https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-supreme-court-showdown-looms-on-transgender-surgeries-and-puberty-blockers/?utm_source=recirc-
The Supreme Court took seven cases this morning to hear next year, including a long-running lawsuit by Holocaust survivors against Hungary for expropriation of property. The big one is United States v. Skrmetti, a Biden administration challenge on equal-protection grounds to Tennessee and Kentucky laws that restrict the use of potentially irreversible gender-transition treatments such as transgender surgeries and puberty blockers on minors.
I explained, back when the lawsuit was filed in May 2023 as part of Merrick Garland’s campaign to stamp out self-government in the states on any issue where states dissent from cultural progressivism, why it was nuts:
The legislature reached its own conclusions about whether the treatments at issue were medically supported or abusive to children. . . . Are these really interests no legislature is permitted to consider? The complaint cites the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (“DSM-V-TR”) as “an authoritative source for psychiatric conditions,” ignoring how often the DSM has been revised — and politicized — over the years. Of course, unlike the Tennessee legislature, the authors of the DSM are neither representative of, nor accountable to, a democratic populace. Moreover, on transgender issues, there is a significant divide between the American medical establishment and the European medical establishment. I’m as rah-rah USA as the next guy, but when that happens, it’s at least reasonable to allow the democratic process to consider the possibility that the Americans are wrong. Once upon a time, the American medical profession refused to accept the European consensus that doctors should wash their hands.
We may get a sense of how this Court resolves this question soon in this term’s big abortion case, Moyle v. United States, in which the Biden administration and the liberal justices argue that a federal statute puts an unelected national “medical consensus” above the elected legislatures in determining the standards for emergency-room care. Then again, Moyle is a statutory case rather than a constitutional one, and it might well be resolved on other grounds.