The Great Disappearing Trans Freakout

The Supreme Court drives a stake in the transgender controversy, and neither party says much. Is this chapter in American politics headed for the dustbin of history?

From the New York Times, on the Supreme Court ruling affirming a Tennessee ban on surgeries or the prescription of puberty blockers for minors. Note the language:

Here’s what else to know about the case, United States v. Skrmetti:

The treatments: The law prohibits medical providers from prescribing puberty-delaying medication, offering hormone therapy or performing surgery to treat the psychological distress caused by incongruence between experienced gender and that assigned at birth.

With the trans issue, even America’s ostensible paper of record has to speak in code, in its own pages. The Times couldn’t or wouldn’t use the word sex at the end of the above sentence, though it later used it appropriately when referring to a “federal policy requiring passports to reflect the sex on a person’s original birth certificate.” As if in protest, the paper swapped one preposterous bespoke language innovation (“sex assigned at birth”) for an even more nebulous and confusing one: “gender… assigned at birth.”

I’m an aging cis male without gender-fluid children, so according to current formulas of mainstream discourse my opinion counts as about 1/19th of a person. Still, I’d like to offer a meager observation. No topic in recent history has been language-policed more thoroughly than this one (I have friends who still won’t return calls because I reviewed What is a Woman?). However, because the “Kamala is for They/Them, Trump is For You” commercial is widely credited with helping swing last year’s election, the usual Internet goon squads have gone mute of late, even after this week’s ruling. The Times even ran a think piece about the “new discomfort” yesterday.

If we’re really at freakout’s end, let me be first to say, Ding, Dong, the Language-Policing Witch is Dead! This episode should be an object lesson in what happens when you try to tell people what they should think about things they can see with their own eyes, like a 6’4” biological male flashing the victory sign after double-lapping an NCAA pool full of bewildered young women. Awesome quantities of PR capital were expended denouncing those who booed as bigots. Still, the public wouldn’t budge, on that or related concerns, like the extant question of whether or not minors who can’t vote or drive have an absolute right to Lupron prescriptions. There were ways to talk sensibly and with sensitivity about all this, but no room was left to do so, and this is the result.

Unfortunately, it’s already clear no lesson will be learned, as was also made clear in The Times this week: