It looks like our human rights are going the way of abortion!
So what the heck is government jumping into politics instead of the law… the Constitution is very clear you have to treat everyone equally, we even have an Amendment about that! It is call the Fourteenth Amendment, you know the part where it says…
You I’m not a lawyer but I can read… and I see denying us healthcare as a violation of the amendment.
If this holds, it doesn’t bode good for us!John Roberts Has a Plan to Deny Transgender Rights
Conservative justices suggest the science is too hard—and that they’ll let states sidestep the Constitution.
Mother Jones
By Pema Levy
December 5, 2024After contemplating a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors Wednesday, the Supreme Court appears likely to greenlight the prohibition on the theory that nine humble justices are not the best arbiters of complex medical questions.
It’s a theory of a modest judiciary that stays in its lane and knows the limits of its expertise. But the notion is a wolf in sheep’s clothing: Under the guise of judicial restraint, several justices suggested during arguments they would allow states to circumvent the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection.
This Supreme Court, dominated by a 6-3 majority of Republican appointees, doesn’t usually take such a modest posture toward government regulation. But when it does, it’s often in cases that will allow a state to implement a constitutionally questionable and partisan-motivated policy. If Wednesday’s case, United States v. Skrmetti, is decided this way, it will be one in a line of decisions where the court deferred to state legislatures so it could avoid facing the constitutional deficiencies those same lawmakers created. Such an outcome would also stand in stark contrast to the court’s rulings on federal law and regulations, where conservative justices have been eager to take power away from Congress and federal agencies.
It’s hard to deny that Tennessee’s law treats people differently based on sex. For one, the Tennessee law explicitly states that its purpose is to “encourage minors to appreciate their sex” and prohibit treatments that might “encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex.” As Justice Elena Kagan put it on Wednesday, “sounds to me like we want boys to be boys and we want girls to be girls.”
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
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Did that slam the lid on our coffin?Civil rights isn’t the right framework for assessing many trans issues
A Supreme Court case on trans teens shows how this type of law struggles with biology.
The Washington Post
By Megan McArdle
December 6, 2024The most telling moment in a Supreme Court case called U.S. v. Skrmetti happened toward the end of Wednesday’s arguments.
[…]
Two hours in, Tennessee Solicitor General J. Matthew Rice remarked that giving testosterone to a biological male with a hormone deficiency is different from giving it to a biological female with gender dysphoria. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked what basis he had for saying that. Didn’t they do the same thing in the body?
No, said the solicitor general, who sounded faintly surprised. “If you give a boy testosterone … that allows him to go through and develop the reproductive organs associated with being a male,” Rice said. “If you give it to a girl, it renders the girl infertile.”
It seems to me that Gender Confirming Care is not the issue but rather that fact that the states are denying us care that other cis-gender people get normally? That is the question not what hormones do and not do or how puberty blockers work. The same treatment that we get are given routinely to other children. It should be left to the doctors to decide not judges!
In Balls and Strikes they write…
As the quoted text should make clear, Senate Bill 1 explicitly treats children differently on the basis of sex—discrimination that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits. Under the law, for example, a teen assigned male at birth who wants testosterone to lower his voice can have it. A teen assigned female at birth cannot.
Back around the turn of the century the Harry Benjamin Standard of Care required trans women to be “passable” and attracted to men.
That seems to be how the justices think… in the binary.
The conservative justices showed no signs of understanding those stakes during oral argument. They gave no indication of comprehending sex discrimination. No clue about what it means to be trans. Not the foggiest idea about how laws have discriminated against gender nonconforming people throughout American history. Frankly, they seemed to know nothing at all about the people whose lives they held in their hands. Worst, they appeared comfortable with using their ignorance to insulate discrimination against transgender people from the Constitution’s demand for legal equality.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh were more subtle about how their emptyheadedness endangers trans people. They acknowledged that there were things they didn’t know, but offered that up as an excuse to do nothing about the discrimination they do know is there. Roberts voiced concern about the propriety of the Court interfering in a “dispute between both sides” over evolving scientific standards. “Doesn’t that make a stronger case for us to leave those determinations to the legislative bodies rather than try to determine them for ourselves?” he asked. Kavanaugh later echoed these worries about a shifting debate: “If it’s evolving like that and changing, it strikes me as a pretty heavy yellow light, if not red light, for this Court to come in,” he said.
I foresee a ruling of the Justices that turns it back to the states!
What a nightmare! You think that the abortion ruling turning abortion back to the states created a nightmare this is going to be a thousand times worst!
Will states respect other states birth certificates? What about driver licenses? Will trans children travel to get their healthcare only to be arrested on return? If we travel across country will we have to pick our states where we can pee? Then there is the fact that drugs can be ordered in another country and then shipped here.
No matter how anyone slices it, all I see is a segment of society who are trying to force their Biblical scripture on everyone. I expect SCOTUS to do what it did with reproductive health care; throw it back to the individual states. If the Constitution does not explicitly list something as a federal issue, then it falls to the states and the people, although it never really falls to the people. The state get in the way of individual rights.
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