Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barret asked a team of ACLU lawyers advocating for trans rights if trans people had ever really been discriminated against.
The court on Wednesday held oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, a landmark case originating from Tennessee that could decide just how far the federal government has to go, if at all, to protect the rights of trans people. In 2023, Senate Bill 1 became law in Tennessee, banning hormone therapy and puberty blockers for minors and imposing civil penalties on doctors who don’t fall in line. Skrmetti is challenging S.B. 1, but the conservative justices don’t seem to be having any of it.
“One question I have is, at least as far as I can think of, we don’t have a history—that I know of—we don’t have a history of de jure discrimination against transgender people,” Coney Barrett said during oral arguments on Wednesday morning. “You point out in your brief that in the last three years there might have been these laws, but before that we might have had private societal discrimination.… Is there a history that I don’t know about where we have de jure discrimination?”
By de jure Coney Barrett means “federally mandated,” and she goes on to note that other minority groups have experienced that kind of discrimination, while to her knowledge trans people haven’t.
U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar responded immediately. “Historical discrimination against transgender people may not have been reflected in the laws. But I think there’s no dispute that there is a broad history here and it hasn’t just been confined to private actors,” she said. “I think that if you actually looked at the facts there’s a wealth of evidence to suggest that transgender people throughout history have been subjected to violence, discrimination, and maybe lost employment opportunities, housing opportunities.”
Attorney Chase Strangio, the first transgender lawyer to argue in front of the Supreme Court, also later addressed Coney Barrett’s tone-deaf question.
“Transgender people are characterized as having a different gender identity than their birth sex. That is distinguishing,” Strangio said. “I would also point, if I could, to the history of discrimination—and there are many examples—of in-law discrimination, exclusions from the military, criminal bans on cross-dressing, and others.”
Coney Barrett has a history of judicial hostility toward LGBTQ issues, and trans rights specifically. She defended the dissenting justices on the Marriage Equality Act, has argued Title IX rights shouldn’t apply to trans people, and personally believes that marriage should be between a man and a woman.
Tennessee is just one of 26 states with laws that ban gender-affirming care for minors.
The nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services is open-sourcing cures from anyone with a song.
The FAQ for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” website features a relatively banal assortment of questions, from how to troubleshoot merchandising orders to how to stop recurring donations to RFK Jr.’s defunct presidential campaign. But among the bullet points hides a strange prompt that one wouldn’t expect from a man on the cusp of overseeing the nation’s health policies: an invitation to email him whatever medical therapies you’ve got lying around.
If you “have a cure for something,” the website reads, “please send an email to info@teamkennedy.com.”
The request plays into Kennedy’s larger conspiratorial ideas on modern medicine, effectively equating old wives’ tales and snake oil elixirs with thoroughly researched and studied science-backed treatments.
Kennedy—a virulent vaccine conspiracy theorist who doesn’t believe that AIDS is caused by HIV, insists that WiFi causes cancer, and has shared he has brain-eating worms in his head—has promised to completely reshape America’s approach to public health.
Under Trump’s helm, Kennedy has sworn to remove fluoride from all public water systems—reversing a 1945 public health decision that has reduced cavities and tooth decay in adults and children by as much as 25 percent, according to the American Dental Association.
During the “plandemic,” Kennedy likened 2020 vaccination efforts to the Nazi testing on “Gypsies and Jews,” referring to the jab as “a pharmaceutical-driven, biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare.” As part of Trump’s Cabinet, Kennedy reportedly has plans to strip not just the Covid vaccine but older, irrefutably effective vaccines from the market, as well.
But Kennedy’s vaccine conspiracies aren’t just easily refutable hogwash—they’ve caused legitimate, real-world harm. Prior to a deadly measles outbreak on the Pacific islands of Samoa in 2019, Kennedy’s anti-vax nonprofit Children’s Health Defense spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines, sending the nation’s vaccination rate plummeting from the 60–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones. That year, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles—an illness that was declared eliminated by the United States in 2000 thanks to advancements in modern medicine (read: vaccines)—as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of 5.
Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have practically eradicated some of the worst diseases, from rabies to polio and smallpox, from our collective culture—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat for the average, health-conscious individual.
Representative........