Commentary
Do No Harm Hosts ‘Stop the Harm’ Rally on Steps of Supreme Court
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On Wednesday, as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case pivotal to future efforts to restrict child sex change interventions, Do No Harm hosted our “Stop the Harm” rally featuring prominent voices advocating against these dangerous practices.
The event was an enormous success, even going viral on social media, as crowds of Americans gathered to cheer on our cause and the importance of protecting our country’s children. Advocates, lawmakers, and physicians alike all joined together to explain why the Supreme Court must uphold prohibitions on child sex change interventions.
Hosted by our own Beth Serio, the rally’s speakers included the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, the American Principles Project’s Terry Schilling, and representatives from over a dozen other organizations such as the Alliance Defending Freedom.
Do No Harm was also joined by Tennessee lawmakers William Lamberth and Jack Johnson, who were behind the Tennessee law restricting child sex change interventions at the center of the Supreme Court case. Moreover, the rally featured members of Congress including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Rep. Gary Palmer (R-AL), and Do No Harm staff, fellows, and advocates.
The case in question, United States v. Skrmetti, concerns a Tennessee law prohibiting doctors from performing so-called “gender-affirming care” on children. This includes cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and surgical procedures.
The ACLU first sued Tennessee over the law, and the Department of Justice under President Joe Biden intervened in the case in 2023, arguing the law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Seeing as 26 states including Tennessee have passed laws restricting child sex change interventions, the Supreme Court’s decision in this case will likely have wide-reaching consequences for the protection of children across the country.
“I’m confident that the highest court in our land will stand for not only what is morally and ethically right, but with the scientific and medical literature, and ban the medical and surgical experimentation on innocent children once and for all,” said Do No Harm Senior Fellow Dr. Jared Ross.
“The most central and fundamental duty of any society is to protect their children,” said the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh. “Children are innocent and helpless. They know very little about themselves and very little about the world around them. They rely on us for clarity and guidance … they trust us adults implicitly.”
“If we will not fulfill that obligation then we are worse than useless,” he continued.
Do No Harm Parent Advocate January Littlejohn shared her own harrowing experience with her thirteen year-old daughter.
“Our daughter at thirteen was encouraged through activism and peer pressure to disassociate from her body and to believe her body parts could simply be removed, modified or replace,” Littlejohn said. “She cavalierly talked about getting puberty blockers and getting a double mastectomy, that has been rebranded as ‘top surgery.’ But it was clear to us she did not understand the gravity or scope of what she was requesting.”
Her thoughts were echoed by American Principles Project President Terry Schilling.
“I have a very simple message to the trans industry: You will not take our children,” Schilling said. “And your days of harming [other] children are numbered.”
Inside the courthouse, the majority of the justices were skeptical of the federal government’s arguments and of the efficacy of so-called “gender-affirming care” more broadly, with many of them bringing up evidence that
“It strikes me as a pretty heavy yellow light, if not red light, for this court to come in, the nine of us, and to constitutionalize the whole area, when the rest of the world, or at least the people who the countries that have been at the forefront of this, are pumping the brakes on this kind of treatment,” said Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
“Why isn’t it best to leave it to the democratic process?” Kavanaugh asked at another point.
Justice Samuel Alito cited the Cass Report, a nearly 400-page report that examined “gender identity services for children and young people” in the United Kingdom. The report, which was commissioned by the National Health Service (NHS) England roughly four years ago, found “remarkably weak evidence” to support the use of puberty blockers and hormone treatments for gender distressed children.
Alito brought attention to a particular passage that found no evidence child sex change interventions reduced suicides in gender distressed youth. ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio admitted that this was the case.
Chief Justice John Roberts noted that the lack of evidence for these practices made it all the more reasonable to allow states to restrict them.
“Doesn’t that make a stronger case for us to leave those determinations to the legislative bodies rather than trying to determine them for ourselves?” he said.
However, not all the justices appeared to quite understand the gravity of what was at stake, or the serious harms of these medical interventions.
For instance, Justice Sonya Sotomayor trivialized the harms of child gender medical interventions by stating that every medical procedure carries some degree of risk, bringing up the example of taking an “aspirin.”
This line of reasoning fails to acknowledge that there are medical procedures with high risks and uncertain to nonexistent benefits (like, say, gender medical interventions), and it would be grossly irresponsible for a physician to perform such procedures in almost any other scenario.
Nevertheless, the outpouring of support evident at the rally today only reinforces the empirical reality that the public is on our side. Americans do not want their children subjected to dangerous and unproven medical interventions in service of radical gender ideology. Laws prohibiting these practices are essential to protect this country’s youth.
We hope the Supreme Court agrees.
