Warning! Warning! The Supreme Court will be hearing a case about us this fall!
The New York TimesBy Lydia PolgreenAugust 13, 2024In its upcoming term, the Supreme Court will once again hear a case that involves a highly contentious question that lies at the heart of personal liberty: Who should decide what medical care a person receives? Should it be patients and their families, supported by doctors and other clinicians, using guidelines developed by the leading experts in the field based on the most current scientific knowledge and treatment practice? Or does the Constitution permit lawmakers to place themselves, and courts, in the middle of some of the most complex and intimate decisions people will make in their lives?The case, United States v. Skrmetti, has been brought by the Biden administration to challenge a ban in Tennessee on gender-affirming care for adolescents that all major American medical organizations support. Tennessee is one of some two dozen states that have passed laws limiting gender-affirming care for young people. The appeal argues that these bans are an unconstitutional form of sex discrimination: They forbid long-used treatments for transgender adolescents that are also given to children who are not transgender for different reasons.
(Yeah those reasons are precocious puberty, which they have been given to children who begin puberty too early and there have been no side effects for over 40 years)
In a free society we agree that these are private matters, decided by individuals and their families, with the support of doctors using mainstream medical science as a guide, even when they involve children. We invite politicians and judges into them at great peril to our freedom.
And now, nine judges will rule on our lives.
While the Supreme Court grapples this term with issues ranging from presidential immunity to abortion and the power of federal administrative agencies, the justices’ docket for the 2024-25 term has so far involved mostly lower-profile issues. That changed on Monday, when the justices waded once again into the culture wars – specifically, the debate over rights for transgender people. In a list of orders released on Tuesday morning, the justices agreed to take up a case challenging a Tennessee law that bans gender-affirming care for transgender youths.The justices will hear arguments in the case in the fall, with a decision likely by late June or early July 2025.Major U.S. medical groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association have opposed efforts by states to restrict gender-affirming care. In a 2021 letter to the National Governors Association, for example, the American Medical Association cited studies indicating that gender-affirming care can lead to (among other things) “dramatic reductions in suicide attempts, as well as decreased rates of depression and anxiety.”[…]The challengers in both cases went to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to take up the issue, as did the Biden administration, which had filed its own challenge to the Tennessee ban.The Tennessee challengers told the justices that the “legal uncertainty” surrounding the availability of gender-affirming care for transgender youths “is creating chaos across the country for adolescents, families and doctors.” Both the federal government and the challengers in the Kentucky case echoed that sentiment, with the Kentucky plaintiffs noting that in recent years “twenty-one states have banned adolescents from obtaining medical care for gender dysphoria, throwing the lives of young people in these states into disarray.”
You place your bets and you take your chances... it is going to be a crap shot next June! Will we have our rights stripped from us? Danger! Danger!
My Body, my choice!
My Body, my choice!
My Body, my choice!
Vote Blue!
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