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NYT Skewers Former Heroes of Trans Movement After SCOTUS Defeat

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June 24, 2025

NYT Skewers Former Heroes of Trans Movement After SCOTUS Defeat

by Katherine Hamilton
Breitbart.com


The Supreme Court delivered a crushing blow to the transgender movement last week when it upheld Tennessee’s law banning sex change drugs and surgeries for minors.

The ruling is a massive defeat that could “set the movement back a generation,” The New York Times reflected in a 10,000-plus word article. The Times details mounting evidence against sex changes for minors, while leaving the movement’s former heroes out to flail in the wind, including former transgender-identifying Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Rachel Levine, transgender-identifying A.C.L.U. lawyer Chase Strangio, and A.C.L.U. executive director Anthony Romero.

The article, written by Nicholas Confessore, first introduces Strangio, the A.C.L.U. lawyer who argued against the Tennessee law, and the first openly transgender-identifying lawyer to argue before the Supreme Court. Confessore appears to place much blame for the Supreme Court loss in United States v. Skrmetti on Strangio, whom he called a “burgeoning celebrity of the cultural left.”

“Strangio and other advocates for trans rights have cast Skrmetti as the case they had to bring. It may also have set their movement back a generation,” he wrote.

Confessore credits Strangio with not only pushing a losable case to the nation’s high court, but also with having a radical “style of politics that began to prevail within the movement,” leaving little room for debate or middle ground.

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“Strangio disputed that a trans woman could be ‘born with a male body’ or ‘born male’; in his view, a trans woman was born a woman just like any other woman. There was no such thing as a ‘male body,’ Strangio told his colleagues: ‘A penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman,”‘ the article reads:

…[I]t was Strangio’s style of politics that began to prevail within the movement. Activists on the left believed that achieving trans rights required a more fundamental social reimagining of sex and gender. There was less and less room for competing views….Online and off, trans activists attacked journalists and academics who explored whether the sudden rise in dysphoria among teenagers was linked to social media and peer influence or reported on “detransitioners”— people who abandoned a trans identity and sometimes regretted undergoing medical transition. When the journalist Abigail Shrier published her 2020 book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” — casting the rise in dysphoria among teenage girls as a form of social contagion — Strangio tweeted that “stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”


The article goes on to note that Strangio and the A.C.L.U. continued “digging in” on the narrative that sex change drugs and surgeries for minors were “safe and effective,” while European countries were “backing away” from supporting sex changes for minors after finding that such experimental methods show little evidence of quelling adolescents dysphoria and self-harm.

Confessore also hones in on Romero, who “cast the lawsuit over pediatric gender medicine as the logical next step in his organization’s much longer battle to defend personal freedom.”

“Skrmetti, Romero argued, was ‘literally a life-or-death matter’ — a case not only worth taking to the Supreme Court, but ‘the best case in the transgender rights docket,'” Confessore wrote. “Others, however, saw the Skrmetti case as a tragic gamble built on flawed politics and uncertain science.”

“Over the last decade, they told me, the movement was consumed by theories of sex and gender that most voters didn’t grasp or support, radicalizing its politics just as the culture wars reignited and the Supreme Court began moving further right,” he wrote. “And as Skrmetti and other lawsuits made their way through federal courts, some of the central medical claims girding the legal case for pediatric gender treatments — that decades of thorough study had found them to be safe and effective — began to unravel amid growing scrutiny by other doctors and experts.”

The last trans activist hero-turned-pariah named culpable by the Times is former HHS Secretary Levine, a man who identifies as a woman.

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The Times blasts Levine for publicly claiming the sex changes for minors are considered “suicide prevention care” and “well-established medical practice” despite a shocking lack of quality evidence. Confessore also pointed back to the Times own reporting finding that Levine was “instrumental” in World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) removing age-limit recommendations on sex changes for minors.

“After seeing an early copy of SOC-8 [the recommendations], Levine and her staff began pressuring WPATH to drop the new age minimums, arguing that ‘specific listings of ages, under 18, will result in devastating legislation for trans care,’ as the group’s president relayed to colleagues in July 2022,” the article reads. “That September, the American Academy of Pediatrics — which had also been provided a preview — followed suit, treatening to publicly oppose SOC-8 if the age minimums were not deleted.”

WPATH is considered the leading “transgender” healthcare organization, with its guidance for gender dysphoric individuals being widely used in American, British, and Canadian hospitals. The group also influences health insurance policies and other health organizations such as the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Many legal cases have used WPATH’s guidance as evidence against tate laws protecting minors from sex changes, but reports of politics allegedly influencing WPATH’s guidance undermined much of the A.C.L.U.’s case against Tennessee.

“Just as WPATH’s internal emails began trickling into public view, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear Skrmetti. Not long after, Levine’s requests to WPATH were reported by The Times. White House officials were blindsided, several told me,” Confessore wrote. “Though Levine would later tell Biden aides that she had been trying to protect the president, the West Wing saw it differently: Her request could suggest that the administration thought there should be no minimum ages at all. ‘Everyone was like, holy cow — did Rachel Levine really go out and lobby for 9-year-olds to get surgery?’ one former Biden aide told me. (Levine’s spokesman says she based “all policy recommendations on the best available cience.”)”

The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Tennessee’s law, Senate Bill 1, does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in the U.S. Constitution, contrary to the claims of transgender activists who sued the state.

The court rejected claims brought by plaintiffs that Tennessee’s law discriminates on the basis of sex. Instead, the court countered that the state’s law bars sex-change drugs and procedures for individuals based on their status as a minor and bars the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for the purpose of treating gender dysphoria.

The Supreme Court also found that Tennessee had enough rational basis to ban such drugs and surgeries for minrs, pointing to the state’s findings of potentially severe side effects, lack of quality evidence and long-term studies, the experimental nature of the so-called treatments, and European countries that had pushed similar practices reversing course over concerns about long-term impacts. The court also acknowledged the state’s argument that minors do not have the maturity to fully understand the potentially life-altering consequences of sex change drugs and surgeries, meaning they cannot reasonably consent.

The ruling does ban sex changes for minors nationwide but allows states to set their own laws , essentially killing similar legal challenges to other red state laws protecting children from mutilating drugs and surgeries, like in Idaho.

http://www.breitbart.com/politics/2025/06/24/nyt-skewers-former-heroes-of-trans-movement-after-scotus-defeat/

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