In June, the Supreme Court is all but guaranteed to issue a horrific decision in the case U.S. v. Skrmetti. Most immediately, this decision will uphold Tennessee’s 2023 ban on ALL forms of gender-affirming care for minors, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy. This ruling, which will needlessly deprive children in Tennessee of life-saving healthcare, is awful enough as it is—but the actual ramifications will be much greater.

First of all, states around the country will be empowered to pass similar bills without fear of legal challenges, putting potentially hundreds of thousands of young people in danger. But this case won’t just legitimize bans on gender-affirming care; it will most likely cement the right-wing legal theory that the US Constitution offers NO protection for trans people, in any area. From a legal point of view, this will make it even harder, if not impossible, to challenge laws which discriminate against trans people in terms of housing, employment, or virtually any other sphere of life. This is why we need mass working-class struggle to defend trans rights, because the courts won’t save us.

This development would arrive on the wave of a much broader onslaught on the basic rights of trans people, which has become a hallmark of the US (as well as the global) right wing. The Trump administration has heightened this to a new level. Although it’s been blocked by federal courts so far, Trump’s threats to withhold federal funding from facilities that provide gender-affirming care to minors have intimidated many doctors and hospitals out of providing treatment. More recently, Trump’s “Big Beautiful [read: Billionaire] Bill,” if it passes in the Senate, would block access to gender-affirming care on Medicaid or Obamacare plans. Meanwhile, attacks continue to rain down from school administrators, employers, and all levels of government which have prevented trans people from using their right bathroom, applying for passports, and essentially living life in public. 

What is the basis for all of this? Under capitalism, oppression serves a concrete purpose for the ruling class. It can never just be boiled down to random obsessions or hatred. Fostering divisions in the working-class prevents us from uniting in struggle for our common interests and from directing our strength at our real class enemies. Transphobia, specifically, works to reinforce the strict gender divisions and roles which have formed the social bedrock of capitalism for centuries. While the architects of these laws claim that banning gender-affirming care is about protecting our children from “dangerous” medical procedures, we must be clear about the bans’ actual impact: devastating mental health consequences in the midst of an already dire crisis among young people, a pathway for cuts to ALL healthcare, and a weakened working class overall.     

When capitalism is the reason for transphobia in the first place, we can’t rely on capitalist institutions for solutions. Our strategy can’t just be to wait until there are different justices on the Supreme Court, or to put any faith in a Democratic Party that has proven it is willing to throw trans people under the bus at the first opportunity. We must turn Pride Month into a month of all-out protest to defend trans people and to fight for things like free, universal healthcare that includes gender-affirming care, paid for by taxing corporations and the billionaires. Ultimately, attacks on trans people are an attack on every worker. By using the full force of the working class, we can go beyond immediate victories to replace capitalism, and all of its institutions, with a world that bases itself on human need rather than division, control, and profit: the only world where we will be free from transphobia and all forms of oppression.