Supreme Court upholds ban on child butchery

The US Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld Tennessee’s ban on the medical mutilation of children, or what gender activists call “gender-affirming care.”

Tennessee is one of 26 states that have laws against medical mutilation procedures for minors, which include puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and genital surgeries. These interventions are known to cause permanent castration, sterility, and other serious damage in children. In 2023, Tennessee’s legislature passed SB1, a law prohibiting medical providers from giving such medical interventions to children. The Biden DOJ collaborated with the ACLU to sue Tennessee, alleging that the law discriminates based on sex despite its equal application to males and females.

In a 6-3 decision on Wednesday, Supreme Court justices ruled in favor of Tennessee in United States v. Skrmetti. The three liberal justices—Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—dissented. 

Legacy media have mourned the decision as a “devastating loss” while most Americans cheer the ruling as a major victory. Polls have found that 72% of American voters think it should be illegal to perform medical mutilation procedures on children under 18. That number includes 86% of Republicans and 58% of Democrats.

Justice Thomas rips gender pseudoscience

In his opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas took particular aim at the “science” that gender activists have used to justify medical mutilation for minors. The Biden administration, medical associations, courts, and NGOs cite guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) to support “gender-affirming” procedures. WPATH is considered “the leading association of medical professionals treating transgender individuals.” Last year, it was revealed that the WPATH’s guidance is politically driven, not science-based. The organization was caught tailoring its “scientific guidance” to the requests of Biden officials. 

“Recent revelations suggest that WPATH, long considered a standard bearer in treating pediatric gender dysphoria . . . bases its guidance on insufficient evidence and allows politics to influence its medical conclusions,” Justice Thomas wrote.

“Other ‘recent revelations’ might reinforce the conclusion that ‘WPATH’s lodestar is ideology, not science.’ For example, newly released documents suggest that WPATH tailored its Standards of Care in part to achieve legal and political objectives,” he continued, adding: “Worse, recent reporting has exposed that WPATH changed its medical guidance to accommodate external political pressure.”

Justice Thomas noted that even WPATH has admitted that evidence supporting “gender-affirming care” is lacking.

“Nevertheless, WPATH publicly represents that ‘[g]ender-affirming interventions are based on decades of clinical experience and research,’ and are ‘safe and effective’ treatments,” Thomas opined. “WPATH appears to rest this conclusion on self-referencing consensus rather than evidence-based research, which may help explain the group’s confidence in the face of concededly inadequate evidence.”

Lack of informed consent

Thomas laid bare another issue with medical mutilation procedures that many ethical doctors have emphasized: children cannot give informed consent to these interventions because they cannot possibly understand the consequences of lifelong infertility. In a leaked recording of a WPATH meeting, an endocrinologist acknowledged that “the thing you have to remember about kids is that we’re often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven’t even had biology in high school yet . . . [I]t’s always a good theory that you talk about fertility preservation with a 14 year old, but I know I’m talking to a blank wall.”

“Analogizing a teenage patient’s comprehension to that of a blank wall should raise serious concerns regarding the patient’s ability to provide informed consent,” Justice Thomas stated.

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