00:00The Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law that bans gender-affirming care for transgender minors,
00:06including hormone therapy and puberty blockers.
00:10The decision was a stunning setback to transgender rights.
00:13The court's vote was 6-3, with conservatives in the majority.
00:18Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion,
00:21which almost certainly will mean that similar laws in 26 other states will survive legal challenges,
00:27and it could also make it easier for other efforts to roll back transgender rights to survive their court challenges.
00:34Those might include President Trump's executive order that seeks to ban transgender health care for people 19 and younger.
00:43The issue in the case was whether the Tennessee law violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution,
00:51which requires that people who are similarly situated be treated the same.
00:55Chief Justice Roberts, in his majority opinion, wrote that this law did not,
01:00and a key part of that ruling was whether the law classified people on the basis of sex or transgender status.
01:07The court said it did not classify on either basis.
01:12The chief justice wrote that the law is subject to the lowest standard of review by courts,
01:18and under that standard, almost every law survives the challenge.
01:22Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the court's liberal justices,
01:26said that this law clearly characterizes people on the basis of sex
01:30and should have been struck down as a result or at least sent back to a lower court
01:36and told to apply the correct standard in the case.
01:41There are about 300,000 minors and about 1.3 million people in the United States who identify as transgender.
01:48That's according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA Law School.
01:53Five years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that federal civil rights law that prohibits job discrimination
02:00did apply to discrimination suffered by LGBTQ people in the workplace.
02:07In that decision, the court said that treating transgender and lesbian and gay people differently in the workplace was, in fact, sex discrimination.
02:20But the court did not apply that reasoning to the case that was decided Wednesday.
02:25Chief Justice Roberts was in the majority in that case in 2020,
02:30as was Justice Neil Gorsuch who wrote that decision.
02:33And on Wednesday, both justices were in the majority that upheld the Tennessee law.
