What to Know About the Transgender Rights Movement's Supreme Court Gamble
The Supreme Court's decision on Wednesday allowing Tennessee and other states to ban gender-affirming care for minors was a crushing blow for the trans rights movement.
For some trans activists and their allies, the case, known as United States v. Skrmetti, was the culmination of a powerful Trump-era backlash against trans people, artfully stoked by right-wing politicians and abetted by biased media coverage. But some civil rights experts and veterans of the L.G.B.T.Q. movement view the Skrmetti case as a tragic gamble built on flawed politics and uncertain science.
An examination by The New York Times found that over the last decade, the movement was consumed by theories of sex and gender that most voters didn't grasp or support, radicalizing and calcifying its politics just as the culture wars reignited. The decision by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Biden administration to take Skrmetti to the Supreme Court was '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.
Here are six takeaways from the full Magazine article:
Some L.G.B.T.Q. activists and legal experts have long expected a defeat in Skrmetti.
In private meetings of L.G.B.T.Q. legal-advocacy groups, many lawyers expected a loss almost from the moment the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, according to one person briefed on the conversations. On the outside, many experts considered the case an extraordinary risk. Not only was there little chance that the conservative-dominated court would expand heightened constitutional protections to trans people; a defeat in Skrmetti could open the door to other losses. 'If you can't win a challenge to strike down a gender-affirming-care ban, it's going to be hard to win other cases around trans rights,' said Michael Ulrich, a professor of health law and human rights at Boston University.
Underlying Skrmetti was a broader cultural battle over how to understand — and describe — human identity.
In recent years, many L.G.B.T.Q. activists came to believe that gender identity should supplant older understandings of physical sex. In this view, all people have the right to determine their own gender, regardless of how they dressed or whether they opted for medical transition. This self-identified gender — not your physical body — should determine what appears on your driver's license, which bathrooms you could access and what sports teams you could play on. When Joe Biden was elected in 2020, his administration embraced much of that worldview, directing government agencies to interpret old civil rights laws against sex discrimination to include this more novel — and more contested — concept of gender identity.
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