Why Justice Jackson invoked interracial marriage in Supreme Court’s historic transgender care arguments

The Supreme Court was more than an hour into its feisty debate over gender-affirming care when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson invoked one of the most significant civil rights precedents in the nation’s history.

The Supreme Court was more than an hour into its feisty debate over gender-affirming care when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson invoked one of the most significant civil rights precedents in the nation’s history. A liberal named to the court by President Joe Biden two years ago, Jackson said she was “suddenly quite worried” about how the arguments over Tennessee’s ban on transgender care were unfolding and she pointed to the court’s seminal 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia that struck down a state ban on interracial marriage. “I’m getting kind of nervous,” Jackson said at one point. “I’m worried that we’re undermining the foundations of some of our bedrock equal protection cases.” A unanimous Supreme Court was able to wade into a messy equal protection fight back then and arrive at one of the court’s most important decisions, Jackson seemed to be saying. Why, then, couldn’t it do so now when confronted with one of today’s most pressing civil rights issues? “I wonder whether Virginia could have gotten away with what they did” if state officials then had made an argument similar to the one Tennessee put to the court Wednesday in defending its ban on gender-affirming care for minors, Jackson said. It was a particularly poignant moment in the argument over Tennessee’s law, in part because the question came from the Supreme Court’s first Black female justice – who is in an interracial marriage – but also because it subtly tied the transgender appeal to the court’s blockbuster decision two years ago to overturn Roe v. Wade.