To read Tennessee Code § 68-33-101, whose ban on trans kids’ medical care was just argued in the Supreme Court’s United States v. Skrmetti, you’re immediately struck by the fact that it mentions 'sex' no less than 10 times. This includes 'minor’s sex' referenced six times and even 'minor’s sex organs' twice.
Despite this, the six far-right Christians on the Supreme Court have ruled that SB-1 does NOT discriminate based on sex.
To make it even plainer, Tennessee's SB-1 even asserts the state's "compelling interest in encouraging minors to appreciate their sex" and discourages anything that might make them "become disdainful of their sex."
Appreciate? Denying individual autonomy and enforcing appreciation for something we know is a social construct is far more complex than any of these folks would ever admit. You have to wonder what, if anything, Tennessee could have written in SB-1 that would have convinced at least two of the six that it was about sex, short of adding a clause that stated, "…and by 'sex' we mean ‘sex’ as defined by under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which Tennessee specifically intends to ignore and act like it never existed."
But I doubt even that would have moved this Court.
It's not easy to get someone to understand something when their job depends on not understanding it. And if not their jobs, certainly their religious convictions depend on these six Justices not reading the plain black-letter meaning of the law.
In Sex Is As Sex Does, scholar Paisley Currah documents how states' managed their citizens' sex traces back to Napoleon's annual accounting of the age and sex of every child in each village. A way to know how many conscripts he could expect for his Grande Armée.
Now, 200 years later, states are declaring their interest in making sure every young person not only remains tethered involuntarily to their birth sex whether they want to or not, but in forcing them to appreciate how wonderful their birth sex is. Or as a kids’ book distributed by the rabidly anti-trans website Transgender Trend puts it: "I am my body. My body is me. It's a wonderful thing, I’m sure you’ll agree."
The white Christian nationalist movement that now animates the corpse of what was once Republicanism has transformed it from a small-government/strong defense party into a Handmaid's Tale-like cult of fertility. One in which cis, straight men are masters of the universe, straight women are wombs, and everyone else is in their crosshairs.
The goal is to protect and extend white ethnic fertility at all costs.
As far back as the availability of the birth control pill in 1960, right-wing evangelicals have been railing against anything that might abridge our ability to procreate generally (which they believe is Biblically mandated) and the fertility of the white ethnic Christian population specifically (which they believe is in constant danger of extermination). Polling shows that white evangelical conservatives are now the only major religious group that considers procreation a major national social priority.
Thus, when Texas enacted the first statewide ban on pediatric transgender care, Attorney General Ken Paxton's notorious legal opinion KP-0401 began with "sterilization of minors…" and devoted the bulk of its 13 single-spaced typed pages to trans youth imperiling their God-given ability to procreate. In other words, it was a love letter to the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest evangelical Protestant denomination, and the white Christian fetishizing of heterosexual procreation. This is why Great Replacement Theory, the conspiracy that Black and brown people along with the sexual deviants are trying to replace God's anointed, is now a common belief on the right from mainstream Republicans to the neo-Nazis white boys who marched in Charlotte NC.
White Protestant ascendancy is as American as apple pie. It was practically engraved on Plymouth Rock by the Puritans, our first evangelical extremists. What's new here is the weaponization of state powers to control the bodies of gay and trans people as well as those of reproductive-age women. Even though it is waged between Democrats and Republicans, this is not a political battle but a religious crusade, one that seeks to impose what are essentially Scriptural beliefs on a sectarian public. This is why many women and civil rights groups sitting on their hands while trans kids get beaten up are making a vast political miscalculation. These are different heads of the same monster. Christian nationalist organizations are already gaming the laws that might land a case before the Supreme Court to reconsider gay marriage.
And as GWU legal scholar Naomi Schoenbaum has documented, despite the silence from the feminist community, the point of Skrmetti was to use trans people as disfavored plaintiffs to carve out the first exception to six decades of uninterrupted sex discrimination rulings. Because while we may be fighting separate battles, the Christian Nationalist right has just one: dominating the rest of us.
And the sooner we realize that, the sooner we can pull together and combat their religious agenda effectively.
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