It's Official: Hatred and Cruelty Toward Trans Kids Is Perfectly Legal in America
SCOTUS just upheld a state law that will undoubtedly cost lives and spread heartbreak
The U.S. Supreme Court signed some death warrants today.
By a partisan 6-3 majority, SCOTUS allowed to stand a Tennessee law that bans gender-affirming care for transgender minors. Even when those kids have the full support of their parents and doctors.
That will in turn unleash similar attacks on trans kids and their families in at least 25 other states, including Missouri. The victims will be the kids who comprise one of the most vulnerable subgroups in America—with shocking rates of suicidal thoughts and attempts.
At least 46 percent of transgender and nonbinary youth seriously considered suicide in the past year, and 14 percent attempted it, according to The Trevor Project’s 2024 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People.
The message to those kids could not be clearer: There are only two genders —male and female—and if you don’t live your life as the one you were born with, you’re living a lie. You have no right to do that and if you try, you have no rights. You don’t exist.
Real kids in the real world will die because of today’s decision. If that comment offends you, so be it. It’s the truth.
Let’s be crystal clear: Neither the six justices nor the politicians who have cashed in on the trans issue could possibly be mistaken to give a damn about any of that.
There won’t be a public dime allocated for counseling that would alleviate the pain of today’s decision. And certainly no help to cover the costs of children's funerals.
This has come to pass because the political class has been either unable or unwilling to separate the two tracks of the trans issue, one that has reaped such rich rewards for the Right’s culture war. These are:
The issue of trans women competing in women’s sports;
The healthcare and privacy rights of American parents and their children.
It’s the grandest of understatements that the debate about athletics sucked all the air out of the room. It’s a complex and emotionally charged subject with legitimately debatable points.
But the questions swirling around sports participation could not be more distinct from the matter of providing essential health care to all children, regardless of how they identify themselves. In a more decent world, no debate would be had.
Participation in sports is not a basic human right. It’s not a civil liberty.
Access to essential healthcare is a human right, or at least should be. It most certainly should fall under the protection of civil liberties.
How we’ve fallen to the point that this distinction isn’t possible is itself a complex failure. Both sides bear some of the blame for that.
Rather than confront the cruelty and raw hatred spewed from the Right regarding the health and privacy rights of all kids, Democrats and others on the Left often committed political malpractice by allowing themselves to get ambushed by the sports debate.
Like it or not, defending trans women’s participation against other women in sports was political kryptonite. It had to be separated from the healthcare side, but wasn’t.
It’s as simple as this: There are competing civil-liberties interests on the sports side. On one hand, there are trans women who understandably want to compete against other women because that’s who they are.
But on the other side are girls and women who have spent much of their lives dedicated to their sports who can clearly be shown — in some, not all, sports — to be disadvantaged when competing with those who were born as biological males. It’s an issue best left to the governing bodies of sports, not government, but it’s an issue nonetheless.
When it comes to healthcare, there are no competing civil-liberties issues. When a child receives puberty blockers or other gender-affirming care that’s approved and recommended by an overwhelming majority of medical professionals, no other person’s liberty is compromised.
Trans people aren’t hurting a soul when they receive medical care to help them live their lives to the fullest, as they and their parents see fit. Today, they are victims of a judicial system that should have protected them from the vagaries of our darkest politics.
And six justices of the U.S. Supreme Court will be remembered as the perpetrators.
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