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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe Supreme Court on Tuesday passed up a chance to intervene in the debate over bathrooms for transgender students, rejecting an appeal from an Indiana public school district.
Federal appeals courts are divided over whether school policies enforcing restrictions on which bathrooms transgender students can use violate federal law or the Constitution.
In the case the court rejected without comment, the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an order granting transgender boys access to the boys’ bathroom. The appeal came from the Metropolitan School District of Martinsville, about 30 miles southwest of Indianapolis.
The federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, also has ruled in favor of transgender students, while the appeals court based in Atlanta came out the other way.
Legal battles over transgender rights are ongoing across the country, and at least nine states are restricting transgender students to bathrooms that match the sex they were assigned at birth.
In her opinion for the 7th Circuit, Judge Diane Wood wrote that the high court’s involvement seems inevitable.
“Litigation over transgender rights is occurring all over the country, and we assume that at some point the Supreme Court will step in with more guidance than it has furnished so far,” Wood wrote.
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Sometimes, the Supremes get it right.
And sometimes the Supreme Court decides to be cowardly and not do anything. This topic will resurface again and again until they grow a pair and take action.
Spoken by someone who never has to worry that a person with (on average) 40% more lean muscle mass, who will use HIS “confusion” and “identifying as true self” to connive his way into bathrooms and locker rooms to gratify his fetish. Meanwhile, the actual women (XX chromosomes), who will never have the biological capacity to overpower most men, have now also lost their legal defense.
Yeah, this isn’t going away. if you’re heterosexual and your wife/partner/girlfriend/hoochie-mama supports transgender bathrooms, maybe a good sexual assault in from a man in a women’s locker room will jar some sense into her.
They get it right the vast majority of time. Most in unanimous decisions.
As far as the left accusing the court of rightwing activism, they should hold their lefties to the same standards. AND no judge was more activist in
her decisions than the left’s hero, RBG.
And yet they have decided that women cannot have an abortion.
Methinks that your fourth-grader understanding of how SCOTUS works isn’t serving you very well, Barbara.
With Roe v Wade, a group of eight white men (and one black man) decided that women MUST have the right to an abortion, citing the Constitution by plucking a cherry pit out of a granary to devise the legal basis for superseding states’ rights. Sure was a funny way of flouting the patriarchy, wouldn’t you say?
The overturning of Roe did not involve a single SCOTUS justice (now four women and five men) directly impeding women’s access to abortion. It simply determined that state legislatures are best left to decide this, much the way they decide other polarizing right-to-life issues like euthanasia and the death penalty. It was the state legislatures (all of which have women in the respective Congresses) that made this decision.
And, as I’ve said multiple times here, I’m arguing this from a fundamentally pro-choice vantage point. I support the right to abortion, yet I also support states’ rights to decide this. But when there is such a mass of legal illiteracy on the pro-choice team, is it any wonder they seem to be losing this culture war?
Methinks Lauren B that you have some fundamentally wrong ideas about the Supreme Court. The court is supposed to consider and interpret rights conferred by the Constitution and federal law, and how that may be impacted by efforts by states and others to expand or narrow those rights.
What this Court misses, in particular, is the 14th Amendment, which says I am first and foremost a citizen of the United States. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Very first line of the Amendment. Section 3, the current hot topic, comes later. So, we now (since the late 1800s) have a quandary. If under the US Constitution I have certain rights, such as use of contraceptives, don’t those same penumbral rights extend to the decision to have a child? That’s what Roe said; it wasn’t a cherry pit in a granary. The decision built upon prior law relating to rights of individuals to be free of state interference in the most basic of issues of their existence. If this can be deferred to state action, then Justice Thomas in particular is in trouble, because this is the same line of analysis the Court used in Loving vs. Virginia, which abolishes state laws preventing inter-racial marriage. And Indiana would be free to ban contraceptives of all sorts, pre-intercourse (pills and condoms) and post (the morning after pill). And Fair Housing, and voting (though this Court has pretty much done away with fair voting laws under the Voters Rights Act). Oh, and every homosexual marriage is now in question (as at least two of the Justices would like to address and overturn and let that again be a state by state issue). If all of this is subject to state by state regulation, then I don’t have my 14th Amendment Right to be protected as a citizen of the United States. My rights as a citizen depend on the politics of the state in which I reside.
Which should be scary for women, because their rights to be free of work place discrimination, and banking discrimination, and most other sexual harrasment and discrimination, come from federal law or state law derived from federal law. Go ahead, open up that spigot. Tell women the state in which they live is free to decide if they have any rights as women. Suddenly, there might be support for a new Equal Rights Amendment.
And did you really intend to suggest that women who support trans being allowed to use certain bathrooms should be assualted? Really? That’s your suggestion for intellectual discourse? Just have your opponents beaten up and sexually assaulted. That will teach ’em, eh? You should apologize.
Barbra B.
NO!! The court did not say that a woman can not have an abortion. The
U.S. Supreme Court said it was up to the states to decide.
Tim
Forgetting one simple thing, there are already anti discrimination laws on
the books in the states and the federal government.
In other words your anxiety about women, homosexual marriage, ect….is moot.
You’re worrying for nothing.
Ah yes…Tim, the ever-predictable “slippery slope” fallacy.
In a functional political scenario, one where the institutions aren’t simply doing the state’s bidding, we would have an additional layer of checks and balances that would keep extremism at bay. But since the institutions are completely aligned with the uniparty and the uniparty favors historically Democrat positions about 80% of the time, we no longer have a system that emerges from the will of the electorate. It comes from a handful of financiers who have bought the corporations, who in turn donate to politicians who enact policies that benefit these corporations. Basically mid-century Germany. Weimar and the “failed artist” period.
Where the heck in the US Constitution does it say anything about “contraceptives”? Please enlighten me. The constitution is an incredibly small document because the overwhelming majority of decisions should come through the confederation of states. Using “rights” as an argument can only evoke the constitution if it was enumerated by Madison in the first ten Amendments. Beyond that, the SCOTUS is likely to be hesitant to take up the case (as it should be) and should typically hand it down to the States. This includes transgender bathrooms, which has overwhelming majority opposition in all but the bluest of jurisdictions (a few cities, but probably no states) and isn’t likely to budge as the media tries harder and harder (and fails) to hide the instances of sexual assault taking place for which women have no means of defense other than the courts. As for “your rights as a citizen” depending on what state you live in…well, yeah. So? The 50 states are laboratories of democracy that intend to offer different interpretations of what rights should be. Some states believe you should have a right to kill grandma if she has to go on life support, others believe it’s acceptable to marry your 15-year-old cousin. These are polarizing, which is why comparatively few states support them. As long as you don’t tie your entire identity to where you like to put your pee-pee, then, yes, your core fundamental rights–as defined in the Constitution–are protected in all 50 states. Not sure why this is so hard to grasp unless it’s willful.
My ideas about SCOTUS aren’t “fundamentally wrong”, because they aren’t my ideas. This is simply the role of the judiciary–not to enact laws but to interpret them, ideally through previous case law. You can bleat on about your “rights” but freedom to marry was a state-by-state issue prior to Obergefell, and somehow the world didn’t collapse. In fact, the main reason support for LGB rights has stalled is because the T wants to hitch its cart to their horse. And because, even though marriage equality was the lay of the land since 2015, the activists can’t let well enough alone and must continue to push harder and harder and HARDER. The T has a long way to go in persuading people, and using drag queens twerking in school libraries is exactly the wrong way to go. But it happens since the institutions have forfeited their support in representing average people and instead are representing the decadent interests of globalist billionaires. So progressive.
AP showing its hand yet again: “at least nine states are restricting transgender students to bathrooms that match the sex they were assigned at birth.”
Obstetricians do not assign a sex at birth. They report what is empirically obvious 99.99% of the time. This overwhelming majority includes people with chromosomal abnormalities like Turner (X) or Kleinfelter (XXY) syndrome–even those these individuals usually are infertile and have mild hormonal, they still possess external genitalia corresponding to female or male. Even intersex individuals, for whom we should allow some inclusion of the .001% for which it is not immediately apparent, usually possess enough primary sex characteristics that a physician would declare them one or the other (usually female).
While there is indisputably a condition (rare until about six years ago) where dysphoria causes a person’s mental state to perceive a misalignment between biological sex and psychological sex (often piggybacking on overlap within culturally defined gender roles), this is a condition dependent on the person with the mental illness of gender dysphoria—not a defect in the physician or in society at large.
“Assigning” gender suggests some extraneous standard beyond the biological (chromosomal) and empirical (what exists between the legs)–as though it might be fallacious or even capricious. Carried to its ludicrous extreme, parents of transgender children (which of course is totally NOT the least bit predicated upon nurture and is 100% nature) will eventually gain legal standing to sue their physicians for mis-assigning their children.
The idea pathogens continue to ravage the population. Abetted by corrupt journalists like the staff at AP.
Lauren B +1
Lauren B.
+ 1