Reasonable Concerns

The wedge on trans people moved exactly where we said it would. The people who gave it cover are still quiet.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled that states can keep trans girls and women out of girls’ and women’s school sports.

The vote was 6 to 3, sort of. Six justices decided the bans don’t violate the Constitution. But on the separate question of whether they violate Title IX, the federal law against sex discrimination in schools, all nine agreed the answer was no. Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority, and the takeaway is that a state can decide who gets to play on a girls’ team based on what he called “biological sex.”

---

---

Then there’s the part where you can hear them straining to sound kind about it. Kavanaugh closed by assuring trans kids that their “desire to compete warrants respect” and that none of them should be “ostracized or vilified.” Clarence Thomas, in a concurrence, skipped the bedside manner. Trans girls, he wrote, “are not women or girls, even if they believe that they are.”

The West Virginia half of the case was about a girl named Becky Pepper-Jackson. She’s 16. She throws shot put and discus, she’s been on puberty blockers and estrogen since before her teens, and she never went through the testosterone-driven puberty these laws claim to be built around. She’s also, as best anyone’s been able to determine, the only person West Virginia’s ban has ever applied to.

Becky Pepper-Jackson. (Photo by John Nacion/Getty Images)

The ruling clears the way for laws like the one aimed at her, already on the books in 29 states.

You already know how this gets covered: as a sports story. Kavanaugh the girls’ basketball coach, sounding a little sorry. A respectful nod to how decent people can disagree. A debate about fairness and biology, pre-booked for the Sunday panels.

I’ve written about trans athletes for more than a decade, and I’ll say up front that the sports question has some real complications (more on that shortly). But the people who spent years drafting these bills have said, out loud and in print, that they picked sports and kids because it was the easiest place to begin, and that they mean to go a great deal further.

So while everyone else argues about the shot put, I want to talk to a different group. For years, a certain kind of person has told me, and told themselves, that they aren’t “anti-trans.” They just have some “reasonable concerns.” Concerns about sports. Concerns about teenagers and medicine. And plenty of them treated those concerns as a reason to stay quiet while the restrictions piled up, on the assumption that this would all stop somewhere sensible.

This ruling is where that assumption comes due. The people who kept warning where this was going got called hysterical for it. And I’d like to know, from everyone who promised me their concerns were reasonable, whether they ever intend to say enough is enough, or whether the people they dismissed have been right the whole time.

Where I land on the sports question

Before I get to those people, I owe the sports question an honest answer of my own, because I’ve never been able to pretend it’s simple. So here’s the version that doesn’t fit on a chyron. Does a trans girl have some physical advantage over the other girls on the team? Sometimes. It depends on the sport, on whether she went through puberty on testosterone or blocked it early, on how long she’s been on estrogen, on a dozen things that vary from one kid to the next. At the top levels of competition, that’s a real conversation, and the bodies that run elite sports, the NCAA and the IOC and the rest, are a legitimate place to have it. I’ve said as much for years. And for what it’s worth, I think both of them folded to political pressure when they moved to shut trans women out, because nothing on the field had changed to make them. But that’s between me and the people who run sports.

Fine, Let's Talk About Trans Athletes

This case was never about that.

By the time it got to the Supreme Court, the result was close to a formality. A year ago, in Skrmetti, the same six justices ruled that laws restricting this kind of care for trans kids only have to clear the lowest bar the law sets, the one almost nothing fails. Once that was the standard, a sports case built on the same constitutional claim was going to fall the same way. The Title IX claim was weak enough that even the court’s liberals rejected it. The court is hostile, sure. But this one was weak on its own terms, and it would have been a heavy lift in front of almost any bench. I’m not going to pretend a friendlier court would have saved it.

I can lose that argument and still tell you, flatly, that the court got it wrong. Both things are true at the same time. West Virginia passed a law that has only ever applied to one girl, and yesterday the court told the state it can keep her out. I think that’s sad, and I feel back for Becky.

The parts of this that can still be won are worth fighting for. The states that let trans kids play should keep letting them. The legislatures that protect those kids should hold the line. And when Congress tries to turn yesterday’s ruling into a national ban, which it already started with the Protect Women and Girls Act, that’s a fight worth having as loudly as we can have it.

Terry Schilling told you the plan

Terry Schilling runs the American Principles Project, one of the outfits that spent years writing and bankrolling bills like the ones the court just upheld. In early 2023, he told the New York Times what the group was really after. Its goal, he confirmed, was to do away with transition care entirely, for adults as much as for kids. Starting with kids was just, in his words, “going where the consensus is.”

He wasn’t being coy about the rest of it. That same year, lawmakers in Oklahoma and South Carolina were pushing bills to criminalize transition care for anyone under 26, felony charges included. Others, in those two states and in Kansas and Mississippi, would have drawn the line at 21. A 25-year-old isn’t a kid. Neither is a 21-year-old. The movement that swore it only wanted to protect kids was already writing adults into the bills, in 2023, where anyone reading the Times could see it.

Now here’s Schilling yesterday, in a statement his group put out to celebrate the ruling. He called it a “landmark victory for fairness and sanity.” He said girls deserve spaces “free from biological men who seek to invade them.”

The “biological man” in this case is a 16-year-old girl who throws discus.

So the same ruling that assured trans kids their “desire to compete warrants respect” is being cheered by the man who calls one of those kids an invader, whose stated goal is to end transition care for every trans person in the country, and who said so in the New York Times three years ago. Anyone who told you this was only ever about a fair race either wasn’t paying attention or was lying to you.

About those reasonable concerns

So let’s say you meant it. Your worry really was just about a fair race, or just about kids and hormones, and nothing past that. Fine. Here’s some of what’s happened while you were thinking it over.

Start with the care, since that’s supposedly where the line sat. The federal government stopped covering hormones and transition surgery for its own employees this year, at any age. It’s proposed a rule that would pull Medicare and Medicaid from any hospital that provides that care to a patient under 18, which would drive it out of most hospitals in the country. And in March, a federal appeals court let West Virginia drop transition care for adults from its Medicaid program, on the theory that it would, in the court’s words, “encourage citizens to appreciate their sex.”

Then there’s whether the government will admit you’re who you say you are. On his first day back, Trump signed an executive order defining sex as fixed at conception and ordering every federal agency to swap the word gender for the word sex. New passports now carry the sex you were assigned at birth, a policy the Supreme Court let take effect in November. The Social Security Administration stopped processing gender-marker changes. Kansas told residents it had flagged as trans that their driver’s licenses would stop being valid the next morning, no grace period.

That last part isn’t abstract for me. A license or a passport with the wrong letter on it doesn’t stay in a drawer. It comes out whenever a bouncer or a pharmacist or a TSA agent asks for ID, and I don’t go around telling strangers I’m trans. These policies do it for me, in front of whoever’s next in line, and then I get to learn in real time how that person takes the news.

It keeps going from there. Trans people in federal prison are now put through a program borrowed from Florida: hair cut short, hormones stopped, psychiatric sessions meant to talk them out of being trans. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi has told the FBI to pay for tips that lead to arresting trans activists she’s branded domestic terrorists, and the White House’s counterterrorism strategy now lists “radically pro-transgender” groups next to the cartels and terrorists it exists to stop. In the schools, the Justice Department has been demanding that districts hand over files on their trans students.

None of this is about a track meet. I could keep listing, because the real tally runs a lot longer than what fits here. But every item on it has the same hole in the middle that the sports ban does. Nobody who wrote these rules has ever answered the one question you’d ask about any new restriction before you agreed to it. What’s the problem it solves?

---

For those who would like to financially support The Present Age on a non-Substack platform, please be aware that I also publish these pieces to my Patreon.

---

Nobody’s making you say anything

That question never gets answered, and to see why, go back to what the reasonable-concerns crowd said it feared in the first place.

The fears were about words. Being forced to say “trans women are women.” Being made to say “chestfeeding” instead of “breastfeeding,” or to watch the word “woman” get retired from official forms. None of that happened. And the part that should have been obvious from the start is that none of it could. There’s no law that can put words in your mouth and make you say a slogan. Nobody had that power over you, and nobody was trying to get it.

Nobody is trying to ban the word "woman."

You already saw what this administration did to the word “gender.” It went into the federal code, struck it out everywhere, and put the word sex in its place (and as yesterday’s SCOTUS decision tells us, they view “sex” as whatever you were born as), effectively boxing trans people out of any legal protections at all. So if the thing that worried you was somebody with real power reaching into the language and deciding which words are allowed, your instinct wasn’t wrong. You just had the wrong culprit.

There’s an asymmetry underneath all of this, and it frustrates me. I can think of plenty of changes I’d like to see in trans people’s favor beyond just undoing the attacks against trans people that have taken place since Trump retook office. If I wanted them, the work of making the case would be mine. I’d have to show why the current rule is unfair, make the argument for a better one, and expect a real fight along the way. That’s what it’s supposed to cost to change the rules on people, and I’d consider it fair.

The other side never pays it. They never had to show that trans women were wrecking women’s sports. They never had to show that Becky’s medicine had hurt a single person, or that the letter on my license put anyone in danger. They just said the word “protect” and pointed at us.

And the press treats that as an argument. It runs the restriction as news, quotes the sponsor calling us a threat, books the segment, and never once asks him to name a person we’ve endangered. The bar for taking something from us turns out to be lower than the bar I’d face for asking to keep it.

That machine only runs because enough people who think of themselves as reasonable decided that staying quiet kept their hands clean. It didn’t.

So where are you?

I’m talking to you now. You spent the last few years telling everyone you weren’t against trans people, that you just had questions.

You were allowed the questions. Everybody had questions once. But it isn’t 2021 anymore, and the questions have answers, and the answers are sitting in a Supreme Court opinion and a stack of federal rules and a press release from a man who told the New York Times his goal was to get rid of us. This is a project with an endpoint, and the endpoint is a country where being openly trans gets harder every month, on purpose, until it isn’t possible at all.

So I want to know what you’re going to do about it. Whether you’ll say, out loud, that this has gone too far, the way you were so sure you would if it ever did. Will you use your platforms at big, mainstream news outlets, the same ones you used to help spark the moral panic about trans youth medicine and sports, to make a compassionate argument in favor of trans people and against the ongoing persecution?

Because the people you called alarmists have been right about every step of this, and most of you have met the moment they were proven right with silence.

I’d love to be wrong about you. I’d love for this to be the paragraph that ages badly, the one where I misjudged a lot of decent people who were about to find their voice. So prove me wrong. Say something now, while it’s still moving, while it still matters.