Excerpt from Stateline:
“The justices’ reasoning in the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding Tennessee’s ban on youth gender-affirming care could have much broader implications, perhaps opening the door to state restrictions on health care for other groups of people, experts say.
The ruling could give states leeway to make rules on any other sex-related treatment — potentially affecting people of all genders, according to legal and health policy scholars.
In U.S. v. Skrmetti, three families and a physician argued that a Tennessee law barring the use of puberty blockers and hormone treatments for transgender minors violates the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause. They asserted that the law discriminates on the basis of sex, since the state allows the use of similar treatments for cisgender boys and girls with other medical conditions.
The court weighed the argument of whether the law treats people differently, subject to what is called heightened scrutiny. Under this higher level of judicial review, the state must identify an important objective for a law and demonstrate how it helps accomplish that goal.
The ruling marks “a deeply concerning direction,” said Kellan Baker, executive director of the Institute for Health Research and Policy at Whitman-Walker, an LGBTQ+ health nonprofit in the Washington, D.C., area.
“At any time and for any reason, a state legislature could decide that any medical indication is suddenly not politically palatable and move to ban access to any type of care that legislature wants to target,” Baker said.
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