The War on Trans Kids Is Totally Unconstitutional

Laws that prohibit physicians from providing treatments such as puberty blockers and cross-hormone therapy to minors are bad public policy. Their advocates claim that these are efforts to protect kids, who they argue may later change their mind, from medical treatments they characterize as irreversible. But these arguments don’t hold up to scrutiny: The laws—such as the one Arkansas just passed and those that more than a dozen other states, including Alabama, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas, are actively considering—will certainly harm transgender children, denying them medical care that they need and causing them psychological pain. That should be reason enough to oppose these laws.

But even those who are skeptical of today’s gender politics should oppose these laws for another reason: They clearly violate the U.S. Constitution.

The most obvious, and compelling, constitutional objection to Arkansas’s Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act and laws like it arises from the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. That guarantee means, among other things, that