Far-right figures including Elon Musk and Rep. Nancy Mace raged against gender-affirming medical care as the conservative-heavy Supreme Court seemed poised to uphold a Tennessee law denying transition treatments to transgender youth when the justices heard arguments Wednesday.
During the court’s wide-ranging discussion of the case, several of the court’s six conservative justices suggested that the legislature, rather than the justice system, should be the one to address a divisive matter like the one at hand.
As Chief Justice John Roberts put it, according to The New York Times, “The Constitution leaves that question to the people’s representatives, rather than to nine people, none of whom is a doctor.”
The three-justice liberal minority, however, all seemed to indicate their support for the challenge to the Tennessee law—which is mirrored in nearly half of states—brought by three families of transgender teens and a doctor, with the support of President Joe Biden’s administration.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackon, for one, shared concern about the idea that the court should avoid ruling on complicated issues because they lack expertise.
“That’s a question for the court because it’s a constitutional question,” she said. “I’m worried that we’re undermining the foundation of some of our bedrock equal protection case.”
While an official ruling in the case has yet to be reached, suffice it to say that a landmark decision affirming the right of trans youth to have transition care would come as a shock given the indications justices gave Wednesday.
In contrast to the court’s deliberations, social media reactions to the case from high-profile figures on the far right arrived in more extreme, and often overtly transphobic, terms.
Musk, the emergent MAGA loyalist and billionaire, who has repeatedly declared his estranged 20-year-old daughter Vivian Wilson “dead” because she decided to transition, was quick to weigh in.
“Sterilizing minor children before the age of consent is deeply wrong and many who had surgery now greatly regret it,” he wrote on X.
Contrary to Musk’s claims, however, some studies have shown that hormone treatments do not make transgender women permanently infertile and that very few people who transition later regret doing so.
In another post, the world’s richest man called to “defund” the American Civil Liberties Union, which had argued the case Wednesday on behalf of the plaintiffs.
Also taking up the anti-trans mantle was Mace, the Republican South Carolina congresswoman who made waves in November when she successfully sought to bar her incoming trans colleague Sarah McBride from using bathrooms matching her gender identity on Capitol Hill.
A stream of anti-trans posts poured onto Mace’s X timeline throughout the day, interrupted only when her staff made a “takeover” of her account to wish her happy birthday and share a photo of Mace eating a chocolate pie from Waffle House, where she used to work as a waitress.
In one post, Mace bizarrely compared transitioning to getting a tattoo. “‘Children can decide to change their gender.’ If there weren’t laws preventing kids from getting tattoos, a lot of us would be walking around looking like an Etch A Sketch,” she wrote.
And in another, she mocked ACLU attorney Chase Strangio, who on Wednesday became the first openly trans person to argue before the Supreme Court, writing: “Their lawyer doesn’t even look old enough to transition, let alone practice law.”
