On Wednesday, the Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law banning minors from accessing certain kinds of controversial gender-transition treatments. The lawsuit over the case hinged on whether the state's ban on hormones, puberty blockers, and surgical interventions violated the Equal Protection Clause and required a stricter standard of scrutiny than the one a previous appeals court used.
The court made its decision along ideological lines, with three liberal justices dissenting. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the law, Senate Bill 1, "does not exclude any individual from medical treatments on the basis of transgender status but rather removes one set of diagnoses—gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, and gender incongruence—from the range of treatable conditions."
"If a transgender boy seeks testosterone to treat his gender dysphoria, SB1 prevents a healthcare provider from administering it to him," Roberts continued. "If you change his biological sex from female to male, SB1 would still not permit him the hormones he seeks because he would lack a qualifying diagnosis for the testosterone—such as a congenital defect, precocious puberty, disease, or physical injury."
