The Family Foundation Files U.S. Supreme Court Brief Supporting Law Protecting Children From Gender Mutilation

LEXINGTON, KY – As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hear United States v. Skrmetti, the Family Foundation, along with several allied family policy organizations, has joined an amicus brief supporting Tennessee’s protections for children against life-altering gender “transition” interventions that physically mutilate and disorder their healthy bodies.

Skrmetti concerns a challenge to Tennessee’s law that prohibits children from receiving life-altering gender “transition” interventions. The Supreme Court’s decision to review the law follows the Sixth Circuit ruling in favor of Tennessee’s and Kentucky’s laws prohibiting such procedures. The Supreme Court now has the opportunity to definitively rule that these essential protections for children, rightly passed by state legislators in at least 23 states, are consistent with the U.S. Constitution.

You can read the brief, written by the Family Action Council of Tennessee, here.

Statement from David Walls, executive director of The Family Foundation:

“We urge the High Court to uphold these commonsense laws protecting children from harmful ‘gender transitions.’ The Sixth Circuit was right to uphold Tennessee’s and Kentucky’s laws that protect children from these irreversible medical experiments that leave children physically and chemically mutilated.

“Up to this point in history, the truth that the human person is objectively and profoundly male or female has been the cornerstone and celebrated feature of civilization. We pray that the Court’s decision will recognize the harms perpetrated upon children in the name of “gender-affirming” care, and that they would rightly allow for Kentucky, Tennessee, and other states to protect our most vulnerable fellow image-bearers from lifelong harm,” Walls concluded.

The brief notes, “In sum, the fundamental issue for this Court is not “whether the Constitution is neutral about legislative regulations of new and potentially irreversible medical treatments for minors,” L.W. v. Skrmetti, 83 F.4th 460, 472 (6th Cir. 2023), but whether States may refuse the novel proposal by some in society that a child is a blank construct for self-definition and medical manipulation and may also refuse the consequences to law and society that will come once such a radical departure from an objective human nature and historic community precept and embedded in our nation’s jurisprudence is made normative.”

The brief concludes by arguing, “As persons have a right not to be bodily injured by third persons, physicians like all other third persons have a corresponding duty in their practice not to injure the bodies of the persons who are their patients. The jurisdiction of States to regulate the practice of medicine to protect the health of its citizens has been recognized since adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

The group Do No Harm recently released a study which revealed that almost 14,000 children have undergone dangerous transgender procedures which include mutilating surgeries, cross-sex hormone injections, and puberty blockers. The Family Foundation played an integral role in supporting the passage of Kentucky’s Senate Bill 150 in 2023 and in supporting its commonsense protections for children that ban these dangerous procedures. We urge the Court to uphold Tennessee’s law, and protect the right of states like Kentucky to protect children from irreparable harm.