The Supreme Court Takes On Transgender Care for Minors AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Daily

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Episode: The Supreme Court Takes On Transgender Care for Minors

Author: The New York Times
Duration: 00:35:16

Episode Shownotes

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard a major case on the rights of transgender children that could help uphold or dismantle dozens of laws across the country.Adam Liptak, who covers the Supreme Court for The Times, explains how the questioning played out and how the justices are likely to rule.

Guest: Adam Liptak, who covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments, for The New York Times.Background reading: The justices heard arguments on Wednesday over whether Tennessee can ban some medical treatments for transgender youth.For families of transgender children, Tennessee’s ban forces hard choices.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Summary

The Supreme Court recently deliberated a pivotal case regarding the rights of transgender minors, centering on a Tennessee law that restricts access to puberty blockers and hormone therapy. Families and a doctor challenged the law, claiming it violates the Constitution's equal protection clause by discriminating based on sex. The court's discussion highlighted the implications of the law on individual rights, potential discrimination, and the necessity of transgender care. The ruling could set a nationwide precedent, affecting similar laws and parental rights in medical decisions for transgender youth.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (The Supreme Court Takes On Transgender Care for Minors) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_03
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today.

00:00:13 Speaker_03
In history-making arguments on Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard a major case on the rights of transgender children that could help uphold or dismantle dozens of laws across the country.

00:00:27 Speaker_03
My colleague, Adam Liptak, listened in and explains how it played out and how the justices are likely to rule. It's Thursday, December 5th. Adam. Welcome back to the show.

00:00:53 Speaker_08
It's good to be here.

00:00:55 Speaker_03
Adam, this case that we're going to talk about today has that feeling of bigness that comes when the Supreme Court takes up a defining social issue of our time at the precise moment when that issue is completely front and center.

00:01:12 Speaker_08
That's right. This is the biggest case of the term and would have been regardless. But it hits the court just as we're coming off a presidential campaign in which trans rights played a central role.

00:01:26 Speaker_08
So the Supreme Court confronts an important civil rights issue at just the moment in time when it's at the peak of public scrutiny.

00:01:35 Speaker_03
Right. And not just the presidential campaign, but school boards across the country and sports leagues across the country. So tell us about this case and, Adam, how it fits into all of that.

00:01:47 Speaker_08
Well, this case, Michael, presents probably the most fraught question of all, gender transition care for people under 18.

00:01:56 Speaker_08
And the case concerns a Tennessee law that bars providing some kinds of medical care to transgender minors, to people under 18 years of age, in particular, puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgery,

00:02:13 Speaker_08
23 other states have similar laws and the Tennessee law was challenged by three families and a doctor. The Biden administration intervened on the side of the families and they say that the law violates the Constitution's equal protection clause.

00:02:31 Speaker_03
And can you just explain that argument started by these families and, as you said, picked up by the Biden administration about why this is an equal protection 14th Amendment case?

00:02:45 Speaker_08
So the equal protection clause says that some kinds of discrimination are presumptively unlawful. And the classic examples are, of course, race or gender.

00:02:56 Speaker_08
And what the families and the Biden administration say here is that this law is an example of sex discrimination. It says that certain forms of care are available to everybody except minors who are seeking gender transition care.

00:03:14 Speaker_08
And you have to take account of the sex of the child involved to know whether they're entitled to get that kind of treatment or not. So think about it this way, Michael. If you have a child assigned male at birth experiencing precocious puberty,

00:03:30 Speaker_08
meaning he's going through puberty earlier than he wants to. He can get puberty-blocking drugs. If a transgender boy doesn't want to experience puberty because it doesn't align with his gender identity, he's not entitled to the very same treatment.

00:03:46 Speaker_08
So the challengers would say that example tells you that this Tennessee law is a form of sex discrimination.

00:03:54 Speaker_03
So under the Tennessee law, the same medicines and procedures are available or not available depending on whether you are a transgender boy or girl or not, and therefore the claim being made is it's discriminating against trans boys and trans girls.

00:04:12 Speaker_03
That's the claim under the 14th Amendment.

00:04:14 Speaker_08
That's the challenger's argument. The state will come back and say, no, we're not drawing distinctions based on transgender status. We're drawing distinctions based on the medical procedure. These are different medical procedures, they would say.

00:04:28 Speaker_08
And the reason why this matters is that the Supreme Court has said that if it is sex discrimination, the law is subject to a very demanding form of judicial scrutiny. Lawyers call it heightened scrutiny.

00:04:42 Speaker_08
And what it means is that a state has to prove that it has a good reason for the law and that the restriction advances that reason. And that's a difficult hurdle to overcome. Got it.

00:04:55 Speaker_03
And just to be very clear, because I think this might escape people's understanding, the government's legal argument here is not about whether this Tennessee law, and I guess laws like it, violate the rights of trans people as trans people, but instead about whether this law is a form of sex discrimination, which is different.

00:05:18 Speaker_08
Right, and that's kind of a consequence of necessary litigation strategy.

00:05:25 Speaker_08
Almost surely the challengers would prefer to make the more straightforward argument that this is discrimination based on gender identity, this is discrimination based on transgender status, and not have this kind of intermediate workaround about sex discrimination.

00:05:40 Speaker_08
But sex discrimination, the court has ruled, is subject to heightened scrutiny.

00:05:45 Speaker_08
And transgender status, they have never said is subject to heightened scrutiny, and almost any reason will do for a state to discriminate against transgender people if it's not sex discrimination.

00:05:59 Speaker_08
So while the transgender discrimination idea is in the case as a backup argument,

00:06:05 Speaker_08
Most of the chips of the challengers are put on the sex discrimination argument, because that's the one where we know heightened scrutiny kicks in if the court agrees it's sex discrimination.

00:06:18 Speaker_03
Okay, got it. So Adam, take us into the courtroom for these arguments from the federal government and the state of Tennessee.

00:06:25 Speaker_09
We'll hear argument this morning in case 23477, United States versus Scrimeti. General Krelager?

00:06:33 Speaker_01
Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court.

00:06:37 Speaker_08
So the case, United States against Scrimeti, starts with the Solicitor General of the United States, Elizabeth Prelogger, the top appellate lawyer in the Justice Department representing the Biden administration.

00:06:49 Speaker_01
SB-1 bans the care outright, no matter how critical it is for an individual patient. And that approach is a stark departure from the state's regulation of pediatric care in all other contexts.

00:07:01 Speaker_01
SB-1 leaves the same medications and many others entirely unrestricted when used for any other purpose, even when those uses present similar risks.

00:07:10 Speaker_08
telling the justices that whatever else you can say, a law that is this categorical and that prohibits gender transition care for all minors, whatever their parents say, whatever their doctors say, whatever their personal situation is, is deeply problematic.

00:07:31 Speaker_08
and that the court should apply heightened scrutiny because this is plainly a law that draws distinctions based on sex.

00:07:41 Speaker_01
Someone assigned female at birth can't receive medication to live as a male, but someone assigned male can. If you change the individual's sex, it changes the result.

00:07:52 Speaker_01
That's a facial sex classification, full stop, and a law like that can't stand on bare rationality.

00:07:59 Speaker_03
And so what strikes you as the justices inevitably begin their questioning?

00:08:05 Speaker_08
Well, one major theme that runs through the conservative justices, and particularly the more moderate, by the standards of this court, conservative justices, I'm thinking of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, sort of in the middle of the court.

00:08:20 Speaker_10
And, you know, we might think that we're, you know, we can do just as good a job with respect to the evidence here as, you know, Tennessee or anybody else. They take the view that This is above our pay grade.

00:08:35 Speaker_10
But my understanding is that the Constitution leaves that question to the people's representatives rather than to nine people, none of whom is a doctor.

00:08:45 Speaker_08
That we can't make decisions about medical practices, that we're just nine people, we're not medical doctors.

00:08:54 Speaker_08
And it's a little reminiscent, Michael, of the opinion in Dobbs, which said, we're going to send this back to the States, you can have abortion, you can not have abortion.

00:09:03 Speaker_12
Justice Kavanaugh? It seems to me that, you know, if the Constitution doesn't take sides, if they're strong, forceful, scientific policy arguments on both sides in a situation like this, why isn't it best to leave it to the democratic process?

00:09:19 Speaker_08
Similarly, Justice Kavanaugh says You know, some states may be fine with these procedures, others not. We take no point of view on that. The Constitution takes no point of view on that. And we're not even capable of making these judgments.

00:09:35 Speaker_03
And how does the government's top lawyer, the Solicitor General, respond to that?

00:09:39 Speaker_08
She says they're kind of leapfrogging the question before them.

00:09:43 Speaker_01
But when you look at how this law actually operates, what it is doing is denying individual plaintiffs the ability to access medications on the basis of their sex.

00:09:53 Speaker_08
The question before them is simply, is it sex discrimination? If so, does a demanding form of judicial scrutiny apply?

00:10:00 Speaker_08
And only then, once you determine that question, which is the only question she really has before the justices, do you get into this area of, do we know enough? What's the right answer? Is it good policy? Is it good law?

00:10:13 Speaker_01
If you are concerned, Justice Kavanaugh, about maybe restricting the ability of states to take a close look at these issues, I think the court could write a very narrow opinion in this case that when you prohibit conduct that's inconsistent with sex, that is a sex-based line, so you do have to apply... She's focused on what is a fairly modest ask.

00:10:33 Speaker_08
which is to say, what's the right way to analyze the question? Do you analyze it as sex discrimination giving rise to heightened scrutiny? And then you get into all the other stuff the justices are eager to talk about.

00:10:45 Speaker_03
Right. But as narrow as she wants to keep this set of oral arguments, and I was watching them alongside you, Adam, the justices keep finding ways to go bigger and bigger in their questions.

00:10:59 Speaker_08
Yeah, it's a wide-ranging argument, and all kinds of things pop up.

00:11:03 Speaker_12
Justice Kavanaugh, who coaches a girls' basketball team,

00:11:16 Speaker_08
was very interested in the impact of a potential ruling on transgender participation in sports.

00:11:23 Speaker_12
Would transgender athletes have a constitutional right, as you see it, to play in women's and girls' sports, basketball, swimming, volleyball, track, etc., notwithstanding... And it wasn't just the conservative justices who seemed to want to expand the scope of their questioning beyond that narrow legal question.

00:11:43 Speaker_06
Some children suffer incredibly with gender dysphoria, don't they?

00:11:49 Speaker_01
Yes, it's a very serious medical condition.

00:11:51 Speaker_06
Some attempt suicide?

00:11:53 Speaker_01
Yes, the rates of suicide are striking.

00:11:57 Speaker_08
Justice Sotomayor said that transgender minors suffering from gender dysphoria, the disconnect between sex assigned at birth and gender identity, can go through very rough times, including potential suicide.

00:12:14 Speaker_06
One of the petitioners in this case described throwing up every day. going almost mute because of their inability to speak in a voice that they could live with. These are physically challenging situations as well, too.

00:12:33 Speaker_08
So that this is an urgent situation, she says. that needs to be addressed and indicated that the Tennessee law gets in the way of what can be life-saving care.

00:12:44 Speaker_11
On the other side of the balance... The restriction that I mentioned was imposed by the British government some months ago. It was reaffirmed

00:12:53 Speaker_08
Justice Alito kind of surveyed the world and said that much of Europe has grown cautious about some forms of transgender care, to which the Solicitor General responded,

00:13:07 Speaker_01
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.

00:13:18 Speaker_01
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.

00:13:26 Speaker_08
that it's true that there have been adjustments in the UK, in Sweden, but none of them have a categorical rule like the one in Tennessee forbidding transgender care as such.

00:13:40 Speaker_08
So at this point, the argument and the justices are sort of all over the map, quite literally.

00:13:47 Speaker_08
Trans kids in sports, laws in Europe, you know, all very important stuff, but really beyond the very specific question of does this law discriminate on the basis of sex?

00:13:59 Speaker_14
I guess. I think there might be some confusion a little bit. At least I'm confused because there's so many lines that this statute could draw.

00:14:09 Speaker_08
And then there was a striking moment when Justice Katonji Brown Jackson says, wait a second, we have a job here. It's not to decide the risks or benefits of the policies that justify the law.

00:14:21 Speaker_08
It's our job under the Constitution to decide, at least in the first instance, whether the law triggers the Equal Protection Clause.

00:14:30 Speaker_14
And the question for equal protection purposes is, if you're right that there is a sex-based line being drawn, then to the extent the plaintiffs are implicated by that line, don't we have to apply heightened scrutiny in evaluating their claims?

00:14:46 Speaker_01
Yes, that's exactly right.

00:14:48 Speaker_08
She said, that's the job of the Supreme Court to police the 14th Amendment and at least reach the initial question of, is this sex discrimination? And does that mean that a heightened form of judicial review kicks in?

00:15:04 Speaker_03
Right. She's sort of like, people, focus. We have a job here.

00:15:08 Speaker_08
It was a striking moment. Mr. Strangio?

00:15:12 Speaker_07
Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court,

00:15:15 Speaker_08
But I think in a lot of ways, one of the most memorable moments in the arguments came when another lawyer challenging the law stood up to argue.

00:15:24 Speaker_07
But SB1 has taken away the only treatment that relieved years of suffering for each of the adolescent plaintiffs.

00:15:32 Speaker_08
Chase Strangio, a lawyer with the ACLU representing the families and the doctor challenging the law, is the first transgender lawyer ever to argue before the Supreme Court, or at least the first openly transgender lawyer.

00:15:47 Speaker_11
Let me ask a question about another issue that came up during Justice Kagan's questioning.

00:15:53 Speaker_08
And he pretty quickly gets into an exchange with Justice Alito, who's one of the court's most conservative members, that's really quite remarkable. Is transgender status immutable? Alito asks him whether transgender identity is immutable.

00:16:10 Speaker_07
I think that the record shows that the discordance between a person's birth sex and gender identity has a strong biological basis and would satisfy an immutability test.

00:16:22 Speaker_08
And Alito is essentially asking a transgender person, a lawyer, arguing before the court, is your identity an essential element of who you are? And it's not just a striking moment. It also has some legal significance.

00:16:37 Speaker_08
Whether or not a characteristic is immutable plays into deciding whether that characteristic can make you into a protected class. So this was not only personal, but also an important point for his side to try to win.

00:16:50 Speaker_07
If Tennessee can have an end run around heightened scrutiny by asserting at the outset that biology justifies the sex-based differential in the law, that would undermine decades of this court's precedent. Thank you.

00:17:04 Speaker_03
Thank you, counsel. So Adam, when the two lawyers arguing against this Tennessee law are done and about to hand it over to the folks defending this law, what are you thinking?

00:17:17 Speaker_08
So, Michael, by the time the challengers finished, and it was kind of an unwieldy romp through a lot of different areas, not tightly focused on the legal question before the justices, I kind of had the sense that the challengers were facing an uphill fight in what they had to prove.

00:17:40 Speaker_08
in persuading the more conservative majority that this law amounts to sex discrimination.

00:17:47 Speaker_08
And that was before we even heard from Tennessee's lawyer who's defending the law and saying that it wasn't about sex discrimination, but about something else entirely.

00:18:00 Speaker_04
We'll be right back.

00:18:17 Speaker_03
So Adam, tell us about the second half of these arguments when the lawyer for Tennessee argues his side of this case.

00:18:24 Speaker_13
Mr. Rice?

00:18:26 Speaker_08
Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court. Tennessee Solicitor General Matthew Rice says the other side misunderstands what's going on here.

00:18:36 Speaker_13
The law imposes an across-the-board rule that allows the use of drugs and surgeries for some medical purposes, but not for others. Its application turns entirely on medical purpose, not a patient's sex. That is not sex discrimination.

00:18:53 Speaker_08
That this isn't sex discrimination. Neither boys nor girls can get this kind of medical treatment. He says it's a restriction on medical procedures.

00:19:03 Speaker_08
It's a restriction on the purpose of the procedure, not on any particular gender, not on any particular sex of a patient.

00:19:13 Speaker_13
The Equal Protection Clause does not require the states to blind themselves to medical reality or to treat unlike things the same.

00:19:21 Speaker_03
He's saying this law, if it discriminates against anyone, does so based on the purpose of this medical treatment. If the purpose is to transition a minor, we're not for it. If it's for something else, we are.

00:19:36 Speaker_03
He's saying as a result, it cannot be construed as discriminatory based on sex.

00:19:43 Speaker_08
Right. He would also say, listen, we are discriminating based on age, but we're allowed to do that.

00:19:49 Speaker_08
We are discriminating based on, as you say, Michael, what the medical procedures are, but we're not discriminating, he claims, based on the gender of the patient.

00:20:01 Speaker_03
And what do the justices say to that?

00:20:04 Speaker_08
Both the SG and Petitioner have. Justice Clarence Thomas asks the first question to Rice, saying that maybe Tennessee could have taken a different approach to its law.

00:20:17 Speaker_13
So it becomes a pure exercise of of weighing benefits versus risk. And the question of how many.

00:20:25 Speaker_08
And Rice starts to answer the question, says, you know, there are risks to this kind of intervention.

00:20:30 Speaker_06
I'm sorry, counselor. Every medical treatment has a risk. even taking aspirin.

00:20:38 Speaker_08
And as he's answering, Justice Sotomayor interrupts him and says, wait a second. All kinds of medical procedures have risks.

00:20:47 Speaker_06
There is always going to be a percentage of the population under any medical treatment that's going to suffer a harm. So the question in my mind is not, um, Do policy makers decide whether one person's life is more valuable?

00:21:06 Speaker_08
But the question is, what are you trying to achieve and what's the countervailing value of the harm that comes to transgender youths who are deeply distressed by the disconnect between their gender assigned at birth and their current gender identity?

00:21:25 Speaker_06
But the other is... Can you stop one sex from the other? one person of one sex from another sex from receiving that benefit.

00:21:34 Speaker_08
That the same medical treatment under this law is unavailable to transgender kids, but available to other kids.

00:21:43 Speaker_06
That's the sex-based difference. The medical condition is the same, but you're saying one sex is getting it and the other's not.

00:21:51 Speaker_08
And the other liberal justices sort of pile on. They're loaded for bear.

00:21:57 Speaker_14
Now, looking at this statute, a girl comes in biologically and asks for a hormone to deepen her voice in order to affirm the identity that she chooses, which is masculinity.

00:22:10 Speaker_08
Justice Jackson presses the lawyer on the distinction between two different minors seeking the same treatment, testosterone to lower their voices.

00:22:21 Speaker_13
She wants to get the medication in order to deepen her voice and affirm her masculinity. Your Honor, I think if it's for the purpose of identifying inconsistent with their sex, she would be barred from doing that under the statute.

00:22:39 Speaker_05
But isn't that the point, Mr. Rice?

00:22:40 Speaker_08
And Justice Kagan jumps in as well.

00:22:44 Speaker_05
I mean, the prohibited purpose here is treating gender dysphoria, which is to say that the prohibited purpose is something about whether or not one is identifying with one's own sex or another sex. The whole thing is imbued with sex.

00:22:59 Speaker_05
I mean, it's based on sex.

00:23:01 Speaker_08
If the first half of the argument was a little diffuse and roaming across the legal landscape, the second part of the argument had the three liberal members of the court really bearing down

00:23:14 Speaker_08
on the Tennessee lawyer and really questioning him about whether this distinction he's drawing between medical purpose and sex discrimination makes sense and can be sustained.

00:23:27 Speaker_03
And in that moment, Adam, and I don't know if you felt the same way, it did feel like these three liberal justices were cutting this lawyer down to size. I mean, they were landing their points in this sustained prosecutorial style.

00:23:40 Speaker_08
Right, and it looked like, at least for a time... that they had Tennessee's lawyer on the ropes. And that's not the argument that we're making. But Bryce gradually collects himself. We're arguing there is no sex baseline.

00:23:55 Speaker_08
And starts to make probably the best formulation of his argument, saying that maybe there's an incidental effect on sex, but sex is not the baseline. Sex is not the criterion.

00:24:06 Speaker_08
The criterion is, what's the purpose of the procedure you're trying to obtain?

00:24:13 Speaker_13
If you're a boy and you go in to get puberty blockers, you can get the puberty blockers if you're going to use them for precocious puberty. You cannot get the puberty blockers if you're going to use them to transition. That is not a sex-based line.

00:24:25 Speaker_13
That is a purpose-based line.

00:24:27 Speaker_08
And both boys and girls, he says, are prohibited from getting care that is for the purpose of gender transition. So he says there's no sex discrimination there.

00:24:41 Speaker_13
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.

00:24:48 Speaker_13
And the only way they get to a sex-based line is by equating fundamentally different treatments that defy medical reality and defy by how the statute itself sets out what is a treatment.

00:25:01 Speaker_08
And that's similar to the reasoning in Dobbs, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade.

00:25:07 Speaker_08
There was a passage in that majority opinion that says there's an argument that abortion restrictions violate equal protection because they fall disproportionately on women. But that's not how equal protection works.

00:25:22 Speaker_08
If the category, the prohibited procedure, is neutral just because one sex is more affected than the other, that's not an equal protection problem, the court said in Dobbs. And Rice, the Tennessee lawyer, is making a similar point here.

00:25:38 Speaker_03
So even though abortion is predominantly a question for women, The Dobbs opinion makes the case that it cannot be construed as being fundamentally discriminatory to women.

00:25:55 Speaker_03
And now the lawyer for the Tennessee law is saying the same principle applies here.

00:26:02 Speaker_08
Right. That the prohibition is actually neutral. It may happen to disproportionately affect one gender or the other. But the point is, what is the prohibition supposed to achieve?

00:26:17 Speaker_03
— Hmm. And helpfully for the Tennessee lawyer, he is speaking to a court whose majority just wrote and issued the Dobbs opinion, so presumably he thinks he's going to get a pretty sympathetic ear on that point.

00:26:29 Speaker_08
— Yeah, and the Tennessee brief in the case cites Dobbs a dozen times. It knows a good thing when it sees it. — Thank you. — Thank you, counsel. The case is submitted.

00:26:39 Speaker_00
— The Honorable Court is now adjourned until Monday next at 10 o'clock.

00:26:46 Speaker_03
So Adam, once both sides are done here, what are you thinking about how these justices, based on their questions, based on their tone, are likely to rule in this biggest case of the term?

00:26:59 Speaker_08
So I guess I probably put the justices in three buckets. The three liberal justices are almost certainly going to want to strike down the Tennessee law. The most conservative justices will doubtless want to sustain it.

00:27:15 Speaker_08
And then the group in the middle, the chief justice, Justice Kavanaugh, maybe Justice Barrett, might take this kind of hands-off attitude, saying we don't know, we're not doctors, we're going to let the states do what they like.

00:27:28 Speaker_08
And I'd be surprised if we didn't have a classic 6-3 split where the six conservative Republican appointees say that Tennessee law is fine and the three liberal Democratic appointees say that it at a minimum

00:27:44 Speaker_08
amounts to sex discrimination and, at a minimum, requires new analysis by the lower courts to see whether the law can clear that very high bar of heightened scrutiny.

00:27:57 Speaker_03
And what would such a ruling mean for the 20-some state-level bans that seem very much related to this law in Tennessee?

00:28:07 Speaker_08
It would seem to suggest that all of them are constitutional, at least as against an equal protection challenge.

00:28:16 Speaker_08
There's a separate possible constitutional argument, not before the Supreme Court on Wednesday, that parents have a constitutional right to direct the medical care of their children.

00:28:27 Speaker_08
Those challenges might still work, but the equal protection challenge, which was the only challenge the Biden administration pressed, would seem to be dead, if we get that kind of ruling.

00:28:38 Speaker_03
Right, and the parental rights argument was hinted at in this case. Parental rights is and has been for years a tenant of American conservatism.

00:28:48 Speaker_03
And the case being made here would be that bans like this take a crucial decision away from parents when it comes to their children.

00:28:57 Speaker_08
Yeah, like imagine the situation of vaccines. Many conservatives say if a parent doesn't want to have their child vaccinated, the government can't force them. that parental rights have enormous force for many American conservatives.

00:29:13 Speaker_08
So that argument might be a more promising one before this conservative Supreme Court.

00:29:20 Speaker_03
Of course, we do not expect the incoming Trump administration to bring such a parental rights case before the Supreme Court, right?

00:29:27 Speaker_08
No, the Trump administration is not going to do anything to enhance transgender rights. So even though that argument would be available to them, they're not going to press it.

00:29:36 Speaker_08
But that's not to say that private parties, parents, doctors won't make that argument.

00:29:42 Speaker_08
But the Trump administration also has an important decision to make on taking office of whether they disavow the position of the Biden administration in this very case.

00:29:53 Speaker_08
And they are likely to do so, and that will require the Supreme Court to do some procedural gymnastics, because the only petition they agreed to hear was the one from the Biden administration.

00:30:05 Speaker_08
And it's possible they'd find some way to substitute in the families in this case who, while they argued, are not strictly speaking petitioners in the case.

00:30:16 Speaker_08
So there will be some machinations in the coming months because there is no doubt that the Trump administration is not on board for the arguments that the Solicitor General was making on Wednesday.

00:30:29 Speaker_03
And in putting that aside, and assuming that this case does get decided in due course, and assuming, as you suggested, that the justices, a majority of them, side with the Tennessee law, then it looks like we're in a scenario where youth trans medicine is on a similar path to abortion in this country.

00:30:50 Speaker_03
It becomes the province of state lawmakers, and as a result, we get this patchwork. We get two systems in the country.

00:30:57 Speaker_03
And that means there are going to be states where this gender-affirming care for young people is allowed and where it's not allowed, just as we have states where abortion is now allowed and it's not allowed.

00:31:10 Speaker_08
Yeah, it's very much the same dynamic as abortion, where we might have wholly different sets of laws in deep red states like Mississippi and deep blue states like California.

00:31:25 Speaker_08
But then there may be ways in which abortion and trans care are different because it's no small thing, but women can leave a state to get an abortion come back and go on with their lives.

00:31:40 Speaker_08
This kind of treatment might require entire families to leave the state forever, an even bigger burden. And then there's also the question of political power. In a number of referenda around the nation, voters have re-established abortion rights.

00:32:00 Speaker_08
There's not this sense, I don't think, that the trans community has the political power or their allies have the political power to vote in, by referenda, similar protections for care for transgender minors.

00:32:15 Speaker_03
Right, and in that sense, these laws, especially if upheld by the Supreme Court, may end up feeling like the final word on this for a long time.

00:32:23 Speaker_08
That's right.

00:32:28 Speaker_03
Well, Adam, as always, thank you very much.

00:32:32 Speaker_08
Thank you, Michael.

00:32:41 Speaker_04
We'll be right back.

00:32:47 Speaker_03
Here's what else you need to know today.

00:32:50 Speaker_03
On Wednesday, Pete Hegseth and his allies tried to salvage his potential nomination for Secretary of Defense amid growing allegations about his public drunkenness, his sexual pursuit of subordinates, and his financial mismanagement of two nonprofit groups.

00:33:11 Speaker_03
In an interview with Megyn Kelly of Sirius XM Radio, Hegseth dismissed the allegations against him as a fiction created by enemies of Donald Trump.

00:33:22 Speaker_02
It is the classic art of the smear. take whatever tiny kernels of truth, and there are tiny, tiny ones in there, and blow them up into a masquerade of a narrative about somebody that I am definitely not.

00:33:36 Speaker_02
For his part, Trump insisted that his support for Hegseth remains unwavering.

00:33:42 Speaker_03
But the Times reports that the president-elect is already considering alternatives to run the Defense Department, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

00:33:53 Speaker_03
And on Wednesday, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, one of the nation's largest health insurers, was gunned down in midtown Manhattan in what police are calling a brazen and targeted attack.

00:34:08 Speaker_03
Police said that the gunman was waiting outside of the hotel where the CEO, Brian Thompson, was scheduled to speak at the company's annual meeting of investors.

00:34:19 Speaker_03
As Thompson prepared to enter the hotel, the gunman opened fire, shooting him repeatedly before fleeing into Central Park. Thompson was declared dead shortly after. Today's episode was produced by Diana Nguyen, Sydney Harper, and Will Reed.

00:34:44 Speaker_03
It was edited by Devin Taylor, contains original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderling. That's it for the daily. I'm Michael Boboro.

00:35:11 Speaker_03
See you tomorrow.