The lesson to be learned from recent SCOTUS decision

Photo by Ian Hutchinson on Unsplash

Live and let live.

For the most part, I really do try to adhere to that in almost all aspects of my life. The exception is when you think that “live and let live” means you have to harm others or put them at some kind of risk.

I might mock you for how you want to live, just as I get mocked for various things from time to time, but I won’t interfere with what you want to do.

Unless you cross the line I just mentioned.

Recently, the Supreme Court ruled on laws banning sex changes for children. The case sought to overturn a Tennessee ban on the practice, and, well, they lost 6-3.

I haven’t been thrilled with the Supreme Court of late, but this was an important victory.

Over at the New York Times, they’re lamenting this. A piece was published, titled “How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost.”

In it, they look at some of the things that I think the left needs to internalize significantly.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court delivered a new, crushing blow, upholding Tennessee’s ban in a 6-to-3 decision. In allowing Tennessee to outlaw blockers and hormones, the court not only shielded similar laws on the books in some two dozen states. It effectively closed the door on extending new constitutional protections to trans people. Some advocates fear that Skrmetti could open the door to banning medical transition for adults and perhaps other health care that some conservatives oppose, like birth control or in vitro fertilization — even vaccines. The fate of a once-obscure medical treatment could have profound consequences for American law.

What makes the defeat all the more striking is the remarkable string of victories the broader L.G.B.T.Q. movement was winning until a few years ago. Tailoring its message to reach skeptical audiences, careful to ride near the crest of shifting public sentiment, it pursued incremental legal and regulatory wins that, ultimately, sparked deep social change. Beginning in the 2010s, gay people won the right to marry and, along with trans people, serve openly in the military. The movement defeated “bathroom bills” aimed at trans people in states like North Carolina and Texas, persuading even some Republicans that such measures were unnecessary and cruel. Just five years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that employees could not be fired for being gay or transgender. But with Skrmetti, the movement bet its future on a far more fraught question: whether children have a constitutional right to treatments that halt and redirect their physical adolescence.

See, what the LGBTQIAWTFBBQ movement was winning were things that mostly affected adults. It’s easy to take a “live and let live” approach when it’s adults doing things they want to do that aren’t inherently hurting anyone else.

You ain’t gotta like it, but you just sort of let them do their own thing.

It was when they started focusing on kids in various ways that it became a problem, from transitioning minors to school sports, younger people were the ones being affected, and that changed everything for a lot of us.

I don’t care if you want to cut your junk off, slice off your boobs, and demand that your family refer to you as “Rangor, the Monkey King.” If they go along with it, so be it. If not, same. You’ve got that right to do that to yourself and to voice what you want.

Kids, however, don’t get that say.

Children aren’t permitted to make life-altering decisions like that. We don’t let them get tattoos, and parents have had their kids taken after granting permission for them to do so.

Tattoos, while possibly not aging well, aren’t nearly the same thing as an irreversible medical procedure that has serious risks up to and including sterilization.

They delved too greedily and too deep.

What’s more, it looks like many of them knew it.

In private meetings of L.G.B.T.Q. legal-advocacy groups, many lawyers expected a loss almost from the moment the court agreed to hear the case, according to one person briefed on the conversations. On the outside, I heard rising criticism of the strategic and political judgments animating the A.C.L.U.’s litigation — muted by fear that voicing those criticisms more openly, amid the depredations of Trump’s second term, would only give the right more ammunition. “There are a lot of conversations happening right now,” said Dana Beyer, a physician and longtime trans activist in Maryland. “People know the movement is stuck. They know we’ve gone too far. They know we’ve lost the thread.”

They’ve lost it because kids are the final battleground. That’s a point where someone like me, who is content to let others live how they want to live, can look away no further.

But it goes beyond this.

I already mentioned girls’ sports, but it includes women’s sports as well. There, trans people demand inclusion and that we ignore their biological advantages. They’re willing to injure women and then demand we feed into their own self-delusion of somehow being “real women.”

They’re Pinocchios who think they’ve already become a real little girl or boy.

When they’re criticized, they pretend there are no physical differences between boys and girls, yet they never seem to point to the transmen who are dominating on men’s sports anywhere. That’s because there aren’t any.

And a lot of people saw that and got sick of it.

Along the road to Skrmetti, some believe, the L.G.B.T.Q. movement drove itself toward a cliff — and took the Democratic Party with it, chaining the Biden administration to one of the most divisive issues in American politics at a moment of shifting medical consensus and fierce polarization. “It’s one of the biggest mistakes in the history of trans activism,” said Brianna Wu, a trans woman who serves on the board of Rebellion PAC, a Democratic political-action committee. Strangio and other advocates for trans rights have cast Skrmetti as the case they had to bring. It may also have set their movement back a generation.

I’ve had my differences with Brianna Wu.

Yet Wu has also been pretty quick to point out how stupid the Democratic Party has been on trans issues, and rightly criticized those mistakes.

The LGBTQ movement, as the Times puts it, has driven everything they support not toward a cliff, but straight over the edge.

They put way too much into a demographic that represents a tiny fraction of the electorate, then called everyone who didn’t want their daughters injured on the soccer field or volleyball court a bigot. They demonized everyone who thought that maybe chopping parts off of kids who were too young to make that decision for themselves was a bad thing.

They did everything they could to alienate what they thought was a small group, only to find out just how small the bubble they exist in really is.

There are lessons to be learned about not doing any of this.

What’s unlikely to happen, though, is them learning anything.

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