The Supreme Court Cruelly Condemns Transgender Kids & Teens to Suffering

As if trans children and young people didn't have enough discrimination to contend with, the right wing Supreme Court majority has thrown them into the jaws of the right wing wolves.

Photo by Emmanuel Olguín on Unsplash

The Supreme Court of the USA just told American parents in Red states that if they have a transgender child or teen, they have no right to make the best healthcare decisions for their children.

Lawmakers in 27 Republican - controlled state legislators have enacted bans on gender - affirming care for transgender youth, despite the fact that the American Academy of Pediatrics and 29 other major medical associations and world health authorities recommend this care. The Supreme Court just gave them the go ahead on June 18 to enforce those prejudicial bans.

Samantha Williams, the heartbroken mom of one of the three transgender teenagers and their families who brought the case against the Tennessee’s ban, U.S. V Skrmetti, is devastated by the ruling.

She calls out the six right wing Justices on the court for being unmoved by her “heartfelt plea” to let parents decide along with medical experts, about what treatment is best for their trans child.

“Let us do our job as parents. Let us love and care for our daughter in the best way we and our doctors know how.”. That’s what she and her husband had asked the court to do, she wrote in a brave Op Ed in the New York Times on June 19.

But all of their pleas fell on deaf ears.

Instead, the six right wing justices took a sledgehammer once again to the right to privacy and to the right of liberty for individuals to make their own decisions about their bodies. Their ruling upholding Tennessee’s ban on gender - affirming care for transgender minors will now allow apply to every state with a similar ban.

This Supreme Court erased a Constitutionally - protected right for the first time in 2022 when these same six justices robbed American women of the 50 year right to decide whether and when to have children. Now the John Roberts court has snatched the rights of another group- trans teenagers and their supportive parents - to also exercise personal liberty.

As the mother of a trans daughter - who luckily is not a minor - I can’t help but feel the pain of these parents who love their children like you and I do, all the way ‘to the moon and back again.’

It’s terrifying that the Supreme Court and Republican lawmakers have turned into world class busy bodies, no different from the morality mullahs in Iran who run around checking that every Iranian woman is covering her hair, or else!

THE AMERICAN TALIBAN RULES

Or the Taliban in Afghanistan, who have taken the rights to an education and to work outside the home, from the oppressed women of Afghanistan.

Yes, we have a whole party and their carefully - selected Supreme Court justices who are running their own morality squads - imposing their right wing religious extremist beliefs over all 340 million of us.

From the party that supposedly hates big government and any interference in individual rights, we have lawmakers and Supreme Court justices poking their noses right up into women’s uteruses to ‘protect’ fertilized eggs’ and now they’re obsessed with examining and ruling on genitals and supposedly ‘protecting young people from their parents and doctors.

Are you kidding me?

Unfortunately no. The hypocrisy when it comes to transgender minors is breathtaking.

Republicans have spent the past several years raging about “parental rights.”Parental rights” to object to their children reading any book that might expose them to ideas or people that narrow- minded parents may not approve of.

God forbid that their high school students read ‘Catcher in the Rye’ or a poem by Amanda Gorman, who composed the most inspirational verses in - ‘The Hill We Climb’- which she recited beautifully at Joe Biden’s Inauguration.

The constantly outraged right ring ‘morality’ squad has demanded parental rights to prevent their children from receiving Covid vaccines or any lifesaving vaccines at all. And the parental right to be informed if their child has confided in a teacher that they are LGBTQ or trans or has requested that the school use a name that aligns with their gender identity.

However, when a loving parent listens to a child who trusts them enough to share that they are trans and then that parent wants to help them express themselves - NOPE!

No parental rights for you. The Republican - dominated states and now the Supreme Court have stepped in to tell you and your child what you can’t do.

But hey, wasn’t it Republicans just a couple of years ago who who accused Democrats of running an intrusive“nanny” state. They’ve called paid family leave as well as unpaid leave to attend the events of their children, tax breaks to pay for child care and even the minimum wage - ‘nanny legislation’ ie government has no business legislating these things.

But who are the nosy nannies now, wanting to interfere and tell you what to do with your bodies and families? The prissy nannies today are the religious right wing extremists including the sanctimonious Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

Those two arrogant hypocrites have scolded us for condemning their ’personal’ decisions to except massive gifts - like a $267,000 luxury RV - lavish yacht vacations, free homes and college tuition from their own billionaire benefactors, while they insert their invasive rulings into our private lives.

The problem with busy body red state lawmakers is the cruelty they impose on innocent trans teens who don’t want to be forced into living with the adult sex organs of a gender they don’t identify with.

That is pure torture for them, causing painful gender dysphoria. Just imagine if you were trapped in a body that felt alien to you because it’s the opposite sex as your brain.

It’s not the least bit funny like being trapped in your mom or daughter’s bodies a la ‘Freaky Friday.’

Again, as a mom who has listened to her own trans daughter, I admit that I have a heightened awareness to the heavy depression that a trans person feels when they are unable to even look in the mirror at a body that feels like a prison to them .

But that’s where gender affirming care comes in. It covers everything from counseling by trained therapists to the provision of puberty blocker medications that delay the onset of adult gender characteristics during puberty and it also involves the prescribing of hormones for trans people over 18 to help develop characteristics of the gender that a trans person identifies with.

All this is done by experienced physicians and with the approval of a trans teens’ parents. And from what I’ve read, puberty blockers are all reversible in the very rare occasion that a teen changes their mind. Please read more about all this yourself if you are interested, as I am not a medical expert.

BUSTING THE ‘CHILDREN BEING ‘MUTILATED’ MYTH

And here’s a critical Trump myth - buster: Sorry Donald and other right wing disinformation spreaders - but no one including schools - is doing surgery on minors under 18, to change their genders.

No parent is going to send little Johnny on the school bus one day and have them get off the bus the next day as, Jane! That’s just plain nuts! No schools and no doctors would ever do that! It’s not even physically possible.

So Fox News and other right wing rage -baiting media please just shut up about the non -existent ‘mutilations’ of children. You are lying that about made up BS to rile up your audiences and keep them tuning in for more made up ratings -pumping ‘outrages’.

Now, getting back to the repercussions of this new ruling. Despite the Constitutional guarantees that are supposed to protect every American equally under the law, the Supreme Court has decided that one special group - trans youths who account for just 300,000 or 1.4% of all American teens, 13-17 - get to have their right to healthcare decisions obliterated. Even when they make those decisions with their adult, parents.

The majority in the court writes that it has thrown the decision about access to gender-affirming care for minors back to “the people, their elected representatives and the democratic process”.

As if, Supreme Court.

Come on, the reality is that Republican - dominated states have come to be that way through aggressive gerrymandering and voter suppression which ensures that “the people” don’t get to democratically resolve whether trans teens and their parents can decide for themselves about their need for care.

The result is that real kids are punished as Tennessee plaintiff mom Samantha Williams pointed out in her NYTimes Op Ed.

Her daughter, L.W. came out just before she turned 14 and four years later she is “thriving, healthy and happy after pursuing evidence- based gender- affirming care.”

“But the very care that is improving her life became a primary political target of the Republican supermajority in our home state, Tennessee. When the legislature banned my daughter’s care in 2023. we fought back by suing the state.

Today, we found out that we lost that case when the Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, to uphold Tennessees’s ban on such care. I am beside myself.”

Of course she is. The Supreme Court is hurting her daughter.

And for what reason?

How does it affect the Court and Republican state lawmakers if loving parents provide the healthcare - approved by 30 respected medical associations - that allows their children to live the full lives in the gender-aligned bodies that they are comfortable with?

It only hurts the Republicans and Donald Trump, if they don’t have a tiny, defenseless minority that they can’t scapegoat - to distract voters from demanding better wages, affordable housing and other government support which Republicans don’t want to provide.

PARENTS LOVE THEIR TRANS KIDS -DOING ALL TO PROTECT THEM

I have interviewed multiple parents of trans kids living in Red states for stories I’ve written over the years. Like Samantha Williams and the plaintiffs of the two other trans minors in U.S. V Skrmetti, they have done everything they can to protect their children from the “capricious, narrow-minded attacks of “ their own state governments.

Their situation has only been made more emotionally and financially dire by the court’s ruling. They will have to travel long distances regularly or move to Blue states so their children can still receive the healthcare they need.

Put yourself in their shoes. This is no different from you potentially having to travel or move to another city or state for your child to receive vital treatment for cancer. You would do that. In both cases, the care is life saving.

“Data indicate that 82% of transgender individuals have considered killing themselves and 40% have attempted suicide, with suicidality highest among transgender youth”, reports the National Library of Medicine.

Would you risk leaving your depressed kid untreated if they pleaded for care?

Especially when they live in a hostile environment where our current president has made it his mission to marginalize trans people of every age, banning them from military service, from participating in school sports, from using bathrooms aligned with their gender identity and has prevented them from obtaining passports under their new names and identities.

Trump has even gone so far as to declare in an Executive Order that in the U.S. there are only two biological sexes from birth: "These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality," the order states.”

The Trumplicans aren’t interested even in the scientific ridiculousness of that statement when 0.2% to 0.5% or 1 in 1,000 - 4,000 babies are born with ambiguous genitalia, that don’t align with typically male or female external genitals.

Sorry, Tennessee and other Red state lawmakers, but nature just doesn’t support your culture war issue over rigid biological genders.

Nature does it’s own thing and has all kinds of variations going on. Just ask Charles Darwin.

In any case, as liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor empathetically pointed out: in her emphatic dissent “the court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims.”

I have to join her and I hope you do too, in agreeing with ararely emotional final line for a Supreme Court justice : “In sadness, I dissent.”