The Supreme Court disregarded the issue of precedent when it overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision in 2022, unraveling the legal right to abortion in its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. The Court left it to the states to decide whether they would legalize reproductive autonomy.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the Supreme Court “should reconsider” other previous rulings that granted the rights to contraception access, same-sex relationships, and same-sex marriage.
Since Dobbs, many state legislatures have banned reproductive healthcare for pregnant people and those who wish to become pregnant, as well as the safe and effective drugs used in medication abortions – mifepristone and misoprostol – and IVF (in vitro fertilization).
This has resulted in multiple cases of women bleeding to death after having miscarriages because doctors feared that treating them would break their state laws.
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Bodily autonomy loses again
On June 18, 2025, the Supreme Court issued a destructive ruling in United States v. Skrmetti, upholding Tennessee’s prohibition on gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth.
This 6-3 decision came down on partisan lines, with the Court’s Republican appointees opposing trans rights and the Democratic appointees supporting trans rights.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the majority, with Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas writing concurring majority opinions. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan wrote dissenting opinions.
The plaintiffs arguing for transgender rights claimed that the Tennessee law was unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
The Court’s ruling, however, asserted that Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care does not discriminate on the basis of sex or transgender status. The ruling will now allow the 25 states that currently have such bans to continue to enforce them.
With this draconian betrayal of transgender youth, families will now have to make insufferable choices — in some cases, whether to flee their state or separate their families while taking on huge financial liabilities or taking major legal risks to provide young people the ability to access medically necessary care.
Previously, in Alabama, a majority of judges on the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals declined to reconsider Alabama’s ban on gender-affirming care.
Alabama’s 2022 law makes it a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison for doctors to prescribe puberty blockers or hormone medication to a transgender person under the age of 19. The law also prohibits genital surgeries, even though physicians do not perform these on minors.
Trans people as scapegoats
Shortly after taking office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order allowing transgender troops to serve openly in the U.S. military.
In May of this year, however, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration has the right to enforce its executive order prohibiting transgender people from serving in the U.S. military.
Donald Trump has repeatedly targeted members of the transgender community, attempting to completely erase their existence with his policies.
He recently signed a mean-spirited and petty executive order in which he attempted to rewrite history by expunging trans activism and trans lives. The order demanded that transgender people be deleted from New York’s Stonewall Inn National Monument website, developed by the National Park Service. The acronym that once read LGBTQ+ has been reduced to LGB, standing for lesbian, gay, and bisexual.
Did the people who voted for Trump this time around really want him to spend his hours behind the Resolute Desk scrubbing trans people from U.S. history?
Another of Trump’s executive orders bans trans people from school and professional sports, from using the public facilities of their choice, and for those under 19, from choosing to have gender-affirming procedures to maintain their bodily autonomy because, to Trump, “There are only two genders: male and female.” All else goes contrary to the natural world.
He even signed an executive order declaring that there are only two genders. This led to a series of specific policy changes. Titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” the order describes biological sex as being determined by the size of one’s reproductive cells: small for men and large for women.
Government documents, including passports, visas, and employee records, can only show “male” or “female.” The government will no longer pay for trans-related health care, such as for government employees, military personnel, or federal prisoners.
In addition, he ordered all transgender women incarcerated in federal prisons thrown into male prison facilities despite multiple court rulings blocking the policy.
Trump’s mandates essentially say the federal government will no longer even recognize the existence of trans people and will prevent federal funds from being spent on any programs that do.
The order says, “Federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology” and it directs the Bureau of Prisons to revise its policies to ensure that federal inmates do not receive “any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.”
Recently, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has banned rainbow flags from being flown at U.S. embassies.
As was the case in other authoritarian regimes throughout history, the Trump administration has attempted to limit the bodily autonomy of women, trans, intersex, lesbian, gay, and bisexual people for the purpose of attempting to control their minds and limit their social power.
A nation under God
In her pioneering book, Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism, Suzanne Pharr describes a series of elements she finds common to the multiple forms of oppression. Such elements include what she refers to as a “defined norm” and a “lack of prior claim,” among many others.
Pharr explains a “defined norm” as a “standard of rightness and often of righteousness wherein all others are judged in relation to it. This norm must be backed up with institutional power, economic power, and both institutional and individual violence.”
Another way “the defined norm manages to maintain its power and control” and remain exclusive is by what Pharr refers to as the element or system of “lack of prior claim.”
This, according to Pharr, “means that if you weren’t there when the original document (the Constitution, for example) was written, or when the organization was first created, then you have no right to inclusion… Those who seek their rights, who seek inclusion, who seek to control their own lives instead of having their lives controlled are the people who fall outside the norm… They are the Other.”
In the original and unamended version of the U.S. Constitution, for example, since only male landowners of European-heritage had the right to vote, all Others, including women and people of color (those outside the defined norm and who lacked prior claim) had to fight long and difficult battles against strong forces to gain access to the voting booth, often under the threat of violence.
Some who continue to oppose marriage equality claim that this undermines the sanctity of marriage, and possibly leads to the destruction of society, often using religious sanctions as their justification.
Those in power in the United States have excluded reproductive freedoms, and LGBTQ+ bodily autonomy from the category of “defined norms.”
In addition, by viewing specifically trans, intersex, lesbian, gay, and bisexual people as the Other (and considering the fact that the founding national and institutional policy documents have likewise excluded their civil and human rights from a prior claim), a spate of state legislatures have either passed tried to pass laws prohibiting trans (and by implication, intersex) people from entering the public facilities that align with their gender identities if the identities differ from their sex assigned at birth.
And yes, the denial of bodily autonomy of the Other conforms to a patriarchal heteronormative Christian white nationalist playbook.
Historian Amanda Tyler defines Christian nationalism as a “political ideology and cultural framework that merges Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s promise of religious freedom.”
Christian nationalism, Tyler continues, “relies heavily on a false narrative of America as a ‘Christian nation,’ founded by Christians in order to privilege Christianity. This mythical history betrays the work of the framers to create a federal government that would remain neutral when it comes to religion, neither promoting nor denigrating it – a deliberate break with the state-established religions of the colonies.”
Anthea Butler distinguishes, more specifically, what defines white Christian nationalism:
“Simply put, it is the belief that America’s founding is based on Christian principles, white protestant Christianity is the operational religion of the land, and that Christianity should be the foundation of how the nation develops its laws, principles and policies.”
So, don’t be fooled. The Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Skrmetti has less to do with supposedly protecting trans youth and more to do with reaffirming a dominant patriarchal heteronormative Christian white nationalist norm.
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