# United States v. Skrmetti (2025) Decided **June 18, 2025**, 6–3 (Roberts joined by Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett; dissent by Sotomayor joined by Kagan and Jackson). The Supreme Court **upheld Tennessee's SB1**, a 2023 statute banning gender-affirming hormone therapy and puberty blockers for minors with gender dysphoria. *Skrmetti* is the most consequential single Supreme Court decision against LGBTQ-rights advocates since the Court took its post-*Obergefell* rightward turn. ## What Tennessee SB1 Did The Tennessee law, passed in March 2023, prohibits medical providers from prescribing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or performing gender-confirmation surgery on minors **for the purpose of treating gender dysphoria** — while explicitly permitting the same treatments for other diagnoses (e.g., precocious puberty, congenital disorders). The selective ban was the legal hook for the challengers' equal-protection argument: the law treated identical medical interventions differently based on the patient's underlying diagnosis and (by extension) sex. ## The Holding [[Chief Justice Roberts]]'s majority opinion held that the Tennessee law did **not** trigger heightened equal-protection scrutiny — neither sex-based scrutiny (because the law classified by age and medical diagnosis, not sex) nor transgender-status-based scrutiny (because the Court declined to recognize transgender status as a quasi-suspect classification). Under deferential rational-basis review, the state's claimed interest in protecting minors from "experimental" treatments was sufficient. The opinion is notable for what it **avoided** ruling on. It did not address: - Whether transgender status is a protected classification - Whether adult bans on gender-affirming care would be constitutional - Whether the Bostock-style Title VII reasoning extends to other equal-protection contexts These deferred questions are the openings the LGBTQ legal-strategy community has signaled it will continue to litigate. ## The Dissent [[Justice Sotomayor]]'s dissent argued the Tennessee law was a textbook sex classification — identical medical interventions treated differently based on the sex of the patient — and should have triggered intermediate scrutiny, which the state could not survive on the record. The dissent explicitly invoked *[[Bostock v. Clayton County]]*'s textualist analysis: *"An adolescent assigned female at birth cannot receive testosterone to live as a male; but an adolescent assigned male at birth can. The statute discriminates because of sex."* ## Political Context *Skrmetti* was litigated against the backdrop of: - **24 states** with gender-affirming-care bans for minors at the time of the decision (mostly enacted 2022–2024) - **[[Trump 2.0]] federal anti-trans executive orders** (January 2025) - **The Department of Justice intervention** on behalf of the original plaintiff families (later reversed by the Trump 2.0 DOJ in February 2025) The decision functions as **the *Dobbs* of trans rights** — formally limited in scope but practically devastating to the legal infrastructure that supported gender-affirming care nationally. ## Place in the Vault *Skrmetti* is the **defining post-Obergefell judicial setback** for the LGBTQ-rights movement and the case that confirms the contemporary Supreme Court majority's willingness to roll back Kennedy-era LGBTQ jurisprudence by indirect means — declining to extend protections to trans Americans rather than overturning prior precedents directly. The Thomas concurrence's framing of *Lawrence* and *Obergefell* as targets-on-deck (from his [[Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization]] concurrence three years earlier) remains the live threat vector for the next phase of LGBTQ-rights litigation. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization]] - [[Bostock v. Clayton County]] - [[Lambda Legal]]