Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti spoke exclusively to The Tennessee Star’s CEO and Editor-in-Chief Michael Patrick Leahy on Wednesday just moments after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a landmark case to uphold a Tennessee law that bans “gender-affirming care” for minors.
In the 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court held Tennessee’s law forbidding healthcare providers from performing or administering “gender-affirming” medical procedures or treatments to underage children is not subject to heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and satisfies rational basis review.
Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined the majority opinion while Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.
Skrmetti, on Wednesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, lauded the majority opinion, emphasizing how the justices focused appropriately on the medical nature of the issue and acknowledged how male and female bodies differ biologically and respond differently to certain drugs.
“It was an extremely measured opinion. They zeroed in on the big issue here, which is we’re talking about medical treatment, Male bodies and female bodies are just different. That is a biological fact. No matter how ideological you want to get, different drugs hit different bodies differently and in medicine, it is completely uncontroversial to say you don’t just hand people drugs. You hand them drugs to treat specific conditions, and the state can regulate that,” Skrmetti explained.
“Whereas here, the evidence is increasingly strong that there’s no medical benefit and there’s huge risk under the circumstances of giving kids these drugs for gender transition purposes. It’s okay for the state to say it’s not going to do that,” he added.
Skrmetti framed Wednesday’s ruling in the case as a triumph for democratic governance over judicial activism, arguing that it undermines public accountability when judges insert personal ideology into constitutional interpretation.
“We live in a representative democracy. We have a constitutional republic where the people’s elected representatives make a lot of the policy decisions. We have a federal and state Constitution that sets up the guardrails, but within that, the people rule themselves. When judges start to read their own preferences into the Constitution, that stifles the democratic activity that maintains accountability and legitimacy in our system,” Skrmetti said.
Concerning “gender-affirming” care for minors, Skrmetti stressed how such treatments pose serious and potentially irreversible risks to children, further asserting children cannot meaningfully consent to such treatments and that most gender confusion resolves with time.
“It is absolutely right that the Legislature said kids can’t consent to these life-altering treatments. They are potentially irreversible. The harm that they cause could last a lifetime. Kids being sterilized, kids losing the ability for intimacy, blood clots, cognitive development issues, all sorts of problems. Given how quickly we’ve seen these treatments expand, who knows what we’re going to see over the longer term in terms of adverse effects. Kids can’t consent to that,” Skrmetti said.
“Most kids who have gender confusion grow out of it, and we should be empathetic toward people who are dealing with this because it is a hard thing. This should not be made light. Kids who are struggling with this deserve our empathy, our sympathy, our care, but what they don’t deserve is to be subjected to ideologically-driven treatments that could radically change the course of their lives,” he added.
Skrmetti concluded the interview by crediting the success of the case in part to the drafting of the legislation in the Tennessee General Assembly by Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson (R-Franklin) and House Majority Leader William Lamberth (R-Portland), who, as he noted, prioritized the bill and ensured it was legally defensible through hearings and careful wording.
“It’s always better to defend a law that is very carefully drafted, and I think you can see just in terms of the amount of time that went into this, into the priority it got. Jack Johnson made sure this was SB1, the first bill introduced in the Senate that year. William Lamberth made sure it was HB1, the first bill introduced in the House,” Skrmetti said.
“They put a lot of time into this. They held hearings. They really worked hard, I think, to produce a solid legislative product, and that made it so much easier for us to defend it,” he added.
Live June 18 https://t.co/9AxMDDu8Dq
— MichaelPatrick Leahy (@michaelpleahy) June 18, 2025
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Jonathan Skrmetti” by Tennessee Attorney General.
