The headline deck to the June 16 piece by Jesús Rodríguez for the Washington Post, a profile of the first transgender lawyer to argue before the Supreme Court, heralded the gush to come:
Chase Strangio is trying to help trans people exist in Trump’s America
The first out transgender lawyer to argue before the Supreme Court says that visibility without legal protection is "a trap."
Soon after publication, the Supreme Court ruled against Strangio’s side in the case of U.S. vs Skrmetti, as the ACLU lawyer and trans man (biological woman) failed to persuade the court that a Tennessee law blocking doctors from providing what Rodriguez called “gender-affirming medical treatment” (i.e. genital mutilation) to teenagers was unconstitutional.
Rodriguez took the left-wing line that conservatives started the transgender culture war ("the political right had tried to use them as a wedge issue"), not the biological male trans-activists demanding access to women’s sports and women’s bathrooms:
....During the election cycle, the conservative movement had painted “transgenderism” as a poisonous ideology and a threat to cisgender women and girls. Strangio saw Democrats respond by seeming to discuss trans people as little as possible. “I sort of defended that for a while,” he says of the strategy. “I thought, ‘What good does it do?’” But, in retrospect, he thought, this only made trans people easier to vilify.
Besides, what would that mean? Never talking about trans people?
Are we supposed to vanish? he wondered.
The entire story concerns Strangio’s need for validation, while the welfare of vulnerable children undergoing irreversible sex surgeries was of no concern.
....When he helped make the case against the Tennessee law in December, he became the first out transgender person to make an oral argument at the Supreme Court. But being seen is not the same as being heard.
What happens when the tools won’t fix the problem? What can someone like Strangio do -- and what can’t he?
And why should we care? Rodriguez didn't quote anyone opposed to Strangio, of course, and didn't challenge his fact-mangling, as in: "Strangio sees gender-affirming health care not as upending lives, but saving them." There was no space for detransitioners, for example.
Contrast the Post’s embarrassing therapy session to actual journalism from, of all places, the New York Times.
An 11,000-word investigative report for the upcoming print issue of New York Times Magazine by investigative reporter Nicholas Confessore revealed in devastating detail how Strangio’s argument not only failed to convince the justices but may have set back the transgender cause: “How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost -- The inside story of the case that could set the movement back a generation.”
The Times story appeared after the Supreme Court decision, and recognized SCOTUS delivered a “crushing blow, upholding Tennessee’s ban in a 6-to-3 decision.” While the Post focused on Strangio’s personal psychodrama, Confessore wrote a deeper, more informative story about the decision’s national import.
Along the road to Skrmetti, some believe, the L.G.B.T.Q. movement drove itself toward a cliff -- and took the Democratic Party with it, chaining the Biden administration to one of the most divisive issues in American politics at a moment of shifting medical consensus and fierce polarization....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.
Confessore also provided some of Strangio’s wackier, alienating statements, which the Post avoided, like “A penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.”
Apparently The Post is not a "fact-based" newspaper.
The Times also pointed out the scientific ground for transgender surgery on teens had become shaky, noting “...even as the ACLU and its allies were digging in, several European countries were backing away.” Even the Biden administration noticed.
There was now a dawning awareness within the administration, another Biden aide told me, that its allies in the L.G.B.T.Q. movement had overstated the medical case for pediatric gender-affirming care...
Strangio is currently shipping around Heightened Scrutiny, a documentary about “the dangerous role of mainstream media in fueling anti-trans legislation.” It features Times reporter Lydia Polgreen, who wrote a deeply weird, rambling op-ed on the subject.
