On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in this term's marquee case, United States v. Skrmetti.
The case, out of Tennessee, nominally involves a state law banning minors' use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for purposes of so-called gender-affirming care – which, stripped of all euphemism, means genital mutilation and chemical castration. And the justices will indeed have to resolve the narrow legal question before them in this case: namely, whether or not Tennessee's common-sense protection of vulnerable youth from the predations of the billion-dollar transgender industry offends the 14th Amendment's injunction that no state "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
The straightforward legal answer is that it plainly does not. Fatuous arguments this week from the U.S. solicitor general and American Civil Liberties Union advocate aside, one simply cannot divorce the issue of medical treatment from the issue of medical purpose. Consider the case of fentanyl. There are legitimate purposes for small amounts of fentanyl, which can be used as a painkiller in a contained hospital setting. There are also myriad illegitimate purposes for fentanyl, as anyone remotely familiar with America's depressing drug-overdose crisis can sadly attest. So too can a reasonable person distinguish between testosterone therapy for an adolescent boy with delayed puberty, on the one hand, and testosterone therapy for an adolescent girl with gender dysphoria, on the other hand.
