Trans Group: SCOTUS Decision to Uphold Ban on Sex-Change Procedures for Tennessee Minors a ‘Dangerous Setback’
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) — a group that promotes sex change drugs and surgeries for minors — lamented the Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday upholding Tennessee’s law banning those experimental practices for minors.
WPATH, in a joint statement with United States Professional Association for Transgender Health (USPATH), simultaneously claimed that sex-mutilating drugs and surgeries for minors are “evidenced-based,” while also insisting that laws protecting minors from such practices will “make it much more difficult to create an evidence base.”
“Today’s Supreme Court ruling is a dangerous setback for transgender health and human rights in the United States. This decision will effectively allow states to ban evidence-based gender-affirming healthcare for thousands of transgender and gender diverse youth and their families,” the organization claimed in a statement. “Furthermore, it will make it much more difficult to create an evidence base to support access to healthcare of this kind.”
WPATH went on to claim that sex-confused young are “harmed whenever the government comes in between them and the professional experts trained to provide them this care.”
“Let us be clear – healthcare bans of any kind are rooted in stigma, misinformation, and fear and this one comes at the expense of the youth in need of this care,” the organization claimed.”
WPATH is considered the leading “transgender” healthcare organization, with its guidance for gender dysphoric individuals being widely used in American, British, and Canadian hospitals. The group also influences health insurance policies and other health organizations such as the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
In September 2022, the organization removed age requirements from its guidance for what is essentially chemical castration and genital mutilation.
Such procedures are masqueraded as “gender-affirming care” by advocates, but are quite grotesque in nature, including double mastectomies, female and male genital mutilation and removal, facial feminization and masculinization, hormone treatments and puberty blockers that can cause chemical sterilization, and social transitioning (e.g. using “preferred” pronouns and names). The side effects of sex change drugs and procedures can be severe, including irreversible mutilation and infertility.
In 2023, passed Senate Bill 1, which restricts sex change drugs and surgeries for minors “for the purpose of enabling a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” Tennessee’s law carries an enforcement mechanism and additionally establishes a private right of action, enabling an injured minor or non-consenting parent of that minor to sue the doctor who violated the law.
Plaintiffs, which included several transgender-identifying minors, their parents, and a doctor, quickly filed a pre-enforcement claim seeking to block the law. A district court blocked part of the law banning sex change drugs for minors but allowed the ban on surgeries to stand. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed that order, allowing the full law to stand. The Supreme Court heard the case in December 2024 and ultimately held up the Sixth Circuit’s ruling.
The high court ruled 6-3, with liberal-leaning justices dissenting, that Senate Bill 1 does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in the U.S. Constitution, contrary to the claims of transgender activists who sued the state.
The court rejected claims brought by plaintiffs that Tennessee’s law discriminates on the basis of sex. Instead, the court countered that the state’s law bars sex change drugs and procedures for individuals based on their status as a minor and bars the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for the purpose of treating gender dysphoria.
The Supreme Court also found that Tennessee had enough rational basis to ban such drugs and surgeries for minors, pointing to state’s findings of potentially severe side effects, lack of quality evidence and long-term studies, the experimental nature of the so-called treatments, and European countries that pushed similar practices reversing course over concerns about long-term impacts. The court also acknowledged the state’s argument that minors do not have the maturity to fully understand the potentially life-altering consequences of sex change drugs and surgeries, meaning they cannot reasonably consent.
The ruling does ban sex changes for minors nationwide but allows states to set their own laws, essentially killing legal challenges to other red state laws protecting children from mutilating drugs and surgeries, such as in Idaho.
Conservative-leaning Justice Clarence Thomas, in his own concurring opinion, specifically called out WPATH in a scorching rebuke over several pages, accusing the organization of “bas[ing] its guidance on insufficient evidence and allow[ing] politics to influence its medical conclusions.”
Thomas pointed to several public WPATH scandals, including a leaked internal meeting in which an endocrinologist admitted that discussing long-term potential for infertility with a 14-year-old is like “talking to a blank wall;” as well as a pressure campaign from the Biden administration to remove age requirements for sex change surgeries.
“This case carries a simple lesson: In politically contentious debates over matters shrouded in scientific uncertainty, courts should not assume that self-described experts are correct. Deference to legislatures, not experts, is particularly critical here. Many prominent medical professionals have declared a consensus around the efficacy of treating children’s gender dysphoria with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions, despite mounting evidence to the contrary,” Thomas wrote.
“They have dismissed grave problems undercutting the assumption that young children can consent to irreversible treatments that may deprive them of their ability to eventually produce children of their own. They have built their medical determinations on concededly weak evidence. And, they have surreptitiously compromised their medical recommendations to achieve political ends,” he continued, ultimately concluding that “sovereign prerogative does not bow to ‘major medical organizations.”‘
WPATH, while favored by the Biden administration, has been cast out by the current Trump administration. In January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order called “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” in which he tossed WPATH guidance into the dustbin, deeming it “junk science.”
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.
