The most talked-about Supreme Court decision today is that in United States v. Skrmetti. Thankfully, the Court reached the correct decision, which is that states have the power to legislate that minors cannot be given mutilating surgeries and toxic hormones in pursuit of so-called “gender identity.” However, to the extent that the Supreme Court still acknowledges so-called “transgenderism” as a real thing, the decision is fatally flawed and leaves openings for more gender madness from the Supreme Court.

Here is the opening paragraph from Chief Justice Roberts:

An estimated 1.6 million Americans over the age of 13 identify as transgender, meaning that their gender identity does not align with their biological sex. See 1 App. 257-259; 2 id., at 827. Some transgender individuals suffer from gender dysphoria, a medical condition characterized by persistent, clinically significant distress resulting from an incongruence between gender identity and biological sex. Left untreated, gender dysphoria may result in severe physical and psychological harms.

“Gender identity” is a term of art within the so-called “transgender” community, and it implies that a person’s belief that he or she is not his or her biological sex is a reality. It’s not. But the Supreme Court merely notes that “Some transgender individuals suffer from gender dysphoria, a medical condition...” The implication is that others are actually “transgender”—meaning they really were, as the parlance goes, “assigned the wrong gender at birth” and are, in fact, women with penises or men with ovaries.

Image by Matt Popovich. Public domain.

Had this been an intellectually honest opinion, the Court would have acknowledged that the very existence of a condition known as “transgenderism” is at least open for debate. Instead, it accepts the condition as real and goes on from there to note only that the treatments are open for debate, especially in young people.

I know that what I’m saying seems like a small quibble, but it’s not. Accepting the condition as real got us to the Bostock decision, which conflates a real behavior (same sex attraction) with a mental illness (so-called transgenderism). From there, it went on to say that workplaces must pretend that the fantasy world of mentally ill people is real, no matter how negatively that affects the workplace.

This matters because the plaintiffs in Skrmetti argued their case in part by relying on Bostock (and they were right in their conclusion as to part of their argument). The Supreme Court, in true coward’s fashion, punted: “We have not yet considered whether Bostock’s reasoning reaches beyond the Title VII context, and we need not do so here.” Well, it will eventually have to consider it. Thankfully, Clarence Thomas, the true genius of the Supreme Court, used his concurrence to attack any effort to extend Bostock to create future Equal Protection arguments.

So, the Court’s premise is wrong, and it matters. Having said that, here’s the meat of the decision:

Tennessee passed a very carefully written law saying that so-called “gender affirming” care is dangerous. It banned surgery and hormone treatments for Tennessee residents under 18. The carve-out was that puberty blockers could be used to treat hormonal problems that were interfering with a child’s normal biological development (e.g., precocious puberty, etc.), but for no other reason. It was this carve-out that the Supreme Court considered.

According to the plaintiffs, the law is discriminatory because it attacks so-called transgender people (an allegedly “suspect class,” with “suspect” meaning a group historically subject to discrimination) and because it discriminates on the basis of sex. The Court concluded, though, that the statute (known as SB1) is so patently non-discriminatory that it can stand.

First, the fact that the word “sex” is in the statute doesn’t mean it’s discriminatory. When it comes to medicine, said the Court (intentionally or unintentionally recognizing biological sex), there are all sorts of medicines that are used differently depending on whether they’re used for men or women. So, sex-specific drugs and treatments are acceptable for legislative purposes.

The more important (and gibberishy) argument the plaintiffs made was the claim that it’s discriminatory to give a girl a drug that allows her to develop normally as a girl, but to bar her from receiving that same drug to develop as a boy. (And the same, of course, in reverse, for boys.)

Now, if the Court had said upfront that “transgenderism” is nonsense, this argument would manifestly be nonsense, too, and that would be the end of it. But because of the pretense that so-called “transgenderism” is a reality, the Court went through a laborious discussion about the fact that laws have always held that certain drugs can be used only for certain treatments, and that states have a lot of leeway in the matter. In the case of SB1, both boys and girls can get puberty blockers for genuine hormonal problems, and neither boys nor girls can get it for so-called “transgenderism” (yet another tacit or accidental acknowledgment that the sexual binary is real).

I could write more, but that’s the most important part of the decision. Also, Sonia Sotomayor, per her dissent trying to compare banning children from going to churches or synagogues (which violates the First Amendment) to denying them puberty blockers, is dumber than a rock, but you knew that already.