The Supreme Court’s Chevron Decision Is Already Hurting Transgender Rights

The right-wing majority on the Supreme Court last month upended a 40-year legal precedent that has governed how federal agencies are able to set rules, in a decision legal experts say will do sweeping damage to the regulation of everything from health care to student loan forgiveness to environmental protections and more.

The consequences for transgender Americans could also be dire. Already, the court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo has been cited in recent rulings by federal judges involving Biden-era protections for trans people.

In the Loper decision, the Supreme Court eliminated a crucial 1984 legal precedent known as the “Chevron doctrine,” which allows federal government agencies to interpret how to enforce laws written by Congress.

This doctrine was, in part, what allowed agencies within the Biden administration to interpret laws in order to issue issue a number of rules and regulations that have strengthened protections for LGBTQ+ people.

With the Loper decision, the Supreme Court overturned decades of administrative law. Previously, lower courts had to defer to a federal agencies’ interpretation of “ambiguous” statutes passed by Congress so long as they were “reasonable.”

Now, with Chevron gone, federal agencies have been stripped of that authority, while Congress and the courts — without specific expertise — have been given enormous power to interpret government rules that affect aspects of everyday American life.

“The US Supreme Court seems very interested in turbo charging the executive power in some areas and restraining it in others depending on what better suits conservative policy preferences,” Quinn Yeargain, professor of the law of democracy at Michigan State University, told