Conservative Christian political organizations, including the Heritage Foundation and Family Research Council are celebrating the Supreme Court’s June 18 decision in U.S. v. Skrmetti. The case upheld a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming healthcare—including hormone treatments and surgical interventions—for transgender minors.
Various conservative Christian leaders have similarly claimed that the high Court’s ruling affirms the scientific and divine reality of biological sex. The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, for example, issued a press release describing Tennessee’s law as “built upon the framework of biblical convictions” defending “the historical and biological definition of sex.” In an amicus brief filed for this case last spring, the U.S. Conference of Catholics Bishops put it more directly: religious opposition to gender affirming healthcare is “long-held and universally applied.”
But history tells a different story. Reactions from Christian leaders to gender-affirming healthcare were far more diverse in the past. There was no historical consensus on the topic, as far-right conservative Christians today claim. And, in fact, some leaders from denominations that vocally oppose such care in the current moment once chose to support the decisions of doctors and transgender patients who pursued medical interventions.
We can see how religious reactions to gender-affirming healthcare have become more conservative by looking at how various Christian leaders responded to the opening of the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1966, compared to their opinions of that same clinic (and others like it) today.
The Hopkins clinic was the first of its kind in the U.S. to offer gender-affirming healthcare for transgender adults and children. When it opened, a range of clergy, including from conservative traditions, supported it. Fast forward to today—on the heels of a decades-long conservative…
