Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said Tennessee’s SB1 law that bans irreversible gender transitioning treatments for minors was crafted and implemented based on “evidence” and is being challenged by parties who collectively believe in a “consensus” that is simply not based on evidence.
Skrmetti made the remarks during an exclusive sit down interview with The Tennessee Star’s CEO and Editor-in-Chief Michael Patrick Leahy on Friday while discussing the December 4 oral arguments in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case challenging Tennessee’s SB1 law, United States v. Skrmetti.
Following oral arguments in the case, Skrmetti appeared on the television network CNN where he sat down with host Jake Tapper to discuss the case challenging Tennessee’s law.
Prior to his interview, Skrmetti noted how Tapper had previously interviewed the plaintiffs in the case, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney Chase Strangio, who argued against the state law in front of the Supreme Court, and had run segments showing “sympathetic stories” of children with gender dysphoria and how a ban on transitioning treatments would affect them.
Skrmetti admitted he was “nervous” for the interview as he expected to be “gut like a fish.”
“[Tapper] and his network had a lot of very sympathetic portrayals, so I went in thinking I’m going to get gut like a fish,” Skrmetti explained on Friday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Skrmetti said the first question Tapper posed to him was regarding how the suicide rate among minors gender dysphoric would change if such transitioning treatments were banned in Tennessee, to which the attorney general measurably explained that there is no evidence of increased suicide with such laws in effect.
“The first [question] was, ‘If you’re looking at the parents of a kid who’s transgender and they’re worried that their kid is going to commit suicide if they can’t get these drugs, what do you say to them?’ It’s a pretty hard question. It’s a tough question, but that’s a question that I think a lot of people are worried about, Skrmetti said.
Skrmetti further noted that the ACLU attorney was forced to concede about the unchanged suicide rate when posed with a similar question by Justice Samuel Alito during oral arguments.
“None of us want kids to kill themselves. But the beautiful thing about the argument, I think it was really important, separate from whatever legal outcome there is, the ACLU conceded that the evidence does not show that if you don’t give kids these life altering procedures, that they kill themselves more,” Skrmetti added.
Skrmetti said the argument that children will commit suicide if not offered transitioning treatments has been “used to bully a lot of parents” into conceding into transitioning their children despite evidence which proves otherwise.
“When people are confronted with this, the last thing you want is for your kid to kill themselves. It’s horrible. So a lot of parents, I think, reluctantly went along with this whole regime and that cuts to the heart of it. The evidence just isn’t there and there are people out there who knock me for talking about evidence, they say it’s just intuitively clear that this is an evil thing to do to kids but the response to that is if we just talk to the people we agree with we’re not going to be able to change things,” Skrmetti said.
Noting how the topic of gender transitioning, especially among children, has become an “emotional” and “culture war” issue, Skrmetti said the opposing sides are divided by a line which separates “evidence” from a “consensus.”
“This is people who are looking at the evidence versus people who are following a consensus,” Skrmetti said.
Watch the full interview:
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Tennessee AG at the Supreme Court” by Tennessee AG Jonathan Skrmetti.
