--- title: Supreme Court Seems Likely to Uphold Tennessee’s Ban on Medical Treatments for Transgender Minors | TIME description: When the Supreme Court hears U.S. v. Skrmetti on Dec. 4, trans youth and LGBTQ+ advocates across the country will be watching with bated breath. The case, which centers on a Tennessee law, will allow the U.S. Supreme Court Justices to decide whether gender-affirming-care bans for minors are unconstitutional under the basis of sex discrimination. canonical: https://time.com/video/k0jo3eGS/ og:title: Supreme Court Seems Likely to Uphold Tennessee’s Ban on Medical Treatments for Transgender Minors og:description: When the Supreme Court hears U.S. v. Skrmetti on Dec. 4, trans youth and LGBTQ+ advocates across the country will be watching with bated breath. The case, which centers on a Tennessee law, will allow the U.S. Supreme Court Justices to decide whether gender-affirming-care bans for minors are unconstitutional under the basis of sex discrimination. og:url: https://time.com/video/k0jo3eGS/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/k0jo3eGS/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Supreme Court Seems Likely to Uphold Tennessee’s Ban on Medical Treatments for Transgender Minors twitter:description: When the Supreme Court hears U.S. v. Skrmetti on Dec. 4, trans youth and LGBTQ+ advocates across the country will be watching with bated breath. The case, which centers on a Tennessee law, will allow the U.S. Supreme Court Justices to decide whether gender-affirming-care bans for minors are unconstitutional under the basis of sex discrimination. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/k0jo3eGS/poster.jpg?width=720 --- * Politics # Supreme Court Seems Likely to Uphold Tennessee’s Ban on Medical Treatments for Transgender Minors > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Subscription: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME is a general-interest news organization founded in 1923, reporting on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world. A TIME subscription provides full access to that journalism in print and digital, from $20 a year, and can be cancelled at any time. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Supreme Court Seems Likely to Uphold Tennessee’s Ban on Medical Treatments for Transgender Minors [Watch (HLS stream): Supreme Court Seems Likely to Uphold Tennessee’s Ban on Medical Treatments for Transgender Minors](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/k0jo3eGS.m3u8) (3:17)  _Published 2024-12-05. When the Supreme Court hears U.S. v. Skrmetti on Dec. 4, trans youth and LGBTQ+ advocates across the country will be watching with bated breath. The case, which centers on a Tennessee law, will allow the U.S. Supreme Court Justices to decide whether gender-affirming-care bans for minors are unconstitutional under the basis of sex discrimination._ --- Dec 5, 2024 8:20 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Supreme Court Appears Likely to Uphold State Bans on Transgender Athletes ](/video/DrQS140E/) ### Supreme Court Appears Likely to Uphold State Bans on Transgender Athletes [Supreme Court Upholds Gender-Affirming-Care Ban. Here’s What to Know](/video/sD2JhbKp/) ### Supreme Court Upholds Gender-Affirming-Care Ban. Here’s What to Know [Supreme Court Upholds Obamacare Tax Subsidies](/video/N52WtovW/) ### Supreme Court Upholds Obamacare Tax Subsidies --- ## Transcript We think the court here just needs to recognize the sex based classification in this statute and send the case back. If the court wants to go ahead and look at what's happening in Europe, the UK has not categorically banned this care. Sweden, Finland, and Norway, the other jurisdictions that my friends point to have not banned this care, and I think that's because of the recognition that this care can provide critical, sometimes life saving benefits for individuals with severe gender dysphoria. You prevail here on the standard of review, what would that mean for women's and girls sports in particular? Would transgender athletes have a constitutional right, as you see it to play in women's and girls sports if it's evolving like that and changing and England's pulling back, and Sweden's pulling back, it strikes me as, pretty heavy yellow light, if not red light, for this court to come in the nine of us and constitutionalize the whole area when the rest of the world or at least the people countries that have been at the forefront of this are you know, pumping the brakes on this kind of treatment because of concerns about the risk. In loving, those same kinds of scientific arguments were made. So I'm reading here where the court says the argument is that if the Equal Protection Clause does not outlaw miscegenation statutes because of their reliance on racial classifications, the question of constitutionality would thus become whether there was any rational basis for a state to treat interracial marriages differently from other marriages. On this question, the state argues the scientific evidence is substantially in doubt. And consequently, the court should defer to the wisdom of the state legislature in adopting its policy of discouraging interracial marriages. My understanding is that the Constitution leaves that question to the people's representatives rather than to nine people uh, none of whom is a doctor. You cannot get the puberty blockers if you're going to use them to transition. That is not a sex based line, that is a purpose based line. So our fundamental point here is not that you can discriminate against both sexes in equal degree. Our fundamental point is there is no sex based line here, and the only way they get to a sex based line is by equating fundamentally different treatments that defy medical reality and defy how the statute itself sets out what is a treatment. You're 1% of the population or less. Very hard to see how the democratic process is going to protect you. Well, Your Honor, Blacks were a much larger part of the population, and it didn't protect them. It didn't protect women for whole centuries. Are there individuals who are born male, assigned male at birth, who at one point, identify as female, but then later come to identify as male. And likewise, for individuals who are assigned female at birth, at some point, identify as female I'm sorry, identify as male, but later come to identify as female. Are there not such people? There are such people. I agree with that just. So it's not an immutable characteristic, is it? ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Supreme Court Seems Likely to Uphold Tennessee’s Ban on Medical Treatments for Transgender Minors","description":"When the Supreme Court hears U.S. v. 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