Legal challenge to SC’s transgender health care law quietly dropped. Why?
In the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court decision, a legal challenge to a sweeping South Carolina ban on transgender health care was voluntarily dismissed earlier this month.
The legislation restricts “gender transition” health care for both children and adults in South Carolina. Minors were blocked from receiving care, and adults and children could no longer use state benefits or Medicaid to pay for treatment. The Medical University of South Carolina also stopped providing the restricted procedures for everyone, regardless of age, according to legal documents.
A lawsuit was filed in August 2024 in federal court. It argued the law unfairly targeted transgender people, since South Carolinians could receive the same care for different purposes. It also argued restricting transgender people from receiving care could cause or exacerbate mental health concerns.
That lawsuit was dropped by the plaintiffs, including five transgender South Carolinians and their families, Oct. 7, according to a legal filing.
The transgender plaintiffs, which included two anonymous minors, were unable to access medical care on their expected timeline, according to the lawsuit. One teenage girl will have to seek care out of state and pay for it out of pocket. Another transgender man in his 30s, Sterling Misanin, was unable to have a scheduled surgery at MUSC after the law passed. A transgender woman in Richland County was unable to use her health care coverage through the South Carolina Public Employee Benefit Authority and Veteran Affairs Health Care for her planned gender-affirming surgery, according to legal filings.
Lawyers with the ACLU and ACLU of South Carolina represented the plaintiffs. The decision to drop the case was “heartbreaking,” wrote Paul Bowers, the ACLU of South Carolina director of communications, in an emailed statement.
While he did not provide a reason for dropping the case, Bowers referenced a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld Tennessee’s restrictions on gender-affirming surgery in his statement, United States v. Skrmetti.
The arguments against South Carolina’s law mirrored legally unsuccessful arguments made in the Skrmetti case. The South Carolina lawsuit argued the restrictions could potentially violate federal prohibitions on sex and disability discrimination and due process protections. The lawsuit was also put on hold in December 2024 until the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on the merits of Skrmetti, according to court documents. The question posed in Skrmetti was similar to the case at hand, U.S. District Judge Richard Mark Gergel wrote in the order.
The lawsuit was put on hold again this summer until after the Fourth Circuit Court decided on Kadel v. Folwell, which deals with a North Carolina policy that bans state benefits being used for gender-affirming care.
Attorney General Alan Wilson, the state Department of Health and Human Services, the Public Employee Benefit Authority and MUSC were named as defendants in the lawsuit.