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United States Supreme Court and “Transgender” Minors
The United States Supreme Court heard on Wednesday (December 4) oral arguments on a case in which the federal (national) government and others challenged a law passed by the Tennessee legislature that governs what “treatments” medical personnel can provide to minors (not legal adults) who claim to be “transgender.”
I have not followed this particular case closely, so I am not familiar with the details of the Tennessee legislation nor with the details of the legal points made in the courts (including the Supreme Court).
But, from news (including legal news) reports I have read, the oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Wednesday included a lot of discussion of the conclusions and details of various studies and data concerning “transgender” children and youth.
My simplistic analysis is that as soon as you are analyzing data and debating the results of surveys, you are outside the realm of appropriate court decisions and into territory that is unquestionably the realm of the representatives of the people — the legislature.
Courts are lousy venues for analyzing data and comparing benefits and costs. Courts cannot effectively compare costs, benefits, and risks. If the government is going to balance costs and benefits to determine what should and should not be permitted, that is the realm of Congress. Not the courts.
As soon as the justices and lawyers started into an examination of the survey and study findings, the Court should have immediately realized the case was outside their role and concluded that whatever the challenge to the law was, it should be dismissed.
It sounded to me that many of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments pertained to what studies to believe. That is not the realm of the courts. If the government is going to get involved, that is the realm of the people’s representatives. The challenge to the Tennessee law should be dismissed.
Published in Law
That seems a very sensible take on this.
The “experts” here in the US are
flogging this guffin favor of preventing bans. The Europeans, relying on their experts, are putting sexual reassignment for minors on hold. Therefore, the science is not settled. Therefore, bans are not unreasonable.I thought Alito’s questioning went to whether a class to be protected exists at all. If members of that class can flow in and out of it, then there is no population to point to that is definitively within it, and no population that needs civil rights protection.
The government also led their arguments with assertions that studies pertaining to the subjects in question “transgender” minors, as you say, would be unquestionably disadvantaged by lack of access to the treatments. Alito points out that other studies indicate different conclusions, then asks if the government wants to re-phrase this assertion and not rely upon “studies” that definitively claim something that doesn’t seem claimable.
In other words, and to paraphrase, “Are you going to hang yourself with the ‘studies’ rope, or leave it out of this altogether?” That’s just my interpretation.
Seems to me I heard a (black) comedian ask something like “What’s a gay baby?” Good question! The answer should be simple: “Give me a break!”
Answer – the baby of parents with a specific type of mental illness.
There’s this again:
I’m amazed some people argue that minors should be allowed to choose their “sex” (without parental permission or notification, in many cases) and get medical treatment associated with that choice. Minors are the same people who:
I’m sure there are more. The fact that a case has gotten all the way to the Supreme Court is proof many citizens – and judges – have lost their minds . . .
Good points but I’ll add 1)they can’t be tried as an adult for any crimes committed except very occasionally for especially heinous acts otherwise their cases are handled in the juvenile justice system, 2) generally can’t enter into contracts and 3) their parents or guardians have to care and provide for them until they reach maturity at age 18. All of these laws and policies are in place for the reason they are not considered fully mature and capable of making sound decisions yet. The age of maturity concept for all these issues is somewhat arbitrary but necessary to protect children.
Minors can have sex with each other all day long. All night long, too. “Statutory rape” only applies if one of them is NOT a minor.
Actually…in some jurisdictions minors can also be charged with statutory rape. Some states have a specific age this applies to, California sets a bar of three years age difference.
Edit: You made me curious because I used to work on juvenile justice issues for my state legislature and didn’t know whether what you said was true or not.
I haven’t yet encountered any state where two minors 3 years apart qualifies as “statutory rape.” All I have found is exceptions for when one is no longer a minor but the age difference is 3 years or less. Such that, for example, a High School Senior who just turned 18, is not engaging in statutory rape with his 16- or 17-year-old Sophomore girlfriend. That was sometimes a problem in the past, especially with crazy parents, police chiefs, sheriffs, etc.
I’m not stupid. Of course statuatory rape applies with sex that falls outside of any Romeo-Juliet laws. However, the other requirement for statuatory rape is that they get caught . . .
Not necessarily. Sometimes just the accusation is enough.
The OP criticizes the Court debating studies and so forth, but Justice Alito was challenging the government’s lawyer about their briefing claiming “overwhelming evidence” that the type of “care” at issue provided benefits that greatly outweighed the risks without question. He mentioned a few reports or studies to the contrary, and asked what she had to say to that.
No doubt Sotomayor and “What’s a Woman?” Jackson believe the government’s claim.
In a sane society, neither the courts nor the legislature would need to examine “studies” to know (and I mean “knowing” in the objective truth sense) that gender dysphoria is a social contagion which afflicts mostly the young and vulnerable, and would call “gender affirming care” by its right names — child abuse and medical malpractice involving sterilization and mutilation.
As I said elsewhere, this sick and twisted practice will be viewed as the 21st century’s Tuskegee experiment. It is deeply immoral and a sane society would put these malpractioners in jail for a long, long time.
We are not a sane society.
I still maintain, and have for many years even before this stuff really got widespread, that nobody of either sex/gender can actually feel like they should be the other, because they really have no idea what that other sex/gender feels like. All they can really know is that they don’t feel “right” how they currently are, which certainly requires psychological help not surgery etc, at least for a long time, perhaps forever.
And, of course, the video in #6.
There is a tendency to fixate on something you think will make you feel better. The gender thing is then introduced as a suggestion.
Totally agree. I am a female human and, apart from my biology, I would have a lot of trouble describing to a man what being a woman is like. I have strong opinions on the differences in male and female natures, but that doesn’t mean I could tell you what it’s like to live in a man’s head.
This trans contagion of men in dresses and in women’s spaces makes a mockery of women and is especially revealing of the perversity and narcissism of adult men taking over women’s sports, etc. It’s also a weird denial and extinction-level event for females with masculine traits (tomboys) and men with feminine tendencies (like my uncle who loved to wear native-made turquoise jewelry), as if this spectrum of human tendencies must be “fixed” by changing one’s biological expression.
As I say, we’re not a sane society.
Someone on the Gutfeld! show, I don’t remember who was first, called it “woman-face.” As with “black-face” etc.
This has always baffled me. How does a man know what being a woman really feels like to the extent that he can say he really feels like a woman?
I hear that women experience all sorts of feelings deriving from biology about which I have no concept: “periods,” menopausal “hot flashes,” hormonal swings of emotion, etc. And I am a 68 year old man who has lived with a woman (my wife) for 43 years.
So how can we have any confidence at all that a fifteen year old to “know” that what he or she is feeling is really the other sex. A fifteen year old doesn’t even understand what his or her own sex is, let alone what the other sex “feels” like.
Probably because of the binary thing. They figure that if what they are isn’t right, then it must be that they’re supposed to be the other.
It’s weird how people who insist on “fluidity” and “non-binary” etc, still come down to the binary.
I have mentioned before that I have a 36 year old female friend at church who, until she became a mother, was very much a tomboy. She grew up with four older brothers. She has told me that had she been growing up today, she’s afraid she would have been told she’s really a boy, and that people would try to convince her to be “transgender.” She still loves to work with her husband in the dirt and construction projects around their property, but becoming a mother taught her the absolute wonder of her womanly capacity of growing an entire new human being within her body – a capacity that she has only because she is a woman, regardless of her love for dirt and rough play and competition, and a capacity that her brothers and her husband do not have.
This probably needs to be emphasized more in early life, including at school. I don’t know if it actually was before, or if it was just more of a default that was not actively discouraged the way it seems to be now.
And I’m reminded of a comment from a different Ricochet member that I saved, from some years ago now. (Coming up on 5 years now, it seems.)
Wicked people are decadent. Of course they are. But are we a godless nation? Many, even most, perhaps – but not all.
One key to that comment I quoted is, are people who don’t have children, godless? Maybe so. No matter how “religious” they might be.