Hi everyone!
We had a huge win in the Supreme Court yesterday when the justices voted 6 to 3 to allow the state of Tennessee to ban sex changes for minors. In delivering the opinion of the court, Chief Justice Roberts detailed the history of the medicalized sex change movement going back to the formation of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health in 1979, onto their 1989 guidelines to give puberty blockers to children, and through the latest standards of care, which state that there should be no age-based barriers to treatment—a concept backed by Biden's Asst. Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Rachel Levine, who went trans after a full life as a husband and father.
"In recent years," Roberts wrote, "the number of minors requesting sex transition treatments has increased." This, he goes on to note, has "corresponded with rising debates" on risks and efficacy. Then he destroyed the ACLU's argument that banning cross-sex hormones for minors is discriminatory on the basis of sex, saying that those drugs are banned for the treatment of gender dysphoria no matter what sex the minor person is. The Tennessee law, he said, classifies a person on the basis of age and the basis of medical use, or diagnosis, meaning it's not a sex-based discrimination thing.
He also took aim at the ACLU's attempt to link their case to that of Bostock, where it was ruled that an employer discriminated against a male employee on the basis of sex when he said that males could not wear a dress to work, even though women can. That is a stupid ruling, but in the opinion at the time, Justice Gorsuch said it was only for interpretation of Title VII, and not anything else. Roberts upheld that—though the Biden administration and tons of liberal lawmakers across the country have interpreted Bostock for Title IX cases and a heap of other things. Perhaps this ruling could open the door to challenges to Bostock-based laws all across the country.
In his concurrence, Justice Thomas slammed the expert class that got us into this trans kids mess in the first place. He talked about how the ACLU and Biden admin's arguments against the law relied upon the fact that "every major medical association in the United States supports this position" that child sex changes are totally fine—of course, they did that because they were following WPATH's guidelines, which were in many cases arbitrary and not based on scientific evidence.
"The implication of these arguments is that courts should defer to so-called expert consensus," Thomas wrote. He went on to list the problems with such a conclusion, giving four key reasons:
"First, so-called experts have no license to countermand the 'wisdom, fairness, or logic of legislative choices.' Second, contrary to the representations of the United States and the private plaintiffs, there is no medical consensus on how best to treat gender dysphoria in children. Third, notwithstanding the alleged experts’ view that young children can provide informed consent to irreversible sex-transition treatments, whether such consent is possible is a question of medical ethics that States must decide for themselves. Fourth, there are particularly good reasons to question the expert class here, as recent revelations suggest that leading voices in this area have relied on questionable evidence, and have allowed ideology to influence their medical guidance."
"Taken together," Thomas continued, "this case serves as a useful reminder that the American people and their representatives are entitled to disagree with those who hold themselves out as experts..." Experts have failed us all over the place, from WMD to Covid to trans to mortgage-backed securities to education to climate change to mass immigration. The problem isn't with experts, the problem is when experts are given power without their views undergoing further scrutiny.
The dissenters, Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson, all seem to think that it's unreasonable to prevent minors from making serious, life-altering decisions that could take away their sexual function, their ability to have children, and prevent them from ever living lives without medical intervention—the hormones need to be taken for life. Their dissent states that upholding the ban on child sex changes will do "untold harm to transgender children and the parents and families who love them." The law does not prevent those minors from going through sex change once they are adults, it simply forces them to wait.
It would behoove Sotomayor and her colleagues to know that when trans treatment for minors is called "life saving," when Levine and others say that it will "save lives," what they mean is that by the time the child is an adult, it will be easier for them to pass as the opposite sex because they used drugs to prevent the emergence of secondary sex characteristics. It's literally all about appearances. The idea that so-called trans kids will kill themselves if they can't have drugs to accelerate their transition was also debunked, and in court, the ACLU's attorney was forced to admit that.
Kudos to everyone who fought for this. Justice is served.
Here's what's on my desk today:
Whoopi Goldberg claims living under Iranian regime is ‘the same’ as being black in America
“I’m sorry, they used to just keep hanging black people,” Goldberg said. “It is the same.”
Supreme Court upholds Tennessee’s ban on child sex changes
The ruling was 6-3.
Judge blocks Trump admin’s ban on ‘X’ gender marker on passports, claims it will cause ‘anxiety’ for trans people
There are many nations that do not accept the “x” gender marker as valid on transit documents.
Man with world’s highest IQ declares ‘Jesus Christ is God’
“As the world’s highest IQ record holder, I believe that Jesus Christ is God, the way and the truth and the life,” Kim wrote.