The Bad Science Behind Trans Medicine Bans

The conservative movement has built its case against gender-affirming care on the authority of anachronistic, faulty clinical research.

Marjorie Taylor Greene discusses the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, which would prohibit gender-affirming care for minors, at a news conference on Capitol Hill on September 20, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

In United States v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices are poised to uphold bans on medicine for transgender minors. According to Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, who is defending his state’s ban, trans youth are not a vulnerable minority deserving of civil rights protections. Rather, they are the victims of dangerously uncertain medical practices.

Tennessee, along with twenty-five other states, allege that a rapid increase in diagnoses of gender dysphoria is pushing the nation’s children toward “experimental,” “unproven,” and “excessively risky” gender transition care, ranging from puberty-suppressing medications to surgical procedures. The court’s decision, expected in June, is likely to affirm state lawmakers’ wide latitude to regulate matters of “medical and scientific uncertainty,” a principle that the court’s right-wing bloc previously articulated in a case featuring erroneous claims about certain abortion procedures’ potential health risks. If the court is similarly convinced by this caricature of gender-affirming care, it is likely to uphold these bans as a constitutionally appropriate exercise of a state’s power over public health and safety despite their clear violation of the Constitution’s equal protection clause.

Skrmetti’s argument is bolstered by a broader conservative panic over trans medicine. According to the most paranoid versions of the argument, the vast majority of trans youth are not who they claim to be. Instead, they have been corrupted by social media algorithms and the allure of modern medicine—that is, Big Tech and Big Pharma—and the sinister, or unwitting, clinicians who treat kids’ depression and anxiety with hormones and pronouns. Summing up this sentiment, the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo has called for lawmakers to ban “gender pseudoscience” and to “put the transgender