See You In Court!

Our Take on U.S. v. Skrmetti

Last week, the PITT editors announced that we had agreed to sign an amicus brief in support of the state of Tennessee’s ban on the use of puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries for trans-identified minors. We’ve read Tennessee’s bill that legislates the ban (SB1) and many of the briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court, to better understand the case. At it’s core, this is a case of Petitioners claiming that there is a class of children- transgender kids- who require extreme, irreversible body modifications to survive, and Respondents who know that’s a dangerous absurdity to believe.

The case can be summed up in two recent X (Twitter) exchanges:

The importance of this case cannot be overstated. The ruling will not only set precedent for the challenges to bans in other states, but potentially establish a new “protected class”, historically reserved for immutable characteristics, which would elevate “gender identity” to the same status as sex. What should be glaringly obvious is that “gender identity” and sex cannot be equally protected. One must be subservient to the other, as we’ve seen play out in sex-segregated space such as sports, bathrooms, locker rooms, sororities, and shelters. If “gender identity” is recognized as a protected class then sex-based rights disappear entirely. Equally troubling is the threat that parents who don’t agree to transition their gender-confused children would be deemed abusive- even in “red” states- for denying their child access to “life-saving, medically necessary” treatments, giving the state cause to take control of parenting.

Although alarmed, we are hopeful that a favorable ruling by the Court will put us one step closer to ending, once and for all, the most egregious medical scandal in modern times. We are thrilled for the attention this case brings to the issue. Those who have denied that children are having healthy body parts removed will have to acknowledge that it’s really happening, and that this “fringe issue” is actually the issue of the century.

Check out these quotes from some of the briefs, and what we think they mean in parenthesis, to see for yourself the worn-out, hyperbolic, dangerous nonsense the Petitioners present to the Court, and the measured, evidence-based truth of the Respondents.

Petitioners

Brief of Petitioner (We claim that cutting off the healthy body parts of children is “life saving” and “medically necessary.”)

·       Ryan says: Gender-affirming health care saved my life and the idea of losing it terrifies me.

·       John Doe is a 13-year-old transgender boy. From an early age, he knew he was a boy, choosing a male name for himself and socially transitioning at school. He is terrified of undergoing the wrong puberty because he knows that some of those changes could be permanent.

Brief of Elliot Page, Nicole Maines, and Sixty-Two Other Individuals in support of Petitioners (We think choosing as adults to medicalize our bodies to live out a fantasy has made us happy, so we think kids should do it too.)

·       In his memoir Pageboy, he [Elliot Page] writes, Primarily, I understood that I wasn’t a girl. Not in a conscious sense but in a pure sense, uncontaminated.

·       Transitioning “set everything right” and his life has “taken off like a rocket ship since then.”

Brief of the American Historical Association in support of Petitioners (Let’s reframe history that has absolutely nothing to do with the issue at hand to try and prove that “trans kids” are real.)

·       Gender-Affirming surgical interventions have been practiced for centuries.

·       …religious functionaries in the late Republican and early Imperial Rome period who were designated male at birth, practiced surgical testicular removal, and wore women’s clothing and makeup.

Brief of Members of Congress in support of Petitioners (If you think it’s important to safeguard a child’s health and right to an open future, you’re mean.)

·       Unfortunately, certain state elected officials- and even some members of Congress- stoke fear and target hatred towards transgender people.

·       These public statements suggest that these laws are driven by prejudice, and not by science or the responsibility to represent, and protect the freedom, liberty, and equality of, their constituents- which include transgender people.

Brief of Gifford Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence in support of Petitioners (Although it’s well understood that suicide is a complex issue we’re going to insinuate that children will shoot themselves if they can’t permanently alter their healthy bodies.

·       Denying transgender youth gender-affirming medical care places them at a higher risk of suffering self-inflected harm of dying by suicide using firearms.

Respondents

Brief of Respondents (There is no evidence to support the crazy idea that medicalizing children’s healthy bodies is a good idea, and we want to safeguard children.)

·       Vanderbilt’s gender-clinic director presented a seminar titled “Caring for the Transgender Patient: With little evidence, but a lot of love.”

·       The government’s one-sided telling of the evidence misreports the medical landscape.

·       It blinks reality to assert that transgender-identifying persons do not “wield political power.”

·       The government downplays desistance with expert testimony asserting that adolescent desistance is “rare.” But desistance is not theoretical. Minors can and do grow up to regret the life-long results transition treatments produce.

·       The Constitution does not compel lawmakers to shield their eyes from detransitioners’ experiences. And no amount of rose-colored ink overwrites the documented downsides of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

Brief of Alabama in support of Respondents (Thank you for suing us and giving us all the evidence we need to prove that WPATH is nothing more than an activist organization that will go to any lengths to keep up the façade of legitimacy.)

·       WPATH, joined by the United States and “social justice lawyers,” crafted SOC-8 as a political and legal document.

·       Discovery uncovered that not only does the WPATH emperor have no clothes but that senior HHS officials and “social justice lawyers” acted as the organization’s tailor.

·       Yet the United States and WPATH press on, pretending the science is settled, the debate over.

·       The Constitution does not mandate that States bow to the dictates of radical interest groups like WPATH.

·       As is clear by now, though WPATH cloaks itself in the garb of evidence-based medicine, its heart is in advocacy.

Brief of the Manhattan Institute and Dr. Leor Sapir in support of Respondents (Long gone are the days when activist clinicians can make false claims and cherry-pick and twist data, because Leor Sapir will fact check them every time.)

·       Amici are well-positioned to explain why some of the petitioner’s amici have misrepresented and overstated the medical literature to bolster the filmy case for the long-term safety and efficacy of youth “gender-affirming” treatments.

·       Given these profound uncertainties and the untrustworthiness of clinicians who practice and claim special expertise in youth gender medicine, states like Tennessee are justified in taking steps to protect minors from potentially harmful medical interventions that are not supported by rigorous, reliable evidence.

·       The director of the gender clinic at Boston Children’s Hospital admitted in a private video that they were giving out puberty blockers “like candy.”

·       Even the founding psychologist of that clinic sounded the alarm that assessment was being abandoned in favor of self-diagnosis and that adolescents were consequently being inappropriately “rushed toward the medical model.”

·       It is precisely in the face of such medical hubris, where the health of children is at stake, that lawmakers in Tennessee have resolved not to trust gender clinicians to regulate themselves.

Brief of Do No Harm in support of Respondents (The Court should know that gender ideologues will do anything to push their agenda, including ignoring scientific evidence and emotionally blackmailing parents with hyperbolic rhetoric.)

·       “Gender affirming care” is a medical scandal.

·       Petitioner and its amici have no answer to the systematic reviews described above. So instead, they try to change the subject.

·       It is difficult to see how one could say a drug has been proven to be effective if the doctor tells you that she has “limited” or “very little confidence” that the drug will work.

·       The briefs seeking reversal are shot through with assertions that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are “life saving” or reduce the risk of suicide. This language is grossly irresponsible in light of the actual evidence on this question.

·       The briefs to the Court in this case are reminiscent of the emotional blackmail that a small number of doctors blinded by ideology have inflicted on parents of children suffering from gender dysphoria: “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?” This reprehensible language is completely unsupported but the evidence.

Brief of Our Duty-USA in support of Respondents (We parents have personal knowledge and proof that kids change their minds, detransitioners and desisters exist, and people should pay attention to their experiences.)

·       Our Duty approaches this subject with personal knowledge that youth distress is genuine but believes adopting transgender identities is inorganic, the cure is not drugs or surgeries, and the child’s best interest is served by returning to comfort in his natural body.

·       Our Duty’s view is that segments of society have created unsubstantiated theories and fictional children said to be born with a mismatch of their brain and secondary sex characteristics without any scientific basis.

·       Trans-identified youth are also not a suspect class, as the existence of detransitioners and Our Duty’s desistance stories demonstrate: gender identity is not static, but mutable, and therefore should not be afforded suspect classification status.

Brief of Women’s Declaration International USA in support of Respondents (There is simply no such thing as “gender identity”.)

·       The word “transgender” is a linguistic sleight of hand that cannot be protected legally as a quasi-suspect class under equal protection analysis because it has no coherent meaning, is not an immutable trait, and does not describe a politically powerless group of people.

·       WDI USA works to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls. When anyone tries to refine the word “woman,” we take it seriously.

·       We are female human beings; this recognition is demonstrably more accurate than notions from the framework of so-called “gender identity.” In fact, not a single one of us has a “gender identity” at all, notwithstanding petitioner’s absurd and utterly baseless contention that “every person has a gender identity.”

·       It would defy reason to establish a quasi-suspect class of such people for equal protection purposes, and this Court ought not to want to be the Court that establishes such a classification for a group of people that, at least according to the ACLU, includes part-time cross-dressers.

·       It hardly seems that joining a child (or adult) in his or her flight from reality would be the most helpful or healthy approach to take. Hard truths must still be told.

·       Repurposing this limited medical description to imply that every human is arbitrarily “assigned” a sex that might not be his or her “real” sex exemplifies Orwell’s Newspeak. But just as two plus two equals four, every person is a member of either the female or male sex.

·       We want to note that children who are convinced they were born in the wrong body didn’t get that idea on their own.

At least 50 briefs were submitted to the Court in support of Tennessee’s effort to safeguard children. They came from parents, advocacy groups, legal and policy experts, States and legislators, medical groups and doctors, and most importantly detransitioners. We could only highlight a few, but are profoundly grateful for the hours of dedicated, painstaking work to ensure that the Court justices will see a clear picture of the true impact of gender ideology on children, families, and society. PITT is honored to have signed one of the briefs in this momentous case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Last week in the comments section of our announcement you might have noticed Kara Dansky, who authored the Women’s Declaration International brief, congratulating PITT on our signing. We look forward to a favorable decision in this case, and echo Kara’s words by saying to everyone in the fight to make sure children have every opportunity to grow up with healthy bodies intact and that society returns to living in a world of truth and reality- well done!

Oral arguments will take place beginning December 4, 2024. You can listen to the arguments here. For those of you who can be in Washington, D.C. there will be a rally at the Supreme Court on December 4th. For more information about the rally send an email to lgbtcouragecoalition@gmail.com. Let’s show the nation that no child is born in the wrong body!

See you in court!