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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Many people are shocked by the smug, foolish behavior of Justices Sotomayor and Jackson at Skrmetti oral argument.
I'm not shocked. They remind me of several other federal judges who have ruled in favor of "trans rights." These people are very confident they are heroes.
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The scene they paint is unfamiliar to me. Were we even on the same plaza? Yes, we were. One of the reporters @minhokimdh interviewed me.
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2/ This makes it sound like the Tennessee side was playing Antifa. Not so! First, there's nothing remarkable about people wearing black winter coats on a freezing day.
Second, there were non-black coats on our side, not to mention our funky signs.
3/ As usual, NYT accepts the premise that some youth are "transgender" even though I told Kim that was disputed.
You can livestream the Skrmetti argument at the Supreme Court website starting at 10am eastern.
Does Tennessee's ban on child gender med discriminate by sex or trans status?
Some thoughts about what we might hear 🧵
1. Definitions of transgender, sex, gender, male, female. If the justices press for these, it means they’re figuring out the grift.
2. Keep in mind: A justice asking a Q doesn’t mean “I’m concerned about this point.” Could be devil’s advocate. Stress testing. Wanting to hear the best response so they can use it in their opinion.
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In the 1970s doctors required male transsexuals to sign on for castration at the outset of transitioning because they were worried about the combination of male-level T and female-level E causing cancer.