When I had my first gender-affirming medical intervention, I was 21 years old. The year was 2005, and at that time, the idea of a trans surgery being covered by health insurers was outlandish.

So, I saved up money starting at age 18, and visited psychologists at the free gender clinic in the San Francisco Bay Area where I lived. I told them I had been “living as a man full time” and pretended to fit the clinical definition of gender dysphoria in order to get a letter allowing the surgeon to work on me. (I was genderqueer and nonbinary, had a high voice and feminine features and had virtually never “passed” as a man.)

I knew deeply and with utter certainty that having a double mastectomy would improve my self-image and help me live in an expression closer to who I am. So I jumped through all of their hoops, including the surgeon himself at the consult taking one look at me and asking if I was really sure about this.

I lay in a hotel bed in Plano, Texas, afterward, as happy as I have ever been. My dad, whose warm supportiveness was rare among parents of trans children at that time, visited me and took me out to the Cheesecake Factory while I delighted in my next body. It was easier for me than most people: I had family support, the ability to travel and pay out of pocket for treatment, and I was transitioning in a direction that afforded me more privilege over time as I became more masculine in appearance.

Years later, when I started hormone treatments, I was thrilled to find how much the medical community had advanced on trans issues, taking an “informed consent” approach with hormones rather than requiring me to pass an unpassable gender test. But of course, these gender tests are not required for cisgender people who want breast reductions, breast augmentations, plastic surgeries or gender-affirming hormone treatments, so long as these align with some societal caricature of their assigned sex at birth.

When I had top surgery back in 2005, people told me I was mutilating myself, that I was too young to decide, and that my decisions didn’t make sense to them. Now, I am one of thousands who can attest that accessing this care was life-saving and deeply affirming of my being.

My concern today is that trans people should not have to attest to this — because the “debate” over trans health care presented to the Supreme Court this week in U.S. v. Skrmetti will impact all of us, not just trans people.

At its core, this Supreme Court case is about the government’s control over gendered bodies. The case challenges a Tennessee law that bans trans youth from accessing gender-affirming care. But the proliferation........

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