In Bitter Dissent, Sotomayor Says Supreme Court 'Abandons' Transgender Kids

The Supreme Court justice accused her colleagues of abandoning children "to political whims."

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a bitter dissent Wednesday, reading it aloud from the bench after the Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law that bans gender-affirming care for minors on a 6-3 vote.

“By retreating from meaningful judicial review exactly where it matters most, the Court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims. In sadness, I dissent,” said Sotomayor.

“Transgender adolescents’ access to hormones and puberty blockers (known as gender-affirming care) is not a matter of mere cosmetic preference. To the contrary, access to care can be a question of life or death.”

Transgender people already have to contend with structural discrimination, noted Sotomayor, because they’re extremely underrepresented in government and therefore unable to use political power to ward off discriminatory treatment.

The justice reserved particular scrutiny, however, for a provision of Tennessee’s law, known as SB 1, that hypocritically permits doctors to prescribe gender-affirming care to children to align their physical appearance with their sex assigned at birth ― but not the opposite.