by Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman, Quillette
Thanks to the US Supreme Court, America’s helping professions—including medicine, education, and psychology—may finally adopt an evidence-based approach to treating trans-identified children.
On 18 June, the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in United States v. Skrmetti, upholding Tennessee’s right to prohibit the use of puberty blockers and hormones to treat gender-distressed minors. The ruling sets a precedent likely to shape similar state-level legislative initiatives across the country.
Within elite American academic institutions—including our own school, Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois—the ruling was widely denounced as a reactionary assault on the transgender community, as well as a harbinger of far-right encroachment on human rights more generally. But as clinical researchers in the field of psychology who’ve long been concerned about the growing ideological capture of our discipline, we see the decision in a different light.
During oral arguments before the Supreme Court, litigants seeking to block Tennessee’s law were forced to admit that the evidence backing medicalised paediatric gender transition is extremely weak—notwithstanding the endlessly repeated assurances offered by activists and doctors that they’re just “following the science.” As such, Skrmetti presents a call to re-centre all forms of gender-related therapeutic care on actual evidence—as well as a chance to restore intellectual integrity to the “helping professions” whose regulating bodies have bought hard into this movement, including medicine, nursing, and education.
We entered the field of psychology to help women and girls recover from sexual violence and exploitation. Like most feminists, we know that experts can—and often do—get things wrong. In the past, claims about women’s emotional instability, intellectual inferiority, and biological unfitness for leadership were treated as clinical facts, justifying their exclusion from public life. Now, as then, protecting the interests of women and girls requires the courage to challenge dominant narratives—even when they appear to carry the weight of consensus.