In a win for children, common sense, and constitutional integrity, the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a Tennessee law (SB1) protecting minors from gender transition procedures. In a 6-3 ruling, the court affirmed the Sixth Circuit judgment in Tennessee’s favor, finding that the law “is not subject to heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and satisfies rational basis review.”

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court’s majority opinion (United States v. Skrmetti), which was joined by four other justices: Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. While he concurred in judgment, Justice Samuel Alito wrote his own opinion and only joined brief sections of the majority opinion. The court’s progressive wing, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Elena Kagan, dissented from the opinion.

While lawyers may parse every detail and precedent of the ruling, laymen will derive more benefit from considering five takeaways of the ruling.

1. The Supreme Court is, generally speaking, conservative.

This first takeaway may be the most obvious. In a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court chose not to force left-wing gender ideology down the throats of states whose legislatures chose to reject it. Literally half of this positive outcome is due to the three Supreme Court justices President Trump nominated during his first term in office. For all the worry over the compromising tendencies of “the Roberts Court” or the conservative bona fides of Trump’s court picks, these justices usually deliver conservative verdicts — at least in the sense of forestalling the culture’s leftward drift.

The worldview of the Supreme Court justices bleeds through in their framing of the issue. The opinion is carefully worded to describe Americans who “identify as transgender, meaning that their gender identity does not align with their biological sex.” Later a footnote clarifies, “We use ‘transgender boy’ to refer to an individual whose biological sex is female but who identifies as male, and ‘transgender girl’ to refer to an individual whose biological sex is male but who identifies as female.”

The care taken to craft a relatively neutral definition provides a sharp contrast to the ideological framing that marked certain lower court rulings. For instance, in striking down a Florida law similar to Tennessee’s, Judge Robert Hinkle proclaimed in 2024 that “gender identity is real,” as opposed to “just a choice.”

The justices’ conservative sentiments also show through in three concurring opinions. Thomas wrote separately “to address some additional arguments made in defense of Tennessee’s law,” he said. He argued forcefully against “extending the Bostock framework” and warned about overly crediting “claims about medical consensus and expertise” — particularly those made by the politically compromised World Professional Organization for Transgender Health (WPATH). Barrett wrote separately (in a concurrence joined by Thomas) to argue that transgender status does not constitute a “suspect class” that should enjoy special discrimination protection.

Alito was so “uneasy” with the court’s analysis that he wrote separately to emphasize the same point: “neither transgender status nor gender identity should be treated as a suspect or ‘quasi-suspect’ class.” He explained, “Transgender status is not ‘immutable,’ and as a result, persons can and do move into and out of the class. Members of the class differ widely among themselves, and it is often difficult for others to determine whether a person is a member of the class.”

2. Not everything can be fit into the category of “sex.”

Ever since the Obama administration, progressive ideologues have tried to shoehorn the entire LGBT agenda into existing anti-discrimination laws either by broadening the definition of “sex” to include any category that references sex or gender, such as “sexual orientation,” and “gender identity,” or “sex stereotyping.” Such reasoning was the basis for equal protection legal challenges of laws like Tennessee’s.

Without fully tackling this movement, the Supreme Court’s Skrmetti decision at least erected boundaries around it. The court did so simply by refusing to acknowledge sex-based categories as relevant to Tennessee’s law. “On its face, SB1 incorporates two classifications. First, SB1 classifies on the basis of age. … Second, SB1 classifies on the basis of medical use,” wrote the court. “Neither of the above classifications turns on sex.”

The challengers argued Tennessee’s law counted as sex-based discrimination “because its prohibitions reference sex” or, alternatively, “because application of the law turns on sex,” but the court found neither argument persuasive. The court declined to answer whether transgender identity classified as a “suspect class,” reasoning that “this case … does not raise that question because SB1 does not classify on the basis of transgender status.” The court also declined an invitation to apply Bostock to this case, stating, “We have not yet considered whether Bostock’s reasoning reaches beyond the Title VII context, and we need not do so here.”

While the court punted on settling these disputed points, it did undermine their relevance by declining to find them applicable in the context of law protecting minors from gender transition procedures. The law classified on the basis of “age” and “medical use,” the court said, not “sex.”

3. Newsworthy developments influence judicial verdicts.

Especially for amateurs, it can be tempting to think of constitutional law in an idealized way, as if the judicial system exists in a bottle, isolated from cultural developments. But, for good and ill, Supreme Court verdicts are influenced by the culture, because the justices live in that culture.

As they signaled during oral arguments, the justices are well aware of multiple newsworthy developments relevant to the Skrmetti case. The justices highlighted the eroding credibility of WPATH, the European walk-back of gender transition procedures for minors, and especially the Cass report, which caused England’s National Health Service (NHS) to totally redraw its model of care for gender dysphoric youth.

Regarding the Cass report and England’s revised care model, the court explained that they cited it “not for guidance they might provide on the ultimate question of United States law … but to demonstrate the open questions regarding basic factual issues before medical authorities and other regulatory bodies. Such uncertainty ‘afford[s] little basis for judicial responses in absolute terms.’” Therefore, they found a “need for legislative flexibility in this area.”

4. American society is deeply divided.

The reason for this legislative flexibility is that transgender issues in general — and the policy question of providing gender transition procedures to minors in particular — are deeply divisive. This is evident from Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion, which Justices Jackson and Kagan joined (Kagan wrote a separate dissent to highlight one issue she would remand to the appellate court).

The opinion reads like it came from an alternate universe, declaring that the majority opinion “obfuscates a sex classification that is plain on the face of this statute.” To make this point, Sotomayor is forced to argue that the Supreme Court should overturn yet another 1970s precedent, Geduldig v. Aiello (1974), which she said “was ‘egregiously wrong’ when it was decided.” In it, the court found that “discrimination on the basis of pregnancy” did not qualify as “discrimination on the basis of sex.”

5. Good-faith political action can survive judicial scrutiny.

Regardless, the most important takeaway from the case is that political activity on hot-button political issues still matters. In an era where seemingly every legislative and executive action faces immediate legal challenge, it can be tempting to indulge the despairing notion that only the courts really decide what actions stand or fall — a notion that leads to withdrawal from the political process.

This ruling proves the opposite: the campaign to curtail gender transition procedures for minors began more than five years ago. Since then, a burgeoning coalition has developed activist networks, model legislation, and good arguments for enacting them. Legislative allies have passed bills protecting minors from gender transition procedures in over half (27) of all state legislatures. Legal allies have successfully defended the laws and exposed the lies thrown against them in the process. Above all, the movement has focused on persuasion, using facts, personal anecdotes, and reasoned arguments to change people’s minds.

This Supreme Court decision has vindicated that historic effort by acknowledging the right of states to pass such laws. In a rebuke to the challengers’ exclusive focus on issues of sex, the court listed Tennessee’s various persuasive reasons to enact such a law: known dangerous side-effects, the experimental nature of the procedures, minors’ immaturity to make life-altering decisions, and a variety of less-invasive treatment options.

“Our role is not ‘to judge the wisdom, fairness, or logic’ of the law before us … but only to ensure that it does not violate the equal protection guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment,” the court concluded. “Having concluded it does not, we leave questions regarding its policy to the people, their elected representatives, and the democratic process.”