The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is appealing to the Supreme Court after a lower court ruling upheld Tennessee’s ban on child sex change surgeries.
According to the ACLU’s Petition for a Writ of Certiorari, which asks the nation’s highest court to review the case, there are two questions of law.
They are:
1. Whether Tennessee’s SB1, which categorically bans gender-affirming healthcare for transgender adolescents, triggers heightened scrutiny and likely violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
2. Whether Tennessee’s SB1 likely violates the fundamental right of parents to make decisions concerning the medical care of their children guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.
In March, the General Assembly passed SB001, banning sex change surgeries for minors.
The bill, which was signed into law by Gov. Bill Lee (R) and took effect in July, says, “As enacted, prohibits a healthcare provider from performing on a minor or administering to a minor a medical procedure if the performance or administration of the procedure is for the purpose of enabling a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.”
According to the petition, the ACLU filed an initial injunction in April seeking to bar the law from taking effect in July, alleging that “the law violated the adolescent Petitioners’ rights to equal protection and the parent Petitioners’ substantive due process right to make decisions concerning the medical treatment of their minor children.”
That request for an injunction was granted in late June, but the state quickly appealed to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that the ACLU was “not likely to succeed on the merits of their claims.”
Now that the 6th Circuit has denied its efforts, the activist group is asking the Supreme Court to take up the case.
The petition alleges that children should be allowed sex change surgery to, in effect, cure gender dysphoria and prevent suicides.
According to the petition:
Gender-affirming medical treatment in adolescence can drastically minimize dysphoria later in life and may eliminate the need for surgery. A delay in treatment, on the other hand, can result in significant distress, including anxiety and escalating suicidality, as well as permanent physical changes from puberty that can be impossible to reverse.
A substantial body of evidence, including crosssectional and longitudinal studies, as well as decades of clinical experience, has shown that these medical interventions greatly improve the mental health of adolescents with gender dysphoria. The evidence supporting this treatment is comparable to evidence supporting other pediatric care.
However, the most thorough study ever conducted, which over 30 years tracked the mental health results of 324 post-operative transgender people in Sweden, found that the rate of suicide was actually higher after sex change surgeries.
The ACLU did not return a Thursday comment request from The Tennessee Star.
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Pete D’Abrosca is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on X / Twitter.
