I'm reading the Skrmetti transcript.
This 🧵is Chase Strangio from the ACLU arguing against Tennessee's ban on child gender med.
Strangio says gender med is the ONLY treatment that helped her clients. What other treatments were tried? Appears none.
Since 1960s, gender doctors have insisted that if someone wants to be the opposite sex, only gender med can help them. They refuse to develop alternatives.
Alito presses Strangio on suicide research, just as he did with Prelogar.
Alito is right to zero in on this deception. There's no research showing gender med reduces suicide, one study showing it doesn't, one showing the suicide rate of treated patients is 19x general population
Alito cites the Cass Review.
Strangio's response: gender med reduces suicidality, not suicide. Significant difference there! You might call it life or death.
Alito keeps asking if trans status is immutable. Finally Strangio says discordance between gender identity and sex has a biological basis.
Note she doesn't say GI itself has a bio basis (it doesn't). Discordance is their code word for gay, which does have a bio basis.
Some have gagged at Alito referencing gender fluidity. But he's (probably) not saying he believes in gender fluidity. He's exploring Strangio's belief in gender fluidity and how it screws up her argument.
Prelogar and Strangio use the term "birth sex" rather than "sex assigned at birth." To sound less insane I suppose. It plays the same function in their verbal trickery -- both terms just mean sex, but they don't want to acknowledge sex.
Alito makes another good point about transgender being a big vague "umbrella term" according to shrinks.
All this just goes to one of the arguments, the one nobody expects to prevail. But does it also indicate Alito is very close to peaking?
I think Kavanaugh is expressing how he genuinely feels about the case. Trans kids are real, detrans is a real problem, it's hard!
In the middle of rambling along Kavanaugh just accidentally hits it BAM on the head.
Wow. Jackson returns to her interracial marriage analogy, this time with an entirely different theory about why it works.
She doesn't believe this blather. She's just trying to stigmatize Tenn's position by comparing it to one of the dumbest, most offensive laws ever.
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