On June 18, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6–3 ruling authored by Chief Justice Roberts, upheld Tennessee’s Senate Bill 1, which prohibits puberty blockers and cross‑sex hormones for minors with gender dysphoria. The Court ruled that the law does not violate the Equal Protection Clause because it regulates based on age and medical use, not sex or transgender status.
Roberts emphasized that the judiciary isn’t tasked with resolving “fierce scientific and policy debates” over such treatments, but simply with ensuring constitutional compliance. Since Tennessee permits the same treatments for non-gender‑related conditions (e.g., precocious puberty), the law applies uniformly across biological sexes.
Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson sharply dissented, warning the decision exposes transgender youth and families to harm and “political whims,” arguing that prohibiting transgender treatments for one group while allowing them for another constitutes sex-based discrimination
While the ruling by the court was not a scientific one, it does align with the comprehensive review released on May 1, 2025, by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria”. The report concluded that evidence on benefits is “very uncertain, while the evidence for harm is less uncertain”. Given the Church’s general support for fully informed decision making, it also follows to not push minors or their parents into making irreversible medical decisions, when the evidence of benefit is questionable at best. It added that “[s]ystematic reviews of evidence have found no evidence of adverse effects of psychotherapy in this context.”
While the US Bishops have not yet released a statement directly on this ruling, they released a statement in March of 2023 of why they oppose “interventions…intended to transform the body so as to make it take on as much as possible the form of the opposite sex, contrary to the natural form of the body.” Not only does this contradict the dignity of the human person, it also may contribute to the confusion already being experienced, especially with minors. The National Catholic Bioethics Center (NCBC) has long maintained that medicalized interventions—puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, surgeries—are not morally licit, especially on minors. In their own “Statement on Protecting Children from Harm,” they call for halting such procedures in favor of psychological evaluation. The NCBC cites several resources emphasizing that true flourishing is found in accepting the body God gives.
The Supreme Court’s decision, underpinned by legislative discretion and scientific caution, aligns closely with the Catholic ethic of protecting minors from irreversible harm and honoring the integrity of the human person. While this ruling is a great step for truly helping minors struggling with gender identity, it still leaves the door wide open for young adults to be caught up in an ideology of “gender affirming care” that is too often politically and financially motivated, based on evidence that is at best of questionable validity, and bereft of any acknowledgement that seeking counseling to accept one’s biology should at least be considered as a first step of treatment. We do, however, still have a long way to go to defend in today’s culture the truth of the fundamental order of the human person, including sexual differences inscribed in the human body.