News
The Supreme Court’s Hearing on Trans Rights Was Bigotry Masquerading as Law
The conservative majority spent much of the oral arguments for US v. Skrmetti trying to erase the trans community.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday in US v. Skrmetti, a major case concerning transgender rights. During the two hours of bigotry disguised as a hearing, it became clear that the conservative majority is almost certain to uphold the Tennessee law banning gender-affirming care that lies at the center of the case; but what stood out the most was the conservatives’ dedicated attempt to erase the trans community.
When conservatives want to deny rights to whichever group is asking to be given the same constitutional protections that cishetero white men have enjoyed since 1787, they have a number of tricks to get around constitutional prohibitions against discrimination and legalize bigotry.
Their most common trick is to argue that the discriminatory law at issue is not really discriminatory. Their most insidious trick is to question whether the group appealing for basic rights and justice exists as a cognizable group in the first place, and, if they deem they do not, the Republicans reject the possibility that they can be discriminated against as a threshold constitutional issue.
The trans community received both ends of these demeaning sticks during oral arguments.
The central issue in the case is whether the ban on gender-affirming care violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and discriminates against trans people on the basis of sex. That may sound like an open legal question, but it’s really not. The Tennessee law, on its face, discriminates on the basis of sex assigned at birth. In Tennessee, a child assigned male at birth can take a testosterone booster, for instance, to deepen his voice and inhibit the development of breasts—but a child assigned female at birth cannot take the exact same drug for the exact same purpose. That is a point-and-click violation of the Constitution.
To get around this obvious problem, the lawyer for Tennessee, Tennessee’s Solicitor General Matthew Rice, argued that the law was not discriminatory because the child assigned male at birth is suffering from a “medical condition” (delayed growth or puberty) while the trans-boy was simply experiencing “psychological distress with her body” (emphasis mine). The Republican justices appeared to uniformly agree that it was not “sex” discrimination because both “boys” and “girls” are prevented from taking hormones for the purpose of transitioning. It is a bankrupt view of sex discrimination, but intellectual bankruptcy is how Republicans on the Supreme Court make their living.
In an attempt to come at the issue from a different angle, Justice Elena Kagan argued quite passionately that the court didn’t even have to consider the question of whether Tennessee’s law is a form of sex-based discrimination because it is facially discriminatory against the transgender community. That is because the law specifically targets trans teens. But here the Republicans deployed their other trick, and argued that the trans community does not face discrimination at all.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett literally fixed her mouth to say that the trans community faces no history of state-sponsored discrimination that she is aware of, only what she called “private” discrimination, and thus could not be viewed as a suspect class (in the legal jargon, being identified as a suspect class—a group of individuals sharing an immutable characteristic that has been subjected to historical discrimination—grants that group a higher level of protection under the equal protection clause). She essentially argued that the government never does anything bad to trans people, and thus the court doesn’t have to worry if the states infringe on their civil rights.
Justice Sam Alito echoed the concern, and asked Chase Strangio, an attorney with the ACLU who co-argued the case against the Tennessee law with US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, if being trans was an “immutable characteristic.” The smug and retrograde innuendo from Alito was that since trans people transition, they cannot be said to have an immutable characteristic.
These unnecessary barbs sting at least as much as the likely legal loss, because they not only reduce the trans community to an invisible underclass but implicitly deny the very reality of transness. They are the Supreme Court’s way of giving its blessing to discriminate, belittle, and harass kids—while treating trans individuals like hysterical teenagers who don’t know what’s good for them.
Indeed, Rice gave away the whole game (and the likely argument the justices will make, come June) near the end of the hearing when he argued that, in bringing the case, the trans plaintiffs are asking for a “substantive right to non-conformity.” It was a gross yet revealing admission of his viewpoint: Tennessee should provide kids with hormone treatment if, and only if, they conform to Tennessee’s vision of cisgendered adolescence, but they won’t if the child doesn’t.
The argument against non-conformity is all the anti-trans arguments ever boil down to: Republicans, MAGA lawmakers, and conservative Supreme Court justices hate people who are different. This time, the bigots on the Supreme Court didn’t even try that hard to hide their antipathy to difference behind legal jargon. They just pretended that people who are different don’t really exist.
Harmeet Dhillon was chosen by the president-elect to replace Kristen Clarke on the Justice Department’s civil rights efforts.
President-elect Donald Trump announced on Monday that he plans to nominate a conservative California attorney to lead a critical division of the Department of Justice.
Harmeet Dhillon, a former vice chairwoman of the California GOP and a national committeewoman for the Republican National Committee, was selected by Trump to serve as assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department. She would replace Kristen Clarke, who became the first woman and first Black woman to run the division in 2021.
Trump, who described Dhillon as one of the “top Election lawyers” in the country in his Truth Social announcement, said that she would have a large role in voting rights enforcement.
“Throughout her career, Harmeet has stood up consistently to protect our cherished Civil Liberties, including taking on Big Tech for censoring our Free Speech, representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID, and suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers,” he wrote.
Dhillon combated stay-at-home orders during the COVID-19 pandemic. She filed several lawsuits against government-level regulations, arguing there was overreach. The lawsuits Dhillon filed came after Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom became the first governor to issue statewide stay-at-home orders to shut down nonessential activities and interests to combat the spread of the coronavirus.
In 2018, Dhillon founded the conservative nonprofit The Center for American Liberty, which has filed lawsuits challenging vaccine requirements and trans-inclusive school policies. Most notably, Dhillon currently represents Chloe Cole, a young activist who sued Kaiser Permanente in California after she detransitioned from male to female. Cole has rallied alongside Republican politicians and conservative media figures, and has testified in support of dozens of state laws restricting access to gender-affirming care for trans youth.
Dhillon is highly critical of blue states that aim to uphold and protect rights for transgender people in light of ongoing legislative attacks. She said Maine’s “shield” law, which protects reproductive health care providers and trans people, is “unconstitutional” and expressed concerns about future protections in California.
A staunch opponent of abortion herself, the attorney also unsuccessfully represented anti-abortion activist David Daleiden, who in 2016 used a fake driver’s license to pose as a biomedical company executive and tried to buy fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood, in an effort to accuse the health care provider of selling tissue for profit.
Dhillon, who was born in India and is a practicing Sikh, has faced pushback from fellow Republicans due to questions of her faith. After she announced in 2022 that she would challenge RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel for her position, several members of the RNC circulated a video of Dhillon opening a 2016 Republican National Convention with a Sikh prayer. In a letter to Alabama Republicans in 2023 responding to the incident, Dhillon addressed concerns about her faith and slammed McDaniel’s leadership. Alabama Republican Chris Horn questioned how Dhillon’s religion would impact policy to NBC. McDaniel condemned attacks on religion but told Politico her allies questioned how Dhillon’s faith would impact the party.
Last year, former Fox News host and conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson hired Dhillon to represent him in a gender discrimination lawsuit by his former producer, Abby Grossberg. The ensuing settlement resulted in Fox paying Grossberg $12 million.
“I’m extremely honored by President Trump’s nomination to assist with our nation’s civil rights agenda,” Dhillon said in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter). “It has been my dream to be able to serve our great country, and I am so excited to be part of an incredible team of lawyers led by @PamBondi. I cannot wait to get to work!”
The president-elect appeared very confused about how American citizenship is conferred.
In a freewheeling interview with NBC News Sunday, President-elect Donald Trump offered a head-scratching explanation for his plan to wage an attack on birthright citizenship.
“Did you know, if somebody sets a foot — just a foot, one foot, you don’t need two — on our land, congratulations, you are now a citizen of the United States of America,” Trump said, when discussing birthright citizenship.
“Yes, we’re going to end that, because it’s ridiculous,” he added.
Trump appeared to describe a hypothetical scenario in which a woman would give birth to an infant who — either capable of walking at birth or helped along by someone eager to win a bet — would set one foot on American soil and the other in either Mexico or Canada.
It is also possible Trump was imagining an infant hopping or standing on one leg. Neither scenario is plausible.
Trump also repeatedly asked whether the interviewer, Kristen Welker of “Meet the Press,” knew that the United States was the only country that conferred citizenship by birthright.
“We’re the only country that has it, you know,” Trump said. “You know we’re the only country that has it.”
Birthright citizenship is commonly recognized in the Americas, including in Canada and Mexico. Also known by its Latin legal term as “jus soli,” it is the concept of conferring citizenship by birth in a given country. Most countries instead recognize “jus sanguinis,” which instead confers citizenship based on the nationality of a person’s parents.
Welker did not challenge Trump’s utterly wrong description of how birthright citizenship works or that the United States is not alone in recognizing it. But she asked whether Trump intended to enact his proposed change through executive action.
“Well, if we can, through executive action,” Trump said. “I was going to do it through executive action, but then we had to fix COVID first, to be honest with you.”
Birthright citizenship is protected by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The president cannot use executive action to overturn a constitutional amendment, though legal experts expect the Trump administration to challenge the long-settled legal interpretation through the courts.
Trump has spent significant time in southern Florida, which is home to a large Cuban-American community.
He likely came up with this weird description of birthright citizenship by free-associating the issue with the now-defunct policy of allowing Cuban migrants to stay within the United States and pursue citizenship upon touching American soil. The policy was known as “wet-foot, dry-foot.”
During this year’s presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly described immigrants as coming from jails and mental institutions. He was likely resurrecting assertions he heard during the era of the Mariel boatlift four decades ago.
Trump mocks the United States’ northern ally
In a post just after midnight on Truth Social, Trump took aim at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with a mocking reference, calling him “Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada.”
The comment, a throwback to Trump’s past suggestion that Canada might become the 51st U.S. state if they can’t handle his tariffs, is an insult to both Trudeau and Canada.
Trump recently posted an AI image of himself looking into Canada as if to annex it. Trump’s midnight post, claiming to look forward to future discussions on tariffs and trade with “Governor Trudeau,” further stoked tensions with a key ally and makes one question his diplomatic judgment.
Trump’s post undermines the United States’ relationship with Canada. Calling the Canadian leader a “Governor” belittles the sovereignty of a close neighbor and trading partner, and further feeds into the narrative of disrespect that Trump has often displayed toward foreign leaders.
The United States and Canada share deep economic, cultural, and geopolitical ties, and statements like this can jeopardize decades of cooperation. Trump is proving once again he will be an embarrassment to the United States.
-
News5 days agoBernie Sanders Flips The Script And Praises Trump Picks
-
Uncategorized1 week agoNaked RFK Jr. Makes Cameo On Wife Cheryl Hines’ Social Media
-
News5 days agoHouse Democrat Trashes Trump’s Cabinet Picks With Brutal Made-For-TV Dig
-
News1 week agoGeraldo Rivera Slaps Trump Supporters With A Reality Check After Biden’s Pardon
-
News1 week ago‘Banana Republic Stuff’: Mehdi Hasan Nails GOP Hypocrisy Over Trump’s Latest Move
-
News1 week agoTrump Is Using “Unitary Executive” Theory in His Bid to Amass Supreme Power
-
News1 week agoTrump’s Next Term Could See America’s First True Oligarchs, Warns Democracy Activist Garry Kasparov
-
Uncategorized1 week agoElizabeth Warren Signals Possible Support For Trump Labor Nominee