Supreme Court allows Idaho’s gender-affirming care ban to go into effect

The Supreme Court mostly reinstated Idaho’s ban on gender-affirming health care for minors on Monday, overturning a lower court decision to block the transphobic law while Labrador v. Poe, a lawsuit challenging its constitutionality, moves forward in lower courts. The law will now go into effect for all but the two minors and their families who sued to stop it… and the justices’ written comments suggest that they may ultimately rule in favor of such bans.

Idaho’s ban will punish medical professionals who provide such care to trans minors with felony convictions, up to $5,000 in fines, and up to 10 years in prison. A federal district court issued an injunction against the law in December 2023, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision the following month.

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Lawyers defending the ban argued that the lower courts went too far by prohibiting the state from enforcing the law against any patient or doctor, Vox explained. “The plaintiffs are two minors and their parents, and the injunction covers two million,” Idaho Attorney General Raúl R. Labrador wrote in his appeal.

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The matter ended up on the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” a list of emergency motions and other decisions that the court handles on an expedited schedule. Usually, the court does not explain its shadow docket decisions, but this time around Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that, if elected representatives’ laws are regularly blocked by courts, than many “necessary” newly passed laws “will remain ineffectual for years on end.”

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito concurred with Gorsuch’s opinion. However, all three aforenamed justices have previously issued past decisions allowing Republican judges to enforce statewide injunctions against the sale of abortion medication and the banning of homemade “ghost guns.”

A concurring opinion by Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett stated that the court had to “decide the emergency application by assessing likelihood of success on the merits.” In other words, they think the court’s decision to let the ban go into effect suggested that the ban’s supporting lawyers will ultimately prevail in the Republican-leaning high court.

This spells bad news for opponents of gender-affirming care bans. While many such bans have been blocked in court, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices are signaling their support for the bans. Democratic Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor both dissented however, saying that the high court should have let the lower courts resolve the matter of constitutionality first since those courts have more direct knowledge of the case.

“Today’s ruling allows the state to shut down the care that thousands of families rely on while sowing further confusion and disruption,” wrote the Idaho chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who is helping fight the law in court. “Nonetheless, today’s result only leaves us all the more determined to defeat this law in the courts entirely, making Idaho a safer state to raise every family.”

Imara Jones, a Black trans woman, civil rights expert, and CEO of TransLash Media, wrote, “This is a full-scale attack on the rights of trans people in all fifty States. We should say that clearly…. [The high court decision] is a logical consequence of the long-game legal strategy to undermine the rights of all transgender people in the United States and democracy itself.“

“For the past decade, far-right extremists at the Alliance Defending Freedom [ADF] have been the tip of the spear for nearly every anti-abortion, anti-trans, and anti-gay Supreme Court case,” Jones continued. “Idaho has long served as the ADF’s petri dish: giving them a place to ideate, propose, and pass radical anti-trans bills, all with the intention of setting Constitutional challenges and elevating their cases to a fully-captured Supreme Court.“