A thtunning thetback
The Associated Press is staffed by teenagers.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors, a stunning setback to transgender rights.
Stunning shmunning. There is no “right” to be mutilated or prescribed harmful drugs or both. The whole idea of “gender-affirming care” is both absurd and malign.
Imagine if people started claiming to idennify as trees, and doctors rushed to provide transarborial rights. Yes, certainly, we will encase you in bark and replace your head with foliage, and behold, you are affirmed as a tree.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for a conservative majority that the law does not violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause, which requires the government to treat similarly situated people the same.
“This case carries with it the weight of fierce scientific and policy debates about the safety, efficacy, and propriety of medical treatments in an evolving field. The voices in these debates raise sincere concerns; the implications for all are profound,” Roberts wrote. “The Equal Protection Clause does not resolve these disagreements. Nor does it afford us license to decide them as we see best.”
I wish the goddam liberal majority agreed.
In a dissent for the court’s three liberal justices that she summarized aloud in the courtroom, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “By retreating from meaningful judicial review exactly where it matters most, the court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims. In sadness, I dissent.”
Newsflash: the ludicrous notion that people’s sex is all in their heads and can contradict their bodies is a political whim. It’s the whimmiest whim that ever whimmed.
The decision comes amid other federal and state efforts to regulate the lives of transgender people, including which sports competitions they can join and which bathrooms they can use.
Snide misogynist bullshit. It’s not a matter of “regulating the lives” of trans people, it’s a matter of preventing male people from grabbing everything that belongs to women and girls.
In April, Trump’s administration sued Maine for not complying with the government’s push to ban transgender athletes in girls sports.
Male athletes you craven callous shitheads.
The government regulates our behavior in many ways. I can’t drive 300 mph on I-80. I can’t dump my trash in the Platte River. I can’t shoot the mailman. I can’t let a dangerous dog run free (or even a non-dangerous one; sometimes you regulate all for the benefit of one). I can’t move into my neighbor’s house, eat all their food, use up all their toilet paper, and kick them out. I must have a license to drive, a license to teach, and a SSN. All of these rules were made for a purpose. We can agree with all of them, some of them, or none of them, but the idea that the government can’t regulate someone’s behavior is ludicrous. They do it all day, every day, and in most cases, it is a good thing.
This one is a good thing. It’s not like when it was illegal to be gay, or when women weren’t allowed to vote. It’s not like holding slaves or shoving people into concentration camps. The TRAs would insist that it is like all of those, and more – they would insist it is like putting Jewish people into gas chambers and killing six million of them. I never, ever thought I would live to see the day when ANYONE would claim that using a correct pronoun when referring to someone would be an oppression greater than KILLING SIX MILLION JEWS.
Well without “promoting the general welfare” and “providing for the common defense” we would be in serious trouble. I forget where I heard it, but “a little socialism never hurt anyone” comes to mind. I turned that over in my mind quite a bit before looking around extensively and seeing how it’s true.
Parents are not permitted to keep their children in dog cages, they are required to feed and clothe their children, and they are not allowed to beat their children half to death. Children have rights that don’t derive from their parents’ rights. Children’s rights should include being allowed to grow up naturally, not having their puberty interfered with in the name of wild-eyed theories about gender.
To add to Papito, parents are also expected to keep their children from playing on the freeway, from sticking beans up their nose, from setting fire to their toes, from sticking knives into light sockets (that one I actually did; I’m not sure where my mother was at the time, but she didn’t stop me; it was my first scientific experiment).
Kids may want to do things, but parents stop them. Some of them the law says they must stop, such as parents not being legally allowed to provide their kids with cigarettes or beer (some do it anyway, I realize). Puberty blockers are dangerous, with long-term consequences.
It is up to parents to ensure that the desires their kid feels, however fleeting or persistent, are channeled into directions that do not harm them. If the parent fails, the government can step in and remove the children from their custody.
I guess, on this issue at least, we should be grateful that the Supreme Court consists largely of Republican appointees; Gorsuch’s and Kavanaugh’s places had gone to Obama or Biden nominees the decision would likely have gone the other way.
Sign in a local tattoo shop window: You must be 18 or have written permission to be tattooed. Yet we are told adolescents can do intrusive surgeries with no parental permission.
iknclast #4
“parents not being legally allowed to provide their kids with cigarettes or beer”
My parents smoked but didn’t give their children cigarettes.
However, when we were quite young, my father would have one beer before dinner & sometimes we would get a small cup and ask for some beer and he would pour a *small* amount into each cup. This *might* have helped teach us that alcohol *in moderation* was OK. None of us became alcoholics or binge drinkers.