Published October 16, 2024
On October 16, 2024, EPPC scholars filed two amicus briefs in United States v. Skrmetti, in support of Tennessee’s right to enact legislation restricting medical interventions to “transition” minors with gender dysphoria which it considers harmful and contrary to the best scientific evidence. The case was appealed by the federal government after the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Tennessee’s favor.
Tennessee’s brief notes that the European medical community is now recognizing that “these interventions pose significant risks with unproven benefits” and points out that the standard of care the federal government relies on is not supported by reliable medical research. The State argues that these so-called standards of care are based on ideology, not science.
EPPC Fellows Eric Kniffin, Mary Rice Hasson, and Theresa Farnan, drawing on the work of EPPC’s own Person & Identity Project, wrote an amicus brief on behalf of EPPC. The brief explained:
The fundamental disagreements between the parties are not rooted in different assessments of the scientific evidence as much as they are in fundamentally different visions of what a human person is…
These two visions … lead to two “irreconcilably conflicting visions of what it means for doctors to do harm or injustice to children experiencing confusion and distress about the normal biological development of their bodies.”
The Traditional Vision is assumed by and informs pediatric medical care, while the Transgender Vision contradicts biology and is inconsistently applied even by those who claim to hold it. It is legitimate for the Tennessee General Assembly to hold the Traditional Vision of the person, to prevent medical interventions that it believes to be harmful in light of that anthropology, and to protect all minors, of both sexes, from those harmful interventions.
EPPC Fellow Erika Bachiochi signed onto a separate amicus brief in the case, joining thirty other scholars in philosophy, theology, law, politics, history, literature, and the sciences. The scholars’ brief critiques petitioner’s “philosophical anthropology of fragmentation, in which the mental aspects of sex have almost entirely displaced the meaning of the body and organic wholeness of the person.”
The briefs urge the Supreme Court to affirm the Sixth Circuit’s judgment below.
Eric Kniffin is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he works on a range of initiatives to protect and strengthen religious liberty as part of EPPC’s Administrative State Accountability Project.
