New York Times - How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost

Thanks for posting! Andrew Sullivan is a great political writer and he was indeed an instrumental voice in arguing for gay marriage, so he knows what he's talking about. I'm 100% in agreement that the original sin of the woke left was the pivot to 'no debate'. The fact that an ideology that's so incoherent and absurd could accomplish so much through this kind of socially reinforced censorship is sinister.

I think what's also notable is the veiled warning that it will soon time for gays and lesbians to split with with the T and the old legacy advocacy institutions if the fanatics don't change course. In reality it's past time. And realistically I don't think there's any possibility that captured organizations are going to moderate. But no one so far, at the national level in the US, has publicly dared suggest a split. This is the first step in that direction, and perhaps even a shot across the bow. Having it published in the NYT will set off a shock wave.

What a very good article. Thanks for sharing

Really good essay.

I think the fundamental difference between gay rights and trans rights is that it is demonstrably possible for somebody to have a romantic and/or sexual same sex relationship, so the battle was about public acceptance.

Changing sex is not possible, so the battle is to impose an alternative reality.

This is interesting, because I narrowly agree with Romero - one of the problems with the 'omnicause' is that it's intersectional in a way that allows sister groups to coerce fellow members of their coalition and that it allows activists who don't have the best interests of the class they represent to speak for them in matters of national policy and dialog. Nowhere is this tendency more egregious than the force teaming of LGB with T. Each topic should be evaluated on its own merit.

Instead of what groups had been consulted, what should have been asked is whether the ACLU carefully considered the rights of women (and gays and lesbians) and what process did the ACLU follow to capture those voices and concerns and give them proper consideration?

The ACLU most definitely does have a mandate to protect the rights of women. But, as with everything the trans debate touches, the emotionally charged hysteria that engulfs each topic makes it impossible to even raise the possibility that there might be a competition of rights between women and trans identified men, let alone where that balance might lie.

Hollywood actors: you can totally change your sex

Also Hollywood actors: step away from that vaccine and buy my macrobiotic yogurt with pine kernels

Hollywood is the dream factory!

If you can get everything else fixed, why not your sex?

Just on the vibes thing - anti-vax being coded as right-wing in the US is very recent and in some ways accidental. Demographically the two big vaccine hesitant groups are black men and white Republican men, who share a suspicion of government.

But among elites, the one place anti-vax has always been really strong is not among Republican elites but among Hollywood lefties. And, weirdly enough, often the very same celebrities who now have trans children.

I sometimes do a though experiment of what would have happened if the Pfizer vaccine had come out a few weeks earlier in 2020 - just before the election instead of just after. There's a good chance Trump would have won re-election, but leaving that aside, I'm convinced all these Jamie Lee Curtis types would have been all over social media telling people not to take the "Trump vaccine".

The irony is that the case made is exactly the same as that made by the NRA or anti-vaxxers - “I have the right to live my life as I want and you can’t tell me what to do”.

It’s the American Dream.

Considering the McBride/Klein interview again, it's remarkable the way the conversation electrifies a certain do-gooder class of the electorate that yearns for a righteous civil rights cause to get behind. (McBride couldn't resist the obligatory allusion to likening trans rights to rolling back Jim Crow in the 50s and 60s) From the comment section:

"'We are in a competition for pain, when there is plenty of pain to go around.' What a wonderfully articulate interview, there are so many well reasoned and poignantly delivered arguments. I am so impressed by Sarah.'

"The best and most intelligent and sensitive conversation I have listened to in years!"

"Within minutes I was like 'yeah I see why this person is good at politics'."

"Formidable emotional intelligence and intestinal fortitude to rein in primal instincts to fight those whose only purpose is to seek attention. "Intentionality of hope, principle and strategy are signs of strength"
Great conversation. Thank you, Sarah and Ezra."

"Sarah McBride is a brilliant and empathetic woman. I learned a lot in this conversation because of her openness and honesty."

I can't imagine many on this thread would be similarly touched by the conversation. But the appraisals are not exactly wrong. McBride did emote a lot: "pain", "hurt", "suffer", "oppression", "marginalization", "cruel", "hateful", "horrible", "grace", "miserable", "dehumanization", "decency" figured prominently.

As someone familiar with trans emotional blackmail, my own reaction is to find it all cringe. But to its target audience it's catnip, and McBride deploys those words skillfully. It's remarkable that barely any attention at all was given to the real core of the debate: women's right to exclude men from their spaces and to have services for themselves, the remodeling of language to replace sex with gender and striping women of the ability to use their own language to talk about themselves, prisons, the endless bullying and hatred TA pour on their opponents, the barest mention of trans medicalizion of children - no discussion and only in the barest euphemised language, trans homophobia and erasure of gays and lesbians.

How do talk about why the left 'lost on trans rights' when you don't even talk about what those supposed rights are (apart from existing) let alone make a case for them and discuss the potential compromised to make that case to the larger public? In fact this is the real failure of the left writ large - it's a vibes evacuated of substance.

I think there’s also an element of being so bonkers, people will believe/accept it because it has to be true because no one would present something so insane otherwise.

Go hard or go home, and all that.

Having watched the recent series of 'I Kissed a Boy'( which featured 'Lars' a transman who identified as a gay man)...of the many memorable moments and elements was that whilst all of the gay men, without exception, flaunted and played up their more glamorous, expressive 'feminine' selves ( camping it up).....dressing in glamorous and 'revealing' clothing, jewellery and make up and so on...it was clear that 'Lars' was trying to suppress and flatten out any elements of their own 'femininity' - in a very conscious and studied way.
Not only by dressing in an archetypically masculine way ( unlike all of the gay men) - but by clearly trying to overcome what looked like a natural, instinctive 'femininity' in their relationship with Ruben.

As I said "Whittle was far more subtle and clever in helping getting the GRA through in 2004" not that Whittle did it alone. Whittle was a significant figure, who helped make the gender cause way more effective in the UK at that time and has been recognised as such. As being a key founder and Vice President of Press for Change in 1992 called "one of the most successful lobby groups seen in the last 25 years" we can't downplay the leadership role Whittle had. Obviously though there were others involved as well as Whittle would be the first to say.

Strangio has now been recorded giving opinions on the Supreme Court and the NYT article. Long read but worth it. Basically doubling down on the failure.

"Insidious": The ACLU's Chase Strangio Slams The New York Times In Leaked Audio
In some of his first comments since U.S. v Skrmetti came down, Mr. Strangio never acknowledged or responded to the sharp critiques in a recent Times investigation of his own rhetoric and actions.
https://benryan.substack.com/p/insidious-the-aclus-chase-strangio

It is looking more and more that Strangio may be the Maugham of the TA cause in the States. A massive ego, fueled by early success, means that pursuing weak cases resulting in legal defeat as a policy gets locked in. Strangio is almost certainly to try some other legal tactic and fail again. Because of Strangio's "identity" and position even though there is a lot of criticism of the mistakes made in the case even from the TA side, Strangio can't be sidelined now.

I have been mulling this. Most movements for social change keep the crazies out the back, but this one puts them front and centre.

I think this is because the only way for gender identity arguments to be even vaguely internally consistent is for sex to be totally irrelevant (a penis doesn't have to be male) and for gender identity to to the only thing that matters (people are what they say they are);and the thing we should organize ourselves around legally and socially. This proposition is bonkers, and just would not work in practice and even most allies would baulk at this, but I think logically it is the least flawed argument they have.

Strangio told his colleagues: “A penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.”

That anyone can say this with a straight face still amazes me, even after all these years in the GC trenches.

"we don't need to rethink our goals, but if we adopt a more moderate tone we might do better at bringing people with us"

What boggles my mind is that if you have to say things like this, does it not occur to them that if you have to sneak something past public opinion then you might be wrong in what you're doing?

See also: the Denton's Playbook.

Thanks for explaining @CuiBon0 , there are lots of differences between the UK and US legal systems and it can be hard to follow and understand and not make the wrong assumptions about how things work (either way!)

Yes, the entirely self made woman, it's a very American myth.

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/06/trans-journalist-says-new-york-times-coverage-partly-to-blame-for-skrmetti-decision/?fbclid=IwY2xjawLHSVRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHt-PK9as8w5pz8h2o7HktnxoImxC64Y8ChUkBXfLHT9DvTXsq_iL_NXeNph__aem_AWgKtS1SHc5baLGFnlZIxg&sfnsn=scwspmo

This journalist seems to think that the NYT is responsible for "anti trans" sentiments, rather than seeing that it reflects what a lot of people think.

In the US, employment law generally and most protection against discrimination is left to the states. The states have traditionally been suspicious of federal encroachment into what they view as their jurisdiction. The Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution reserves powers not delegated to the federal government, nor prohibited to the states, to the states respectively, or to the people. In general, posters here seem to not recognize how much power US states have and how different the laws between different states may be.

The Civil War Amendments to the US Constitution changed that somewhat, esp w regard to racial discrimination, but states still retain the power to govern this area of the law, so long as their laws don't violate federal law so the federal government's approach is very different in the US. It's designed to put guardrails up against things deemed too discriminatory, not to positively declare civil rights (in general). That's for the states. As examples see California's Unruh Act and Fair Employment and Housing Act (or laws in New York) https://calcivilrights.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/32/2022/11/The-Rights-of-Employees-who-are-Transgender-or-Gender-Nonconforming-Fact-Sheet_ENG.pdf

vs the lack of protection in, e.g., Mississippi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_Mississippi

That's a feature, not a bug

"we don't need to rethink our goals, but if we adopt a more moderate tone we might do better at bringing people with us"

I'm conflicted in how I think about this. Across the West governments and political parties are facing a crisis of legitimacy because major civic, economic and governing institutions lack accountability to popular opinion. This is typified by the trans debate. The stability and effectiveness of liberal democracy depends on addressing this crisis, which means radically opening up the popular debate on a number of issues, and raising the level of intellectual honesty and the coherence of arguments made. In that sense the above sentiment would be a good thing for democracy.

Unfortunately, the NYT and especially McBride aren't making the case out of democratic principles. Instead, all the voices calling for moderation accept the notion that trans rights are the next great civil rights cause and the natural trajectory of that is enshrining TWAW into unchallengable civil rights code. So, when they argue for 'debate', they are equating GC people with supporters of Jim Crow -- that is GI's opposition are the equivalent of immoral racists, but like the racists of old, in part you win by protesting and enacting legislation and in part by engaging in productive dialog to win them over.

But of course, the GC argument is that the status quo has already gone too far and should be rolled back, or rather re-framed, that in fact TW should be treated categorically as males, that transition of children must be an absolute last resort (or forbidden outright), that it goes without saying that women's sports should be restricted to biological women. Trans people remain a protected category under law, of course, in the UK and US. But it should not be seen as a valid identity to be affirmed by medical intervention but a manifestation of serious psychological distress for which all attempts to alleviate it through non-medical treatment should be tried first.

Given how far gender ideology has out-run the sex realist position (and popular opinion) the conclusion to be drawn is that, in fact, past TA tactics were a marked success, especially the aggressive bullying and social media censorship. Had TAs engaged in a pluralistic, democratic debate they would not have achieved as much. Pivoting to open robust debate on the premise that it will help TAs achieve their goals would seem to be a misreading of the situation entirely. The only way the center-left can escape from it's current vortex of public contempt regarding the issue is to acknowledge that they might actually have been fundamentally wrong about the nature of trans rights, and the reason they were wrong is because of the authoritarian, anti-democratic, anti-free-speech tendency of the left activist class which locked them into an indefensible position without public vetting. That realization seems a long way off.

There should also be a SexMatters USA (and a Helen Joyce USA 🤣)

I'm not sure that that's true.
If this is the same case that was in the lower courts five years ago (or more? - I have a feeling I read about it on Gallus Mag's blog before it was taken down), the women's funeral attendant uniform is a short blazer and pencil skirt. If a male person who hasn't had a penectomy wears the uniform his penis bulge will be visible to people attending a funeral (needless to say, the trousers worn by male funeral attenders don't let attendees know which way the man is tucking). Most of the people buried by this funeral parlour were from a conservative Christian community. I've always remembered this case because it's the first time I ever came across the limits (for me) of the principle that, whatever a man can wear in a given situation a woman should be able to wear, and vice versa.
(And if I'm wrong and this is actually a different funeral parlour employee case and the trans woman / uniform / community serviced by the funeral parlour are different it may well actually just be bigoted discrimination).