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

[zanahoria]

How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/magazine/scotus-transgender-care-tennessee-skrmetti.html

https://archive.ph/MjbLL

very long read but well worth the time

Funny thing about Strangio, I'd read interviews with her before but never actually heard her voice until her argument before the SC was broadcast.

Nobody who actually hears Strangio will be in any doubt that this is a woman, albeit one with a weird obsession with erasing women in law and public life.

For anyone wanting to learn more about the Supreme Court judgment in an accessible way, I recommend this from LGB Alliance USA:

I've listened to a number podcasts and this is the most clear and helpful by some way.

Excellent article from the NY Times, thank you for the link @zanahoria

Slight derail but learning that Chase Strangio is a transman clarifies some things for me. She reminds me of our own Stephen Whittle. I'm not sure sure how much she is sacrificing other women to the needs of transwomen as the price of her own acceptance as a "man", versus how much she is suffering from intense and unprocessed internalised misogyny and scorn for everything female or feminine (starting with her own body) Strangio's attitude to "gay white men" (in the Andrew Sullivan article) makes more sense as a transman because she must have experienced as much sexism as the rest of us and maybe that didn't stop altogether even after she's done her damndest to trans herself out of it. I was surprised that she seems to be same-sex attracted.

I don't want to over-generalise though, I know this isn't universal for transmen. Strangio and Whittle are a stark contrast to the transmen of e.g. the Gender Dysphoria Alliance.

I was thinking something similar @AmaryllisNightAndDay

The Sarah McBride interview is not without interest, but McBride conforms to the HSTS pattern of not seeming to see or hear women, even while he wants to be one. His whole critique of the trans extremists is "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".

Well, I think the ship has sailed on that one, but what I see in McBride is a kind of unthinking male chauvinism rather than active misogyny.

Strangio seems to me to be very much a Whittle type. The visceral contempt for women seems hard to understand until you know she's a biological woman, and then it all falls into place.

Wow I’ve just checked it out and that’s so true! It’s not even just the voice - very feminine-coded phrasing and cadence.

@AmaryllisNightAndDay I'd been thinking the same thing over this morning. What is it with women like Strangio and Whittle that they are so willing to throw women's rights under the bus? Is it a "pick me" thing to show how 'male' they are? Is it some kind of internalised misogyny? Even if they don't want to be female, why the scorched earth policy for the rest of us?

The article made it very clear that Strangio was quite happy to force-team trans rights with women's reproductive rights and yet, when asked whether she'd actually asked women's groups about this, made it clear she didn't give a shit what anyone else thought as long as she achieved her aims.

Strangio is an odd one, that's for sure. She seems to have a deep hatred of all things female, starting with her own body. But, when you get past the facial hair, she's unmistakably female and even feminine.

I wonder if there's an alternate reality where Whittle and Strangio were just content to be lesbians. It would probably be a better reality than this one.

Whittle was far more dangerous than Strangio, because Whittle was far more subtle and clever in helping getting the GRA through in 2004. The irony is I don't think average TA in the UK knows who Whittle is. If the TAs just had publicity hungry men they would have not got this far. Driven lesbians tend to get more things done. In retrospect we can see Whittle's agenda, but Strangio has done serious damage to the TA cause in the States through being more blatant and lack of ability. You don't attempt to subvert the Supreme Court and boast about it soon after.

Interestingly Strangio is now getting a lot of scapegoating from TAs in the States as how significant the loss was becomes clear and how badly their case was argued. Of course there was little chance of any victory, but the decision to take the case was real arrogance and has seriously undermined their plans long term.

Whittle in turn is a bit adrift in the current situation. Their pronouncements have become increasingly over the top as reality begins to assert itself in the UK. I think Whittle would have avoided such obvious losers as Maugham in previous decades.

The TAs in the US are really in trouble now with this court case loss and more prending along with the various government actions. They are starting to lose money and for a lot of them cash was a huge motivation.

Something we haven't discussed much is the closure of the Children's gender experimentation unit in Los Angeles California. Lots of kids are being saved.

https://abc7.com/post/childrens-hospital-los-angeles-closing-center-transgender-youth/16735999/

McBride wrote a memoir in 2018 called Tomorrow Wiill Be Different.

Sarah Stuart gave it an uncharitable and long review a few years back:

the-lies-they-tell.org/2022/05/21/review-of-trans-memoir-by-sarah-mcbride/

That's a very illuminating review. I didn't know that McBride's late partner was a transman, but of course that makes perfect sense.

I might grit my teeth and read the book some day. Though from the sound of it, there's an awful lot of "nobody noticed I was trans and then when I mentioned it everyone got up and clapped"

Again I don’t think it’s true that Whittle achieved the GRA solo. This is too focused on sex as a cause of behaviour (ie too gendered) imo. That ignores the role of Christine Burns MBE (sorry might be OBE) and a very long line of activists doing things such as choosing the Goodwin case to take to the ECHR. That also wasn’t the first case to result in a defeat for the UK government. The Goodwin win was part of an incremental progress, substantially aided by the history of NHS provision of surgery to transsexuals (male and female) - the ECHR taking the view that if you are going to provide this surgery with the aim of people being visually identical to the opposite sex, it then makes no sense not to provide them with privacy in their new identity. TBH it’s all such a different worldview, and it’s hard not to see the change as both generational and showing something about national culture. Prof Whittle and their misty memories of enjoying Guide camp and interest in real ale and hobbyist computing, campaigning for absolute privacy and tbh the ability to hide your past, vs Strangio’s crazy sounding compulsion to separate physical reality from their life and to be super public about their identity as long as they are able to deny that such a thing as being female exists. I’d like to know what Strangio does in their spare time. Part of me hopes that they cultivate cacti, keep bees and play golf, and that eventually they will become more grounded and forgive whatever the past has done to them. But I fear they prefer gaming and performance art and anything that allows you to abandon reality.

I think this is interesting:

"Romero cast the lawsuits over pediatric gender medicine as the logical next step in his organization’s much longer battle to defend personal freedom."

He is talking about the ACLU but, from a non-American's point of view, he might as well be a the head of NRA talking about the right to own a semi-automatic rifle.

The American concept of rights and the UK concept of rights are not the same thing.

It's also noticeable that there doesn't seem to be any a-political organisation questioning whether these treatments are a good idea.

L.W. began taking estrogen, to ensure that her body would “go through the changes that other girls’ bodies go through during puberty.”

Nobody seems to have either told L.W. that this is not possible, or even thought through what puberty means.

It's just utterly mad that people like Strangio thought they could simply rewrite reality to what they wanted it to be and demand the rest of us simply accept it.

As if that was never going to create any kickback.

I always say, to get a sense of the prehistory of trans, it's worth reading Christine Jorgensen's memoir. There's a way in which Jorgensen's reinvention of himself really struck a chord in the American psyche, and that as much as the experimental surgery is why he became a celebrity. There's a direct line that goes from Jorgensen to someone like Caitlyn Jenner.

But Jorgensen was only trying to reshape his own life. Strangio seems to always have had bigger ambitions to reshape reality.

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).

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

"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.

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

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.

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

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!)

"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.

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.

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 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.