NY Times: “Members of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed ready on Wednesday to uphold a Tennessee law denying transition care to transgender youth, with some of them saying that judgments about contested scientific evidence should be made by legislatures rather than judges.
“The Constitution leaves that question to the people’s representatives, rather than to nine people, none of whom is a doctor,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson responded that leaving the question to the states was an alarming abdication of responsibility. “I’m suddenly quite worried,” she said.
The Tennessee law prohibits medical providers from prescribing puberty-delaying medication, providing hormone therapy or performing surgery to treat what the law called “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.” But the law allows those same treatments for “a congenital defect, precocious puberty, disease or physical injury.””