The Supreme Court temporarily allowed Idaho on Monday to enforce a ban on gender-affirming treatment for minors, effectively suggesting that some justices appear comfortable with wading into another front in the culture wars.
In siding with state officials who had asked the court to lift a block on the law as an appeal moves forward, the justices were sharply split, with a majority of the conservatives voting to allow the ban to take effect over the objections of the three liberals.
The court said the ban would apply to everyone except for the plaintiffs who brought the challenge.
Notably, the opinions focused not on transgender care, a hot-button political issue that has prompted several Republican-led legislatures to approve bills to restrict puberty-blocking drugs and hormone treatments, but on a broader legal question: universal injunctions.
Universal injunctions are when a single judge issues a sweeping decision that applies beyond those directly involved in the dispute. Some justices have signaled an interest in looking at the tactic.
Although orders in response to emergency applications often include no reasoning, the justices in this case divided into several factions.
The decision included concurrences by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who was joined by Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas, and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who was joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. did not note a position.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented and was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Elena Kagan noted a dissent.
The Idaho law, passed by the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature, makes it a felony for doctors to provide transgender medical care for minors, including hormone treatment.
States around the country have pushed to curtail transgender rights. At least 20 Republican-led states, including Idaho, have enacted legislation that limits access for gender transition care for minors.
In his concurrence, Justice Gorsuch said the use of a universal injunction “meant Idaho could not enforce its prohibition against surgeries to remove or alter children’s genitals, even though no party before the court had sought access to those surgeries or demonstrated that Idaho’s prohibition of them offended federal law.”
He wrote that the case broached the use of such injunctions, “a question of great significance that has been in need of the court’s attention for some time.” In recent years, he added, lower courts had overstepped their bounds by seeking “to govern an entire state or even the whole nation from their courtrooms.”
In her dissent, Justice Jackson also honed in on similar questions. But she wrote that the case, particularly given that it was brought on the emergency docket, was “not be the place to address the open and challenging questions that that issue raises.”
If there was any point of agreement in the case, it seemed to be a growing frustration with the number and scope of cases brought on the court’s emergency docket.
Justice Jackson noted that she saw “some common ground” with her conservative colleagues by agreeing that “our emergency docket seems to have become increasingly unworkable.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents the plaintiffs in the case, denounced the outcome, saying it was “an awful result for transgender youth and their families across the state.”
“Today’s ruling allows the state to shut down the care that thousands of families rely on while sowing further confusion and disruption,” it said in a statement.
The Idaho attorney general, Raúl Labrador, a Republican and former member of Congress who helped found the conservative House Freedom Caucus, celebrated the decision.
“Denying the basic truth that boys and girls are biologically different hurts our kids,” Mr. Labrador said. “No one has the right to harm children, and I’m grateful that we, as the state, have the power — and duty — to protect them.”
Idaho officials had appealed to the Supreme Court after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, upheld a temporary block on the law as litigation continues in lower courts.
The law, the Vulnerable Child Protection Act, makes it a crime for medical providers to offer medical care to transgender teenagers.
Mr. Labrador, in his emergency application, said that the case raised a recurring question that a majority of the justices had expressed interest in: whether a court can enact a universal injunction.
Mr. Labrador contended that a federal court erred in applying the freeze so expansively. “The plaintiffs are two minors and their parents, and the injunction covers two million,” he wrote.
Temporarily barring the law meant “leaving vulnerable children subject to procedures that even plaintiffs’ experts agree are inappropriate for some of them,” he added.
Mr. Labrador continued, “These procedures have lifelong, irreversible consequences, with more and more minors voicing their regret for taking this path.”
The plaintiffs had asserted that the case was not the right vehicle for addressing concerns about universal injunctions.
That is because the four plaintiffs are anonymous, referred to only by pseudonyms. If the court narrowed the temporary pause on the Idaho law to apply only to those directly involved in the lawsuit, the plaintiffs, including minors, would be forced to “disclose their identities as the transgender plaintiffs in this litigation to staff at doctors’ offices and pharmacies every time they visited a doctor or sought to fill their prescriptions.”
