Alito chides Supreme Court for rejecting gender dysphoria case at time of ‘national importance’
Kaelan Deese
Video Embed
The Supreme Court on Friday declined to get involved in a dispute surrounding a transgender inmate who was put in a men’s jailhouse despite identifying as a woman in a case that asks whether gender dysphoria is a disability under federal law.
The majority of justices declined an appeal by a Fairfax County, Virginia, sheriff of a lower court’s ruling allowing former inmate Kesha Williams, who had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, to proceed with a lawsuit against jail officials. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented, saying the case “presents a question of great national importance that calls for prompt review.”
CALIFORNIA REPARATIONS: WHAT NEWSOM HAS SAID AHEAD OF TASK FORCE’S FINAL PROPOSAL
“This decision will raise a host of important and sensitive questions regarding such matters as participation in women’s and girls’ sports, access to single-sex restrooms and housing, the use of traditional pronouns, and the administration of sex reassignment therapy (both the performance of surgery and the administration of hormones) by physicians and at hospitals that object to such treatment on religious or moral grounds,” Alito wrote.
In 2020, Williams sued Sheriff Stacey Kincaid and two other officials after spending time in jail for a drug-related offense. The suit alleges jail officials violated Williams’s rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act as well as the Constitution’s provisions guaranteeing equal protection under the law and barring cruel and unusual punishment.
Williams was initially put into the women’s side of the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center but was subsequently placed in the men’s facility after the center’s deputies learned Williams was a biological male.
The suit further alleges Williams was initially blocked from taking prescribed hormone treatments for two weeks, alleging it caused “severe anxiety and distress.”
A federal judge in Virginia dismissed the suit, holding that Williams lacked a disability covered by the ADA and noted that Congress had “excluded from the term ‘disability’ all gender identity disorders,” aside from those resulting in physical impairments. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit reversed that judgment, finding that gender dysphoria is protected under the ADA.
The Supreme Court has held off in recent months from taking various lower court challenges on a range of transgender issues including matters pertaining to schools, women’s sports, and college dorm rooms.
Alito wrote that there are times when it is “prudent” to deny petitions to review appeals court decisions but said in this case that “prudential consideration is not sufficient to justify the denial of prompt review.”
On June 20, the high court also rejected an appeal from a Christian college in Missouri that sued the Biden administration over a requirement to open dorm rooms and shared shower spaces with members of the opposite sex.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The Supreme Court also declined a petition in March that would’ve given the court the opportunity to weigh in on the contentious issue of transgender athletes in women’s sports.
Justices in 2021 left in place a lower court’s ruling in favor of a transgender former public high school student who spent six years fighting against a Virginia county school board that had barred the student from using a bathroom corresponding with that student’s gender identity.