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The Roberts Court exists to give legal cover to bigots
The majority decision in US v. Skrmetti is the latest example.
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The best way to approach the Supreme Court’s decision in US v. Skrmetti, which upheld Tennessee’s transphobic ban on gender-affirming care for minors, is to understand that the conservative majority these days begins with their desired result and then works backward.
You’d think the conservative justices would care about how to craft their arguments, particularly Chief Justice John Roberts, a person who’s exceedingly concerned about his legacy. But they don’t. It’s not laziness — lord knows these justices probably run their Federalist Society/fascists-in-training law clerks ragged tracking down material they can bend and twist and mangle in service of rolling back civil rights. It’s that they don’t care because they don’t have to. They know they have all the power.
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Think of the MAGA majority’s shoddy arguments as a flex, a reminder that five (or six) justices control your fate and can’t even be bothered to pretend that they value coherent reasoning. That’s the real legacy of the Roberts Court: a steady erosion of rights dressed up as freedom, with little care as to whether their positions are legally sound.
Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Skrmetti, a low quality mix of medical misinformation, praise for other countries that also kick trans kids in the teeth, and legal conclusions that are equal parts tortured and dishonest. None of these things is new, however. These are the usual rhetorical tricks of the Roberts Court.
Slapping a legalistic veneer on bigotry
The biggest problem for transphobes, including the conservative members of the Court, is that every major medical organization agrees that gender-affirming care for transgender minors is both safe and medically necessary.
A lengthy piece in Scientific American covers the dozens and dozens of studies showing that lack of access to gender-affirming care results in higher rates of depression, suicidal ideation, and self-harm for transgender minors. In contrast, Tennessee’s brief in Skrmetti relied in part on discredited studies.
But the Skrmetti case is the culmination of years of right-wingers ginning up a moral panic about trans youth and getting mainstream publications like The Atlantic and The New York Times to sign on. That allowed the transphobic “just asking questions” stance to be treated as if it genuinely challenged the medical consensus, which, in turn, allowed John Roberts to claim there is “ongoing debate among medical experts” about the use of hormones and puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria.
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Roberts has a different problem here, medically speaking. He concludes that Tennessee has shown there is “an ongoing debate among medical experts regarding the risks and benefits associated with administering puberty blockers and hormones to treat gender dysphoria” and that the law “responds directly to that uncertainty.” Tennessee law states that providing puberty blockers or hormones to treat gender dysphoria “can lead to the minor becoming irreversibly sterile [and] having increased risk of disease and illness,” and it was "likely that not all harmful effects associated with these types of medical procedures when performed on a minor are yet fully known, as many of these procedures, when performed on a minor for such purposes, are experimental in nature and not supported by high quality, long-term medical studies."
So, puberty blockers and hormones are magically only dangerous when prescribed for gender dysphoria, but somehow that danger disappears when the same drugs are prescribed for something else. This is, of course, nonsense. It’s a law driven by anti-trans hatred, not medical science. The fact that Roberts quotes these things approvingly as strong evidence supporting Tennessee’s law is worse than nonsense.
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