The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a blow to transgender rights by upholding a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for adolescents, but legal experts said the ruling was narrower than it could have been and left open the door for challenges to the rising number of government restrictions aimed at transgender people.

For this article, he reviewed thousands of pages of court documents and interviewed former Biden administration officials, lawyers at L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups and the A.C.L.U. and dozens of civil rights experts and current and former L.