Great News today. The US Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law that prohibits some medical treatments for “transgender youths". This doesn’t mean the end of transgender madness where we are all supposed to pretend a man is a woman because he says he is.
It is, unfortunately not the end of the mutilation of children. But it is the beginning of the end. And Justice Clarence Thomas is on fire as he demolishes Transgender lies. You can read the best part of his judgement below and his comments in full here.
The court has said that a state has the right to ban controversial medical procedures such as mutilating children in the name of transgender care.
Shockingly the vote was just 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal members in dissent. Although I suppose it’s probably not that shocking. The decision is not a complete Supreme Court rejection of transgender ideology but it is a rejection of institutions that become captured by a few ideologues and then write policy for millions of members which has happened with American medical associations.
Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the majority, acknowledged the “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.”
But he said these questions should be resolved by “the people, their elected representatives and the democratic process.”
In other words local legislators know best. The court has not announced what they think about states such as California which has become a “sanctuary state” for so called trans kids. Right now children can go to California if they are denied mutilating treatment in their home state.
My favorite part of the ruling was the concurrence by Justice Clarence Thomas. It is one of the best summations of why you should never, never, never trust the experts or the pretend consensus. And it is also a brilliant summary on what is so wrong with medicalizing and mutilating children.
Read it and weep (and smile):
The Court rightly rejects efforts by the United States and
the private plaintiffs to accord outsized credit to claims
about medical consensus and expertise. The United States
asserted that “the medical community and the nation’s
leading hospitals overwhelmingly agree” with the Govern-
ment’s position that the treatments outlawed by SB1 can be
medically necessary………. The implication of these ar-
guments is that courts should defer to so-called expert con-
sensus.
There are several problems with appealing and deferring
to the authority of the expert class. First, so-called experts
have no license to countermand the “wisdom, fairness, or
logic of legislative choices.” …. Second, contrary to the rep-
resentations of the United States and the private plaintiffs,
there is no medical consensus on how best to treat gender
dysphoria in children. Third, notwithstanding the alleged
experts’ view that young children can provide informed con-
sent to irreversible sex-transition treatments, whether
such consent is possible is a question of medical ethics that
States must decide for themselves. Fourth, there are par-
ticularly good reasons to question the expert class here, as
recent revelations suggest that leading voices in this area
have relied on questionable evidence, and have allowed ide-
ology to influence their medical guidance.
Taken together, this case serves as a useful reminder
that the American people and their representatives are en
titled to disagree with those who hold themselves out as ex-
perts, and that courts may not “sit as a super-legislature to
weigh the wisdom of legislation.”
Justice Thomas also goes on to attack the idea that the treatment of “transgender kids" is settled science or even something that there is agreement on the treatment.
Before this Court, the United States asserted that “over-
whelming evidence” supports the use of puberty blockers
and cross-sex hormones for treating pediatric gender dys-
phoria, and that this view represents “the overwhelming
consensus of the medical community.”
These claims are untenable. “[T]he concept of gender dys-
phoria as a medical condition is relatively new and the use
of drug treatments that change or modify a child’s sex char-
acteristics is even more recent.” The
treatments at issue are subject to a rapidly evolving debate
that demonstrates a lack of medical consensus over their
risks and benefits.
The concurring opinion by Thomas goes on to call into question almost every aspect of gender affirming care pointing out much of it is experimental and the evidence for it is “rapidly evolving” and side effects are appearing every day.
PUBERTY BLOCKERS
To treat precocious puberty, puberty blockers are adminis-
tered until the age appropriate for puberty; to treat gender
dysphoria, however, puberty blockers are administered to
stop puberty throughout the years it would normally occur.
The “use of drugs to suppress normal pu-
berty has multiple organ system effects whose long-term
consequences have not been investigated.”
This absence of evidence is a “major drawback” in as-
sessing the effects of puberty blockers on children with gen-
der dysphoria.
Cross-sex hormones.
Following puberty blockers, the. next stage of sex-transition treatments for children involves cross-sex hormones.
This treatment is also typically “off-
label,” and requires “very high doses” of hor-
mones of the opposite sex. For example, one of
the organizations that sets standards for pediatric sex-
transition treatment recommends raising transitioning fe-
males’ levels of testosterone “6 to 100 times higher than na-
tive female testosterone levels.” For males
seeking to transition into females, the organization recom-
mends raising levels of estradiol, a type of estrogen, to “2 to
43 times above the normal range.”
Prescribing such high doses of testosterone to girls in-
duces “hyperandrogenism,” which can cause increased car-
diovascular risk, “irreversible changes to the vocal cords,”
“clitoromegaly and atrophy of the lining of the uterus and
vagina,” as well as “ovarian and breast cancer.”
Giving high doses of estrogen to boys induces “hypere-
strogenemia,” which can produce similarly severe side ef-
fects including, among other things, increased cardiovascu-
lar risk, breast cancer, and sexual dysfunction. Id., at 779–
781. And, for girls and boys alike, “it is generally accepted,
even by advocates of transgender hormone therapy, that
hormonal treatment impairs fertility, which may be irre-
versible.”
Thomas was scathing about how medical policy was foisted on the membership of medical organizations by radicals pushing a progressive political ideology.
“They have built their medical recommendations to achieve political ends,” he wrote in his judgement.
The judgement is a masterclass in demolition of Progressive madness. You can read it in full here.