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"So I guess I'm suddenly quite worried," Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said during this week's Supreme Court arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, a case about a Tennessee law that prohibits doctors from prescribing medicine to help transgender kids. Puberty blockers and hormones remain available to kids who need them for reasons other than treating gender dysphoria; it’s just trans kids who are denied care under the statute.

What worried Justice Jackson, she said, was the way her conservative colleagues were talking about the case. The Constitution guarantees all of us “the equal protection of the laws.” Usually, this means that when laws treat certain groups (like racial minorities or women) differently, the Supreme Court scrutinizes the law with extra care and skepticism, in what’s called “heightened scrutiny.” But the conservative justices seemed ready to throw that process away.

It’s not that anyone really denies transgender people are a vulnerable minority in our society. We're about 1.6% of the population. The trans community is bracing itself for new policies from a ferociously anti-trans federal government. Republican campaigns spent a reported $215 million on anti-trans advertising, which, as trans writer Gillian Branstetter observed, is more than a hundred dollars for every trans person in the United States.

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So why wouldn’t the conservative justices want to look skeptically at laws that target trans people?

Gender-affirming care for minors, the conservative justices kept repeating, involves “strong, forceful scientific policy arguments on both sides.” It’s an issue on which many people disagree, Tennessee says, with mountains of research to read. This isn’t really true; even in the European countries hostile to gender-affirming care, medical........

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