00:00:09.520And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.
00:00:13.700So, Adrienne, today we are talking about one of the smallest groups in the United States who are subject to one of the most outsized political campaigns.
00:00:49.700And I get the impression that, as has never happened before in the history of LGBT rights
00:00:55.760and the contentious debates around them, people seem to be saying they're talking about trans
00:01:02.060kids when they really want to govern what goes on with trans adults.
00:01:06.920Right. The kids are both subjects who have their own qualities that incite a lot of anger and rage1.00
00:01:14.080in the right wing imagination. And they are also this kind of like cipher or a prism through which
00:01:19.540other anxieties, really anxieties about grownups, get sort of put to the test or sublimated into
00:01:26.580perhaps a, on its face, more respectable anxiety or fear. So I wanted to talk about trans kids today
00:01:35.740because I spent part of this week writing about and listening to oral arguments in a Supreme Court
00:01:42.220case called U.S. v. Scrimetti. Have you heard anything about this? I have, yes. So what do you
00:01:46.980know about U.S. versus Cremetti? So it's a case out of Tennessee, and it's about a law in Tennessee
00:01:52.540banning, I believe, transition care for minors. Is that correct? Yeah. So this is a law in Tennessee
00:02:00.900referred to helpfully as HB1. Do not try and Google that because you will get a hundred different
00:02:06.960laws. Tennessee HB1 was passed in 2023, and it outlaws basically all transition-related care for
00:02:15.920anybody under the age of 18, right? And it bans the use of puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones
00:02:23.200or any kind of surgical intervention. And we should say that while Scrametti is the case that
00:02:28.420worked its way to the Supreme Court, there are laws on the books that resemble HB1 in fully like
00:02:34.080half the states at this point, right? Oh, we're going to get there, Adrienne. But yeah, this is
00:02:38.360one of many such trans healthcare bans. HB1 is an interesting little nugget. Like different states
00:02:44.820have taken a few different approaches to banning trans health care because, as you said, it is0.99
00:02:49.200something that a lot of them are doing. HB1 is really interesting because the drugs that are1.00
00:02:54.660used in transition-related care, a puberty blocker for a minor, cross-sex hormones for a trans person
00:03:01.660of any age, these are drugs that, much like misoprostol, which is used in abortion medication,
00:03:08.420have a bunch of other different clinical uses. So puberty blockers are routinely prescribed
00:03:14.560to kids who have what's called like early onset or precocious puberty, right? Like if your seven
00:03:20.800year old son has started to have his voice drop and is growing hair and is showing signs of puberty,
00:03:27.040you might want to delay that with a puberty blocker. Usually the reason given actually is
00:03:32.220that puberty tends to arrest growth, right? So it's actually usually about height. And then you
00:03:37.060might want to, you know, buy your kid a couple more years of a, you know, prepubescent childhood
00:03:42.680body for various different health-related reasons and social reasons. There are similarly
00:03:48.380decent reasons to give kids, minors, hormones. If you have a kid who's got a delayed puberty,
00:03:57.980you might treat that kid with a hormone therapy. Also for height-related reasons, for instance.
00:04:03.380So there's a lot of different uses for these drugs. Tennessee didn't want to ban those
00:04:09.900clinical uses. So Tennessee specifically wrote into its law that this is a ban on any kind of
00:04:19.260treatment that is inconsistent with the sex of the child, by which they mean like sex assigned at
00:04:24.700birth. And in the legal parlance surrounding this case, people are referred to as their sex assigned
00:04:31.340at birth like throughout their life, right? Which is a sort of quirk of the legal system and not
00:04:36.860only a symptom of like the ignorance of the justices so inconsistent with their sex or that
00:04:43.720might cause them to disdain their sex which is a very broad category right yeah so the bill the
00:04:50.740text of the bill is itself pretty explicit yeah about its sex discrimination right so like you
00:04:58.500can give a boy assigned male uh at birth a testosterone treatment but you cannot give that
00:05:05.660same treatment in Tennessee to a child assigned female at birth, right? And it's also very
00:05:10.560explicit about having an ideological agenda of gender conformity among children, right? In fact,
00:05:15.760one of the lower court judges says this is a bill about how we, the state of Tennessee,
00:05:20.500want boys to be boys and girls to be girls. Yeah, yeah. So the law is obviously discriminatory.
00:05:26.420Am I going to get to a moment where I throw my mic across the room because one of the conservative
00:05:30.820justices makes the point that oh this can't be discriminatory because it can apply both to men
00:05:36.160and to women that would be uh one brett kavanaugh who made that that is that is literally how they
00:05:43.160upheld that's literally that was the argument and loving and that was the point that katanji
00:05:47.740brown jackson made oh thank god and she was screaming about the about the same tenor that0.96
00:05:53.120you were yeah oh my god fuck that guy i knew it i mean i guess as we were laying that out i'm like0.96
00:05:58.620It seems really weird that, like, how are conservatives going to talk their way out of, like, this discriminatory bill is not, in fact, discriminatory.0.99
00:06:18.200So I had to – and now that I'm on the West Coast, those oral arguments are at 10 a.m. East Coast time, at D.C. time.
00:06:24.440And they are live – the audio is live streamed.
00:06:26.720Like, there's no video because these people are narcissists and they think they're too good to have cameras in their courtroom, but there is an audio live stream.0.67
00:06:33.140So I have to listen several times over the course of every Supreme Court term at seven in the fucking morning to some red state solicitor general, get up there and say, well, you know, the law in its majestic equality forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges.0.64
00:06:55.800Like, you would be shocked at how often that exact argument is made in a court.0.97
00:07:19.880This also featured one of the, in fact, the first transgender attorney to ever argue before the Supreme Court, Chase Strangio of the ACLU, very famous trans advocate, nice guy. I've talked to him a few times because we have some friends in common. Chase, if you're listening, come on in bed with the right.
00:07:41.120And he was an advocate in favor of some trans children and their families for the ACLU, as well as Elizabeth Prelogar, who was representing the Biden administration as the solicitor general, because the Biden administration joined the ACLU in suing to try and get this law thrown out.
00:08:37.340And now 26 states have these bans on the books.
00:08:40.360So basically once they were done with like bathroom bills and trans athlete bills, they were like, what else can we do?
00:08:46.960Well, this is interesting, Adrienne, because I think to understand the emergence of the trans child as a politicized subject, we actually do have to go back to bathroom bills.
00:09:27.260It was a dark time. And in ways, it was also kind of a much more progressive time, right?
00:09:34.080Because Donald Trump and his brand of, you know, revanchist identity politics, weaponized animus, that was still kind of not as mainstream. Right. And what was really mainstream in 2016 was a kind of like raw, raw liberal love is love appreciation for LGBT rights.
00:09:58.360Absolutely. And I mean, I remember that the bathroom bills, the first round of them brought on huge advertiser boycotts and sports boycotts, huge political blowback and really didn't go anywhere, including I think Trump kind of came out not quite against them, but basically saying that it was not going to be a priority for him.
00:10:17.560You know, this brings us exactly to where I wanted to be, which is North Carolina. Right. So in 2016, North Carolina passes HB 2, which is its bathroom bill. It's one of the first of these. Right. It's one of the most ambitious anti-trans bills that had been passed at the time. And it was a total ban on trans people using the appropriate public restroom. Right.
00:10:44.580And there was a lot of media attention on trans people as subjected to a public indignity, right? There was a lot of comparisons to Southern racial segregation and white and black restrooms.
00:10:58.520And there were, in that same campaign, a few high-profile examples of students in North Carolina public schools who were like, you can't make me go to the wrong restroom or hold it all day. This is about my access to education, right?
00:11:16.460This was a new politicization of the right to pee, you know, like what our friends at Lux Magazine called the right to pee, you know, this ability to be far from your home for long periods of time, which constitutes all of our working lives and our educational lives and our place in the public sphere, requires us to have access to public restrooms, right?
00:11:39.700Otherwise, you're tethered to your home.
00:11:42.000And the sort of stakes of a bathroom became really clear.
00:11:44.760And, you know, in this pro-LGBT moment, remember, we're just like a year after Obergefell, right?
00:11:51.700This is a moment when people can feel really, like straight people can feel really, like, smug about not being homophobes, right?0.60
00:11:58.900There was this, like, kind of rainbowification that at the time I found so annoying and now I'm so nostalgic for.0.79
00:13:27.760So this was a huge backlash to an attempt to politicize trans existence in public life and to roll back trans rights. Right. And it was like a pretty like framed as a very morally simplistic issue at the time. Right. Like this is about the forward expansion of the liberal civil rights project to a new identity group that has been marginalized. Right.
00:13:51.940We finally got the gay people their marriage. Now we're going to expand rights for trans people and we will resist the backlash. There was like a ton of like pro LGBT liberal energy at the moment.
00:14:03.040So after this really kind of unmitigated defeat for like the anti-trans movement, there was a moment of like kind of licking their wounds and like trying to figure out what to do next. Right.
00:14:18.980And they found a sort of like next step, like they found a wedge issue. And this was a this according to Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project, which is like a righty right wing social conservative think tank.
00:14:33.940they said okay first of all we need to find an issue that can begin a like re-radicalization
00:14:42.460against trans people and they kind of like played around with a few things apparently that one idea
00:14:48.780was to be like oh we should pass amendments to our civil rights laws to clarify that sex
00:14:56.660discrimination does not include gender identity discrimination right like that was one idea
00:15:00.420that didn't really go anywhere. There was one idea that is like, okay, we should pass laws
00:15:05.140saying that trans women can't be housed in domestic violence shelters, which is just like
00:15:10.020so sadistic and cruel that like, I can't really even get my mind around it. But like that didn't0.96
00:15:13.880really go anywhere either. Right. Although it's interesting, right? Like prisons and women's
00:15:19.680shelters, right? This was already building a bridge to like the JK Rowling's of the world.
00:15:24.200This is something that Christian, right? And TERFs can sort of agree on.0.82
00:15:26.860Well, that was like, that was one idea. I mean, the JK Rowling wasn't a turf yet back in 2017. Like, but the idea was that like people who had, you know, broad socially liberal sympathies could get online with this. Right. And then the one that they found that actually did it was women's sports.
00:15:47.140Yeah. So, like, what do you know about the controversy over trans women and women's sports? And this trans athlete issue does exclusively seem to be about women's sports.
00:15:56.440That's right. What I know about it is that when you broadcast women's sports, when you ask people to show up for them, no one shows up.0.96
00:16:06.580And yet we have a nation of experts on women's sports who have for a long time deeply cared about women's sports at pick one, the collegiate, the high school, the middle school, the elementary school, the, you know, intramural, whatever level.0.74
00:17:58.060So what you get in this moment when the anti-trans, you know, organized right turns to women's sports is that you get this focus on excluding trans athletes from sports at around the same time that some major women's sports franchises are actually kind of taking off.
00:18:16.880Like the U.S. Women's National Team, which is a soccer team, started doing really well.
00:18:21.740And it became clear that they were going to dominate on their way to the 2019 World Cup, which they eventually won.
00:18:27.220It was a fantastic afternoon at the Lesbian Bar in Brooklyn when they did.
00:18:32.280And then, you know, the WNBA started gaining a lot of like new fans and new revenues, right?
00:18:39.980And their salaries started inching up a bit.
00:18:41.900So this was a moment like when people were starting to watch women's sports in newly engaged numbers, right? So there's also like kind of a market coincidence that women's sports had become like newly salient, right?
00:18:55.980And then the turn to women's sports allowed anti-trans bigots to do a couple of things, right? Like one is that like as you mentioned, it allowed them to bring in constituencies that were maybe not already committed to a socially conservative policy agenda, right?
00:19:19.100It seemed like a small ask, and it also allowed them to focus on something that nominally wasn't as central to people's public participation as bathrooms were, right?
00:19:31.120Like, there's really not much you can do if you're not allowed to go to the bathroom, right?
00:19:37.120But there's a lot of life that doesn't involve being in an organized sports team, right?
00:19:42.180So it was able to seem like, oh, this isn't an attack on these people's whole, like, right to be equal members of a community and of a polity, right?
00:19:53.700This isn't about your working life or your education.
00:20:00.600But at the same time, it really brought the focus to trans people and really trans women's bodies, right, about the difference in their embodiment.
00:20:11.640It allowed a sort of essentializing rhetoric about male strength and female vulnerability, right?
00:20:18.780Including in chess in a very, very funny moment involving Riley Gaines.
00:20:25.420At some point, a trans chess player beat a cis chess player and like these people lost their minds.1.00
00:20:31.320And then they all started with like brain pans and shit.1.00
00:20:33.700And you're like, oh, so you are saying that women are just dumber than men naturally?1.00
00:20:37.280It was a banner moment for the intrinsic sex differences crowd allegedly not being sexist.0.99
00:20:45.120I mean, these people tend to go mask off pretty quickly, right?
00:20:48.180But like it allowed a sort of patriarchal defense of sex segregation on the grounds of protecting or defending women's access to public life, right?0.52
00:21:02.640Like, women need a sex-segregated space so that they can compete fairly was the line.
00:21:09.060And it allowed to, like, spend a lot of time focusing on trans women's bodies, which, like, do have a capacity in, like, latently transphobic people as opposed to, like, committedly avowedly transphobic people to, like, elicit disgust, right?
00:21:23.480It's something people don't understand.
00:21:24.680And, you know, there's a lot of kind of unresolved science about, like, what hormone replacement therapies do to people's athletic capacity, right?
00:21:33.080And it, like, allowed people who did not understand themselves as bigots to buy into a project about excluding trans people from public life as a matter of public policy.
00:21:44.260This is something that we talked about a little bit in our Olympics episode.
00:21:46.880So I know that today, basically, there are these people who are always pushing the women in sports or trans women in sports debate.
00:21:55.240And I agree with you, it's never trans men in sports.
00:21:58.020And basically, they're like, oh, well, we're only asking questions.1.00
00:22:02.120And if you look at any athletic organization, there is a policy.
00:22:06.300Absolutely, there are real rules what you have to do if you're transitioning and you're participating in sports.
00:22:10.960Was that the case back then already? Or is this basically people kind of not reworking their talking points because, as you say, the issue just kind of connects? It works pretty well for these latent transphobes. Or was it even then true that basically like the, you know, Women's Hockey Association fully knew like what the rules were? It's just people were like, there should be some rules, you know.
00:22:33.520A lot of these associations did create guidelines under political pressure because we are talking, Adrienne, about such a vanishingly small number of people that for many of them, it had simply never come up before.
00:22:48.260So one thing to realize when we're talking about trans people is that we are talking about, according to Pew Research, maybe 1.6 percent of adults. 1.6 percent, which includes both transgender people who are like binary trans people who might have made medical efforts to transition, you know, changes to their bodies.
00:23:12.420And it also includes non-binary people who may or may not have made such changes.
00:23:16.380You know, it's like it includes a lot of people who don't all mean the same thing when they say trans.
00:23:21.240This was a hilarious and incredibly uncomfortable conversation between Chase Strangio and Sam Alito yesterday morning in the Scrimatic oral arguments.
00:23:31.700Say more about that. I didn't catch this.
00:23:33.500I think actually Sam Alito was maybe trying to humiliate the trans attorney by making him explain gender fluidity.
00:23:38.880But, you know, this notion that like not everybody means the same thing when they say trans. So it's actually kind of a hard population to measure, but it is a just vanishingly small number of people. And particularly when we're talking about kids, it's about 2% of high school students in the U.S., most of whom have not made medical changes to their embodiment.
00:23:57.020This is just people who are identifying as transgender who, you know, in most cases, these kids have not undergone surgery, right?
00:24:07.600So it's a teeny weeny minority of kids who are already different and vulnerable in the stigmatized way, right, who are already being singled out to not even be allowed to play on their volleyball team anymore.
00:24:22.500Because a Republican needs to hit those fundraising figures, you know?
00:24:25.220And I mean, a lot of this is not even about transness. It's about gender nonconformity, right? It's about people who optically don't look right. There are, right in huge quotation marks, people can't see that. I always forget this is a audio only podcast.
00:24:41.000But what I mean is like a lot of cases where these athletes, you know, middle schoolers, high schoolers get humiliated by spectators challenging their gender.
00:24:52.440In some way, it doesn't matter whether you're trans or cis in that moment.0.94
00:24:55.980But it is important to note that like what these transvestigators do, which is really what this is all about, is do kind of a visual pat down on how you conform to gender.0.99
00:25:05.400Right. I don't watch women's sports because I don't watch any sports, to be quite honest.1.00
00:25:09.020But I would say one thing, having gone to school with a lot of wonderful women athletes, they're not always the most gender conforming, right? They're not the daintiest flowers, I would say. They are definitely, they could break my jaw.1.00
00:25:21.180Let's be explicit, Adrienne. What we're talking about here is a social movement backed increasingly by the force of law and encouraged by a right-wing media ecosystem in traditional channels and online that is seeking out and bullying tomboys, masculine little girls and butch women, right?
00:25:42.120This is, in many cases, a way in which cisgender women who are gender nonconforming, who may or may not be lesbians, who are more masculine, are bullied and subjected to public speculation about their genitals because they are not sufficiently feminine for these people.
00:26:01.200And, you know, there is this kind of assumption, oh, some of this is because this is so new. And we should say our friend Jules Gil-Peterson wrote this wonderful book about the history of the transgender child, where Jules points out that like, no, this has been around for a long, long time. The novelty is in some way a smokescreen in order to just revisit things that if they weren't about gender, but about sexuality would be absolutely recognizable as the most rank ass homophobia, right?
00:26:29.760And the idea that like a woman has her femininity questioned, right?0.95
00:26:34.980Like which lesbian hasn't that happened to basically, right?
00:26:37.680Or, you know, which gay guy hasn't been asked, so who among you is the woman, right?
00:26:41.180Like we're all familiar with this.1.00
00:26:43.280We recognize that you're running the same fucking play.0.99
00:26:46.100It's just shocking to me that the New York Times somehow isn't able to catch on to the fact that it's the same three card fucking Monty, right?0.99
00:26:52.940Yeah. May I take you to the lovely In-N-Out bathroom line in Bakersfield, California, where me and my wife were on our road trip last week, like getting shit from somebody's creepy Christian aunt who didn't want us in line with them.0.99
00:27:08.400Yeah. I mean, this happened. This does happen. It happens regularly.0.97
00:27:12.360So this is a like series of bills that are able to get a lot of traction, right?
00:27:21.060By 2021, 10 states have laws on the books that ban trans women and girls from participating in any kind of women's sports, right? And that was a real change. That was a wedge issue that a activist bigoted group deliberately found.
00:27:42.520They pulled it, they tested it, they focus grouped it, and they found this one, right? It brings the focus back to their bodies. It allows people who want to think of themselves as nice, enlightened liberals to get on this train. And it seems like a small ask that can be righteously justified, right?
00:28:01.240And that allows an opening for reconsideration of both bathroom bans, which now exist in 14 states without any similar boycotts, and then for these outright bans on trans medical care for minors.0.68
00:28:25.520Just in three years, right? That's between 2021 and 2024. More than half the states have them. About 40% of trans youth live in states in which those laws are on the books.
00:28:37.960God, Pamela Paul must be so proud.0.99
00:28:39.800Well, that is a good point, right? Because for this political, this legislative and political transformation to happen, there had to be a cultural transformation, right? Those love is love straight liberals had to be given social permission for transphobia. And to look at how that happened, Adrian, I am about to send you a link in the chat.
00:31:52.620So the premise of the single article from 2018 is that very young children with very new and ambiguous gender dysphoria or gender discontent are being rushed into irreversible medical changes, right?
00:32:11.700Yeah, I'll take stuff that didn't happen for 500, Alex.
00:32:14.780It's amazing because he cannot find an example of this actually happening.
00:32:18.340He goes to a lot of families, including his central example is of a 13-year-old girl who expressed a transgender identity to her parents, socially transitioned in several ways, expressed an interest in getting hormones, and in fact then did not.
00:32:41.140and started identifying as a cis girl again and was not rushed into hormones or surgery,
00:32:49.540was greeted with seemingly a degree of acceptance and sympathy from her parents and her social
00:32:57.060world, had a period of identity exploration that did indeed turn out to be a phase and was fine.
00:33:04.100So there's a lot of examples of this where Singhal goes, I think we can all agree that
00:33:09.620things need to move slowly and we need to be really cautious. And then he indeed produces a
00:33:14.7808,000-word article full of examples of exactly that happening. He interviews this one clinician
00:33:22.980in Oakland who he positions at first as being this gung-ho maximalist who wants to inject
00:33:30.060testosterone into every seventh grader. And then he sits down with her and she's like,
00:33:34.740no i mean we spend a lot of time talking to them uh like it's not for everybody there's a lot of
00:33:41.480different like regimens of treatment or of like identity categories that people wind up in and so
00:33:47.880we spend a lot of time working with each individual patient and he's like this is so crazy that even
00:33:54.160she this wild radical can see you know it's like no it's like there's just nobody is going around
00:34:00.820Doing the thing that you claim they're doing, yeah.
00:34:03.160Nobody is going to, like, your, you know, your kid's peewee soccer team and injecting all the little girls with tea.
00:34:12.040Well, presumably right before their rainbow parties they do.0.96
00:34:16.480But, I mean, Michael Hobbs does such a great job talking about sort of also the weird work that the idea of rapidity does in all these discourses, right?
00:34:24.940This is also the rapid onset gender dysphoria kind of discourse, right, where like the rapidity for people who haven't delved into it, the studies that find this are surveys of parents and often parents that hang out on transphobic forums, frankly.
00:34:39.900So the output of rapidity is actually parental non-acceptance, right, that they sort of can't hear their children until that child is fairly sure about what's wrong and what they need.
00:34:52.780And then they're like, well, out of nowhere, she suddenly says she's a boy, right?
00:34:57.000And it's like, no, like the rapidity comes from your resistance.
00:35:01.740This idea that things are happening too quickly, that our children are changing because of
00:35:06.360social contagion, that they are rushed into transition, that they are rushed into social
00:43:10.420I do have short hair. It's true. But it's pretty easy to be a gender-conforming gay person. Nobody is having sex or even sexual desire all the time. Or maybe somebody is, but they're very tired.
00:43:25.600You know, it is like athletics, a part of your life that you can, you can make it not anybody's problem, right? Your embodiment, your identity, that is a precondition of knowing you, right? And it throws this hierarchy, this taxonomy of people into doubt, right?
00:43:45.760And when it's children, that's not just a challenge to gender and our conceptions of it. It's also our challenge to, like, what is childhood? What is identity? What is, like, agency or free will? Like, these are all questions that get brought up by the trans child in a way even more so than with trans adults.
00:44:05.280yeah my conclusion is that i think we should leave trans kids alone i think they're going
00:44:11.320through enough they don't need this uh they are about to come in for worse treatment yeah yeah
00:44:18.880and maybe we'll say in case there are listeners which i sincerely doubt that think that transphobes
00:44:24.660make some good points and that you know maybe we're being unfair thinking this is all a right-wing
00:44:30.540culture war and think like oh you guys think everything's a right-wing culture war they're
00:44:34.640not going to stop at trans kids. They're going to get to trans adults. And if you don't care about
00:44:38.440trans kids or trans adults, they're also going to come for the lesbians, gay and bisexual people in0.99
00:44:43.340your lives. Like this is, as Maura is pointing out, this is a nodal point. This is the avenue
00:44:49.660that they chose after they had to give equal rights to LGBT people on some questions.
00:44:55.780This is the battle they picked after they lost the battle on gay marriage, right?
00:44:59.140Exactly. And, you know, I will say in oral arguments yesterday, it became clear that this is not just about trans kids. This is, you know, it came up several times that the same logic would apply to a ban on health care for trans adults. Right. But really what they're doing is they're kind of pulling a loose thread on the sweater that is the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Right.
00:45:22.620This is the beginning of the unraveling of sex discrimination protections in federal law under the 14th Amendment, which was the big legal project in the second half of the 20th century of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Pauli Murray, right?
00:45:35.900They are going to allow a whole slew of sex-based discriminatory laws under the model of this one, right? So if you like what you have right now, which is the constitutional freedom protected by the 14th Amendment to not have to abide by sexual stereotyping as enforced by law, then you need to be on the side of trans kids because they're really after you.0.94
00:46:00.340They're really after you, and that trans softball player is just in the way.0.68
00:46:05.120I worry this one wasn't as happy as our latest, but I do think on a good note, one thing that the law can't stamp out and never has been able to, even though it has historically tried, is the defiant diversity of gender expression and identities, including in kids, who are being themselves against some pretty horrible odds.0.99