Democrats Double Down on Sex Changes for Minors After Explosive SCOTUS Ruling: ‘Heartless’

Democrats are doubling down on their support for mutilating sex change drugs and surgeries for minors after the Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld Tennessee’s law banning those experimental practices. 

“Today the Supreme Court chose to abandon trans children in America,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) said.

“Upholding the Tennessee ban on medical care for trans kids is heartless. This is a sad day, but know I will never stop fighting to protect trans children everywhere,” he added. 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) claimed that “trans kids suffer when they don’t get medically-necessary care.”

“This is a brazen political decision by the Supreme Court,” she added. “My heart is with trans kids and their loved ones. I won’t stop fighting to make sure they can be exactly who they are.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) pinned blame on Republicans, claiming their supposed “cruel crusade against trans kids is all an attempt to divert attention from ripping healthcare away from millions of Americans.”

“We’ll keep fighting and we’ll keep marching on,” he said. 

Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE)— a man pretending to be a women who is Congress’s first transgender-identifying member — also bemoaned the ruling.

“The ruling in U.S. v. Skrmetti bans health care decisions made by patient and families in consultation with their doctors. Once again, politicians and judges are inserting themselves in exam rooms,” he said. “This ruling undermines doctors in delivering care to some of the most vulnerable patients in our country.”

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) said: “This fight isn’t over.”

“Families across the country may now be forced to leave their state to ensure their kids can access medically necessary care,” she said. “As the proud grandma of a young trans man, I know that gender-affirming care can help trans youth live openly and authentically.”

Democrat Sens. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who filed an amicus brief in the case last year alongside several other lawmakers asking the Supreme Court to strike down Tennessee’s law, also slammed the ruling.

“This is just wrong,” Merkley said, per The Hill. 

“Today, hate won,” Markey said in a statement. 

Tennessee passed the law, Senate Bill 1, in 2023, becoming one of more than 20 states to pass similar legislation. The bill restricts sex change drugs and surgeries for minors “for the purpose of enabling a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” Tennessee’s law carries an enforcement mechanism and additionally establishes a private right of action, enabling an injured minor or non-consenting parent of that minor to sue the doctor who violated the law.

Plaintiffs, which included several transgender-identifying minors, their parents, and a doctor, quickly filed a pre-enforcement claim seeking to block the law. A district court blocked part of the law banning sex change drugs for minors, but allowed the ban on surgeries to stand. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed that order, allowing the full law to stand. The Supreme Court heard the case in December 2024 and ultimately held up the Sixth Circuit’s ruling.

The high court ruled 6-3, with liberal-leaning justices dissenting, that Senate Bill 1 does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in the U.S. Constitution, contrary to the claims of transgender activists who sued the state.

The court rejected claims brought by plaintiffs that Tennessee’s law discriminates on the basis of sex. Instead, the court countered that the state’s law bars sex change drugs and procedures for individuals based on their status as a minor and bars the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for the purpose of treating gender dysphoria.

The court also found that Tennessee’s law meets the “rational basis inquiry” and noted: “Where there exist plausible reasons for the relevant government action, our inquiry is at an end.”

“SB1 clearly meets this standard. Tennessee determined that administering puberty blockers or hormones to a minor to treat gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, or gender incongruence can lead to the minor becoming irreversibly sterile, having increased risk of disease and illness, or suffering from adverse and sometimes fatal psychological consequences,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority opinion.

“It further found that it was likely that not all harmful effects associated with these types of medical procedures when performed on a minor are yet fully known, as many of these procedures, when performed on a minor for such purposes, are experimental in nature and not supported by high quality, long-term medical studies,” he continued:

Tennessee determined that minors lack the maturity to fully understand and appreciate the life-altering consequences of such procedures and that many individuals have expressed regret for medical procedures that were performed on or administered to them for such purposes when they were minors. At the same time, Tennessee noted evidence that discordance between sex and gender can be resolved by less invasive approaches that are likely to result in better outcomes for the minor. SB1’s age- and diagnosis-based classifications are plainly rationally related to these findings and the State’s objective of protecting minors’ health and welfare.

The ruling does ban sex changes for minors nationwide but allows states to set their own laws, essentially killing legal challenges to other red state laws protecting children from mutilating drugs and surgeries, such as in Idaho.

READ MORE: Supreme Court Upholds Tennessee Law Banning Sex Changes for Minors

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti issued a statement celebrating the ruling.

“In today’s historic Supreme Court win, the common sense of Tennessee voters prevailed over judicial activism,” Skrmetti said. “A bipartisan supermajority of Tennessee’s elected representatives carefully considered the evidence and voted to protect kids from irreversible decisions they cannot yet fully understand. I commend the Tennessee legislature and Governor Lee for their courage in passing this legislation and supporting our litigation despite withering opposition from the Biden administration, LGBT special interest groups, social justice activists, the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association, and even Hollywood.”

“The rapid and unexplained rise in the number of kids seeking these life-altering interventions, despite the lack of supporting evidence, calls for careful scrutiny from our elected leaders,” he added. “This victory transcends politics. It’s about real Tennessee kids facing real struggles. Families across our state and our nation deserve solutions based on science, not ideology. Today’s landmark decision recognizes that the Constitution lets us fulfill society’s highest calling — protecting our kids.”

The side effects of sex change drugs and procedures can be severe, including irreversible mutilation and infertility. Some of these so-called treatments include double mastectomies (the removal of healthy breasts), female and male genital mutilation and removal, facial feminization and masculinization, hormone treatments, and puberty blockers that can cause chemical sterilization. Puberty blockers can also have long-term impact on bone growth, bone density, and growth spurts, according to Mayo Clinic.

Many people who have undergone these sex change drugs and procedures as minors and later decided to reverse course, called detransitioners, have begun speaking out about the irreversible physical damage and mental torment they have experienced.

The top-down push for minors to obtain sex-mutilating drugs and surgeries under the misleading moniker “gender-affirming care” is promulgated by academia, large hospitals, and major medical organizations. The previous Biden administration aggressively pushed for minors to have access to sex change drugs and surgeries. 

Transgender activists frequently claim such sex-mutilating drugs and procedures for confused minors help reduce suicides and improve mental health — dubious claims which increasingly appear untrue as more studies and data come to light.

Other research has indicated that a majority of children who are confused about their sex grow out of that feeling by the time they become adults. European countries that pushed sex change drugs and surgeries for minors before the United States are notably reversing course over concerns about long-term impacts.

At the root, these actors, along with the proliferation of gender ideology on social media, promote the false idea that human beings can naturally be — or become through medical treatments — a different sex than what they were born as. Even further, the gender ideology complex claims these individuals should take sex-change drugs and get sex-change procedures to align their outward appearance with how they feel on the inside.

While the push toward transgenderism is heavily ideological, a report released in December 2020 found that the U.S. “sex reassignment” surgery market was valued at $267 million in 2019 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 14.4 percent from 2020 to 2027.

Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.