Supreme Court will tackle transgender rights, ‘ghost guns’ in term beginning Monday

People attend a rally as part of Transgender Day of Visibility near the U.S. Capitol on March 31, 2023. The Supreme Court opened a new term Monday, facing major decisions on whether states can ban “gender-affirming care” for transgender teens and if the U.S. government can restrict the sale of untraceable “ghost guns.” Both cases could have a broad impact in the years ahead. Last year, Tennessee joined 23 other conservative states to outlaw the use of puberty blockers and other hormones that allow “a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” The Williams Institute at UCLA told the court that “more than 100,000 youth aged 13 to 17 identify as transgender and live in states where their access to puberty-blocking medication and gender-affirming hormone therapy is threatened by state prohibitions.” Most red states have also refused to abide by new Education Department rules that forbid schools and colleges from discriminating against transgender students. Three years ago, the LAPD said these “ghost guns are an epidemic not only in Los Angeles but nationwide.. Ghost guns are real, they work, and they kill.” The Justice Department told the court that local law enforcement agencies seized more than 19,000 ghost guns at crime scenes in 2021, a more than tenfold increase in four years. They said that even in states such as California that forbid the manufacture and sale of weapons with no serial numbers, the previous “federal inaction has enabled individuals to circumvent state gun laws and bring unserialized weapons into the very states that have been trying to keep them out.” For example, even though California has attempted to curb unserialized guns since at least 2016, these weapons accounted for nearly 30% of all guns recovered in the state by the ATF, he said.