On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear two cases about whether federal law protects gay and transgender people from being fired simply for being who they are.
Since in 26 states you can be fired from your job simply for being transgender, the decision could have an immediate impact on the lives of the 1.4 million Americans who identify as transgender. This is arguably the most important LGBTQ Supreme Court case since same-sex marriage.
Over 90 amicus briefs (“friend of the court”) have been filed by everyone from the state of Nebraska to the Southern Poverty Law Center. From the right, many of them seem to emanate from a parallel universe to the one occupied by all the country’s major medical organizations, sociologists, and trans people themselves, repeatedly making the shocking, indefensible claim that people who say they are trans are either mentally ill, nonexistent, or dangerous predators—or, somehow, all three at once.
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A perfect example of this parallel universe is the brief filed by Walt Heyer, for example.
Heyer is the poster child for the supposed “ex-trans” community, a minuscule group of people who have “de-transitioned” and are now darlings of right-wing media outlets. Heyer in particular has been featured in the Christian Post, the Daily Signal, the Church Militant, The Federalist. The day after the LGBTQ cases are heard at the Supreme Court, Heyer will be on a panel at the Heritage Foundation. Even mainstream media has occasionally given him a platform. CNN invited him to opine about Caitlyn Jenner and USA Today published an op-ed by him.
Heyer is no expert. He is not a doctor, has no understanding of (let alone expertise in) the science of sex and gender, and he is, by his own admission, someone who has struggled with mental illness for many years.
Indeed, his story is almost tragic. Born in 1940, Heyer transitioned from male to female in his forties, then “de-transitioned” back to living as a man eight years later, after a suicide attempt and a diagnosis of dissociative disorder.
Now, de-transitioning does happen, but it is extremely rare. One study from 2018 found that out of 22,725 people who underwent gender confirmation surgery, 62 regretted their decision. (No comparable data exists for trans people who only undergo hormone therapy or other non-surgical treatments. And of course, the 2018 study only measured regret, not de-transition.)
In other words, 99.7 percent of study participants expressed no regret, while 0.3 percent did. That’s an astonishing success rate. By contrast, the success rate for heart transplants is 88 percent.
A second study, tracking patients from 1972 to 2015, found similar numbers, with 0.6 percent of trans women and 0.3 percent of trans men expressing regret over their treatments.
Yet Heyer, armed with no reliable data, credentials, or sense of proportion, simply trots out his own story as if it is typical. His brief, most likely written by his lawyer, Greg Teufel, a member of the Federalist Society (the dark-money-funded conservative pipeline to Trump-era judgeships), is mostly just Heyer’s life story, which, sympathetic as it may be, is extremely atypical.
And where the brief does venture into fact, it’s wrong. “Doctors admit they do not know who will remain gender-dysphoric long term,” it claims, “yet they condone gender identity change, socially and medically, for youths and adults. This is abuse.”
Of course, that isn’t true. There are rigorous protocols in place before surgery can be performed. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health has 11 pages of guidelines for “Assessment and Treatment of Children and Adolescents With Gender Dysphoria.” The American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Academy of Pediatricians, and other medical associations recognize gender dysphoria—the deeply-felt sense that one’s gender is different from one’s biological sex—as a treatable condition. And there are countless studies demonstrating the positive effects of hormone therapy, surgery, and other interventions.
But it isn’t just the right that’s obsessed with the “ex-trans” myth.
Last year, for example, The Atlantic ran a cover story featuring teenagers who thought they were trans, then changed their minds. And while the story did say (2000 words in) that “for many of the young people in the early studies, transitioning—socially for children, physically for adolescents and young adults—appears to have greatly alleviated their dysphoria,” ultimately it was totally bereft of proportion. It told one complex and heart-rending story about one teenager with a constellation of conditions, and offered no perspective on how “many” people were like her, and how “many” were not.
It was profoundly irresponsible journalism.
Now, a diagnosis of gender dysphoria is indeed complicated. Many trans people have the opposite experience from Heyer’s: they are initially diagnosed with a host of psychological problems, but once their gender dysphoria is addressed, the other problems disappear, because they were all a consequence of the underlying condition. And many others have ongoing psychological issues.
That’s why the protocol for trans people, especially those under 18, is so elaborate. Because life is complicated, gender isn’t binary, and, yes, our society is still figuring all this out.
After all, most Americans have been on a steep learning curve these last few years, when it comes to LGBT issues in general and trans issues in particular. The complicated realities of sex and gender are new, often confusing and even frightening.
Yet Americans have listened and learned.
According to a recent study by the Williams Institute, 72 percent of Americans believe that transgender people should be protected from discrimination. Celebrities from Jenner to Laverne Cox are fixtures of popular culture. And 40 percent of Americans say they know someone trans.
That’s why the bizarre claims of Heyer and many of the other conservative “friends of the court” are so bizarre: they fly in the face of reality.
Which is why they will ultimately lose. After all, we’ve seen this before. Only two decades ago, gay people were routinely described as sexual predators, pedophiles, and dangers to society. Those lies didn’t last forever, and neither will today’s.
