Washington, D.C.—The National Center for Law & Policy’s Dean Broyles filed a friends-of the-court brief with the U.S. Supreme Court on October 15, 2024 in United States v. Skrmetti, asking the court to decline to restrict state legislatures from protecting children struggling with gender dysphoria from experimental medical procedures. Tennessee passed a law in 2023 protecting children from harmful, unnecessary, and risky medical procedures to alter their natural physical bodies to try to make it appear physically that they are the opposite sex. The specific procedures banned for minors include puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgeries to remove (and replace) already healthy body parts. The Biden-Harris administration intervened and appealed Tennessee’s well-reasoned 6th Circuit legal opinion deciding in favor of the state’s protections to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The powerful brief was submitted by the NCLP on behalf of 31 scholars of philosophy, theology, law, politics, history, literature and the sciences as well as think-tank experts. Its primary author is David S. Crawford, J.D., M.T.S., S.T.L., S.T.D., Dean, Associate Professor of Moral Theology and Family Law, Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.Here’s a sample of the brief’s arguments:
“The crucial human question posed by this case is whether “sex” is an objective, non-arbitrary and natural reality and whether it is properly and organically rooted in the body’s sexual dimorphism. Only this non-arbitrary character allows recognition of the individual person as a whole. The non-arbitrary character also points to the natural relationships that form the most fundamental human communities, beginning with natural family relations. From there the tissue of relations extends indefinitely, to encompass the sense in which we are all connected, through the endless river of generations. The subjective, fragmenting and arbitrary implications of Petitioner’s arguments invite a forgetfulness of this tissue of organic ties. If Petitioner’s arguments are accepted by this Court, these unstated but destructive presuppositions could be woven into our constitutional framework, where they will continue to play out in untold ways for the whole of society and in perpetuity. In short, they will amount to the imposition of a false Anthropology on every man, woman, and child in our society.”
“We are honored to be a part of this important effort to affirm basic biological realities and protect children from being turned into Frankenstein-like creatures,” stated the NCLP’s Dean Broyles. “Truth is that which is that which conforms to reality—what is really real. Our laws and public policies are only legitimate to the extent that they are rooted in objective truth and reality,” Broyles continued. “Sex, the natural dimorphism of maleness and femaleness, is an objective reality, firmly rooted in biology, genetics, anthropology, and more than 5,000 years of human history. Recently, radical cultural revolutionaries have confused and obfuscated basic truths about sex by fabricating and promoting the terms “gender,” and “gender identity,” which are not rooted in anything objective, but are, in truth, purely subjective terms tied only to one’s internal beliefs and feelings, untethered from our actual embodied realty.”
“‘Gender affirming care’ is truly an Orwellian euphemism employed as an excuse to engage in immoral, dangerous and damaging social and medical experiments on our children,” stated Broyles. “Purported gender affirming care seeks to negate reality by ignoring and denying rather than affirming, true gender, a person’s actual sex—the natural, real and immutable sexed human body. And it does not provide effective medical care, but has proved to actually undermines physical health and personal wholeness by alienating the soul from the body. It prioritizes one’s mutable internal feelings or beliefs, over and above embodied natural realities reflected in sexual dimorphism. I submit that we are on paper thin ice here, morally and culturally, when we attempt to prioritize body-denying subjective thoughts and feelings, which are admittedly fluid, as opposed to objective embodied reality, which is fixed by our Creator.”
A dangerous trend in recent decades has been for “trusted” adults and medical professionals pushing and “affirm-only” agenda rushing headlong to encourage minors to engage in transition procedures without properly diagnosing or treating underlying mental health conditions. Systematic reviews around the world have shown (a) insufficient evidence to support the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgical interventions on children, and, (b) the risks to children outweigh the hypothetical benefits. In fact, a rapidly growing list of European countries, including Sweden, Finland, Norway and the United Kingdom, have concluded that the risk of these experimental procedures on children outweigh their benefits. Currently, 26 U.S. states have laws that regulate similar medical procedures for minors.
The importance of the Skirmetti case cannot be understated. Because the Biden administration is inviting the high court to recognize gender dysphoria transitioning as something that is somehow constitutionally protected for children by the 14thAmendment’s Equal Protection or Due Process clauses, some court watchers have called this case the potential “Roe v. Wade” of transgenderism. Please pray that our children and grandchildren are protected from such medical horrors.
You can read the NCLP Scholars’ brief here.