrings
Since Trump’s first term, which placed three judges on the Supreme Court and guaranteed a 6-3 conservative supermajoritythe court has openly moved toward conservatism. The maximum expression was the ddisbursement in 2022 of the constitutional protection of the right to abortion which had been in effect for 50 years. That, and the fact that that ruling ensured that a state abortion veto did not represent discrimination based on sex, raises the fear that, when the sentencing of this case, which is expected in June, take a step back in protections and not only for transgender minors but more broadly.
One hope that the plaintiffs have is that Neil Gorsuch, one of the judges appointed by Trump, in 2020 signed a ruling that guaranteed the transgender protection against the employment discrimination under the protection of civil rights laws.“It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex,” the magistrate wrote then.
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