The New York Times is Boohoo Whinin' and Cryin' That Unrealistic Extremists in the ACLU Brought the Tennessee Trans Case to the Supreme Court and Lost Bigly

The article is trying to be nice to their trans allies, but the general thrust is that these people are so isolated in their progressive trans bubbles that they have no idea of what the rest of the country thinks about their extremist crusade to sexually mutilate children.

It's a long, long, super-long article. I'll just quote the parts where the NY Times hints that maybe the trans movement is too strident and delusionary for its own good.

Note the article talks a lot about the transgender lawyer who argued the case for the ACLU. "Chase Strangio" -- super-realistic name there, "Chase," totally sounds like your parents gave you that name and totally not like you just went through YA Novels looking for "kewl" teenager names -- is actually a woman, though she dresses like a man and really thinks she's passing.

I'll try to change the incorrect pronouns he/him/his to she/her/hers, but if I miss any, well, I tried.

If this is too long for you: The main point that true-blue Super Liberal Propagandist Nicholas Confessore is making is that the trans movement is extremist and refuses to see any nuance on any issue and is determined to just ride roughshod over all those who question the Strange New World they're trying to will into being.

They went too far in going after the kids like they're shrimp cocktail at a wedding reception, and by doing so, they have put their own movement and the entire Democrat-Media Party in a precarious place they may not be able to get out of.

How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost The inside story of the case that could set the movement back a generation.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court delivered a new, crushing blow, upholding Tennessee's ban in a 6-to-3 decision. In allowing Tennessee to outlaw blockers and hormones, the court not only shielded similar laws on the books in some two dozen states. It effectively closed the door on extending new constitutional protections to trans people. Some advocates fear that Skrmetti could open the door to banning medical transition for adults and perhaps other health care that some conservatives oppose, like birth control or in vitro fertilization -- even vaccines.

So absurd.

You know they're desperate when they break out, for the thousandth time, "You have to support transgenders because the next step is banning condoms!" card.

The fate of a once-obscure medical treatment could have profound consequences for American law.

What makes the defeat all the more striking is the remarkable string of victories the broader L.G.B.T.Q. movement was winning until a few years ago....

But with Skrmetti, the movement bet its future on a far more fraught question: whether children have a constitutional right to treatments that halt and redirect their physical adolescence.

Wait, you mean the public doesn't overwhelmingly support the sexual mutilation of mentally-ill children with a statistically-unlikely tendency towards autism?

You mean, the "bigots" draw the line when you go after the children -- a line you cannot help but cross and cross and cross some more because the only thing you care about is getting those children while they're young?

Anyway.

...

In challenging these laws, L.G.B.T.Q. groups and the Biden administration hoped not only to expand transgender rights, but to protect medical treatments that many trans people view as lifesaving. Yet in conversations this year with dozens of legal experts, activists, and other veterans of the fight for L.G.B.T.Q. equality, I encountered deep apprehension that taking Tennessee to the nation's highest court had been a strategic error -- one symptomatic of broader problems.

In private meetings of L.G.B.T.Q. legal-advocacy groups, many lawyers expected a loss almost from the moment the court agreed to hear the case, according to one person briefed on the conversations. On the outside, I heard rising criticism of the strategic and political judgments animating the A.C.L.U.'s litigation -- muted by fear that voicing those criticisms more openly, amid the depredations of Trump's second term, would only give the right more ammunition. "There are a lot of conversations happening right now," said Dana Beyer, a physician and longtime trans activist in Maryland. "People know the movement is stuck. They know we've gone too far. They know we've lost the thread."

...

Others, however, saw the Skrmetti case as a tragic gamble built on flawed politics and uncertain science.

Whoa, wait a tic -- are you saying the Science is Not Settled on the sexual mutilation of children?

Over the last decade, they told me, the movement was consumed by theories of sex and gender that most voters didn't grasp or support, radicalizing its politics just as the culture wars reignited and the Supreme Court began moving further right. And as Skrmetti and other lawsuits made their way through federal courts, some of the central medical claims girding the legal case for pediatric gender treatments -- that decades of thorough study had found them to be safe and effective -- began to unravel amid growing scrutiny by other doctors and experts.

Last summer, thousands of emails and other documents released in a case challenging Alabama's ban raised further questions about medical standards at the heart of the A.C.L.U.'s lawsuit against Tennessee. "This case exposes a lot of ethical problems in the practice of medicine," a law professor with expertise in sex-discrimination law told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of blowback from students and colleagues.

An expert just told this fake reporter that there are ethical problems in the trans "medicine" racket -- and this "reporter" had no follow up question!

No further questions occurred to him!

Or he did ask -- but chooses to hide the answer from readers.

You know, like a real reporter hides information instead of publishing it.

"For Skrmetti to be the next step in a progress narrative -- an incrementalist would say, This is way far from where we ought to be."

Along the road to Skrmetti, some believe, the L.G.B.T.Q. movement drove itself toward a cliff -- and took the Democratic Party with it, chaining the Biden administration to one of the most divisive issues in American politics at a moment of shifting medical consensus and fierce polarization. "It's one of the biggest mistakes in the history of trans activism," said Brianna Wu, a trans woman who serves on the board of Rebellion PAC, a Democratic political-action committee.

The article talks about the "Dutch protocol" and early medical approval of gender transitioning -- but only after extensive psychiatric analysis and counseling and the determination that there was little other choice.

The Dutch Protocol was quickly abandoned and kids were transitioned just for saying "I'm trans" at a single "consultation."

...

It was right as this new consensus was emerging that gender clinicians began to see a sharp rise in adolescent patients, most of them female at birth. Most had not reported gender distress until their early teens, after beginning to develop physical signs of puberty. A disproportionate number had other mental-health conditions, such as autism or depression.

They have preyed on autistic children searching for answers about why they don't fit in, and mentally-ill children who really just needed someone to talk to.

...

Within activist circles, though, that idea began to give way to a concept called self-ID, rooting gender identity in bodily autonomy. Activists argued that all people had the right to determine their own gender, regardless of how they dressed or whether they opted for medical transition. Your self-identified gender -- not your physical body -- should determine what appeared on your driver's license and which bathrooms you could access.

In the wider culture, concepts of gender were becoming dizzyingly capacious, even confused. Challenging the idea of a rigid male-female binary, academic theorists detached gender from sex entirely, then reimagined it as an infinite spectrum. By the mid-2010s, when Time magazine declared that America had reached a "transgender tipping point," a trans person might identify as male, female or neither. The gender of a "gender fluid" person might shift from month to month, or day to day. The phrase "sex assigned at birth" -- originally devised to classify babies born with ambiguous genitalia or other rare congenital disorders -- was now employed to suggest that biological sex was arbitrary, even a kind of fiction. Gender, not sex, was the inherent quality.

This new understanding of gender fueled rising calls to change how doctors approached medical transition. Critics inside and outside the medical establishment argued that overzealous "gate-keeping," like extended psychological assessments, stigmatized trans people and slowed their access to hormones or surgery. In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association eliminated the formal diagnosis of "gender identity disorder," with its suggestion of pathology, and replaced it with gender dysphoria, a diagnosis with looser criteria. A few years later, WPATH issued a position statement that treatments for dysphoria were a "medical necessity," the term used by insurers to categorize care they will cover.

In the relatively small community of pediatric gender medicine, physicians increasingly advocated a "gender-affirming" approach, in which clinicians should generally defer to a child's self-declared identity.

If "experts" are just deferring to a little mentally-ill kid's self-ID as trans, then what the fuck do we even have experts for?

As Corporal Hudson said of the 9-year-old Newt: "Why don't you just put her in charge??!"

Some doctors, citing the risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior among trans youths, argued that failing to affirm a child's expressed gender would put their life in danger. "We often ask parents, 'Would you rather have a dead son than a live daughter?'" Johanna Olson-Kennedy, one of the country's leading gender physicians, told ABC News.

Parents got sick of "experts" with their own sick agenda pressuring them by promising dead kids unless you submit.

By then, practitioners like Olson-Kennedy were arguing that trans-identifying children -- even those whose dysphoria might be entwined with other mental-health problems -- didn't need extended psychological assessments any more than trans adults did. ("I don't send someone to a therapist when I'm going to start them on insulin," she told The Atlantic in 2018.) Some doctors and activists went further. In a 2019 journal article, the trans bioethicist Florence Ashley argued that trans people, including "older teenagers," should not require a formal diagnosis of dysphoria before gaining access to cross-sex hormones. Rather than relieving supposed distress, Ashley wrote, patients might be seeking "gender euphoria" or "creative transfiguration," which "sees the body as a gendered art piece that can be made ours through transition-related interventions."

Obviously: these are not medical outcomes. "Gender euphoria" is not a medical goal, nor is turning children's bodies into "gendered art pieces" that can be shaped through hormones and butchery.

This was an entirely political effort towards a bizarre end that resembles a Joker plot more than medicine.

For Chase Strangio, the stakes were both personal and political. He She joined the A.C.L.U. in 2013, a few years after undergoing top surgery, or a mastectomy, a procedure that "saved my life," as he later wrote. "When you spend your life hiding from yourself, experiencing embodiment is nourishing, exhilarating," Strangio wrote. "It is survival." He vowed to work "to create social, political and legal conditions so that others could experience the same possibility."

Like Strangio, the younger people going to work at L.G.B.T.Q. groups leaned further left than their older colleagues. Often identifying as queer -- a label that could connote radical politics as much as any sexual or gender identity -- they resented the incremental, assimilationist politics that had won the right to same-sex marriage.

They sought to deconstruct assumptions about what was normal -- to dismantle bourgeois institutions, not seek inclusion in them. Strangio wrestled with how to achieve justice for trans and other marginalized people through a system she believed was designed to subjugate them. In interviews and on social media, she has described himself as "a constitutional lawyer who fundamentally doesn't believe in the Constitution," an L.G.B.T.Q. activist who felt his movement was overly devoted to gay white men with "social power and capital and political power" and to the "fundamentally violent institution of civil marriage."

The turn to trans rights would ultimately reopen an old fissure in the L.G.B.T.Q. movement: whether to seek civic equality -- or liberation.

So what I hear this woman saying is that she doesn't care about the kids per se, just using the bodies of kids to force her weird ideas of "liberation from the sexual binary" on to the public. Once you convince a boy to lop off his dick, you own his parents for life, don't you?

The parent could never, ever admit to himself for one second that he was snookered and sacrificed his child on the bloody altar of woke extremism, could he? The parent could never admit to himself he let his boy mutilate himself over a lie.

No, once you get that parent to agree to mutilate his child, you own that parent for life. He can never even allow himself to suspect the trans extremist cause is anything less than holy.

Here's an example of Strangio's extremism in action:

In 2016, North Carolina passed legislation requiring people to use bathrooms and locker rooms reserved for their "biological sex," setting off the country's first major clash over transgender rights. When a coalition of L.G.B.T.Q. groups began planning an ad campaign, message testing showed that most people were unfamiliar with the movement's terminology and the physical realities of being trans; the phrase "assigned male at birth" left audiences confused and skeptical. To win them over, the coalition created ads featuring a trans woman with long hair and conventionally feminine clothing. In a spot that first aired on Fox News, the woman is barred from a restaurant bathroom by an angry manager, who backs down after two other women -- messaging "validators" the audience could relate to -- intercede. "I was born with a male body," the trans woman says in a voice-over. "But inside, I always knew I was female."

More than 20 L.G.B.T.Q. rights groups signed on to the messaging plan. The A.C.L.U. did not. Strangio, working on an A.C.L.U. team suing North Carolina, objected to the framing. According to two people present for the discussion, Strangio disputed that a trans woman could be "born with a male body" or "born male"; in her view, a trans woman was born a woman just like any other woman. There was no such thing as a "male body," Strangio told her colleagues: "A penis is not a male body part. It's just an unusual body part for a woman." Before the advertisement aired, Strangio elaborated on his critique in an article in Slate. "Many advocates defend the use of the 'born male' or 'born with a male body' narrative as being easier for nontransgender people to understand," Strangio wrote. "Of course it is easier to understand, since it reinforces deeply entrenched views about what makes a man and what makes a woman. But it is precisely these views that we must change."

These are revolutionaries that seek nothing short of the overthrow of biological and physical reality.

And the Democrat-Media Party embraced their madness, and now finds itself tied to them and unable to cut itself free.

Seriously, transgenders would do themselves a favor to give them more plausible sounding fake names. "Chase Strangio" sounds like a character from The Shadow.

I know I call myself Ace of Spades but, seriously, not in real life!

posted by Ace at 04:20 PM

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