By Jesse Singal
Thursday, June 26, 2025
The American LGBT movement has had a devastating couple
of weeks when it comes to both its goals and its reputation. The first blow
concerned United
States v. Skrmetti, a case challenging the constitutionality of a
Tennessee law, SB1,
which outlawed anyone under 18 from receiving puberty blockers, hormones, or
surgery to help them transition their sex.
While the case was brought by three minor plaintiffs and
their families, the Biden administration and the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU) joined early on. Between the high-profile nature of the participants and
the stakes—the very fate of youth gender medicine in red states—this was a
blockbuster case. And in an unsurprising result, the conservative majority
upheld the law, 6-3, in a decision
released on June 18.
The next day, the New York Times Magazine published
a truly damning exposé arguing that this loss was at least partially
self-inflicted by the LGBT movement. The article, written by Nicholas
Confessore, was headlined “How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the
Supreme Court and Lost,” and it painted a picture of a movement that has, at
least in recent years, done an exceptionally poor job of making persuasive
arguments and sound tactical decisions.
He writes:
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.”
I’ve been reporting on the youth gender medicine debate
off and on for almost a decade, writing about it for major outlets (including this one).
Confessore’s reporting tracks with my own experiences. In recent years, I’ve
found, the activist groups and journalists advocating for youth gender medicine
and for trans rights more broadly have exhibited a marked inability to make
cogent arguments, a penchant for alienating allies, and a general level of
dysfunction and divorce from political reality that is hard to fully grasp
(even if Confessore’s article marks an excellent start).
Before I go any further, I should note that I’m a bit
biased here; I’m writing about groups that have, in some cases, called me out
for my own alleged transphobia, and I am still listed on a GLAAD website
because of that supposed transphobia. I’m also biased because I’ve been
extremely frustrated, most recently, at how groups like GLAAD have treated
other journalists; the organization orchestrated a genuinely
calumnious campaign against a group of Times reporters who have done
truly excellent, careful, compassionate work on this subject.
The ACLU, for its part, has reflexively adopted the
maximalist position of full self-ID (your sex is what you say it is) on all
sorts of issues—not just on youth gender medicine, but also on trans women in
sports, prison, and locker rooms—that require sensitivity and compromise, not
self-righteous dogmatism. And it has both litigated and advocated
for positions on these matters that are well out of line with the average
American’s views.
At the national level, none of this has worked: none of
the browbeating, none of the language policing, none of the attempts to
“re-educate” the public about sex and gender. If you’re one of the small number
of Americans in favor of full self-ID, you should be asking whether your cause
would be in a better position if GLAAD and the ACLU had simply taken its last
decade worth of donations and thrown the money into a pit somewhere, rather
than do what they’ve been doing. These cascading failures are a clear example
of what happens when activist groups get high on their own supply and stop
trying to convince the public, and when their members succumb to the so-called
“iron
law of institutions”—a tendency to act in a manner that promotes their own
own in-group status rather than their group’s external goals.
***
It wasn’t always this way.
Confessore’s article explores a “profound generational
and political transformation within the L.G.B.T.Q. movement.” In the run-up to
and wake of the 2015 Obergefell decision that legalized gay marriage
nationwide—a profound victory for LGBT activists—“movement leaders faced
pressure to shift their focus to trans people, long the coalition’s junior
partners,” Confessore wrote. This ushered in the present age of LGBT activism,
which is focused almost entirely on trans rights, and which—as Confessore
notes—has pushed the aforementioned maximalist approach, premised on the idea
of a core human right to define one’s sex for oneself, and to have society
respect that definition.
The differences between these two iterations of the LGBT
movement are hard to miss. I came of age politically during the fight over gay
marriage. It was the first domestic cause I felt strongly about, and the logic
behind it seemed airtight. The ask being made by the LGBT community was, in
effect, for gay men and women who wanted to marry one another to simply be left
alone. To mount meaningful moral arguments against this was to enter into
strange territory, such as to argue that “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam
and Steve” (irrelevant if you believe in the separation of church and state) or
to conjure slippery slopes involving marriages not between man and man, but
between man and beast. There was very little substance to these
counterarguments, and this fact can partly account for Obergefell:
Outside of religious settings, there is not a great deal of moral complexity
when it comes to gay marriage; it does not involve deep discussions about
ethical tradeoffs and the value of human life in the way that, say, abortion or
medical assistance in dying do.
The LGBT movement isn’t any one thing; like any other
big-tent group, it has always had its internecine disputes. At one end are
conservative integrationists
like Andrew Sullivan (that’s the term he prefers), and at the other are radical
types who, as Confessore puts it, have “sought to deconstruct assumptions about
what was normal—to dismantle bourgeois institutions, not seek inclusion in
them.” And I would argue that the LGBT movement won its recent victories in
part due to the power of the integrationist camp.
But now, the radical types have surged to the forefront.
One of them is the main character in Confessore’s piece: Chase Strangio, the
star ACLU attorney who made history during Skrmetti by becoming the
first openly trans person to argue before the Supreme Court. Strangio, who
identifies as a male, “doesn’t believe in the Constitution,” describes marriage
as a “fundamentally violent institution,” and doesn’t
think there’s such a thing as a “male” or “female” body in the first place.
Strangio reached such a perch because the present
iteration of the mainstream LGBT movement, perhaps emboldened by its successes
with gay marriage, has lately come to favor this sort of boundary-pushing. “In
the wider culture,” Confessore reported, “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.” It would be one thing if this stuff stayed
on campuses or online. But there ended up being very little daylight between
the weirdest claims about sex and gender on TikTok or Bluesky, the demands of
major activist groups, and in some cases, the policies
of certain blue-state governments themselves.
If LGBT activists were ever going to convince the
American public that
13-year-old children should have near-unquestioned medical autonomy, that
male rapists who have not fully transitioned should be housed in women’s
prisons, that males should compete against females in competitive sports from
high school on, and that human sex isn’t straightforwardly binary, it was going
to take some strong and genuine efforts at persuasion. Humans tend to have very
strong and deeply felt intuitions about biological sex, simply because every
adult is keenly aware of its ramifications. Even a social conservative who has
some level of disgust for homosexuality can understand, and maybe eventually
accept, a libertarian argument for gay marriage. But the arguments the
contemporary LGBT movement has chosen to stake its political capital on
represent not an attempt to move the ball 10 or 15 more yards down the field,
but to play an entirely different sport, with an entirely different set of
(rather byzantine) rules. And all too often, what passes for discourse among
LGBT activists and their allies amounts to yelling at the spectators for not
understanding the rules rather than explaining the new sport and making an
affirmative case for why it should be played.
I’d go back to the campaign against the Times reporters
as a prime example: Katie J. M. Baker, Azeen Ghorayshi, and Emily Bazelon all
published
careful, in-depth work
that examined the new claims being made by LGBT rights groups, presented the
different sides of the arguments, and treated trans people themselves with the
utmost respect. They were met not with “Thank you for taking this
seriously—here’s some stuff we disagree with” by groups like GLAAD, but with
the sort of reputational napalming one would normally reserve for an outright
Nazi. GLAAD famously even parked a truck,
emblazoned with the phrase “Stop questioning trans people’s right to exist
& access to medical care” outside the Times building. (“The science
is settled,” a laughably false claim, was on the truck
as well.)
The trans rights movement needed an Andrew
Sullivan type, and instead it got Chase Strangio. Whether or not you agree
with Sullivan, it’s undeniable that the average American can read one of his
columns, understand it, and rarely feel like Sullivan is making wild leaps of
logic or accusing them of bigotry for not accepting his arguments. The same is
not true of figures like Strangio.
In the absence of a Sullivanesque figure, the LGBT
movement could only offer bizarre mantras, pretzel-like logic, and, frankly,
lies in defense of an agenda that became genuinely radical. (I say that as
someone who thinks the term “radical” is chronically overused, such as when it
is applied to politicians like Barack Obama or policies like, well, gay
marriage.) The example that always stuck with me—because it was so
silly—concerned the sports question and went something like this: “Who said
sports are fair? LeBron James has a competitive advantage over less athletic
basketball players, but we don’t ban him.” This, of course, misses the
entire point of why we have a women’s category in the first place.
Silly as these arguments were, anyone embedded in liberal
professional or social circles who questioned them was going to have a very bad
time. Within liberal communities, a culture of pluralistic
ignorance set in, obscuring the fact that even many Democrats are opposed
to the positions held by mainstream liberal institutions and, in some cases,
pushed by the most recent Democratic administration. In polling published
this past January, for example, Ipsos and the Times found that,
among those who identify as Democratic or Democratic-leaning, 67 percent
believed trans girls and women should be banned from female sports, and 54
percent believed no one under 18 should have access to youth gender medicine.
Only 19 percent of respondents believed 10 was old enough for kids to go on
puberty blockers.
Still, one of the movement’s extremely silly arguments
got all the way to SCOTUS. I’ll leave the details to The Dispatch’s in-house
experts, but to win the case, the plaintiffs in Skrmetti first had
to convince the court that Tennessee was engaging in sex discrimination: that
the law treated kids differently based on whether they were male or female. The
thinking went that under SB1, male children might be allowed to take
testosterone for delayed puberty, but female ones might not be allowed to do
the same to go through a partial male puberty of their own—and this therefore
amounted to discrimination on the basis of sex.
The conservative majority swatted this argument away
rather effortlessly. The governing variable in this case was not treatment on
the basis of sex, argued Chief Justice John Roberts, but rather treatment on
the basis of medical condition. That is, under SB1 in Tennessee, male and
female minors are similarly barred from receiving endocrinological
interventions to treat gender dysphoria, and equally allowed to receive
them to treat other conditions, like early puberty, late puberty, or hirsutism.
Whether or not you agree with the outcome, the sex
discrimination claim—a mainstay of activists on X and Bluesky, I would add—was
very unlikely to fly, because it just didn’t map neatly onto reality or the
legislative text being scrutinized. Throw a conservative majority into the mix,
and it’s hard to disagree with the assessment of Confessore’s sources that this
case was always a doomed enterprise for the ACLU and Biden administration.
In fact, the case was something of a buffet of failed but
viral claims bouncing off the conservative justices, reality, or both. For
example, LGBT activists have endlessly claimed, without anything resembling
solid evidence, that youth gender medicine saves lives by preventing adolescent
suicides. This claim not only found its way into top medical journals, but was
also disseminated by the Biden administration itself via Rachel Levine, a trans
woman who served as assistant secretary for health and the White House’s chief
cheerleader for these treatments.
As Confessore writes:
In March 2022, as Alabama’s ban
was winding through
the Legislature, Levine’s office issued a
fact sheet asserting that the treatments had proven clinical benefits for
children and adolescents. That April, in a speech urging doctors to
fight the bans, Levine seemed to go further, claiming that gender-affirming
care broadly was “suicide-prevention care. It improves quality of life, and it
saves lives. It is based on decades of study. It is a well-established medical
practice.”
But because there has never been anything substantive to
these claims, Strangio was forced to concede during oral arguments that “there
is no evidence that this treatment reduces completed suicide.” You can repeat
false claims over and over on social media and in other contexts where there’s
no one around to meaningfully rebut you. But it’s a lot harder to do that in
front of a panel of mostly skeptical Supreme Court justices. Maybe there’s a
lesson there about effective arguments?
***
The good news is that treating trans people with respect
and dignity does not require adopting the most radical claims of the
contemporary trans movement. While polling of trans people is scarce, I’ve
found in my reporting that trans people are themselves rather divided about
issues like full-blown self-ID and youth gender medicine, and I’ve spoken with
plenty who believe that the mainstream movement has lost the plot. (On average,
I would wager that older and younger trans people have different views on these
issues, as do those who have versus haven’t sought major medical interventions.
For understandable reasons, these arguments are often kept out of public view.)
Gender dysphoria is real and causes real distress; anyone
who experiences it deserves the utmost compassion (not to mention the best
available science). But this issue is more complex than the LGBT fights
of yesteryear; it does necessarily entail tradeoffs and fraught
discussions. While there is plenty of room for conversation, education, and
compromise, activists will continue to hit dead ends unless they can make their
case to the public in a clear, coherent way that doesn’t require adopting
complex, academic notions of sex, gender, and gender identity that come across
as strange—or simply false—to many people.
It will be very interesting to see what the ACLU, GLAAD,
and the other groups do in response to their recent failures. Part of what’s
vexing about all this is that the Strangios of the world seem to be rewarded
for their failures—Strangio has been the subject of multiple
glowing
profiles and interviews,
a hagiographic-looking
documentary, and the other perks of stardom. By presenting as a member of
the radical, burn-down-the-old-order vanguard, he enjoys immense perks.
But does this stance actually help Strangio’s movement
win? It certainly doesn’t seem like it.
No comments:
Post a Comment