Ketanji Brown Jackson's New Warning to Supreme Court

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is pictured while attending President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address in Washington, D.C. on February 7, 2023. Jackson warned that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority had not shown “reason and restraint” by allowing an Idaho ban on transgender youth health care to be enforced on Monday.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has warned that her conservative colleagues failed to show “reason and restraint” by allowing Idaho’s transgender youth health care ban to be enforced during an appeal.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Monday granted a request from Idaho officials to allow enforcement of a near-total ban on gender-affirming health care for transgender youth while the case works its way through the courts. The ban had previously been temporarily blocked by a lower court.

The decision does not apply to the two teenage transgender girls whose families filed a lawsuit over the ban. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch noted in his concurring opinion that “the plaintiffs face no harm from the partial stay,” while arguing that blocking the ban could prevent “Idaho from executing any aspect of its law for years.”

Jackson and fellow liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan objected to the decision. In her dissenting opinion, Jackson argued that the court had failed to show “respect for lower court judges” and that Idaho had not shown that blocking the ban during the appeal would cause the state “irreversible injury.”

“We do not have to address every high-profile case percolating in lower courts, and there are usually many good reasons not to do so,” Jackson wrote. “Few applicants can meet our threshold requirement of ‘an exceptional need for immediate relief,’ by showing that they will suffer not just substantial harm but an ‘irreversible injury.'”

Jackson went on to argue that Idaho had already conceded that the new law, which was signed last year by Republican Governor Brad Little, was “likely unconstitutional, at least as applied to the plaintiffs.” The Supreme Court’s majority decision on Monday did not address whether or not the law was constitutional.

“The State takes this litigating position while defending a statute that regulates access to gender-affirming medical care for transgender children,” Jackson wrote. “That is a serious and consequential matter… [that] will have a significant practical impact on everyone it affects.”

“We should resist being conscripted into service when our involvement amounts to micromanaging the lower courts’ exercise of their discretionary authority in the midst of active litigation,” she added. “It is especially important for us to refrain from doing so in novel, highly charged, and unsettled circumstances.”

Jackson concluded by asserting that she had decided to dissent because she believes that the court “must proceed with both reason and restraint” regarding the case and “the majority demonstrates neither today.”

Newsweek reached out for comment to the Transgender Law Center via email on Monday.

“Incredibly devastating ruling out of the Supreme Court for transgender people,” transgender activist and journalist Erin Reed wrote in response to the ruling on X, formerly Twitter. “The Supreme Court has allowed Idaho’s gender affirming care ban to go back into effect for everyone but the plaintiffs. No sugar coating this one, it’s devastating for trans youth nationwide.”

Meanwhile, Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador celebrated the decision as a “BIG win to protect vulnerable kids,” writing on X that he was “proud to defend Idaho’s law that ensures children are not subjected to these dangerous drugs and procedures.”

Transgender rights, particularly youth access to gender-affirming medical care, have become political wedge issues that are central to the culture war in recent years, with dozens of bills similar to the Idaho ban being passed or proposed in Republican-run states throughout the nation.

Virtually all major mainstream American medical organizations—including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics—support gender-affirming care as the only effective treatment for transgender adults and youth.

While gender-affirming care for transgender youth sometimes involves no medical intervention at all, medical treatments are often limited to the use of puberty blockers, which have also been safely used for several decades to treat non-transgender children with precocious puberty.

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