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On a blustery December Wednesday in Washington, DC, hundreds of protesters rallied outside the United States Supreme Court to advocate for trans rights. “I came out here to show my pride and support of all these other kids across the country,” Mya Figueroa, 15, an advocate for trans youth who traveled from Arizona to DC with her mother, tells Teen Vogue. The ban at the heart of the case being heard, she says, “shouldn't even be existing, yet it is. So we just have to show our support and keep on going.”
The case, United States v. Skrmetti, has united a wide swath of LGBTQ+ and youth advocacy groups, dozens of which were present outside the Court. They see the case as part of a broader assault on the ability of trans people to use the correct pronouns and restrooms, participate in gendered sports leagues in alignment with their gender, and to safely, comfortably occupy public space.
Slate describes Skrmetti as “likely to be the most important trans rights case in [SCOTUS] history,” which “will have knock-on effects for civil rights jurisprudence that will affect the freedoms and protections of LGBTQ+ Americans, women, medical providers, and parents’ rights to raise their children without interference from the state.”
After the spring 2023 passage of Tennessee’s Senate Bill 1, which banned youth gender-affirming care, the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal led the legal challenge to the state ban. The case began as L.W. v. Skrmetti, representing parents Samantha and Brian Williams and their trans teen daughter, known only as L.W., and other trans teens in Tennessee who were identified by pseudonyms. The titular Skrmetti is Jonathan Skrmetti, the state's attorney general.
The Biden administration, backed by several civil rights organizations, has taken up the case before the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, arguing that the ban amounts to gender-based discrimination and a violation of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that attests to the safety of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to treat gender dysphoria. Meanwhile, according to reporting in The Guardian, the health care providers cited in Skrmetti’s brief include those who have never treated trans youth and others affiliated with right-wing Christian groups.
Tennessee is one of 26 US states with some sort of ban in place on gender-affirming care for youth; Arizona, home to Figueroa and 17-year-old Daniel Trujillo, is another. “I should be at school right now," Trujillo tells Teen Vogue outside the Supreme Court. "I should be doing kid things. Instead, we're here fighting for our rights.”
Inside the Court this morning were the ACLU’s Chase Strangio, the lead attorney on this case, who today became the first known trans person to argue before SCOTUS, and 16-year-old L.W.
In spring 2023, after the passage of Senate Bill 1, L.W.'s mother, Samantha, told the Washington Post she had filled out a form from the ACLU about the SB 1's impact on L.W.'s access to care — not knowing it would lead the family to the Supreme Court. Since Nashville’s Vanderbilt University gender clinic stopped operating in June 2023, L.W. and Samantha have regularly traveled more than five hours one way to access L.W.’s medical care in North Carolina.
I first met the 16-year-old at the center of this case on Zoom. Speaking at 5 p.m. on a Friday after a long week of media interviews for her, set up with a podcaster-level mic, joined by her mom, attorney, and the ACLU’s Gillian Branstetter, L.W. was exhausted, but clearly still 16. Though feeling drained, she snarked on the call as her new kitten, Mushroom, clambered over her head and shoulders.
L.W. and her parents recall her adolescence pre-transition as being extremely difficult, especially with the onset of puberty. As described in the legal filing, L.W. developed urinary tract infections due to avoiding the school bathroom. A cousin of hers eventually transitioned, which inspired L.W., at age 12, to tell her parents of her suspicions that she was trans. The process of accessing gender-affirming care took months of discussions and meetings with doctors before L.W. started puberty blockers and, later, estrogen.
Social and emotional struggles defined L.W.'s childhood, but since transitioning, she says, her life has become full, including AP classes, hobbies, video games and DJ sets (she tells me proudly that she was producing a song throughout our Zoom call). It is this normalcy that anti-trans youth bans damage.
“I always paid attention to politics because I had the fear and understanding that it would affect me in the future — and I still do,” L.W. says. “Of course, even more so because it is affecting me.” In order to travel for HRT, she’s been forced to leave school for whole days, which puts her behind on schoolwork.
“It's a very terrifying thought that I could have to go off this medical care, because my dysphoria was horrible before [I started]. I was really isolated because of it, which tended to hurt my mental health,” she explains. “Obviously, you're not yourself. It's real-life body horror, essentially: Body horror is a genre of horror that's particularly terrifying because it's about the lack of autonomy over your own body.”
L.W. tries not to think too much about the fact that she’s part of such a consequential moment in trans history, but there are aspects that nag at her. “It's very upsetting that a lot of my medical records had to be sent to the opposing side really early on. That's definitely something I am not very happy about,” she says. “My medical records are a pretty personal thing.” This is only one aspect of the invasion into the lives and homes of families with trans children that is attempting to tear them apart.
The amici briefs filed in support of L.W.’s case are full of similarly heart-wrenching stories. One family split time between Texas and Oregon after the May 2023 passage of Texas’s ban on youth gender-affirming care; another family was forced to spend $10,000 to relocate from North Carolina to Michigan, just to be put on a 10-month waiting list for their child’s care. “Given bans on gender-affirming medical care all over the country, many people are traveling out-of-state to access the care they need, and care in Michigan is bottlenecked as a result,” a brief reads. Another child was forced to graduate early from her Missouri high school to attend college at 17 in Minnesota, where she could maintain access to her health care.
To call these scenarios “options” is a generous reading. Relocating hasn't been a possibility for L.W. and her family because it would uproot the family from her brother’s social universe and separate her father from his aging parents.
L.W. is unique among the tens of thousands of trans kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria in the last few years because they won’t all become named plaintiffs in a Supreme Court case. But the stakes for them are equally as stark — and the possible consequences just as dire.
This case is deeply consequential for a population that is facing a hostile Trump administration, a weak and waffling Democratic Party, and a continued barrage of bills and policies targeting trans life. In the 2024 presidential election, the GOP spent some $200 million on anti-trans ads, while the Democrats spent about a ninth of that on ads in response.
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“I would see these ads all over the place about ‘Kamala’s for they/them,’” 20-year-old Malika Saint Laurent, who is nonbinary, tells Teen Vogue. “But nobody [in the Democratic Party] said, ‘Hey, that's okay.’” In the wake of the election, Saint Laurent is working on getting their passport renewed, as are countless other trans people nationwide.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), echoing the rhetoric of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, wrote yet another “just asking questions” op-ed about “trans girls in sports” for the Washington Post. In 2022, the ACLU’s Strangio, the lead attorney on this case, argued that there is “a direct line from the discourse to these policies.” Two years later, what was clear then has become only more so: In just the past few weeks, 24 state attorneys general asked SCOTUS to step in and ban trans girls’ participation in youth sports.
Much like bans on trans youth health care, the emphasis on trans youth in sports is part of an effort to target gender-nonconforming girls and women in sports writ large. A quick Google search of Blaire Fleming, the 22-year-old San Jose State women's volleyball player, is full of conservative coverage that misgenders her, and cis teammates complaining about her to the press. The young woman’s participation on her college sports team somehow even merited commentary from Donald Trump on the campaign trail.
This transphobic political climate has dire consequences for trans youth, whether they’ve been advocating for themselves publicly for years or forcibly politicized just by living as trans people, regardless of their age. Saint Laurent lived with another trans student during their freshman year of college, at a school where, they suspect, there were maybe a handful of trans students among a student body of thousands. Their roommate died by suicide that year, leading Saint Laurent to drop out.
Nineteen-year-old Dylan Brandt, who spent his teen years fighting a trans health care ban in his native Arkansas, transitioned at age 13. These days, generally, people don’t know he’s trans in his day-to-day life. But with the threat of bathroom bans, he tells Teen Vogue, that normalcy would be ruptured. “I would look pretty weird walking into a women's restroom,” Brandt says dryly. “If I was forced to choose between getting charged with sexual indecency against a minor if I went into the men's bathroom and there happened to be a minor in there, or I walk into a women's bathroom behind a guy's daughter, and he's standing outside of the bathroom waiting for her — he's not going to wait for an explanation for me before he pulls me out of that bathroom and goes ham on me.”
Alexis Rose Hinkley, a registered nurse specializing in youth gender-affirming care, who is also a popular TikTok commentator, is cis and has trans loved ones, including several trans youth she’s cared for over the years. “It's wild to me that they have become this political scapegoat when they're literally just trying to get through f***ing high school,” Rose, also in DC for the oral argument and rally, tells Teen Vogue a few days prior.
There is plenty of research to back up the concrete benefits appropriate medical care has for trans youth who need it. In an amicus brief jointly filed by the Trevor Project, the Juvenile Law Center, and the National Center for Youth Law, it is noted:
For the past few years Rose has worked at an LGBTQ+ summer camp that has been doxxed, resulting in lockdowns — which is eerily reminiscent of the threats of mass shootings at spaces for LGBTQ+ adults. Last year was the first year, she says, that the camp had campers from Tennessee who were forced to de-transition after the state’s ban.
“We've gotten letters from parents about how talking about camp and planning for camp was the only thing that kept their kids alive,” Rose tells Teen Vogue. “Trans health care is suicide prevention, at its core…. These [politicians] have never had to sit with these kids and talk them through, ‘Hey, what are you feeling right now? Do you need me to call someone? Do we need to go somewhere? Like, how do we keep you safe?’ The fact that it's people who have never even had a conversation with these kids that are making these decisions for them, for their families, for their medical providers, is asinine.”
This sentiment is echoed to Teen Vogue by parents of trans youth, such as Daniel Trujillo’s mother, Lizette, a fierce advocate for trans youth who says she felt nervous outside the Supreme Court. “To do something proactive, to protect our children, is what's keeping me going,” she explains. “It's scary to think that next summer we could have an unfavorable ruling. Then I have to keep reminding myself that we will take care of each other, we'll be in community and do the things that we need to do, because our children are not going to stop being transgender just because you strip them of their care."
Lizette continues, "Stripping them of their care is cruel, but they will continue to be who they are, and parents like myself will continue to do what we need to do to protect them and keep them safe and alive.”
