A leading pro-family organization has filed a legal brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in a case determining whether states can protect children and adolescent minors from the predatory transgender industry.

Family Research Council filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief in the case of United States v. Skrmetti. The case aims to determine whether Tennessee’s version of the SAFE Act passes constitutional muster, a proposition challenged by the Biden-Harris administration. The case focuses on “[w]hether Tennessee Senate Bill 1, which prohibits all medical treatments intended to allow ‘a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex’ or to treat ‘purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity,’ violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.”

The legal brief supports Tennessee’s protective law on two fronts. First, it denies that U.S. medical organizations enjoy complete unanimity on the importance of so-called “gender-affirming care” based on the medical evidence. Secondly, it disputes the evidence in question.

“The cornerstone of the Biden administration's argument in this case is that every major American medical association agrees that minors should be subjected to gender transition, chemical interventions, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones — and though they don’t like to talk about this — surgeries to ‘transition’ their gender. The emphasis is on the ‘consensus’ of American medical groups,” explained Christopher Mills, a legal expert who helped draft FRC’s brief, on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” Thursday.

“The medical groups’ reliance on low-quality studies to claim a ‘robust’ scientific ‘consensus’ exposes them for what they are, at least on this issue: policy advocates rather than honest brokers of medical evidence,” says the brief. “The one common ground in the literature is that, as the World Health Organization concluded, ‘the evidence base for children and adolescents is limited and variable regarding the longer-term outcomes of gender affirming care for children and adolescents.’”

The brief attacks “deceptive” arguments made by the ideology’s medical advocates, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). “The groups here cannot cite a systematic review that supports them, because there is none,” the brief reports.

“But the American medical groups have done totally the opposite. They’ve said, ‘We don’t really care what the evidence is.’ And so, our brief tries to expose that,” Mills told Perkins. “Then we go through the specific studies in this area and expose how weak it is.”

Mills said the low quality of evidence in favor of invasive transgender procedures is “not surprising. These are very new interventions, and they’re really dangerous. The puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones will, for many children, lead to permanent sterility, permanent changes in their body,” Mills stated. “And so, I think the ideological capture of the American medical groups is really what our brief tries to focus on.”

But evidence shows the World Professional Association for Transgender Health or (WPATH) had little regard for medical evidence. “Internal emails have showed that WPATH was not focused on the evidence. Their own scientific reviews from Johns Hopkins said, ‘We’re really not finding much good evidence,’” said Mills. Instead, they focused on questions such as “Are we going to be able to characterize this as medically necessary so that we can get insurance coverage? Can we give cover to physicians who are already doing these treatments, so they don’t get sued for malpractice?”

The amicus brief notes, as well, the consent-based argument that medical ethics hold children lack the mental faculties to agree to life-altering surgical procedures. “The past chair of AAP’s Committee on Adolescence, Dr. Cora Breuner, recently gave an interview supporting state laws prohibiting children from obtaining tattoos: ‘It is a permanent mark,’ ‘and I don’t think kids under 18 have that kind of agency to make a decision.’” Despite this contradiction, “we’re asking kids at ages nine, 10, and 11 to make these life-altering decisions, even while at the same time, the AAP says that kids that age shouldn’t be able to consent to a tattoo,” said Mills.

“They were thinking about practically everything except the scientific evidence and who gets harmed,” Mills concluded.

Nations around the world have retreated from pediatric gender interventions. One of the most notable studies cited in the brief, the Cass Review from the United Kingdom, found “no evidence that gender-affirmative treatments reduce” suicide. It concluded the entire edifice of transgender medical and surgical interventions rests on “remarkably weak evidence.”

Legal briefs such as FRC’s are important, because they help the Supreme Court understand the underlying issues at the heart of the cases, which may go unexplored in the regular briefs due to limited space, Mills said. “The main parties — the Biden administration, the state of Tennessee — only have a limited number of pages and a limited number of words and, especially in cases like this, there are a lot of complicated moving parts. You’ve not only got complicated legal arguments about the Constitution, what ‘equal protection’ means, how that applies, and the context of gender issues,” in addition to “factual, medical, scientific questions about treatments for gender dysphoria itself.” As a result, he stated, “there’s a lot of room to cover that can’t be done just by the parties.”

Anything that can block the rapid onset of gender ideology is welcome, pro-family advocates say. Extreme gender ideology, and the adolescent medical pipeline to which it is attached, “is leading them down a path of destruction,” said Perkins.

The brief shows that Christians must band together to oppose the spread of extreme gender ideology, culminating in the surgical removal of healthy reproductive organs, through society. “This really is demonic,” said Perkins.