Good! Federal Court Upholds Tennessee Law Protecting Children From Sexual Groomers, Genital Mutilation

Tennessee is likely to succeed in defending in court the state’s prohibitions on minors receiving transgender drugs and surgeries, a three-judge panel of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Saturday.

Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton, joined by Judge Amul Thapar, ruled against a preliminary injunction to halt enforcement of Tennessee’s law, which was set to go into effect on July 1.

Sutton wrote that the state is likely to win on the merits of the case, and he argued that federal judges should not insert themselves into the debates about transgenderism and seek to impose a view on all 50 states.

Challengers to the law tried to argue that “the law likely violated the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses,” but Sutton ruled that “the challengers do not argue that the original fixed meaning of either the due process or equal protection guarantee covers these claims.”

He warned against judicial activism, writing:

"That prompts the question whether the people of this country ever agreed to remove debates of this sort—about the use of new drug treatments on minors—from the conventional place for dealing with new norms, new drugs, and new technologies: the democratic process. Life-tenured federal judges should be wary of removing a vexing and novel topic of medical debate from the ebbs and flows of democracy by construing a largely unamendable federal constitution to occupy the field."

The judge also wrote that the challengers did not have case law in their favor; instead, “they seek to extend the constitutional guarantees to new territory.”

“The burden of establishing an imperative for constitutionalizing new areas of American life is not—and should not be—a light one,” he ruled.