Quote:Others, however, saw the Skrmetti case as a tragic gamble built on flawed politics and uncertain science. Over the last decade, they told me, the movement was consumed by theories of sex and gender that most voters didn’t grasp or support, radicalizing its politics just as the culture wars reignited and the Supreme Court began moving further right. And as Skrmetti and other lawsuits made their way through federal courts, some of the central medical claims girding the legal case for pediatric gender treatments — that decades of thorough study had found them to be safe and effective — began to unravel amid growing scrutiny by other doctors and experts.

Last summer, thousands of emails and other documents released in a case challenging Alabama’s ban raised further questions about medical standards at the heart of the A.C.L.U.’s lawsuit against Tennessee. “This case exposes a lot of ethical problems in the practice of medicine,” a law professor with expertise in sex-discrimination law told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of blowback from students and colleagues. “For Skrmetti to be the next step in a progress narrative — an incrementalist would say, This is way far from where we ought to be.”

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. 

Quote:In recent months, Strangio and other trans activists have pleaded for broader public solidarity with their cause, arguing that the defense of gender-affirming care is closely intertwined with the defense of reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy for women. But when I asked Romero if the A.C.L.U. had consulted with women’s rights groups before bringing Skrmetti — with its high-stakes claims about sex-discrimination protections — before the Supreme Court, he seemed impatient. “I don’t play ‘Mother May I?’ with a group of sister organizations,” Romero said. “I don’t run a peer-review journal. I make the best decisions for this organization on its own.”