The trolling style in American jurisprudence

Paul has already accurately summarized the absurdity of the Court’s holding that Tennessee’s ban on medical treatments for people based on their sex does not classify people on the basis of sex. Sotomayor’s accurate summation doesn’t require much more detail:

Coney Barrett’s concurrence is at least willing to admit that the Court just doesn’t think that explicit state discrimination against trans people violates the 14th Amendment. Before you give ACB too much credit for intellectual honesty, though, she then makes the utterly absurd claim that de jure discrimination against trans people doesn’t exist when not only the law in question represents de jure discrimination but (as Sotomayor observes in the second screenshot below) de jure discrimination against trans people is a core Trump administration policy:

The obvious reason for Roberts’s latest exercise in bullshit-minimalism is that the Court’s implicit holding that Tennessee’s law does not warrant intermediate scrutiny is inconsistent with the Court’s five-year-old holding that discrimination on the basis of sexual identity is by definition discrimination on the basis of sex. Roberts doesn’t want to overrule a 2020 case whose majority opinion he joined (and another member of today’s majority wrote), so instead we have to play these little games. As Sotomayor says, Roberts’s sole attempt to distinguish Bostock relies on the Court’s farcical holding that discrimination against pregnant people is not discrimination on the basis of gender:

Some of you will remember that this was also the sole case that Alito cited in Dobbs to explain why bans on abortion do not violate the equal protection clause. These opinions are essentially long trolls on behalf of manifestly cruel outcomes. The bad faith is part of the point — as with their use of the shadow docket, “because fuck you that’s why” is the underlying message. The have the votes to insult your intelligence repeatedly. Plessy v. Ferguson‘s assertion that segregation does not imply that one race is inferior is the tradition in which the Roberts Court operates.

What’s particularly disturbing here is that the case indicates how much hatred of trans people has become constitutive of what it means to be a Republican. It’s pretty clear that Bostock would have been decided differently if it were decided today. Roberts and Gorsuch aren’t going to embarrass themselves further by explicitly overruling it, but they are willing to render it a nullity going forward. This is a dangerous place, and remember that no Republican on the current Court joined Obergefell.