Hi and welcome back to Amicus. This is Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court. I'm Dahlia Lithwick. On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court finally issued its decision in United States

v. Scermetti. In a 6 to 3 opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts held that Tennessee's law

banning gender-affirming care for transgender minors did not violate the Constitution's

Equal Protection Clause by discriminating on the basis of sex or transgender status.

In so doing, the High Court greenlit similar laws in over 20 other states.

We are releasing this bonus episode as part of our Opinion Paloosa coverage of the intense end of the term at the High Court. And while this outcome in Scrametti

was probably not a surprise for those of us who listened in on oral arguments last fall,

it is nevertheless just an utterly devastating blow for trans rights in a political climate that

has featured an all-out assault on transgender Americans

since Donald Trump took office. Mark Joseph Stern is here to talk about the holding in this case

and how the justices voted and how they wrote. Hi there, Mark. Hi, Dahlia. Over the last couple of

years, we've witnessed a really sweeping assault on transgender rights

that, as the ACLU's Chase Strangio warned us in a conversation we had with him over a year ago,

was highly coordinated and highly centralized and well-planned, Empowered by a conservative judiciary and especially

turbocharged after the Dobbs decision, Red States started to declare sweeping new authority

to regulate, quote, experimental medicine, and they started to outlaw care for trans minors.

Tennessee is just one of those states.

Can you just remind us what the legislature enacted in this case?

Yeah, so the legislature here passed a law copied and pasted from many other states that prohibits minors from receiving the full range of gender affirming care,

as relevant here, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

So trans children cannot in the state be prescribed or provided puberty blockers for

gender dysphoria to delay puberty or cross-sex hormones to allow them to resolve for gender dysphoria to delay puberty, or cross-sex hormones to allow them to

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