The day after and it looks like the Tennessee medical ban on children getting transgender meds and surgery will stand

The initial reports were pretty positive. After reading more about it, there is probably a 99% chance that the ban is upheld.

The arguments of the Solicitor General arguing against the ban seemed to be two-fold.

• That the ban was discriminatory against transgender children (Bostock v. Clayton County)

• That there was much scientific evidence that these treatments were medically necessary to keep children with gender dysphoria from committing suicide.

Neither of these arguments held up under scrutiny from the Justices.

The first idea was that Bostock was the overriding precedent (where it was determined that sex discrimination included Transgenderism). Even though Bostock was considered to be a fairly narrow judgement (one that Gorsuch got a lot of heat over for writing the opinion), critics of the decision correctly assumed that it would be called out for other transgender issues. This certainly was one of those examples. However, Roberts (who joined Gorsuch in that opinion) argued flat out that the issue here was not sex or gender, but rather age and use. The ban differentiates on age, and whether or not the medical options are used for physical or emotional reasons. If the person is under the age of 18 and does not have a physical reason to be given puberty blockers (for instance) then they are banned. Roberts and others on the court argued that this is not discrimination for quite obvious reasons. There seemed to be at least five who were pretty set on this reasoning.

The second idea was that this was a needed medical procedure to prevent suicide and emotional stress with the children. But it was Alito who shot this down, by citing the many recent studies that have been widely accepted almost everywhere but in liberal America, including being accepted by the World Heath Organization (WHO). At one point the Solicitor General was asked flat out if they had any study that actually showed that these procedures reduced suicide, and she had to admit that she had nothing. She was at one point offered the opportunity to withdraw or modify her argument that all of the medical studies supported their viewpoint. Not sure this argument could have gone worse for the Solicitor General.

Filed under - did they really say this:

What is creating a lot of buzz is the idiocy of two of our Supreme Court Justices. At one point Justice Sotomayer decided to compare the negative effects of puberty blockers (sterilization, stunting of growth, impotence in males) with the negative effects of aspirin. Meanwhile Justice Brown-Jackson compared the puberty blockers for transitioning to a young boy taking puberty blockers to help make his voice become lower. I get that she is not a doctor, but she doesn't appear to even understand what puberty blockers do.

These two were flat out embarrassments, but I suspect anyone trying to make the argument against the ban was going to look this way. There really wasn't much of a reasonable argument once you got away from the emotions that the left is trying to push to the forefront. Sotomayer and Brown-Jackson seemed to be simply arguing feelings rather than the law here. Not unusual for them.

At the end of the day:

Pretty much everyone from both sides expect this ban to stick. It was a chance for them to take this to the USSC and create a precedent that will no doubt be used moving forward as more and more states start passing these.