Not even feigned impartiality comes through in transgender activists’ interactions with the Supreme Court’s recent United States v. Skrmetti ruling. To the legacy media and the dissenting justices, the decision is strictly unreasonable.

After Skrmetti’s arguments in December 2024, justices released their opinions this past Wednesday, revealing a 6-3 ruling in favor of upholding Tennessee’s Senate Bill 1, which restricts transgender procedures on minors. The state implemented restrictions on the practice in 2023, prohibiting puberty blockers and hormones from being administered for the purpose of sex transition to anyone under the age of 18. The American Civil Liberties Union then filed a lawsuit against Tennessee’s attorney general, and the U.S. government joined to argue that the law is unconstitutional under the equal protection clause.

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The plaintiffs’ argument turns largely on Bostock v. Clayton County in 2020, in which the court ruled that, given Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, employers may not discriminate against employees “simply for being homosexual or transgender.” Justice Neil Gorsuch, in hyper-textualist fashion, joined the Democratic-appointed majority on Bostock, and as such, his position on Skrmetti remained in doubt up until its release. Discrimination on the basis of sex (including gender identity, it seems) is what the ACLU and U.S. argued is the entire, unlawful mechanism of Tennessee’s law.

But the majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, contends that the focus of the restriction is the end of the medical procedure. Specifically, “If a transgender boy seeks testosterone to treat his gender dysphoria, SB1 prevents a healthcare provider from administering it to him. … If you change his biological sex from female to male, SB1 would still not permit him the hormones he seeks because he would lack a qualifying diagnosis for the testosterone.”

The Tennessee law, and other states’ laws like it, is ultimately about protecting children. It revolves around near-entire agreement within the medical field that sex transition procedures are, at best, uncertain in benefit and, at worst, irreparably harmful.

With the understanding that “SB1’s ban of such treatments responds directly to that uncertainty,” Roberts articulates the logic: “Unlike the homosexual male employee whose sexuality automatically switches to straight when his sex is changed from male to female, there is no reason why a female minor’s diagnosis of hirsutism automatically changes to gender dysphoria when her sex is changed from female to male.” Precocious puberty, rather, is an appropriate male flip-side to a young girl’s struggles with such experiences as excess hair growth.

SPLC INFLUENCES GOVERNMENT AND CHILDREN ALIKE

Yet Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote the dissenting opinion, said that “the Court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims.” CNN likewise reported, wholly biasedly, that the ruling is a “major blow” and a script for other “divisive laws targeting transgender Americans.” Vox issued predictably arrogant commentary on this latest “attack on trans rights” being “so incoherent, it is difficult to predict its broader implications for US anti-discrimination law.”

They forget that “transgender children” are not a real concept and leave real, gender-dysphoric children out in yesterday’s paradigm. That happened so long ago that the lunacy of it pales next to their commitment to the bit. Legal activists have misled enough people that, now, they have to be right about it. The court’s ruling is a loud bang against those ethics.