The Biden administration filed a petition with the Supreme Court on Monday to overturn Tennessee’s ban on gender transition procedures for minors.
This move by the Department of Justice follows lower court decisions that allowed similar bans to progress in Tennessee and two other states earlier this summer.
Lawyers for the DOJ argued that the bans, which include one in Kentucky, violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
DOJ lawyers argued in the petition that the question of whether the “recent wave of bans on gender-affirming care are consistent with the Equal Protection Clause” is of national importance and “requires a definitive resolution.”
“Absent this Court’s review, families in Tennessee and other States where laws like SB1 have taken effect will face the loss of essential medical care,” DOJ lawyers wrote in the petition.
Parallel petitions were filed in the last week on behalf of transgender plaintiffs and their families, asking the nation’s highest court to hear cases over similar bans in Kentucky and Tennessee.
However, the DOJ’s Monday filing asked the Supreme Court to resolve only the question of whether the ban in Tennessee violates equal protection. The basis for this argument is the categorization of the law as a sex-based classification, with a focus on how it “discriminates against transgender individuals.”
The two private petitions related to the Tennessee and the Kentucky prohibitions ask an additional question of whether the bans violate the constitutional due process rights of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.
In March, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee enacted SB1 into law, prohibiting transgender treatment for minors, which took effect in July. The legislation requires children who began such treatments prior to July 1 to cease them by March 31, 2024.
In April, several groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), filed a lawsuit challenging this law on behalf of families with “trans-identifying” children.
On Sept. 28, the Sixth Circuit Court of the U.S. Court of Appeals rejected a petitioner’s challenge in a 2–1 ruling, upholding Tennessee’s ban on transgender treatment for children.
In July, a panel of judges on the Sixth Circuit Court of the U.S. Court of Appeals lifted an order that blocked part of the ban and allowed it to take effect.
The DOJ’s brief argues that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit made an error in September by deeming the Tennessee and Kentucky bans likely constitutional. They argue that these bans should be subject to heightened scrutiny and that they fail this stricter standard.
“The Sixth Circuit did not suggest that laws like SB1 could survive heightened scrutiny. Instead, it applied only the deferential rational-basis standard because it held that some laws that draw sex-based lines do not trigger heightened scrutiny—and that laws discriminating based on transgender status never warrant heightened review,” the DOJ lawyers wrote.
“Those holdings are wrong, and they create or deepen circuit conflicts on the proper application of the Equal Protection Clause to laws targeting transgender individuals, both in the specific context of bans on gender-affirming care and more broadly.”
The DOJ also requested that the Supreme Court consider all three cases together and address the equal protection issue.
However, the DOJ’s stance differs from that of the other petitioners, who have asked the Supreme Court to evaluate whether the bans infringe on the constitutional due process rights of parents to guide their children’s upbringing.
In a footnote, the DOJ lawyers asserted that, in the government’s view, the due process question “does not warrant this Court’s review.”
“[B]ecause that aspect of the Sixth Circuit’s decision does not conflict with any decision of another court of appeals and does not otherwise satisfy this Court’s traditional certiorari standards,” they wrote. “Accordingly, the Court should grant the petitions limited to the equal-protection issue and consolidate the cases.”
If the justices agree to hear the case, any decision will have significant implications for the 19 states that have implemented laws limiting transgender youths’ access to transition-related care.
The DOJ emphasized in its petition that allowing these bans to take effect could result in “predictable and significant harms” for transgender adolescents in many parts of the country, including “escalating distress, anxiety, and suicidality.”
Tennessee’s legislation is part of a broader trend where multiple states are taking measures against transgender treatments for minors.
Gender transition procedures pose serious health risks, from mental health issues to glandular misfunction, heart complications, and even death.
In May, lawmakers demanded answers after two youths participating in a transgender hormone study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, took their own lives. In addition, 11 participants reported having suicidal thoughts.
Those who live by their swords shall die by their swords and those families who cut off their swords just end up being treated like innocent unprotected Jewish babies in hotbed Hamas neigborhoods, that end up in microwave ovens or blood soaked cribs, or if lucky, get kidnapped and used as terrorist currency to trade the safety of “slice and dice” Jihadists who act more like the Frankensteinian slice and dice liberal concentration “Vasa Engle” doctors and the Collective Concentration Camp leadership directing type parents who hire them to treat their kid’s non-existent sexual problems. If Joe, as President, is expected to lead by example and actually practice what he preaches, I suggest his family remove all Biden phallic swords from young Biden boys before the age of puberty, to first save the DNA deterioration of the now democrat debilitated collective American gene pool, and secondly save the innocence of the many American young women, and the morality of the foreign floosies they have abused and led astray, in many cases illegally hired for services that render this crime family morally irrelevant to comment on anything sexual or sacred. By definition, criminals are not entitled to equal protection of the law, just well-earned incarceration to separate them from harming the just and the innocent whom Biden’s justice department reflects nothing of and refuses to protect.
WHy is it that the left, for years, have pushed to RAISE the age, for everything adults do (guns, smoking, driving, drinking and such) due to “They are not wise enough etc”.. BUT push that they ARE WISE enough when it comes to permanent mutilation for their bodies…
Remember what Sol. Whiter said, to paraphrase him, said once “… That a Attorney General could get a Jury to Indict A Ham Sandwich if thats what he wantef.”
Note how many things that children under the age of 18 years old are restricted from doing. Why?
Because a child speaks like a child, a child thinks like a child, reasons like a child and a child acts like a child. Without the mental capacity of an adult.
It is child abuse to give gender altering drugs and procedures to a child even before they understand what gender is.
Children only know what they have been taught and the disgraceful woke, LGBTQ+ Democrats want to teach 5 year old children sexual perversions and this is child abuse.
AND note, this is coming from the same party, who is also pushing to LOWER the voting age..
1 Corinthians 13:11
“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
Obviously, these Democrat Party purveyors of puerile genital slice and dice need to grow up and get real. To these children-in-adult bodies,,,they want the real children to become and remain their free candy they can sexually feed upon, whose confusing physical alterations now get medically paid for by the American Taxpayer. Gay Obama’s whole “Affordable???” Care act was getting people who live lean and clean to pay for those who live fat and dirty. Guys like Hunter get all the pleasure, WE THE PEOPLE get all the pain to pay for the STDs and Aids cures. So much for American SELF-governing where people who screw up get to pay the piper, not the ones that toe the line and live to succeed in life.
In part by the byden demanding these procedures on young children is doing what the un wants and that is reducing the population in large numbers. Another reason is the fact that byden is and has been flooding the country with massive numbers of illegals and hecwants to get rid of the citizens that are here. Yeah the (DEMON)crats want only to destroy everything they can including the people and what better way to harm the people than to make them dismember themselves.
evil is rampant in washington on both sides of the isle.
as a matter of fact evil is rampant all over the world
we have been infiltrated by hoards of illegals and bet your last dollar a terrorist attack in country is immenent because
biden and odumbo funded irans terrorist proxy wars.
we have let waaaayyy to many muslims into our country who do not conform to our way of life and western laws.
and the mulsim has no business at all in our government at any level.
AND You cam bet when it DOES happen, Biden and co will say “DO NOT DEMONIZE all illegals because of this..” or the like.
This might be an opportunity. The sane evidence based papers all agree that, with regard to children, “affirming care” lacks solid evidence to regard it as a form of treatment at all.
In fact, most regard it as experimental, non-therapeutic, experimentation on children. The vast majority of bio-ethicists regard experimentation on children to be unethical in most cases. Non-therapeutic experimentation might be regarded as ethical by some ethicists, but they a marginal whackos pushing extreme ideas.
Here, the defendants might have the opportunity to introduce voluminous records demonstrating how and why this is both ineffective and unethical. To pull the curtain back.
These people are simply sick. This is child abuse – pure and simple.