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The ruling, said Justice Sonia Sotomayor, reflects the right-wing majority's "failure to accept and account for a fundamental truth: LGBTQ people exist."
A day after many LGBTQ+ Americans celebrated the 10th anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that established marriage equality in the United States, right-wing Justice Samuel Alito suggested in a new decision that public schools should not promote "acceptance of same-sex marriage."
Alito's opinion was handed down in a 6-3 ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor, in which the high court's right-wing majority held that parents should be permitted to opt their children out of certain lessons in public schools on religious grounds.
The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit filed by parents of several religious backgrounds in Montgomery County, Maryland, who sued the county's school system for not giving parents advance notice and an opportunity to opt out of a curriculum that included storybooks dealing with LGBTQ+ themes.
The books included Pride Puppy, about a dog that gets lost at an LGBTQ+ pride parade; Love, Violet, about a girl who has a same-sex crush; Born Ready, about a transgender boy; and Uncle Bobby's Wedding, about a gay couple getting married.
Alito pointed to the latter book in particular in his opinion.
"It is significant that this book does not simply refer to same-sex marriage as an existing practice," wrote the judge. "Instead, it presents acceptance of same-sex marriage as a perspective that should be celebrated."
Elly Brinkley, staff attorney for U.S. Free Expression Programs at the free speech group PEN America, noted the timing of Alito's comments about marriage equality.
"Just after the 10th anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges and as we celebrate Pride Month, the Supreme Court has delivered a devastating blow to the dignity of LGBTQ+ people and families," said Brinkley. "This ruling means that parents can opt their children out of any classroom activity that acknowledges same-sex marriages, the right to which this very court held was guaranteed by the Constitution."
The right-wing majority ruled that Montgomery County Public Schools must allow families to opt out of any lessons that parents believe will interfere with their children's religious education, including stories or discussions with LGBTQ+ themes.
"This ruling threatens to give any religious parent veto power over public school curricula. If this dangerous logic is carried forward, it could unravel decades of progress toward inclusive education and equal rights."
Legal scholars said that in addition to stigmatizing the families of an estimated 5 million children in the U.S. who have one or more LGBTQ+ parents, the ruling could pave the way for parents to argue that their children shouldn't be exposed at school to materials involving any number of topics, including evolution, yoga, and mothers who work outside the home—all issues that have been the subject of earlier, unsuccessful lawsuits against schools.
"The decision could have far-reaching consequences for public schools' ability to create an inclusive and welcoming environment that reflects the diversity of their communities, as well schools' ability to implement any secular lesson plan that may trigger religious objections," said the ACLU, which filed an amicus brief in the case arguing that the school district's "policy prohibiting opt-outs from the English Language Arts curriculum is religiously neutral and applicable across the board."
Daniel Mach, director of the ACLU's Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, said that religious freedom is "fundamentally important" under U.S. law.
But freedom of religion, Mach said, "shouldn't force public schools to exempt students from any secular lessons that don't align with their families' religious views. This decision could wreak havoc on public schools, tying their hands on basic curricular decisions and undermining their ability to prepare students to live in our pluralistic society."
Cecilia Wang, national legal director of the ACLU, added that parents with religious objections will now be "empowered to pick and choose from a secular public school curriculum, interfering with the school district's legitimate educational purposes and its ability to operate schools without disruption—ironically, in a case where the curriculum is designed to foster civility and understanding across differences."
Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented in the case, with Sotomayor making the unusual move of announcing her dissent from the bench.
Citizens fully experiencing the United States' multicultural society, said Sotomayor, "is critical to our nation's civic vitality. Yet it will become a mere memory if children must be insulated from exposure to ideas and concepts that may conflict with their parents' religious beliefs."
She also accused the majority of making a "myopic attempt to resolve a major constitutional question through close textual analysis of Uncle Bobby's Wedding," which revealed, she said, "its failure to accept and account for a fundamental truth: LGBTQ people exist."
The ruling is the latest victory for right-wing advocates of what they view as religious freedom at the high court; other recent rulings have allowed a web designer to refuse to make a website for same-sex couples and a high school football coach to pray with his team at school games.
Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, called Friday's ruling a "deeply troubling outcome for public education, equality, and the constitutional principle of the separation between state and church."
"This ruling threatens to give any religious parent veto power over public school curricula. If this dangerous logic is carried forward, it could unravel decades of progress toward inclusive education and equal rights," said Gaylor. "Public schools must be grounded in facts and reality and not subject to religious censors."
"This is devastating, to say the least," said one critic of the White House decision to dismantle a program that has served nearly 1.3 million young people in recent years. "Suicide prevention is about people, not politics."
In the midst of Pride Month, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump announced that it will shut down the national suicide hotline for LGBTQ+ youth.
Since 2022, the National Suicide Hotline, accessible by dialing 988, allowed users to "press 3" to speak with counselors trained to support LGBTQ+ youth.
According to the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization that was contracted to run the hotline, LGBTQ+ youth are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers and 41% of them seriously considered suicide in the past year. Now, the service that is meant to help them will be shut down on July 17.
A statement released Tuesday by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration said that the hotline "will no longer silo LGB+ youth services," using a hateful and discriminatory abbreviation that excludes transgender and queer individuals, which has become standard for the Trump administration. SAMHSA insisted that it would continue "serving all help seekers, including those" who used the LGBTQ+ hotline.
However, as Adrian Shanker, a senior advisor to the Biden administration on issues related to gender and sexual identity, told Mother Jones, the LGBTQ+ suicide prevention service was created to deal with the exceptionally high influx of calls from people in that community and designed to meet their specific needs. According to SAMHSA data, the hotline has served nearly 1.3 million callers since its creation in 2022.
"This is not about politics. It's not about the political divide on transgender medicine or trans people in the military, or any of the other hot-button political topics," Shanker said. "This is about suicide prevention and crisis intervention for people living at a higher rate of suicide risk."
The legislation that added special counseling for high-risk populations, including LGBTQ+ youth, was signed by President Trump in 2020. But since its passage, far-right attacks on sexual and gender minorities have become a core part of the Republican platform and the second Trump administration.
Since taking office, the administration has introduced measures that seek to erase transgender people from public life. These have included barring people from identifying as their preferred gender on federal documents, stripping the funds from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care, and erasing the history of transgender Americans from government websites. They have described these efforts as part of a crusade to eliminate "radical gender ideology."
In their efforts to shut down the suicide prevention program, members of the administration have invoked age-old stereotypes accusing gay and trans people of abusing vulnerable youth.
Rachel Cauley, a spokesperson for the White House Office of Management and Budget, told NBC News last week that it defended efforts to defund the suicide hotline because "children are encouraged to embrace radical gender ideology by 'counselors' without consent or knowledge of their parents." Another unnamed senior administration official described the organizations who provided this mental health care to vulnerable youth as "radical grooming contractors."
Ironically, rising bigotry has been one of the driving forces of the LGBTQ+ suicide epidemic. A study published by Nature Human Behavior and the Trevor Project last year found that in states that enacted anti-trans laws, the rate of suicide attempts among transgender and non-binary teenagers increased from 7% to 72%.
"This is devastating, to say the least," Trevor Project CEO Jaymes Black said in a Wednesday statement about the closure of the suicide hotline. "Suicide prevention is about people, not politics. The administration’s decision to remove a bipartisan, evidence-based service that has effectively supported a high-risk group of young people through their darkest moments is incomprehensible."
Dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that "there is no constitutional justification" for the decision, and access to gender-affirming care "can be a question of life or death."
LGBTQ+ advocates decried Wednesday's U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding Tennessee's prohibition on gender-affirming medical treatments for minors as a dangerous green light for states to violate personal privacy and ban healthcare that many transgender people say saved their lives.
Writing for the 6-3 majority in U.S. v. Skrmetti, Chief Justice John Roberts stated that S.B. 1, Tennessee's 2023 ban on gender-affirming care for people under age 18, does not violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The majority concurred with a lower court's ruling that S.B. 1 is not subject to heightened scrutiny, a standard of judicial review also known as intermediate scrutiny used to determine a law's constitutionality, especially in cases involving classifications based on sex or gender.
"The Supreme Court is green-lighting the eradication of trans people from society."
"This case carries with it the weight of fierce scientific and policy debates about the safety, efficacy, and propriety of medical treatments in an evolving field," Roberts wrote. "The voices in these debates raise sincere concerns; the implications for all are profound. The equal protection clause does not resolve these disagreements. Nor does it afford us license to decide them as we see best."
"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 14th Amendment," the ruling adds. "Having concluded it does not, we leave questions regarding its policy to the people, their elected representatives, and the democratic process."
BREAKING: In a 6-3 Roberts decision, the Supreme Court has ruled that Tennessee's ban on gender affirming care is not subject to heightened scrutiny. This decision will strip millions of trans people off their constitutional rights.www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p...
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— Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) June 18, 2025 at 7:17 AM
Roberts was joined in the majority by right-wing Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that "there is no constitutional justification" for the decision, which "does irrevocable damage to the equal protection clause and invites legislatures to engage in discrimination by hiding blatant sex classifications in plain sight. It also authorizes, without second thought, untold harm to transgender children and the parents and families who love them."
She continued:
Transgender adolescents' access to hormones and puberty blockers... is not a matter of mere cosmetic preference. To the contrary, access to care can be a question of life or death. Some transgender adolescents suffer from gender dysphoria, a medical condition characterized by clinically significant and persistent distress resulting from incongruence between a person's gender identity and sex identified at birth. If left untreated, gender dysphoria can lead to severe anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance abuse, self-harm, and suicidality. Suicide, in particular, is a major concern for parents of transgender teenagers, as the lifetime prevalence of suicide attempts among transgender individuals may be as high as 40%. Tragically, studies suggest that as many as one-third of transgender high school students attempt suicide in any given year.
S.B. 1—introduced by Tennessee state Sen. Jack Johnson (R-23)—who was also behind the state's public drag ban—prohibits minors from undergoing hormone therapy or taking prescribed puberty blockers. Three transgender teens and their parents, as well as a Tennessee doctor who treats trans youth, challenged the law, claiming it violated the equal protection clause.
The plaintiffs were joined by the Biden administration along with the national and state ACLU, Lambda Legal, and the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP in asking the Supreme Court to review the ban after the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld it in September 2023.
Responding to Wednesday's ruling, Allison Scott of the Campaign for Southern Equality—which manages the Trans Youth Emergency Project (TYEP)—said: "I am heartbroken today. No one should be forced to leave their home state to access healthcare—and it is outrageous to see the U.S. Supreme Court uphold these bans and continue to allow the government to interfere with the personal medical decisions of families."
Scott was alluding to the argument often made by proponents of bans on not only trans healthcare but also abortion and other reproductive rights that people seeking such care are free to go where it is legal—even as some states pass laws banning such travel.
There are approximately 300,000 people aged 13-17 and 1.3 million adults in the United States who identify as transgender, according to the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, which notes that more than two dozen states have passed laws similar to S.B. 1.
(Image: Human Rights Campaign Foundation)
Transgender activist Alejandra Caraballo, a civil rights attorney and instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic, said on the social media site Bluesky, "I can't begin to tell you just how incredibly fucked trans people are here."
"This will pour gasoline on the Trump administration's attacks on trans people and they will get even harsher and more cruel," Caraballo added. "The Supreme Court is green-lighting the eradication of trans people from society."
Caraballo and others including the ACLU and trans rights activist Erin Reed noted that the decision is somewhat limited because it leaves previous rulings against anti-trans laws intact. However, Caraballo warned that "while the decision didn't explicitly say heightened scrutiny doesn't apply to all contexts involving trans people, it held that it was on the basis of medical diagnosis."
Therefore, "the government could just do whatever it wants to trans people based on gender dysphoria," she wrote. "For instance, they could strip everyone with gender dysphoria of security clearance in the government. Declare everyone with gender dysphoria a national security threat and purge them from the government entirely. The trans military ban will be upheld under this."
"Most importantly, states can now just ban gender-affirming care for everyone, including adults," Caraballo added. "We'll likely see that coming soon in addition to federal government efforts to eliminate access for all trans people."
"This will pour gasoline on the Trump administration's attacks on trans people."
U.S. President Donald Trump has renewed and expanded his first-term attacks on transgender people, including by issuing a day one executive order declaring that only two genders exist, another order advocating action against educators who "facilitate the social transition of a minor," and yet another directing the Department of Education—which he has vowed to abolish—to notify school districts that allowing transgender girls and women to compete on female teams violates Title IX, the federal law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in education.
Trump also appointed a transphobe to head the Justice Department's civil rights office, ordered the removal transgender people and issues from federal agency websites, and reinstated his first-term ban on new military enlistment by trans people, who—according to the White House—cannot lead an "honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle."
"Every day I speak with families of transgender youth who are worried about the future," TYEP patient navigator Van Bailey said after Wednesday's ruling. "Many are panicking, unsure of where or when they'll get the medicine that their child needs to continue leading a healthy, happy life. These laws are cruelly thrusting families into impossible choices, and it is deeply unfair."
As we wait for legal guidance from our partners at @aclu.org and @lambdalegal.org, we want to share what we already know:The Supreme Court’s decision in U.S. v. Skrmetti is devastating, and we will not stop fighting.
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— Christopher Street Project (@christopherstreet.bsky.social) June 18, 2025 at 8:34 AM
ACLU LGBTQ & HIV Project co-director Chase Strangio—the first openly trans attorney to argue before the Supreme Court—said that "today's ruling is a devastating loss for transgender people, our families, and everyone who cares about the Constitution."
However, Strangio also noted that "the court left undisturbed Supreme Court and lower court precedent that other examples of discrimination against transgender people are unlawful."
"We are as determined as ever to fight for the dignity and equality of every transgender person and we will continue to do so with defiant strength, a restless resolve, and a lasting commitment to our families, our communities, and the freedom we all deserve," he added.
Jennifer Levi, senior director of transgender and queer rights at GLAD Law, said in a statement that "the court today failed to do its job."
"When the political system breaks down and legislatures bow to popular hostility, the judiciary must be the Constitution's backbone," Levi added. "Instead, it chose to look away, abandoning both vulnerable children and the parents who love them. No parent should be forced to watch their child suffer while proven medical care sits beyond their reach because of politics."
"When the political system breaks down and legislatures bow to popular hostility, the judiciary must be the Constitution's backbone."
National Center for LGBTQ Rights legal director Shannon Minter asserted: "The court's ruling abandons transgender youth and their families to political attacks. It ignored clear discrimination and disregarded its own legal precedent by letting lawmakers target young people for being transgender."
"Healthcare decisions belong with families, not politicians," Minter added. "This decision will cause real harm."
Sasha Buchert, counsel and director of the Nonbinary and Transgender Rights Project at Lambda Legal, called the ruling "heartbreaking" and contended it will make it "more difficult for transgender youth to escape the danger and trauma of being denied their ability to live and thrive."
"But we will continue to fight fiercely to protect them," Buchert added. "Make no mistake, gender-affirming care is often lifesaving care, and all major medical associations have determined it to be safe, appropriate, and effective. This is a sad day, and the implications will reverberate for years and across the country, but it does not shake our resolve to continue fighting."
The Supreme Court’s Skrmetti decision is a pivotal moment in our fight for LGBTQ+ equality. Here are three ways to TAKE ACTION:
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— Human Rights Campaign (@hrc.org) June 18, 2025 at 9:26 AM
Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Lambda Legal, and other advocacy organizations are planning to hold a "decision day" rally at noon Wednesday outside the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.
HRC lamented that Skrmetti "sets a dangerous precedent and threatens access to care for trans people across the country."
"We are showing up loud and clear: We will not go back," HRC said. "We will not be erased."