America Detransitions

Our silliest civil rights movement is coming to an end

Last week, the Supreme Court delivered the biggest decision in the history of the American trans movement in United States v. Skrmetti, upholding Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and hormones for minors.

Specifically, the Court ruled that the ban did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which says states must treat all people equally. The plaintiffs — three teens who identify as trans, their families, and a Tennessee doctor who treats youth with gender dysphoria — had argued that the ban violates equal protection because it prevents children from taking hormone therapy to affirm their transgender identity, but not to affirm their cisgender identity. So, for example, an adolescent boy who doesn’t produce enough testosterone can be prescribed testosterone replacement therapy to induce male puberty, but a girl who identifies as a boy cannot. In its 6-3 ruling, the Court explained that the ban does not violate equal protection because it applies to all children, regardless of sex.

The fight was a long time coming. As was its outcome, given the conservative makeup of the current Court. Around 2020, Republican state legislatures introduced a wave of “bathroom bills” to maintain sex segregation in bathrooms and sports. The effort was strategic, with many of the bills drafted or promoted by conservative advocacy groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom and American Principles Project. While many of these bills were defeated, there was enough public support for such legislation that Republicans furthered their efforts. “This issue is not about discrimination,” said Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. “It’s about public safety, protecting businesses, and common sense.”

By 2024, the issue had gained currency sufficient to become one of the main reasons Trump won the election. His campaign drove the wedge deep with the attack ad “Kamala is for they/them,” which showed Harris saying she supported tax-funded trans surgery for prisoners and illegal immigrants. The ad featured an image of Shiloh Heavenly (aka Rodney James) Quine, who is serving life in prison for kidnapping and murdering 33-year-old Shahid Ali Baig, a father of three, in 1980. Thankfully for poor Quine, his dreams came true in 2017 when he became the first inmate in America to receive state-funded gender-affirming surgery. In Quine’s lawsuit for the surgery, Harris defended the California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation (CDCR). But not only did Harris negotiate the settlement in which the CDCR agreed to provide the surgery, she quietly pushed for and instituted the policy, later telling the Los Angeles Blade, “I did it quietly … I did it behind the scenes.”

“It sounds insane,” Trump’s attack ad observes, “because it is insane.” Unsurprisingly, even for many Democrats, the ad proved remarkably effective. It was so successful it shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in favor of Trump after viewers saw it, and when all was said and done, Americans cited three main reasons why they did not vote for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election: inflation, immigration, and “cultural issues like transgender issues.” In summary, Trump took the banner of the woke and beat them over the head with it. But of course, none of this backlash would have gained traction if the trans movement hadn’t veered into such hysterical territory. Most Americans were willing to go along with the lie that a man is a woman as a matter of kindness. But then trans women went from saying they identify as women to saying they are women. Pronouns went from being preferred to mandatory. Their plight went from marginalization to genocide. Activists went from talking about liberation and revolution to raping and murdering TERFs.

Even putting aside the repulsive demeanor of the movement, you still have the ideology, because quite soon the level of disbelief one had to suspend in order to continue being an ally surpassed the threshold of sanity. In addition to having to believe that a man is a woman, potentially even a biological woman, one was asked to believe that men can get pregnant, that women can have penises, and that it is more polite to refer to females as cervix-havers or people who menstruate than as women, thus stripping them of womanhood and reducing them to their sex organs in order not to offend delusional males.

I simply cannot tell you how many stories I’ve read about men racking up sports trophies while utterly outmatched women were told to suck it up. Women who trained their whole lives for that moment. Women who were told by their mothers and fathers, coaches, and teachers that if they put in the work, they’d get a fair shot on the field. Now, not only are women forced to endure the humiliation of men trouncing them on the field, and the added humiliation of having to pretend that this is actually fair, but they are told to swallow the lie that they actually had a chance, that they lost not because they were outmatched but because they didn’t train hard enough, and in addition to all of this, if they do object then they are dismissed as right-wing bigots and potentially become pariahs in their own beloved sport.

I have even read about a lesbian who was deemed a bigot for not wanting to give a blowjob to a man in a dress. I have spoken to numerous lesbians who have told me about how spaces that were once safe and welcoming have become destroyed by hysterical men with cluster B conditions who will scream in your face if you as a lesbian do not show interest in them. Nor, of course, can you engage trans activists to address any of these issues, seeing that they frame all disagreement as “hate speech,” reject scientific inquiry and debate, and promote cult behavior such as isolating teens from non-affirming family members. Nor can we turn to our institutions for support given that they have apparently betrayed us. School districts have adopted plans to let students socially transition without telling parents. Medical organizations have defended puberty blockers and surgeries as best practice despite leaked WPATH files revealing that the science is junk or whistleblowers such as Jamie Reed raising legitimate concerns about the lack of evidence behind affirmation as a treatment.

Any normal person observing all this would naturally be alarmed, though what passes for “normal” these days is up for debate. That said, someone who I think expertly captured what it’s been like to witness this freak show from the sidelines is Josh Blackman, writing at Reason about “how quickly the national conversation changed around transgender rights.” Here an excerpt:

During the lead-up to Windsor and Obergefell, I often remarked how effective the social movement was for gay marriage. The argument was simple: allowing this couple to marry will in no way affect traditional marriage. Even the phrase marriage equality was so easy to grasp! I don’t think things were so simple, but the messaging was effective. Moreover, the movement took decades to develop. People had time to accept the argument on their own terms.

However, the argument for transgender rights felt much different. Most Americans had no clue what “cisgender” or “gender affirmative care” meant. Yet, if people refused to uses these neologisms, they were cancelled and deemed bigots. And, unlike with gay marriage, the transgender movement necessarily required others to make changes. People would have to accept transgender athletes in female sports. Women who had privacy concerns about bathrooms would have to just suck it up. And that was before doctors started telling parents they could either have a dead daughter or a live son, coupled with school districts that deceived parents. All of this seemingly happened in a few years. Trump had so much influence in averting this movement.

If you’re a parent who even just casually observes the headlines, you would’ve been forgiven for developing the paranoid sense that the walls were closing in on you — because, my friend, they were. Speaking of WPATH and the medical establishment, major medical associations in the United States have opposed bans like the one in Tennessee. In June 2023, for example, the Endocrine Society released a statement opposing such bans and its signatories included the American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, American Urological Association, American Society for Reproductive Medicine, American College of Physicians, American Association of Clinical Endocrinology, and the American Medical Association.

But as gender expert

Mia Hughes

explained in my conversation with her, these medical associations are ideologically captured. Like other professional institutions, they are subject to social and political pressures, especially from activist groups, media narratives, academic trends, and government-funding bodies. That’s why political commentator Heather MacDonald began her 2022 essay “The Corruption of Medicine” by saying:

The post–George Floyd racial reckoning has hit the field of medicine like an earthquake. Medical education, medical research, and standards of competence have been upended by two related hypotheses: that systemic racism is responsible both for racial disparities in the demographics of the medical profession and for racial disparities in health outcomes. Questioning those hypotheses is professionally suicidal. Vast sums of public and private research funding are being redirected from basic science to political projects aimed at dismantling white supremacy. The result will be declining quality of medical care and a curtailment of scientific progress.

As indeed it has done. But even now, we struggle to disentangle the science from political virtue-signaling. Meanwhile, in the wake of Skrmetti, progressives have predictably learned absolutely nothing and are instead returning to the campfire warmth of their eternal truth that everything is always the other side’s fault. About the recent Supreme Court decision, senior writer Mark Joseph Stern at Slate writes:

That is the key point here: S.B. 1, like other trans health bans, does not outlaw gender-related care for everyone. Rather, it targets transgender youth for disfavored treatment, while allowing cisgender peers to get the same medicine. So, for instance, a transgender boy may not under the law undergo testosterone therapy to bring about male puberty, for the sole reason that he is trans. But a cisgender boy can get testosterone therapy — and many do, often to facilitate the development of secondary sex characteristics that affirm their gender identity as male. Hormone treatment for these cisgender kids remains lawful; the exact same treatment for trans kids is banned. The law therefore turns entirely on sex: Children assigned female at birth can’t access specific treatments that are available to children assigned male at birth. Through S.B. 1, Tennessee is promoting its own conception of how young people should fulfill their gender roles. And it isn’t hiding this fact. The statute itself declares that the state’s goal is “encouraging minors to appreciate their sex” — specifically, the sex, and accompanying stereotypes, that Tennessee politicians think a child must adhere to.

This is undisguised sex discrimination.

Except it’s not. This is a Kendian notion of discrimination whereby anything provided to one group but not another is discrimination. Abortions are discrimination because men can’t get them, and so forth. To use a recently reclaimed term, this is retarded. Thankfully, as I noted above, the Court responded to this concern in Skrmetti simply by pointing out that SB 1 “applies equally” to both sexes:

The application of SB1, moreover, does not turn on sex. The law does not prohibit certain medical treatments for minors of one sex while allowing those same treatments for minors of the opposite sex. SB1 prohibits healthcare providers from administering puberty blockers or hormones to any minor to treat gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, or gender incongruence, regardless of the minor’s sex; That is, it bans puberty blockers and hormones regardless of whether the minor is male or female.

Critics have argued that bringing this case to the current conservative-majority Court was a tactical error that risked, and has now caused, a generational loss for the movement. I agree, but this was an inevitable fight that, for the reasons I have outlined above regarding the shape of the movement itself, was probably always going to come down this way. As Irin Carmon writes for New York Magazine:

To go not only to the Supreme Court but to this Supreme Court — the one stacked with three Trump appointees, plus Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and John Roberts, all of whom voted to overturn Roe v. Wade — to ask for the constitutional recognition of trans people’s humanity at a time of bipartisan backlash and a month before the MAGA party takes over the legislative and executive branches? As Kate Redburn, an academic fellow at Columbia Law School and co-director of its Center for Gender & Sexuality Law, tells me, “It’s understandable to some extent why the case was brought up.” In their view, the bans on trans health care for minors are blatantly unconstitutional. “But now the question is, What will the Court do?” they ask. “I can’t tell the future, but I think the signs are bad.”

But again, even if it was a strategic misstep, the case was inevitable. For one thing, by the time Skrmetti reached the Supreme Court, more than two dozen states had passed laws banning or severely restricting gender-affirming care for minors. Federal courts were issuing conflicting rulings — some blocking state bans, others upholding them. This legal fragmentation created a constitutional crisis. Was access to gender-affirming care for minors a protected right under the Equal Protection Clause or not? That made Supreme Court review not just likely, but necessary. The legal system was already moving toward resolution. So in that sense, the plaintiffs were right to seize the moment. But they were doomed by the movement.

More importantly, they were doomed by the fact that all their legal arguments based on claims of medical necessity and scientific consensus were undermined by emerging data. For instance, leaked WPATH documents show that recommended age cutoffs are entirely arbitrary and political, that informed consent is often compromised for minors, and clinicians are pressured to affirm quickly. Also, systematic reviews such as the Cass Review have found little to no evidence that puberty blockers and hormones improve mental health in minors. The Court also noted that countries like Sweden, Finland, the UK, and Norway have moved toward more restrictive protocols. Perhaps most damning of all, leaked clinical reports and detransitioner testimonies indicate high levels of regret.

The full exposure of the emperor’s clothes will be interesting to watch for the Democratic Party, given how much they have previously aligned themselves with WPATH guidelines. But major supporters have already fallen away. Corporate sponsors of trans-themed events, particularly under Trump’s anti-DEI campaign, are ghosting their old allies. Even The New York Times published a profile of the case this week, “How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost.” But laying naked the lack of evidence for their cause has done nothing to convince the activist crowd. This week, the American Civil Liberties Union writes in its newsletter that “the Supreme Court refused to protect trans youth in U.S. v. Skrmetti,” calling the decision “a blow in the fight for LGBTQ equality.”

One truly wonders how we will achieve “equality” for trans individuals by allowing progressive parents to virtue-signal their politics by injecting their children with gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists. It would be less offensive if Trump supporters started giving their toddlers “MAGA” tramp stamps. Commenting for Time, queer historian Martin Padgett writes:

Until it is overturned, Skrmetti might grant “open season” on trans rights. It places transgender children in states with such laws at risk of persecution and suicide. And while transgender adults now have more autonomy to make private decisions for themselves, the Skrmetti decision will no doubt encourage some states to try to ban gender-affirming care for anyone altogether.

That’s right, allowing states to ban puberty blockers for minors is “open season” on trans rights and it puts trans children at risk of suicide. This is precisely the kind of reasoning that trans activists use when they argue that because gender dysphoria is comorbid with suicide, meaning some trans individuals who cannot afford surgery kill themselves, therefore this constitutes a genocide by the U.S. government for not funding those surgeries. Yes, this is an actual argument that trans activists make. And yes, this kind of shit is exactly why the movement lost the battle in the culture, and ultimately, in the courtroom.