For the past decade, the United States has witnessed an enormous spike in transgender identification among youth that, for some, entailed strange and dangerous experiments with their bodies. This term, the Supreme Court, thankfully, intervened. In three key cases, U.S. v. Skrmetti, Mahmoud v. Taylor, and Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, SCOTUS protected children from the fantasies of gender ideology and its biological consequences.
These decisions reject the manipulation of the law in the service of gender ideology and hold ideologues in government accountable. In so doing, the court also safeguarded childhood.
In Skrmetti, the court upheld Tennessee’s ban on medical “transitions” for minors, rejecting the ACLU’s argument that the law violated the Equal Protection Clause. As Chief Justice Roberts explained for the 6-3 majority, the law “does not classify on any bases that warrant heightened review.” He wrote: “The mere use of sex-based language does not sweep a statute within the reach of heightened scrutiny.” Nor did the application of the law “turn on sex.”
Trans activists hoped Skrmetti would do for gender ideology what Roe and its progeny for decades did for abortion. This Supreme Court wasn’t falling for it. Much like the court did in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision in Skrmetti refused to weaponize the Constitution to block Tennessee from sensibly regulating experimental and highly suspect “interventions” on confused children.
Tennessee is not alone in protecting young people from gender ideologues in white coats. More than half of the states have laws limiting such practices on minors. After Skrmetti, lawmakers in remaining states can confidently join them.
The court also affirmed Texas’ right to demand age verification protections for online pornography in Free Speech Coalition. Minors have “long been thought to be more susceptible to the harmful effects of sexually explicit content,” observed Justice Clarence Thomas for the majority. Applying a heightened level of judicial scrutiny, the court concluded that “Age verification laws like H.B. 1181 fall within States’ authority to shield children from sexually explicit content.”
Given the strong correlation between online pornography exposure and gender dysphoria, we believe that protections like Texas’ are necessary to best safeguard healthy sexual development.
Finally, in Mahmoud, the court vindicated parents of faith in Montgomery County, Maryland who wished to shield their very young children from indoctrination. The school board’s failure to provide notice and opt-out options for parents “interferes with the religious development of petitioners’ children and imposes … [a] burden on religious exercise,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito for the majority.
Granted, the parents were only asking for notice and the opportunity to opt their children out of gender ideology in the classroom. Ridding schools of this nonsense will require a change in the composition of school boards. Thanks to the brave parents in Mahmoud, voters in Montgomery County now realize it should be possible to protect all the children in their public schools.
For all of the good that states like Tennessee and Texas are doing, several other states continue to force gender confusion on the most vulnerable children. Religious parents with traditional beliefs about human sexuality, for example, are brazenly excluded from fostering children in states like Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and Massachusetts. Legal challenges to those practices are in the courts and will likely reach the Supreme Court. When they do, expect the court to again reaffirm the Constitution’s guarantees of religious freedom and free speech.
When the trans craze began, it was journalists like Abigail Shrier, author of the 2020 book Irreversible Damage, who identified the trend of mentally struggling teenagers — disproportionately girls and young women — who were swept into digitally driven peer contagion. Shockingly, girls as young as 12 have undergone transgender mastectomies.
“Detransitioners” escaping from this nightmare have begun to testify publicly about how they were misled by therapists and doctors who put them on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. Most famously, detransitioner Chloe Cole spoke of her regret before Congress in 2023 on her 19th birthday, describing how the experimental drugs she was prescribed as an adolescent caused endocrine complications and sexual dysfunction. Surgeons amputated her breasts when she was only 15.
Despite this, leftist propagandists in the Biden administration and Democrat-appointed judges obsessively promoted gender ideology on several fronts. Most egregiously, internal communications released last summer (as part of the discovery in the Boe v. Marshall case) showed former Assistant Health and Human Services Secretary Admiral Rachel Levine pushing against any age minimums for trans-medical procedures.
The damage wrought by such delusional thinking is astonishing. Between 2019 and 2023, according to Do No Harm’s Stop the Harm database, 5,747 minors underwent so-called gender surgeries — and that’s a low estimate, given that not all insurance systems could be measured. Thousands more children have been experimentally medicalized and may be rendered permanently sterile.
Even gay rights activists are starting to ask questions. In a guest essay for The New York Times, same-sex marriage advocate Andrew Sullivan wrote that males in women’s sports and intimate spaces amounted to “fighting a losing battle” and that untested transgender medical procedures on children are “dumb, offensive to common sense and risks a much bigger backlash.”
The gender craze, built on specious claims about the nature of what it is to be human and targeting children, is losing in the Supreme Court and in the court of public opinion. Future generations will look back and wonder: How did we allow these dreadful things to happen?
Andrea Picciotti-Bayer is the Director of the Conscience Project. Brandon Showalter is host of Generation Indoctrination: Inside the Transgender Battle and a journalist with the Christian Post.
