The Supreme Court issued its highly anticipated decision in United States v. Skrmetti, which focused on the constitutionality of Tennessee’s ban on “gender-affirming care” for minors.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, which was released on June 18 and denied that Tennessee had engaged in a form of sex-based discrimination that warranted greater scrutiny from courts. The decision denied the Biden administration’s request to send the case back to the appeals court for further review of whether the law violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
It was a 6–3 decision with the three liberal justices dissenting. Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned the main dissent, which said that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit should have applied something known as “heightened scrutiny” to Tennessee’s law.
Instead, the Sixth Circuit, applied a lower standard known as rational basis, which generally requires state policies have a rational relation to the state’s interests. Roberts said that rational basis was not only the right standard but that Tennessee’s law satisfied that standard.
Justice Elena Kagan joined most of the dissent penned by Sotomayor but refrained from supporting a concluding portion. Kagan said that she agreed with her liberal colleagues that the law should be sent back to the appeals court for greater scrutiny, but didn’t want to take a position on how the appeals court should rule.
Justice Samuel Alito also slightly differed from the majority; specifically on the way they applied one of the court’s earlier decisions from 2020. That case, known as Bostock v. Clayton County, was something the dissent cited in claiming that Tennessee engaged in a form of sex-based discrimination under the 14th Amendment.
In Bostock, a majority of the court said that employers violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act when they fire an “individual merely for being gay or transgender.” In a line repeated by Sotomayor and lower court judges, Justice Neil Gorsuch said in his majority opinion that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”
Questions remain as to how Skrmetti will impact various other gender-related cases, such as President Donald Trump’s ban on troops with gender dysphoria. Sotomayor alleged in her dissent that the court had done “irrevocable damage to the Equal Protection Clause and invites legislatures to engage in discrimination by hiding blatant sex classifications in plain sight.”
Roberts’s majority opinion declined to say whether Bostock could be applied to alleged violations of the equal protection clause or other areas outside of Title VII. Roberts said that Bostock’s reasoning wouldn’t apply to Tennessee’s law, which primarily is about classifying people according to their age.
Multiple justices—Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, and Clarence Thomas—said they didn’t think that “transgender status” should be considered a “suspect class,” which is a legal term for a group of people who, if targeted, prompt courts to review laws more carefully. Barrett and Alito listed multiple reasons for this—among them that “transgender status” did not contain the same type of immutable characteristics as race and sex.
—Sam Dorman
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—Stacy Robinson
