Tennessee lawmakers and Republican Gov. Bill Lee don’t have their priorities straight, and the U.S. Supreme Court should tell them so.
State legislators rushed a ban on gender-affirming care for minors through the General Assembly earlier this year, and Lee signed the bill into law in March. The law bans gender-affirming care for youths such as puberty blockers and hormone treatments used to treat an underlying gender dysphoria medical diagnosis. The law also banned gender-affirming surgeries for youths.
The law took effect July 1, but it allows doctors to continue prescribing puberty blockers and hormone therapy to minors who were already receiving them before the law’s effective date until March 31, 2024, according to a NBC report.
In their fear-mongering, narrow-minded haste to pass such discriminatory legislation, lawmakers stomped all over parental choice and the integrity and confidentiality of physician-patient relationships.
And who are lawmakers targeting, exactly? More than 31,000 Tennesseans identify as transgender, according to a 2016 UCLA report. Of that population, more than 4,000 are between ages 18-24. It makes little sense to ban medical care for a population that barely makes up 1% of the state’s population.