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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NYT published an essay by a journalist about how essential the youth suicide hotline is. He knows because he worked it himself.
Uh ... does this guy have credentials?🤦
He has no idea what distressed kids need. He just reports what they told him they want. (1/3)
My Dad was a crisis intervention counselor with an MSW and clinical license (now retired). It never ceases to amaze me how different the Trevor Project sounds from him. "Just give suicidal teens what they demand," he said never.
(2/3) nytimes.com/2025/07/02/opi…
This guy could only listen and validate ... because he has no professional training.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say this hotline of inept do-gooders and journalists researching a story is NOT essential.
On second read, the NYT story on the trans legal movement makes the moderates look worse than the radicals.
My notes on that and more...🧵
@nickconfessore
2. NYT implies trans advocates should have avoided debates over sex or made up a palatable theory.
But how can you argue trans people are not the sex they seem to be, without making up a novel theory of sex? And why should voters accept a made-up theory of sex?
3. Why is a sex discrimination law prof opining about medical ethics? To avoid talking about the repercussions of trans ideology for her field (it's dark).
She requested anonymity "for fear of blowback from students and colleagues."
Trans activists are scapegoating Chase Strangio for their loss in Skrmetti, to convince Americans that their movement is fundamentally sound.
No. The perfidy predates Strangio and is intrinsic to the argument that we should pretend some people are the opposite sex.
Links⏬
2. Today, NYT eagerly transcribes the anti-Strangio argument of trans activists and anonymous ACLU attorneys while minimizing the bodily injury caused by gender med nytimes.com/2025/06/19/mag…
3. I placed Strangio within the rich intellectual tradition of trans philosophers.
NYT covers Jamie Reed's explosive affidavit, but only the driest parts. Not the desiccated vaginas ripping open, e.g.
NYT asks Jamie whiny questions. "There are so many people who are going to feel so hurt" by Jamie's testimony against gender med.
2. Jamie responds to NYT brilliantly. But because all the horrifying details of medical harm are stripped out, it sounds like she's engaging in a fuzzy abstract debate about how to evaluate a treatment's efficacy.
3. Jamie shares the trauma of working in a gender clinic where doctors ignored her safety concerns and she worried she was hurting kids.
NYT says her experience mirrors that of trans kids who can't be themselves.
NYT sets up Laura-Edwards Leeper as a hero of careful assessment, and Johanna-Olson Kennedy as the villain who opposes assessment.
JOK is a villain but not because of her stance on assessments. Those are, in fact, bogus. Here we go...
2. LEL spent a week in the Netherlands learning.
She was a young shrink hired by Norman Spack, who'd started transing "street kids" in the 70s and "salivated" at the thought of blocking puberty to help boys pass. (NYT doesn't report this.) badfacts.substack.com/p/how-endocrin…
3. LEL felt nervous assessing kids on her own. She made them get therapists because it "felt good" to have a colleague involved. But these therapists were nervous and baffled themselves - she had to teach them about gender.