Skrmetti Shows Why The Courts Won't Save Us
I appreciate the fight they're mounting, but...
Before I begin this rant, two things:
Thank you to any and all of you who donated to the tornado relief for Grinnell, Kansas, in response to my last entry.
The entry before that, To See The World In A Grain of Sand, was about the war on empathy, and I was thrilled to see Substacker Mona Mona at Philosophy Publics delve into the empathy war with a much finer and detailed eye, tackling the topic with far more time and attention and philosophical background than I could ever muster. Do check out her series.
On to the rage…
In 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter wrote:
These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.
Though Casey was, depending on how you looked at it, a limited win or an example of Roe’s death by a thousand cuts, that bit of language was soaring. I remember how absolutely incensed the theocon Right became at this passage in particular. I think it broke their brains.
Those brains are broken still, and I think the fallout, the repercussions, become clearer every day. The notion of such radical autonomy…it’s like their kryptonite, their bucket of water to the Wicked Witch of the West. They hate it. They fear it.
Yesterday, SCOTUS dropped its decision in US v. Skrmetti, a case about trans kids and gender affirming health care for them.
What Happened in Skrmetti
The court screwed trans kids.
It upheld a Tennessee law saying trans kids could not get gender affirming care—things like puberty blockers and hormone treatments under the supervision of medical professionals, even if their parents are supportive.
Under the law, cis kids can get puberty blockers and hormone treatments (and probably gender-affirming surgeries, as well).
If you’re thinking that this sounds pretty discriminatory, you’re right. The SCOTUS Six used a lot of technical lawyer talk to excuse it. One of the main things was kinda like this: “Tennessee’s not discriminating between types of kids. They’re discriminating between types of medical treatments. The Constitution doesn’t say we have to treat all medical treatments equally.”
Yeah, so Tennessee says, “You can get this drug if you have X, Y, or Z diagnosis and are being treated for it. But you can’t get the same drug if you have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and want to be treated for it.”
So they say they aren’t discriminating against trans kids, but the only treatments they are banning are for kids with a diagnosis that only trans kids have. Everyone can see it’s bullshit, but the majority opinion pretends like it’s not, thanks to the magic words “medical treatments.”
So The Court Declared Open Season on Trans Kids?
Not exactly. There are some silver linings. Or well, some non-toxic linings. SCOTUS did not go as far as it could have. They could have ruled way more broadly in a handful of ways to literally crush trans rights in several other categories of law, but they didn’t, although certain “justices” wrote separately to say they sure were willing to go further.
To understand this cluster, this steaming pile of sophistry, you have to understand just how screwed up our justice system really is. It’s like a city built on really a rotten foundation, and rather than fix the foundation, they keep pretending things are fine as they continue to build upward in more skewed and deformed patterns unfit for human habitation.
It Starts With “Scrutiny”
The whole Skrmetti case was about how closely courts should look at the Tennessee law to see if it ran afoul of the Constitution, specifically the Equal Protection Clause:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Equal protection of the laws. That is, over here you have cis boys who have gynecomastia and want a doctor to fix that…or a cis girl developing facial hair who doesn’t like it. They can get medical treatments that will make them happy.
But over there you have trans kids who are flirting with suicide thanks to gender dysphoria and would like to have puberty blockers while they try to figure out their identity, but if a doctor helps them out, the doc faces a $25,000 fine and civil lawsuit bounties, etc. So the cis kids seeking medical treatment for what ails them are protected by the law, but the trans kids are not—in fact, they are singled out and targeted by the law. This is pretty plain to see.
But in the bizarro world that is jurisprudence, we don’t just call a thing what it is. We have to jump through hoops and satisfy tests.
So we have this thing called “scrutiny.” Specifically, levels of scrutiny. As in, how closely do we look at and investigate a law that someone claims is discriminatory? Do we just shrug and say, “Hey, the government claims they had some reason to pass this law and that’s good enough”? If so, then the level of scrutiny we’re using is called “rational basis review.” Basically, any law not written by the Klan can pass rational basis review.
Then there’s “intermediate” or “heightened scrutiny.” These are usually cases alleging discrimination on the basis of sex (which we now understand includes discrimination based on gender—the social performance of “masculine/feminine”-related or -coded roles, because you can’t talk about “acting like a man/woman” unless you’re making some strong distinctions about the sexes). Why we only look “medium-hard” at sex discrimination cases is partly due to the fact that there are legitimate biological difference between the sexes that are not discriminatory in the bad way, and laws about such differences shouldn’t be struck down.
If a law has to face intermediate scrutiny, then the government has to show that the law in question serves an important (not just “any old asserted”) state interest and that what the law does is substantially related to achieving that interest. This is a harder test for the government to pass, since it requires a close look at evidence, connections, causes, and consequences, and this is what the folks in the Skrmetti case were trying to win at the Supreme Court against Tennessee.
Finally, there’s “strict scrutiny.” Racial discrimination gets strict scrutiny, largely because the whole Equal Protection Clause came out of the Reconstruction Amendments, which were a response to the Civil War, so it’s very hard to pretend like race is no-big in this context—though the right-wingers on the Court keep trying and trying. Strict scrutiny also kicks in when there’s a “fundamental right” at stake, like religion (because the Right Wing still believes in that, at least for themselves).
Strict scrutiny applies when the people involved are members of a “suspect class,” which is a terrible term that makes folks sound like criminals, but actually means people the court has deemed to meet certain criteria which we’ll get to in a second.
If strict scrutiny applies to a case, then the law under consideration has to be “narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest,” and each word in that phrase tends to restrict the state’s ability to tell people what to do, so laws that get the strict scrutiny treatment have a hard time passing muster in court.
Confused? You’re Supposed To Be
What does all this have to do with trans kids getting health care?
In a way, very little. In a way, everything. This is called a “framework debate.” If you “win” a framework debate, you can make all the substance of your opponent’s arguments go away, cease to matter. You can erase the reality of trans kids trying to live an endurable, even enjoyable life as opposed to…well, the alternatives. You take the real lives of kids and parents and their struggles, and push them down and away, then float upward into a realm of abstraction and legalese to discuss things like “levels of constitutional scrutiny” that were derived from the word choices of justices writing opinions a hundred years ago.
That way, you get to sound all regal and serious and objective. Meanwhile, the actual people affected get shoved further and further into the background.
A big, and hardly-ever-spoken reason for the abstraction game is that Supreme Court Justices are lazy. They don’t want to have to deal with stuff. They try to make things go away. Entire swaths of federal oversight and regulation, vast chunks of established civil rights. Be gone with you! Every time a law is challenged, there’s the potential for the Supreme Court to have to weigh in. Technically, SCOTUS gets to choose which cases it will hear, and which specific constitutional questions it will focus on when it hears a specific case, so it’s really nice work if you can get it. (Also, lifetime appointment, generous salaries, breathless and fawning coverage, sycophancy from the world’s most highly-paid and high-powered lawyers, invites to all the best parties, the ability to lord it over everybody else, wear cool robes, take scads of illegal gifts without reporting it and then declare such gifts perfectly legal, and much more.)
So SCOTUS judges are very much inclined to study and learn only the ins and outs of the words and phrases of the law and their own precedents—a world of lingo and parsings and concepts and dictionaries—and blow off the world of actual, flesh-and-blood human beings and their struggles and lived realities. That latter stuff is too vast, too complex, too messy, too changeable. What little most justices know of that world comes to them via Fox News, Xitter’s algorithm, and the like-minded social circles at their exclusive dinner parties and camping trips with reactionary billionaires.
Focusing on “framework debates” allows them to remain in their comfort zones of discussing the language of precedent, plucking quotes from past decisions that fit what they already decided they want to do, all safely above the grubby realities of trans kids struggling in Tennessee. And if they can manipulate the framework debate well enough, there’ll be fewer occasions when they’ll have to listen to stories of those whiny little hillbilly freaks in future.
This is how the messed-up legal system operates. So this is what had to be argued at SCOTUS.
And the bad news is, it gets worse.
Suspect Classes
Not only did the Skrmetti case have to contort itself away from the actual lives and struggles of trans kids and their families under blatant medical apartheid to fit into a discussion about “levels of scrutiny” appropriate for the court to apply, it had to dip into “suspect classes.”
Suspect classes are tied up in levels of scrutiny. If a case involves well-established members of a “suspect class,” then higher levels of scrutiny kick in. And because the Skrmetti case was about the Equal Protection Clause, and because the Court looks at Equal Protection through the framework of “scrutiny,” there had to be this debate about whether trans folk can be viewed as a “suspect” or even “quasi-suspect” class.
I know, shoot me.
Naturally, SCOTUS has criteria for what constitutes a “suspect class.”
To put it in the formula of Jeff Foxworthy…
If your class of people has been historically discriminated against, subject to stigma, prejudice, hostility, perhaps thanks to stereotypes…you might be a suspect class.
If your class of people has some immutable or highly visible characteristic…you might be a suspect class.
If your class of people is a discrete and insular minority, unable to protect themselves through the political process…you might be a suspect class.
So every item in this list gives the justices who basically hate and fear trans folks room to declare that there’s no reason to look twice at the Tennessee law denying kids medical care.
Remember: No suspect class? No heightened scrutiny. No heightened scrutiny? Then the law in question just gets a “rational basis review,” which means anything short of a JK Rowling tweet will pass muster…and maybe even those are okay.
So now the court is looking at trans folks, but not really seeing them. Because it’s not seeing them as they live in the world today, or even historically. They are seeing whether or not trans folks fit through a specifically shaped aperture SCOTUS precedents have carved out to qualify as people whose rights deserve respect. If their rights are deserving, then SCOTUS will take a harder look at the Tennessee law instead of just rubber stamping it.
Hoop upon hoop upon hoop. Abstraction after abstraction.
And the suspect class criteria? Man, are these limited. If we woke up tomorrow and started treating people with blue eyes like absolute garbage, I can’t really say they’d qualify as a suspect class.
First, the discrimination is brand new, so no history of discrimination. As long as the stigma and hostility is relatively fresh (and there are no guidelines as to how dated bad treatment has to be to be considered “historical”), the court will shrug.
Second, how “highly visible” is eye color, really? Don’t you have to get pretty close to someone to tell? Can’t they wear shades? And immutable? What about those colored contact lenses? If people can easily “pass,” no harm no foul, amiright? (This, increasingly, is the quality of logic the SCOTUS Six uses.)
Finally, blue-eyed people could easily band together and lobby and vote and organize to fight discriminatory laws, so if one passed somewhere, they would have a reasonable chance of getting it overturned in the next cycle, so they aren’t insular and powerless.
Therefore, the court might do nothing about a state law that harshly discriminated against the blue-eyed. They just don’t fit the suspect-class criteria.
Trans folk are a real world example of how these criteria just aren’t very serviceable. You can’t be alive in America (or, increasingly, anywhere on earth) and fail to clock how trans folk are demonized and used as a political weapon. While there is historical evidence of not just de facto and private animus, hostility, and discrimination against the trans community but also de jure discrimination (despite Amy Coney Barrett’s delusions to the contrary), you end up in a Catch-22 in some cases: heavily stigmatized minorities aren’t going to have a long-standing, well-documented history of their existence and mistreatment that’s highly salient to the common person, so majoritarian normies (the kind who get SCOTUS seats) are going to be like, “I’ve never heard of this, so how can it be so?”
The immutability criterion is problematic, as it tends to echo a logic of, “Oh, well, they can’t help it that they’re ____, so we shouldn’t treat them differently on that account.” That is, a pitying, consolation prize admission to equal treatment under the law that still replicates the logics of superiority and inferiority. The suspect classification of religion flies in the face of this: I could change my religion this instant, so it’s hardly “immutable,” and certainly not visible unless I subscribe to a faith that requires me to dress or appear in a way that indicates my membership, yet religion is a suspect class all the same. It just happens to get included automatically, like a grandfather clause, thanks to its status as a “fundamental” right. Why is it fundamental? Because it happened to get spelled out in the text. Lucky for religion.
Yet the thought of updating the suspect class criteria—or replacing the entire framework—is not on the table. Instead of looking to see if we have discrimination that is unfair, then sussing out whether that unfairness can in any way be justified or outweighed by some more compelling state interest in a specific case, we make people jump through hoops and criteria that inherently divide them into protected classes first, which in turn dictate how closely we examine the discriminatory laws. As far as I’m aware, the door is entirely closed to rethinking how we do this in American jurisprudence, short of a liberationist legal movement to counter the conservative legal movement: cultivate think tanks and law journals to advocate and flesh out alternate legal frameworks inching closer to a revolution in civil rights approaches, and that would likely take decades.
Meanwhile, the Curse of Bad Precedents Continues
The majority opinion in Skrmetti—where John Roberts two-facedly mansplains that no, Tennessee isn’t discriminating between types of kids, only discriminating between types of treatments for types of diagnoses—probably wouldn’t be possible if it were not for a garbage decision that is still on the books from 1974, Geduldig v. Aiello.
At issue in that case was a public short-term disability program in California, meant to buoy people up after medical issues until they could get back to work. It covered practically everything—root canal, vasectomies, cosmetic surgery. There were a few exceptions to the coverage, all of which were admittedly obsolete categories by the time the case hit the courts…except one: the disability program did not cover “normal” pregnancy-related disability, whatever that meant. (Initially, it didn’t cover any pregnancy related disability, but California decided things like ectopic pregnancies merited a change in the rules.)
The Supreme Court ruled that it was perfectly fine for the state of California to exclude pregnancy coverage in its disability program, even though it pretty obviously screwed over women. On what basis? On the basis that women could receive benefits for all sorts of other disabilities, just not pregnancy, so the program didn’t discriminate against women, just against pregnant people, and really, it discriminated among covered conditions for the sake of, well, keeping the program budget manageable and stuff.
Geduldig was such a disaster that Congress passed a federal law banning discrimination against pregnant people. That’s unheard of these days, no matter how often the Court responds with “Don’t like our decision? Then Congress should do something about it,” while knowing full well that Congress is historically ineffective and even landmark legislation will be truncated or blocked by SCOTUS if it comes from the wrong side of the aisle. Geduldig was transparently an artifact of its sexist time, when (white) women were new to the mass workforce and women couldn’t get credit cards in their own names, and over the years it became a constitutional joke in law schools—but it was never overturned.
In fact, it made a comeback, most notoriously in the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Justice Sam Alito cited Geduldig without shame as he dismissed any notion that doing away with abortion rights was sex-based discrimination:
…a State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex-based classification and is thus not subject to the “heightened scrutiny” that applies to such classifications.[17] The regulation of a medical procedure that only one sex can undergo does not trigger heightened constitutional scrutiny unless the regulation is a “mere pretex[t] designed to effect an invidious discrimination against members of one sex or the other.” Geduldig v. Aiello, 417 U.S. 484, 496, n. 20 (1974). And as the Court has stated, the “goal of preventing abortion” does not constitute “invidiously discriminatory animus” against women.
That Geduldig is back in such a prominent role (it now basically underpins the entire logic of the majority decision here in Skrmetti) shows how a joke of a precedent can return to bite not just trans folk, but women as well. It should surprise no one, since bodily autonomy is the same underlying question, and the overarching threat is the same narrow vision of binary roles and sexes and genders that Christian nationalists and other theocrats and autocrats seek to impose.
Also limiting justice in Skrmetti is the shameful precedent of San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), where the poor were denied the coveted status of “suspect class.” The case involved glaring inequities in schooling driven by funding formulas based on property taxes, creating inadequate schools for poorer districts, and the plaintiffs argued that the affected students and parents should be viewed as a suspect class, in terms of the Equal Protection Clause. They further argued—now over half a century ago—that education should be seen as a fundamental right in America, though not specifically mentioned in the Constitution.
The court rejected both claims, with Lewis Powell—corporate lawyer and the conservative legal movement’s favorite memo-writer—as the deciding swing vote. If you want to know one key reason why life is so egregiously unequal in America, the Rodriquez case is a decent place to start. Put simply, the poor are not a discrete class of people whose discrimination requires any special kind of scrutiny, and education—despite being mandatory up to age 16—is not a right of the people, or so sayeth the Supreme Court.
Why does Rodriquez matter? Because it helps form part of the “logic” Amy Coney Barrett uses to go beyond the majority opinion in Skrmetti to say that not only is Tennessee’s law perfectly fine, but she’s also cool with rejecting any notion that transgender people could ever constitute a “suspect class” entitled to heightened, let alone strict scrutiny. (It’s like she’s upset to be considered a possible “moderate” justice compared to Alito and Thomas, so she’s all, “Oh yeah? Well, I hate trans people just as much!”) She lists off the cases where the court has rejected adding any new suspect classes—not the mentally disabled, not the old, not the poor.
In fact, as far as I can tell, we have never embraced a new suspect class under this test. Our restraint reflects the principle that “[w]hen social or economic legislation is at issue, the Equal Protection Clause allows the States wide latitude, and the Constitution presumes that even improvident decisions will eventually be rectified by the democratic processes.” Cleburne, 473 U. S., at 440 (citation omitted)
It never seems to dawn on Barrett that the court’s restraint might actually reflect outdated and intentionally narrow criteria for interpreting the substantive meaning of the Equal Protection Clause. Maybe that’s why no new suspect classes have been added in all this time. Maybe no one has qualified because y’all are using and abusing a really truncated and tortured set of rules. Maybe that’s how Barrett and her robed brethren like it. Maybe they’re just rubbing our faces in it.
But no matter. I’m sure that the “democratic process” will “rectify” Tennessee’s “improvident decision.” Congress will surely greet the denial of needed medical treatments for trans kids with the same outrage that it greeted the denial of pregnancy-related disability coverage back in 1974.
Transgender folks are just as large and as beloved a bipartisan constituency as pregnant moms, right?
Right?
Reform or Revolution?
Despite the valiant examples usually set by the three sane Justices on the court, seen strongly in Sotomayor’s dissent in Skrmetti, which is joined by Jackson and Kagan (in part), and which cleans the majority’s clock nine ways to Sunday, I really don’t see a reformist path to jurisprudential sanity in, say, the lifetime of my children (ca. the next 80 years, God willing and the creek don’t rise).
The political solutions involve structural reform of the court, and by all means, I’m down for nearly all of it: expansion, rotating on/off the court, set numbers of appointments and schedule per executive, the lot.
Do I see this happening in our present political climate? Nope.
Not when the concept of anti-dictatorship struggles to bring out 3.5% of the population to demonstrate for a few hours on a Saturday.
Not when the only viable political party with an interest and the potential power to push for these reforms is the present, wildly dysfunctional Democratic Party.
Not when challenges to those reforms, no matter how craftily and even legally made, will likely make their way before the very court they are meant to reform.
In terms of the guts inside that structure, the ideas inside the skull, well, the way the conservative legal movement and its allies managed to drag us all into the Mirror Universe was to chuck all notions of good faith and work like partisans for a specific vision of the world for a very, very long time. They had money and invested it in institutions to spread their ideas, cultivate young minds, tempt folks with opportunities and sinecures, surround them with like-minded enablers, and try, try, try, until they eventually won a few, then built upon those wins, with the help of folks they got placed in positions of power and authority. The ideas were never good—the trust-fund system built to support those ideas and make them popular was.
Just as the current political administration is looking at the mass of accreted laws for loopholes to enact dystopia and dictatorship—even when they know they are on shaky legal footing (they can cause havoc and fear for a long while before things wend their way up to a court where they have a 6-3 majority)—the conservative legal movement proffered garbage loophole fringe theories again and again, got loons like Thomas to signal openness to them in dissents from the bench, and collaborated with their political hack think-tank allies to propagandize the reactionary base to foam Amens at the mouth for such notions.
I look at the massive wall of precedents, decisions, dissents, concurrences, amici, law review journal articles, and horrific anti-trans New York Times slop that Thomas likes to cite, and I see an aging trash heap. Yeah, there are still some real gems to be found in there, but the bad faith bastards have figured out how to weaponize so much of the garbage that it’s like an impenetrable wall of flaming crap barring access to the good stuff.
I keep thinking that, whatever structural reforms we might dream of for the Supreme Court, in whatever Cloud Cuckoo Land they might occur, we need a counter to stare decisis, the guideline that “we stand by our past decisions.”
Call it infirmare decisis: “We invalidate our past decisions.” A thoroughgoing review of absolute garbage precedents still on the books that the Court takes up to get rid of obviously bad decisions that still stand as “good law,” that is, not yet officially and formally overturned. Normally, you need a case to rise to SCOTUS to challenge such precedents, but only the Right has the power to do such things. Constitutional normies never dare, because they respect norms. So you don’t see cases filed that, say, try again to get poor people recognized as a “suspect class” for the purposes of the Equal Protection Clause, all while we are living through massive, one-sided class war. You don’t see SCOTUS reexamining whether or not there is a substantive right to education because of a Lewis Powell swing vote fifty-plus years ago. You still have Geduldig on the books, propping up Dobbs and making Skrmetti possible thanks to the attitudes about women’s proper place in the home and the ignorance of dudes circa 1974. I tend to think of it like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Past Supreme Court Decisions, focused on the reasoning and evidence upon which they were based.
How that would or could work, I have no idea. Then again, I have no idea how we could ever get the structural reforms to the Supreme Court passed and implemented either, yet these are pitched as just barely within the realm of political possibility or imagination, like getting rid of Citizens United or reforming the Electoral College or pulling off a Convention of the States that isn’t instantly corrupted by some MAGA-Tea-Party-Federalist-Society-Leonard-Leo hanky-panky.
Bad Sign: Barely a Ripple
Chris Geidner at Law Dork asked “Where is the outrage over Skrmetti?” and it’s a great indictment of the reactionary centrists at The Atlantic and NYT who enabled the court to simply tell the established ways of doing Equal Protection jurisprudence to fuck right off, as Sotomayor’s dissent makes plain.
We’re all reeling every day from assaults on whatever is left of what little we managed to build of an egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy over two centuries. But the fact that Skrmetti was a one-day story, and that only for court-watchers and the LGBTQIA+ community, is deeply ominous.
Jesus H. Pete, people. We are in a battle. A war. Understand this and act like it. (The war is informational and ideological and propagandistic and spiritual at the moment—apart from our opponents who are assassinating elected officials and kidnapping and disappearing our neighbors off the streets—but ideally, we’d like to see zero of that stuff and keep things at the level of words and ideas because we’re not fecking monsters.)
There’s the Niemoller poem.
There’s the whole campaign to toxify basic human empathy.
There’s the notion of what it means to fight for democracy only days after millions hit the streets for a No Kings Day. Rule of law, not rule of men’s whims and preferences and biases.
If you recall, it was the Supreme Court that crowned Trump king in the first place.
I get that we’re freaking. I get that we’re each focused on this or that vulnerable population. But as Chase Strangio, the ACLU lawyer who argued Skrmetti before SCOTUS told the Strict Scrutiny audience, the best thing the vast majority of regular folks can do to help in the fight going forward is to help shift the culture towards one of trans positivity, trans acceptance, trans defense, trans joy, and trans normalization. Why? Because Tennessee’s law—and the laws of 25+ other states—targeting trans folks are only possible because trans folks are a small, poorly understood, marginalized population. They serve as a wedge to help break solidarity because the Right perceives how fearful of difference most normies are.
So if you’re not a frothing, hateful, bigoted loon—if you don’t want your country to go the way of Hungary or Turkey or Russia—then you stand together with whomever the frothing, hateful, bigoted loons choose to target. Because we are all in this together.
You recognize their tactics, and you resent their cynical appraisal of you and your friends. They think they can recruit you into the club of bullies and Nazis simply by showing you someone different and weaker and calling them “freak.”
They’re telling you they think you’re a moral pushover, an intellectual baby, who can be triggered to hate and fear any time they can provide an example of a small group of folks you may not understand that well (so, learn more about them!), who have less power than you.
They’re inviting you to join them in their Nazi club simply because they think they’ve found an outlying group of human beings you’ll draw a line against and say, no, not them. They don’t count or matter. They don’t deserve what I deserve, what any other human being does.
When this tactic works at the highest forum in the US “justice” system, you should be outraged, and you should absolutely double down in rejecting it in your daily life.
And not just rejecting it, but taking up the cause of the people they want to use to break your empathy, your solidarity, your sense of common decency and common humanity, your Americanness, whatever it is that motivates you.
Trans kids suffered a devastating blow on Wednesday, and anybody who beats kids is my enemy. Anybody who’s an apologist or enabler of child abusers is my enemy.
Anybody who chooses a strategy of beating certain kids to break my care for all kids is a sick fuck who deserves nothing but contempt and defeat. Full stop.
I don’t forget those people, or these kids. And they are in no way separate from the rest of the hellscape transpiring in the courts, on the streets, in policy, in international relations.
It’s all connected, because we are all connected.