NY Times: How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost

[martybegan]

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

Long article, but very in depth even if written so you know the author is on the Trans side of the argument, but not 100% on the side of the hard core ones.

Some pertinent excerpts.

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. 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.

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. Strangio and other advocates for trans rights have cast Skrmetti as the case they had to bring. It may also have set their movement back a generation.
Image

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 his view, a trans woman was born a woman just like any other woman. There was no such thing as a “male body,” Strangio told his 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.”

 

[Blaster]

A win for normal people.

 

[RhodyPatriot]

A win for normal people.

Fascism.