Ramble On: Cruelty, Thy Name is Skrmetti (video)

In the abominable "U.S. v. Skrmetti" decision, the Roberts Court allows states to ban gender-affirming care for trans minors. This will cause "untold harm" to trans children—just like MAGA wants.

Good morning! Here is today’s ramble.

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And here is the transcript, edited for clarity:

Good morning. As you’re listening to this, it’s Friday morning, the 20th of June. As I am recording it, it is Thursday morning, June 19th, 8:30 a.m. I am in my son’s room. The door is open. The two cats are coming and going, so they might appear at any time.

I know there’s a lot going on right now, in any number of directions, between ICE and Iran and God knows what else is gonna happen between when I’m recording this and when you’re listening to it. But I want to take a minute and pause and talk about U.S. v. Skrmetti, which is a decision that the Supreme Court handed down this week, involving trans kids.

Trans kids, I think, are the most vulnerable members of society, in the United States, and need our protection. Ignorance about trans people in general and trans kids especially led to the issue being exploited during the presidential campaign and put trans people and trans kids in greater danger. This week the Court ruled that Tennessee can ban gender transition treatments for minors. So I want to read from the decision. This is at the top of the decision, just so we get a sense of what I’m talking about.

In 2023, Tennessee joined the growing number of States restricting sex transition treatments for minors by enacting the Prohibition on Medical Procedures Performed on Minors Related to Sexual Identity, Senate Bill 1 (SB1). SB1 prohibits healthcare providers from prescribing, administering, or dispensing puberty blockers or hormones to any minor for the purpose of (1) enabling the minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s biological sex, or (2) treating purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s biological sex and asserted identity. At the same time, SB1 permits a healthcare provider to administer puberty blockers or hormones to treat a minor’s congenital defect, precocious puberty, disease, or physical injury.

In other words, it’s the same treatment, but for different reasons. And the reason—the trans reason—is what they’re trying to prohibit here. The Court ruled 6-3. I don’t think I need to tell you who the six were and who the three were. Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, “In sadness, I dissent.”

(God bless her, by the way. She’s been the voice of reason through this entire period of time. And I think if mankind survives, in the future, historians will look back on what she’s writing specifically as a window into what we’re dealing with here in the United States in 2025.)

First, the ruling itself is stupid bullshit, a nonsensical, garbage ruling. I’ll just quote Sotomayor here:

What does that mean in practice? Simply that sex determines access to the covered medication. Physicians in Tennessee can prescribe hormones and puberty blockers to help a male child, but not a female child, look more like a boy; and to help a female child, but not a male child, look more like a girl. Put in the statute’s own terms, doctors can facilitate consistency between an adolescent’s physical appearance and the “normal development” of her sex identified at birth, but they may not use the same medications to facilitate “inconsisten[cy]” with sex. All this, the State openly admits, in service of “encouraging minors to appreciate their sex.”

So, you know, right off the bat, the decision doesn’t make any sense. Again, I’ll just read from Sotomayor’s dissent here: “This case presents an easy question: whether SB1’s ban on certain medications, applicable only if used in a manner ‘inconsistent with…sex,’ contains a sex classification.”

Duh.

She writes:

Because sex determines access to the covered medications, it clearly does. Yet the majority refuses to call a spade a spade. Instead, it obfuscates a sex classification that is plain on the face of this statute, all to avoid the mere possibility that a different court could strike down SB1, or categorical healthcare bans like it.

The Court’s willingness to do so here does irrevocable damage to the Equal Protection Clause and invites legislatures to engage in discrimination by hiding blatant sex classifications in plain sight. It also authorizes, without second thought, untold harm to transgender children and the parents and families who love them. Because there is no constitutional justification for that result, I dissent.

That’s Sotomayor, very, very logically and compassionately dissenting.

So the first thing we need to know about the ruling is that Alito, Thomas, Roberts, and the Trump nominees got it just wrong on its face. I think it’s pretty clear now that Alito and these guys have an outcome that they desire, and they’re just going to cherry-pick the case law to get to that outcome. And it’s never going to make any logical sense.

The decision is named for the Attorney General of Tennessee, whose name is Jonathan Skrmetti, S-K-R-M-E-T-T-I. He’s the one who brought the case. Here’s what he said after the ruling, in a statement: “A bipartisan supermajority of Tennessee’s elected representatives carefully considered the evidence and voted to protect kids from irreversible decisions they cannot yet fully understand.”

He’s right about the need to protect kids from an irreversible decision they cannot understand—but it’s not the decision that he’s thinking about. The decision that they need protection from is this terrible SCOTUS decision that bears his own name.

Look: trans people know early, very early, that they’re trans. That’s just how it is. And I know that’s difficult for people who don’t know about the community and don’t have access to it to understand, but that’s how it is. Trans people know when they’re kids, usually very young kids, that they’re trans; they know. And the longer they go without gender-affirming care, the later the medical intervention is put off, the greater the psychological damage and higher the risk of suicide. So what we’re going to see in Tennessee and the other states that have bans on this stuff is, we’re going to see a spike in teen suicide rates.

And in its quest to eradicate trans people, the Trump administration, the same day this ruling came out, decided to cut funding for the LGBT suicide hotline. So, you know: Trump, very compassionate guy. That’s just blatantly hurting people, hurting trans people specifically and gay kids—during Pride Month, by the way.

I want to read also about the parents who brought the case. In Tennessee there’s parents of kids who are trans who needed this care, and they brought the case. So I’m going to read again from Sotomayor’s dissent:

The stories of the plaintiffs in this case reflect the stakes of that harsh reality. Ryan Roe, now 16, felt as early as elementary school that he “was a boy.” Before puberty, Ryan thought “there wasn’t that much of a difference between boys and girls” and that he “could manage existing in the middle.” As puberty approached, however, Ryan grew increasingly anxious about the impending changes to his body. He started throwing up every morning before school. As his voice changed, Ryan contemplated going mute. Eventually, after two years of psychotherapy and extensive consultations with his parents and doctors, Ryan’s physicians prescribed him testosterone. Ryan began to find his voice again. He started raising his hand in class, participating in school, and looking at himself in the mirror. Ryan attests that “[g]ender-affirming health care saved [his] life.” For Ryan’s parents, “[i]t is simply not an option to cut [him] off from this care.” “I worry about his ability to survive,” Ryan’s mother attests. “[L]osing him would break me.”

L. W., too, began to question her gender as early as fourth grade. At the time, she felt like she was “drowning” and “trapped in the wrong body,” often sick at school because she “did not feel comfortable using the boy’s bathroom.” At age 13, L. W. and her parents sought out medical treatment. Puberty blockers and estrogen, prescribed to L. W. after consultation with her parents and doctors, changed her life. “We have a confident, happy daughter now, who is free to be herself,” her mom explains. “As a mother, I could not bear watching my child go through physical changes that would destroy her well-being and cause her life-long pain.”

Echoing a similar refrain, John Doe and his family attest that John felt from an early age he was a boy. He chose a male name for himself around the age of three. As puberty approached, John grew terrified of undergoing what he saw as “the wrong puberty,” recognizing that “some of those changes could be permanent.” After years of psychotherapy, he began taking puberty-delaying medication. His mother, who “shed many tears during the first year” of this process, acknowledges that “John’s gender transition has not been easy.” Yet she attests that John’s access to medical treatment is “the one thing” that gives her hope that he can “have a fulfilling life.”

So this is what happens, okay? I want people to understand that kids know. They know. Trans kids know, and trans kids are right.

Nadine Smith, on The Five 8 1/2 on Wednesday, said there are more people who regret getting MAGA tattoos than there are people who regret getting gender-affirming care when they’re kids. And that’s the truth. It’s very very seldom that that regret happens, and every time it does…it’s like with plane crashes: It happens so seldom that when it does happen, it’s news, so The New York Times writes a big story about it. And that makes it seem like it happens more than it does.

Again, all this Skrmetti decision is going to do is, we’re going to see a spike in the suicide rate. That’s what’s going to happen. Sotomayor notes, “Tennessee’s ban applies no matter what the minors’ parents and doctors think with no regard for the severity of the minors’ mental health conditions or the extent to which treatment is medically necessary for an individual child.”

This is the other thing I want people to understand. Care like this, gender-affirming care for kids, is gradual. It is a gradual process. Mostly it’s hormone blockers, especially early on. It’s chemical stuff. Chemical stuff can be reversed.

MAGA wants you to think—Trump and Vance were floating these kinds of things during the debates and during the campaign season, really disingenuously and really dangerously—that some 10-year-old is going to walk into the guidance counselor’s office at school and have his little thing chopped off.

That’s not how this works. It’s not how it works. It just isn’t. So if you think that, you’re wrong.

My overall point here is that if you’re not the parent of a trans kid, and you’ve never been put in a position where you have to decide whether or not to allow your child to go through with gender-affirming care, and all of the stuff that comes along with it, then, respectfully: you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about and you should shut the fuck up about it.

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I want to talk a little bit about the history of this, because people might ask, “Why now? Suddenly there’s all these trans people. Why now? Why never before?”

Well, there’s a lot of reasons. First of all, you know, now there’s more social acceptance—not as much, obviously, as there should be, but there is a lot more social acceptance. And the second reason is we have the medicine to be able to do it. People can go to doctors and therapists and, you know, medically and legally do this. That wasn’t the case before.

You don’t choose to be trans any more than you choose to be gay. For older people, including like me, the way to wrap your mind around it, if it’s something you don’t understand, is to consider that being trans now is like what being gay was 80 years ago. It’s the same kind of thing. It’s analogous. Like, maybe it made people uncomfortable. Maybe it was illegal. But now even the Republican Party has stopped going after gay marriage and other anti-LGB legislation because people have accepted that gay people exist and deserve rights.

It’s the same thing with trans. So either you’re going to be on the side that’s going to help trans people or you’re going to be on the side that’s going to hurt them. That’s just how it is. And if you say nothing and allow it to happen, allow trans kids to be the sacrificial lambs in this bullshit culture war, you’re on the side that’s hurting them.

I don’t think that anybody should be discriminated against for something they were born with and can’t change, and gender identity is that: you’re born with it. It’s just how it is. At least, that’s how I see it. It can’t be changed. And you should not be able to discriminate legally for anything like that, whether it’s the color of your skin or your gender, whether trans, or at birth, or whatever else. None of these things, whether it’s your height, your country of origin, or anything that you were born with. You can’t discriminate against that.

A couple more things that I want to address, because I think people don’t understand. Bathrooms. The Republican Party loves to make it seem like there’s these guys in dresses that skulk around in bathrooms to try to get little girls—whatever it is, I don’t even know what they’re thinking. They’re trying to instill this fear that that’s a situation that actually happens. Meanwhile, who are the people that get arrested all the time for soliciting minors? It’s almost always a pastor or a youth leader, and it’s almost invariably a Republican. The guy, the state rep, that tried to introduce a bill to make Trump Derangement Syndrome an actual medical diagnosis, was just arrested and indicted for soliciting a minor. So that’s what we’re dealing with.

Here’s the reality about bathrooms: they’re important, especially for kids. Schools, in most places, like the physical schools, they’re old. They don’t have the infrastructure to have this bathroom, that bathroom. So it’s complicated. It can be hard for kids to be able to go where they’re comfortable. And if the administration at the school is not going to help them do that, it’s really, really harmful. It’s a big deal for kids to go into a bathroom where they feel safe and protected, okay? And that’s just how it is.

So whenever you see the Republicans or hear them, “There’s a man in a dress going into the women’s room to get your daughter,” that’s just…it’s just stupid. It’s a lie. It has nothing to do with trans people, anyway. That’s just a rapist in the bathroom.

So, you know, the bathroom stuff is especially important for kids in schools.

That’s another thing I want people to understand: What we’re trying to do here is protect children, which is what MAGA says they want to do: #savethechildren. They never do it, of course. But the way to save the children is to make sure that the bathroom situation at the schools is workable and makes them feel, trans kids feel, comfortable.

Sports. Again. The conversation dominates in Republican circles. “It’s a man who’s a trans woman and now competing in tennis or swimming and won a medal and screwed somebody out of a prize.” That does happen, yes, but it almost never happens. When Ron DeSantis, a couple of years ago, wanted to make a big deal about all of this, about, like, “We have to protect girls from being screwed out of the silver medals they should win in swimming,” he had to import a kid from Connecticut to come to Florida to talk about this because in Florida, one of the most populous states in the country, he could not find a single person that it had happened to. It almost never happens. It’s a rare occurrence. And, yeah, we have to figure out how to deal with it, but it’s so rare, we should just take it as a case-by-case basis.

Much more frequent and much more common is a trans kid who will stop playing sports altogether because he or she doesn’t feel comfortable with the gender assignments of the sports. So for every one case of the trans woman who competes in some swim meet and wins a medal, there’s hundreds if not thousands of kids, trans kids, who just stop playing sports altogether as they reach high school because it’s too complicated for them, being trans, to participate, for a variety of reasons.

This removes them from something that’s social and important. It’s one of a teenager’s most important social activities is joining a team, a sports team, right? Trans kids tend not to participate in team sports after the puberty age, after middle school. That’s just something that happens. Nobody talks about that, but that’s something that’s way more common.

So if the first scenario is important to you, this unfairness that somebody won a gold medal and somebody only has to have a silver medal instead of a gold medal, and whatever the hell this is, then that should also be important to you too.

Getting back to Skrmetti: I think probably in the grand scheme of things, in the whole big picture, it’ll save a handful of people, maybe, from making a decision about hormone blockers when they’re kids that they will later regret. I’m serious. It’s going to be a handful of people. I mean, they’ll easily fit in the back of your Honda Odyssey, okay? But it’s going to hurt thousands of kids. All this is going to do is hurt kids. It’s going to cause kids to attempt suicide at greater rates. It’s going to cause mental harm to kids. That’s it.

So this is more blood on the hands of the Roberts Court. In Heller, they sided with the gun people, and they said, “We need more gun violence. We need more death by gun violence.” In Dobbs, they said, “We need no abortions. We need pregnant women to die more.” And now this. Fewer people are affected by this than by Heller and Dobbs, for sure. But people are going to die because of Skrmetti. They’re going to die.

Who’s on SCOTUS? Sam Alito is just a disgusting misogynist dinosaur. Here’s something people don’t talk about about enough: when he was a federal judge, Sam Alito was known as “Strip-Search Sammy,” because he held that it was okay during a drug raid for agents to strip-search a 10-year-old girl who wasn’t a suspect. She just was there and they were like, “Gotta strip-search her, she might have drugs on her.” And Sammy was like, “Okay, yeah, that’s good. We can do that.” And at his confirmation hearing, he said he “wasn’t happy” about what happened to her, which I think is a lie. I think he was happy. I think probably…well, I can’t say what I really think.

Roberts, John Roberts, I think is a Nazi at this point. He’s a fascist. He’s giving Trump all these dictatorial powers. He’s doing all this fascist stuff.

Clarence Thomas is a sexual harasser at best, and there’s…I don’t know what’s going on with him.

Kavanaugh: sexual assailant, drinks a lot.

These are the moral paragons that we have, deciding this life and death stuff for children.

Brett Kavanaugh is a basketball coach, right? He was a basketball coach for years for his daughters’ basketball teams. There is no way he hasn’t encountered trans boys, when he was coaching middle school girls’ basketball. There’s no way. You know, my kid played basketball in middle school for the town team. Our team had a trans boy, and every team that we played, it seemed, had at least one trans kid. Every one. So I find it almost impossible to believe that Brett Kavanaugh, specifically, hasn’t encountered trans kids as a basketball coach—which makes him ruling this way even more vile and disgusting. Although maybe he just drinks so much beer he forgets? I don’t know. Blackout.

As for Amy Coney Barrett, she’s got seven kids. None of them’s trans, I guess. At least, they’re not out yet, because one of them very well might be. And if so, then will she look back on this decision and say, “Oh boy, what did I do?”

As for Skrmetti, Jonathan Skrmetti, the Tennessee attorney general—young guy, four kids. If one of them isn’t trans—and, you know, we’ll see—they certainly will know trans kids, have friends that are trans. And that name, his name, Skrmetti, will be forever linked to this case and to trans hatred.

SKRMETTI is a name that will live in infamy. As it should.

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Join me and Stephanie “LB” Koff tonight at 8pm ET on The Five 8:

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ANNOUNCEMENT

Finally: we have winners of the Putin’s Sledgehammer book giveaway, which I selected in the very fun way of rolling my 20-sided die three times. (D&D FTW!) Congrats to Amy Starks, Kim Toborek, and Chris Abraham. Thanks to everyone who entered!