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The landmark 6-3 ruling in US v Skrmetti will protect children from sterilising drugs and surgeries in about half of US states, thanks to strong grassroots activism and pivotal moves by Trump.

All 50 US states are free to ban transgender drugs and surgeries for children, thanks to a United States Supreme Court ruling handed down on Wednesday that marks a major victory in the global effort to safeguard children from radical gender ideology.

The nation’s highest court ruled 6-3 to uphold a 2023 Tennessee law banning puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and genital mutilation surgery for gender-dysphoric minors.

Originally brought by the Biden administration, United States v Skrmetti aimed to overturn Tennessee’s law, arguing it discriminated against trans-identifying youth by denying them medical treatment.

Not so, according to Chief Justice John Roberts, who penned the court’s opinion and accused Biden’s legal team of trying to “contort the meaning of the term ‘medical treatment.’”

“Notably absent from their framing is a key aspect of any medical treatment: the underlying medical concern the treatment is intended to address,” he wrote.

Roberts’ point was clear: the issue isn’t the drugs, but how — and why — they’re used. Tennessee’s law doesn’t ban puberty blockers outright, only their use for treating gender distress in children, while still allowing them for conditions like early puberty.

The landmark ruling has implications well beyond Tennessee, protecting similar laws already on the books in around 25 other US states.

It also mirrors policy shifts globally — notably in the UK, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and France — where radical ‘gender medicine’ is now tightly controlled.

Australia is yet to follow suit, despite growing calls from clinicians, lawmakers and prominent leaders.

Commonsense has prevailed in the United States — but why? The Skrmetti decision was shaped by three key factors that offer important lessons for global observers.

1. A Weak Argument

First, the Biden Department of Justice brought forward a weak case.

Lawyers had effectively argued that the framers of the United States Constitution had intended to guarantee children a right to transgender drugs and surgery.

More technically, they claimed Tennessee’s law violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause by discriminating against trans-identifying youth — that withholding these treatments constituted sex-based discrimination and infringed on a child’s bodily autonomy.

Indeed, in response to the ruling, some Democratic lawmakers doubled down on the arguments rejected by the Court.

Senator Elizabeth Warren called it a “brazen political decision” and insisted that “trans kids suffer when they don’t get medically-necessary care” to be “exactly who they are”. Senator Cory Booker called Skrmetti a “heartless decision [that] puts trans children in danger” and represents “a violation of the constitutional protections every child is entitled to”.

Today the Supreme Court chose to cast transgender children in the shadows, deciding they are not entitled to the protections of the Equal Protection Clause. By upholding Tennessee’s ban on medical care for transgender children the Court has legitimized discriminatory treatment of…

— Sen. Cory Booker (@SenBooker) June 18, 2025

Alarmingly, even the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics tweeted out similar sentiments, revealing more about their ideological capture than the Court’s reasoning.

Yet it’s difficult to imagine the drafters of the 14th Amendment — Abraham Lincoln’s Civil Rights era peers — conceiving of a child’s access to sterilising drugs and surgery as one of the “privileges or immunities” of citizenship, or that denying such treatments amounts to a loss of “life, liberty, or property,” or violates “equal protection of the laws”.

As Chief Justice Roberts aptly noted, there are “rising debates regarding the relative risks and benefits of such treatments,” alongside “significant concerns regarding [their] potential harms”.

The idea that children posses a constitutional right to life-altering, experimental procedures may resonate in activist circles — but it is far from self-evident to the broader public.

And now, it has been firmly rejected by America’s top court.

2. A Hard-Fought Consensus

As highlighted by the Daily Wire’s story on the Skrmetti decision:

Tennessee lawmakers were inspired to introduce and pass the law following Daily Wire host Matt Walsh’s explosive investigation into Vanderbilt University’s gender clinic.

That’s right — a humble podcaster who exposed a hospital in his home city for putting profit over care by performing irreversible gender procedures on minors, pressuring staff to go along, and hiding it from the public helped spark this week’s monumental Supreme Court ruling.

BREAKING: My team and I have been investigating the transgender clinic at Vanderbilt here in Nashville. Vanderbilt drugs, chemically castrates, and performs double mastectomies on minors. But it gets worse. Here is what we found. Let’s start at the beginning.

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) September 20, 2022

I’m a regular listener of Matt Walsh’s podcast and closely followed his investigation as it unfolded in 2022. What struck me then — and continues to trouble me today — is that conservative podcasters spoke out more boldly on this issue than many Christian pastors and leaders.

And yet, Matt Walsh has shown that even without the reach of legacy media, a single voice — armed with truth and conviction — can spark national change and hold powerful institutions to account.

(That’s why I’m proud that The Daily Declaration has covered this issue faithfully for years — and why I encourage you to subscribe).

Children in half of America’s states are now legally protected from dangerous drugs and surgery — but this legal victory was only possible because everyday people like Matt Walsh worked hard to move the Overton window on such a vital subject.

And yes — the Overton window most certainly needed to be moved on this subject.

By adopting the language of transgender activists, the legacy media implicitly endorses the drugging and castration of children — and in doing so, shapes public perception. For example, the taxpayer-funded ABC routinely refers to these practices as “gender-affirming care.” But that term is deeply misleading: so-called “gender-affirming care” seeks to alter sex not gender; it denies reality rather than affirming it; and it harms lives instead of caring for them.

Yet, because the billion-dollar behemoth will undoubtedly use this terminology and other sneaky framing techniques when it belatedly reports on the bombshell Skrmetti decision, Australians will be duped into thinking a grave injustice has occurred in America.

The ABC isn’t going to defund itself, nor will the corporate press stop laundering leftist lies anytime soon, so it’s up to us to forge a new public consensus — one that reflects reality — to expose the rot and protect the vulnerable.

3. A Courageous President

Australian journalists have also made it their pastime to condition the public to viscerally recoil at the mere mention of Donald Trump’s name. They even routinely frame him as a fascist dictator — a dangerous claim that has fuelled multiple assassination attempts against the 47th US President.

While we’re all aware of Trump’s manifold flaws, what the propaganda press doesn’t want Australians to appreciate is his stand for commonsense, pro-West, and explicitly pro-Christian values.

The current US Supreme Court — which ruled along ideological lines in the Skrmetti case — holds a 6-3 conservative majority, thanks largely to Donald Trump, who appointed three of its conservative justices (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett) during his first term.

Since Supreme Court justices serve for life, who sits on the bench really matters.

As one commentator pointed out, seven of the nine current justices are parents — and six of them voted to ban drugs and irreversible surgeries for minors. The two dissenting justices, Sotomayor and Kagan, are both childless — mirroring a modern Democratic Party increasingly shaped by childless progressive elites disconnected from everyday family life. Trump’s appointments helped ensure that parental wisdom and common sense still have a voice in the nation’s highest court.

Moreover, it wasn’t just Trump’s 2016 election that helped secure this week’s win, but his re-election last November.

Just days after returning to the White House, President Trump issued an executive order titled Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation, which ordered the US government to stop supporting and funding sex-change treatments for children and ban them to the extent possible. This order reinforced the government’s stance, reducing the likelihood of federal opposition to this week’s Supreme Court decision.

Keep these underreported facts in mind next time the media paints Trump as a villain. And for a clearer picture of his ongoing policy impact, follow his initiatives at The Daily Declaration. Subscribe today.

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Image by Brian Doyle.