In the days after the United States Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, TaMesha Kaye Prewitt, the trans services manager for OUTMemphis, received dozens of phone calls and texts from transgender children and their parents.
“Some parents were thinking of moving out of town,” said Prewitt. “Some even thought about moving out of the country.”
Their children were even more pessimistic. “A lot of kids think they can’t be trans now because of this,” she added. “They feel like they’ll never be able to be their true, authentic selves.”
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Prewitt started working with trans youth in PRYSM, OUTMemphis’ program for LGBTQ youth ages 12-17, three years ago. The kids were relentlessly curious about her youth — “Most of the time, they just asked questions like, ‘how was it growing up trans?’” she said.
Prewitt, who is now 43, was an adolescent in the 90s. When she told her parents she was transgender, they dismissed her. “They said, ‘You’re a child. How could you know what you want?’” she said. “I felt unheard, unseen, unsupported, and unvalued.”
Things had changed, she told the youth at OUTMemphis. “I felt like people were more accepting,” she said. “Kids were allowed to go to school and be themselves.”
Then the general assembly passed Senate Bill 1, a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, in March 2023. For the youth in PRYSM, it felt like an existential threat. According to data from the Trevor Project, 42% of Tennessee trans youth have considered suicide. Prewitt personally knew several young trans people who died after they couldn’t express their gender identity. Suddenly, she had a sense that she was going back in time.
Shortly after SB1 was passed, OUTMemphis worked with the ACLU to challenge the ban. One of the plaintiffs in the case against Tennessee was Dr. Susan Lacy, a Memphis-based doctor who administered gender-affirming care to several of the youth in PRYSM.
The Supreme Court’s ruling to uphold the law was heartbreaking for these young people, Prewitt said. The ruling also prompted critiques from national voices, who say the ACLU imperilled trans rights across the country by suing over the ban. But local advocates say they had no choice but to challenge the law — if they hadn’t, it would have sent the message to trans youth that they aren’t worth fighting for.
Since the ban was passed, several of the trans youth in PRYSM left the state, said Prewitt. Now, those who remain are trying to find a way to move.
“The ones that were fortunate enough to leave have left,” she said. “The ones that are not fortunate are still here. They either live in poverty, so they can’t leave, or they’re people whose parents don’t give a damn anyway.”
‘It was not conceptual. It was personal.’
Several teenagers from OUTMemphis were in the chamber the first time the general assembly debated Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care, said Molly Quinn, OUTMemphis’ CEO.
“We knew exactly what was happening,” Quinn said. “We were being targeted because our state was too under-resourced to defend ourselves.”
In the late 2010s, the religious right — reeling from the legalization of same sex marriage — began to target transgender Americans. By 2021, that movement had honed in on transgender children. Conservative groups like “Do No Harm” and “Alliance Defending Freedom” drafted model legislation that restricted transgender youth’s access to bathrooms, sports teams and gender-affirming care. Across the United States, dozens of states began to pass similar bills. An Associated Press analysis found that many were “identical” to model legislation.
Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care was the legislature’s “number one priority” in 2023, said Lucas Cameron-Vaughn, the lead ACLU Tennessee attorney on the challenge to the ban. The ban was “the first bill filed and the first bill passed.”
Lawmakers crafted Tennessee’s ban after Matt Walsh, a far-right commentator, posted a series of deceptively edited videos of physicians at Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Transgender Health Clinic. Walsh claimed — falsely — that members of the clinic “happily perform double mastectomies on adolescent girls.”
As MLK50 previously reported, SB1 also contained misinformation about gender-affirming care.
The bill’s passage worsened the discrimination that many Memphis trans youth already experienced, said Prewitt. Some parents never wanted their children to access gender-affirming care or participate in OUTMemphis’s programming, she added. Now, they felt further empowered.
“I had a parent tell me, ‘See, you shouldn’t be doing that anyway, because now they’ve banned it,’” said Prewitt. “It made me feel like they were affirmed in their decision to say no.”
As it became clear that SB1 would become law, OUTMemphis staff and youth started speaking with Cameron-Vaughn and Chase Strangio, co-director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, to see if they could challenge the ban.
Fighting the bill in court was their only option, Quinn said. If they didn’t, “what it would have meant to those young people is, ‘no one is coming to save you.’”
Ultimately, the ACLU decided to challenge SB1 because transgender teens in Memphis and Nashville wanted them to, she said. “[This case] was not conceptual. It came from a community. If trans youth in Tennessee didn’t want Lucas and Chase to fight for them, Lucas and Chase would have listened to them.”
To Quinn, the decision to fight — regardless of whether they’d win — was important. The ACLU’s challenge “gave a ton of trans youth in the South information about their rights, and that they were worth fighting for,” she said.
Much of the public reaction to the ACLU’s decision was less sympathetic. In the days after the ruling, media coverage focused on what critics saw as the ACLU’s strategic miscalculation in challenging the ban.
While the ACLU team may have thought they could win the case and build on their previous wins for LGBTQ rights, it was always unlikely that the court’s conservative majority would side with transgender children, critics argued. Instead, the ACLU gave the court an opportunity to further erode the position of transgender Americans.
In The New York Times, investigative reporter Nicholas Confessore wrote that certain leaders within the LGBTQ community thought the fight was “a tragic gamble built on flawed politics and uncertain science.”
In The Washington Post, columnist Megan McArdle wondered why the ACLU had even appealed to the Supreme Court, given that they were likely to lose — “organizations such as the ACLU have always had to be strategic, picking fights they think they can win, or at least lose gracefully,” she wrote.
These critics didn’t understand why the ban was challenged in the first place, Quinn said. “This was not a legal strategy built in some faraway hallway in New York. It was a group of us in Nashville. And it meant a great deal to the teens who were sitting in that room, who no one was fighting for,” she said.
The Tennessee youth targeted by SB1 needed someone to defend them, Cameron-Vaughn added.
“Anyone who takes the time to speak to these young people can’t help but see that they’re struggling,” he said. “We are proud to stand up for these kids, and for this community, and will do so no matter what.”
If you’re a trans Memphian looking for resources, take a look at OUTMemphis’ guide here.
Rebecca Cadenhead is the youth life and justice reporter for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. She is also a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms. Email her rebecca.cadenhead@mlk50.com.
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