Trans rights cases are being adjudicated at all levels of the US courts system. This week we’re seeing hopeful signs as judges in Rhode Island and Idaho weigh the rights of trans people seriously, but ultimately the fate of trans equality lies in the hands of an extreme right wing Supreme Court that seems increasingly unconstrained by the constitution.
In Rhode Island, the DOJ abused subpoenas to target trans youth and their families, and lied under oath to do so. That’s the upshot of findings by the U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy, who found the Department of Justice issued subpoenas seeking access to the full medical records of trans youth “for an improper purpose in bad faith.” She further found that lawyers representing the DOJ misrepresented facts under oath when they told a Texas judge that the target of the subpoenas, Rhode Island Hospital, had failed to comply and stopped communicating with US authorities. The hospital had responded to a DOJ email.
Judge McElroy has referred the Justice Department lawyers for potential disciplinary procedures, but the weight of what’s been claimed in this case has barely made a ripple in mainstream coverage. The magnitude of the abuse of power by the DOJ to misuse subpoenas to harry vulnerable families while claiming to be acting in their interests seems to have been somewhat overlooked because the case involves trans youth healthcare.
In Idaho, a district judge is asking how law enforcement is supposed to enact the legislature’s sweeping bathroom ban. Chief District Judge Amanda K. Brailsford has yet to decide whether to issue a temporary injunction that would halt Idaho’s felony ban on trans people using bathrooms that align with their gender identity. The judge’s questions have focused in part on the practicality of police determining the sex of someone accused of entering a bathroom illegally.
One of the six transgender Idahoans who brought the lawsuit, Diego Fable, explained to the judge the difficulties he’d face if he simply wanted to wash his hands before eating at a restaurant. As a trans man who is generally cis passing, he’d face a choice between breaking the law and potentially incurring felony charges, or following it while being perceived as breaking it, potentially incurring police attention.
During the hearings for the ban in Idaho’s state legislature, police testified that determining a person’s sex would be difficult or impossible without invasive and inappropriate actions. The legislature went ahead regardless.
It all leads back to SCOTUS. June is the month when the Supreme Court issues most big opinions, and this June one of the questions to be decided is the legality of banning trans girls from girls’ athletic competitions.
Last year, the court ruled that scientific evidence has no place in a court room and that state legislatures can ban necessary treatments for trans youth without any need to show such policies promote the health or wellbeing of young people.
This year, the court is widely expected to allow bans on trans people in athletics. While news stories frequently focus on public opinion polling, which opposes trans women in women’s sports, the science of these bans has never been robust, with no clear findings that trans women are at any advantage after several years on hormone therapy. Trans girls who receive puberty blockers early enough to prevent masculinization from testosterone are not even at any theoretical advantage, as the hormone is the basis for all theorized biological advantages in athletic performance.
With shocking decisions from this court that include allowing a congressional redistricting map to stand after it was found to intentionally discriminate against Black voters, the question is no longer what rights the constitution grants each person in America, but what rights minorities could ever have in a country dominated by far right ideologues.
