Biden Admin Regurgitates Lies About Trans Surgeries At SCOTUS

U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar repeated numerous lies about gender transition drugs and interventions during her Wednesday argument to have the Supreme Court strike down Tennessee’s ban on the interventions.

Tennessee’s law, SB 1, blocks the ability of children to obtain medical procedures and drugs in order to “enabl[e] a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex” and “treating purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.”

“It’s a fundamental fact of nature that boys and girls are different, and it’s really hard for anybody to get far with their argument if they don’t acknowledge that when they get pinned down. I mean, it’s just a given of human existence,” Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti told The Federalist in a phone interview after oral arguments.

While the lawsuit was initially brought by the far-left American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is representing the parents of children who claim to be the sex opposite to how they were born, the Biden administration intervened in the lawsuit to join the ACLU.

Prelogar used the propaganda term “gender-affirming care” to refer to allowing children to take dangerous drugs that destroy their bodies, including sterilization, and the mutilation surgeries they subsequently receive.

She also repeated the lie that puberty blockers are “just pressing pause on someone’s endogenous puberty to give them more time to understand their identity” in her argument to justify the use of often irreversible interventions which attempt to alter one’s physical appearance.

Justice Samuel Alito also pushed back on Prelogar’s petition in which she claimed “overwhelming evidence establishes that the appropriate gender affirming treatment with puberty blockers and hormones directly and substantially improves the physical, psychological well being of transgender adolescents with gender dysphoria.”

Calling that a “sweeping statement,” Alito dismantled that argument by citing extensive European research showing the exact opposite.

“The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare wrote the following: They currently assess ‘that the risks of puberty blockers and gender-affirming treatment are likely to outweigh the expected benefits of these treatments,’ which is directly contrary to the sweeping statement in your petition,” Alito said. “After the filing of your petition, of course, we saw the release of the Cass report in the United Kingdom, which found a complete lack of high quality evidence showing that the benefits of the treatments in question here outweigh the risks.”

The justice noted that Prelogar left the European research entirely out of her opening brief and “relegated the Cass report to a footnote” in her reply brief.

Alito asked if Prelogar would like to amend her “sweeping statement” given the research, which she declined, stating, “there is a consensus that these treatments can be medically necessary for some adolescents, and that’s true no matter what source you look at.” However, Prelogar was forced at one point during oral argument to admit that “there are biological differences between males and females.”

Prelogar also cited the “standard of care” and the “view of every major American medical association” that medical transitions should be permitted, sometimes as young as possible. However, the American medical establishment has a massive profit motive for encouraging the procedures.

“We have a big disparity between the medical consensus and the medical evidence — we have this artificial consensus. There’s an artificial consensus in American medicine in support of these procedures, but everybody who has looked at the systematic analysis of the research sees that there’s not evidence of benefits, and you end up in this weird place where these very different countries, from Tennessee — the United Kingdom, the Scandinavian countries, countries that have very different values and very different commitments than Tennessee does — have looked at the evidence and decided to go in the same direction,” Skrmetti told The Federalist. “They were countries that pioneered the use of these treatments on kids, and now they’ve turned around and dramatically restricted their accessibility, because they have seen that the risks outweigh the benefits for these kids. You’ve got the red states, and you’ve got some very progressive countries making evidence-based decisions, fighting back against this consensus that is built upon a foundation opposed to the evidence.”

Prelogar claimed that these interventions have “critical, sometimes life-saving benefits,” referencing suicide, without evidence.

ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio, a woman who claims to be a man, was confronted by the Cass report, part of which found that transition interventions do not reduce instances of suicide.

“There is no evidence in those studies that this treatment reduces completed suicide. And the reason for that is completed suicide is thankfully and admittedly rare,” Strangio admitted in one of the most noteworthy exchanges in oral arguments, as doctors and activists have persistently bullied parents into allowing their children to be mutilated by asking them if they would “rather have a dead daughter or a live son.”

Strangio has claimed that a two-year-old could know that they want to transition to the opposite sex.

Perhaps the most radical argument made by Prelogar was that allowing perfectly healthy children to go through normal puberty (or, wait until they are 18 to make the medical decisions) is tantamount to torture, and is in-and-of itself a medical intervention.

“If you’re thinking about this from the standpoint of there’s no harm in just making them wait until they’re adults, I think you have to recognize that the effect of denying this care is to produce irreversible physical effects that are consistent with their birth sex, because they have to go through puberty before they turn 18,” she said. “So essentially, what this law is doing is saying we’re going to make all adolescents in the state develop the physical secondary sex characteristics consistent with their gender, or with their sex assigned at birth, even though that might significantly worsen gender dysphoria, increase the risk of suicide, and I think critically, make it much harder to live and be accepted in their gender identity as an adult.”

This case being argued before the Supreme Court comes as Republicans in Congress are looking at ways to stop the mutilation and chemical castration of children federally, as The Federalist reported.

Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.