Legislatures, courts, and media outlets have manufactured legal and scientific uncertainty around gender-affirming care. This is the result of a phobic frame that vanishes the perspectives of minors and reduces decisionmakers’ confidence. This Note identifies that gender-affirming care bans should not be understood primarily as forms of sex discrimination, but instead as a form of unjustified impairment of minors’ self-determination. The solution,...
Gender
In states with restrictive Medicaid statutes, many transgender people seeking gender-affirming care look to the courts for injunctive relief to receive gender-affirming surgery. The standard to obtain injunctive relief necessitates, in part, a finding that the plaintiff would be irreparably harmed without the relief—in this case, without being able to access surgery. This Comment outlines dangerous implications embedded in the Ninth Circuit’s...
It has become common to oppose the equal citizenship of transgender persons by appealing to the welfare of cisgender women and girls. Such Cis-Woman-Protective (CWP) arguments have driven exclusionary efforts in an array of contexts, including restrooms, sports, college admissions, and antidiscrimination law coverage. Remarkably, however, this unique brand of anti-trans contentions has largely escaped being historicized, linked together, or subjected...
Transgender rights discussions often turn on the distinction between “gender identity” and “sex assigned at birth.” Gender identity is a person’s own internal sense of whether they are a man, a woman, or nonbinary. “Sex assigned at birth” means the male or female designation that doctors ascribe to infants based on genitalia and is marked on their birth records. Sex assigned at birth is intended to displace the concept of “biological...
Incarcerated transgender individuals with gender dysphoria have increasingly turned to the courts to seek medical relief in the form of gender confirmation surgery (GCS). These claims generally allege that prison officials’ denials of GCS amount to deliberate indifference, which is forbidden under the cruel and unusual punishment provision of the Eighth Amendment. To date, the First, Fifth, and Ninth Circuits have been the primary federal appellate...