The Supreme Court Just Teed Up a Major Ruling on Transgender Athletes
“This case leads to the weight of fierce scientific and political debates on the security, efficiency and convenience of medical treatments in an evolving field,” he wrote. “The voices of these debates raise sincere concerns; The implications for all are deep. The equal protection clause does not solve these disagreements. ”
As I noted last month, Roberts’ decision is not exactly convincing: the law of Tennessee was written to deny the medical treatments that transgender people use to transmit and assert their gender identities. The decision seemed to be more a product of the internal cracks of the conservative wing on the rights of transgender than anything else. Only three of the conservative members of the Court – Les Ront de Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Amy CONEY BARRETT – said concordant opinions that they have rejected a new suspicious classification for transgender Americans.
Barrett and Alito, in separate opinions, argued that “transgender status” did not respond to the traditional court test to recognize a suspicious class. (Thomas joined the opinion of Barrett.) They argued that it was not an “immutable characteristic” because it was not identifiable at birth, that its members had not been historically excluded from the democratic process or were confronted with the discrimination of jure, and that it was not a “discreet group” since, according to the words of Barrett, “the category of transgender individuals is” amorphous ”.
However, it is not clear if this point of view commands a majority of votes on the Supreme Court. Roberts, Gorsuch and judge Brett Kavanaugh has implicitly refused to join the opinions of other preservatives SkrmettiEither because they did not agree with them or because they found them useless to resolve the case. The three liberal judges of the Court, on the other hand, seem to be ready to extend the protections of the fourteenth amendment to transgender Americans as a group – and Roberts et al. I did not join them either.
