The Trump administration changed the government position on Friday in a major case on the rights of transgender minors pending in the Supreme Court.
The development was expected and is consistent with an executive order issued last month directing agencies to take steps to curtail surgeries, hormone therapy and other gender transition care for youths under 19.
The case, United States v. Skrmetti, No. 23-477, was brought by the Biden administration to challenge a Tennessee law that bans some medical treatments for transgender minors. When the case was argued in December, Elizabeth B. Prelogar, then the solicitor general, told the justices that the law violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause.
In a letter to the court on Friday, Curtis E. Gannon, a deputy solicitor general, said the government had changed its stance.
“The government’s previously stated views no longer represent the United States’ position,” he wrote.
But he urged the justices to decide the case anyway. He acknowledged that this presented some complications, as the court sometimes dismisses cases when the two sides agree about the proper outcome.
“The United States believes that the confluence of several factors counsels against seeking to dismiss its case in this court,” Mr. Gannon wrote.
Among them was that three families and a doctor had also sued to challenge the Tennessee law, though the Supreme Court only granted the Biden administration’s petition for review. But Mr. Gannon noted that the private plaintiffs, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, filed briefs and participated in the argument.
Those parties, Mr. Gannon wrote, “remain adverse to the state respondents in a dispute that has not become moot.” He said the court need not grant their petition or ask for “further, likely duplicative briefing” in order to decide the case.
He added that “the court’s prompt resolution of the question presented will bear on many cases pending in the lower courts.”
At the argument, the court’s conservative majority seemed ready to reject a challenge to the law, with some of them saying that judgments about contested scientific evidence should be made by legislatures rather than judges.
“The Constitution leaves that question to the people’s representatives, rather than to nine people, none of whom is a doctor,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said.
The Tennessee law prohibits medical providers from prescribing puberty-delaying medication, providing hormone therapy or performing surgery to treat what the law called “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.” But the law allows those same treatments for “a congenital defect, precocious puberty, disease or physical injury.”
The families’ petition seeking Supreme Court review posed two questions: whether the law violated the equal protection clause and whether it ran afoul of “the fundamental right of parents to make decisions concerning the medical care of their children.” The Biden administration pressed only the equal protection claim.
Because the court granted only the Biden administration’s petition, the question of parental rights is not directly before the justices.
Friday’s change in position is one of several prompted by the change in administrations. The Trump administration has told the justices that it has revised stances or is considering doing so in cases on voting, the environment and student loans.
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