Oral arguments begin in lawsuit challenging Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minorsUS supreme court to hear arguments in pivotal trans youth healthcare caseConservative justice Brett Kavanaugh brought up the possibility that minors who receive gender-affirming care could later regret doing so.“You say there are benefits from allowing these treatments, but there are also harms, right, from allowing these treatments, at least the state says so, including lost fertility, the physical and psychological effects on those who later change their mind and want to detransition, which I don’t think we can ignore,” Kavanaugh said.The record evidence demonstrates that the rates of regret are very low for the population that has access to this treatment. So these are adolescents who have marked and sustained gender dysphoria that has worsened with the onset of puberty. They are very likely to persist in their gender identity. But if you’re thinking about this from the standpoint of, there’s no harm in just making them wait until they’re adults, I think you have to recognize that the effect of denying this care is to produce irreversible physical effects that are consistent with their birth sex, because they have to go through puberty before they turn 18.So, essentially, what this law is doing is saying we’re going to make all adolescents in the state develop the physical secondary sex characteristics consistent with their gender or with their sex assigned at birth, even though that might significantly worsen gender dysphoria, increase the risk of suicide, and, I think, critically, make it much harder to live and be accepted in their gender identity as an adult. Because if you’re requiring someone to undergo a male puberty, and they develop an Adam’s apple, that’s going to be hard to reverse, and they’re more likely to be identified as transgender and subject to discrimination and harassment as adults. Continue reading...