(The Daily Signal)—The Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday on the pivotal transgender case U.S. v. Skrmetti, and both the lawyers arguing against a Tennessee ban on “gender-affirming care” and three Supreme Court justices made dubious claims and stated outright falsehoods in support of experimental transgender “treatments.”
Tennessee’s SB1 bans medical procedures on minors for the purpose of “enabling a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex” or “treating purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, representing the parents of minors who claim to identify as the opposite sex and claim to have benefited from these procedures, sued to block the law, and the Biden administration joined the lawsuit on the ACLU’s side.
The plaintiffs claim that SB1 violates federal law by discriminating against minors who identify as transgender, denying to them the same treatments that would be allowed for minors who do not so identify.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit upheld Tennessee’s law, finding that it doesn’t entail discrimination. The U.S. and the ACLU appealed, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.
U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio—a male who says he identifies as female—argued the case before the court Wednesday, as did Tennessee Solicitor General Matt Rice.
Prelogar, Strangio, and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, an appointee of President Joe Biden, twisted the truth on “gender-affirming care” in at least five ways.
1. ‘Puberty blockers’ are reversible
“Critically, puberty blockers have no effect, in and of themselves, on fertility, so I don’t think that concern can justify the ban on puberty blockers, which is just pressing pause on someone’s endogenous puberty to give them more time to understand their identity,” Prelogar argued.
The Food and Drug Administration has not approved GnRH agonists, which stands for “Gonadatropin-releasing hormone agonists,” for the treatment of gender dysphoria (the painful and persistent identification with the gender opposite one’s biological sex) in children. GnRH agonists prevent the natural release of testosterone and estrogen that initiate puberty.
David Gortler, a pharmacologist and pharmacist who previously was a senior adviser to the FDA commissioner on policy and drug safety, previously told The Daily Signal that physicians developed GnRH agonists to help treat certain cancers that depend on estrogen or testosterone.
Endocrinologists—doctors who specialize in the hormone-regulating endocrine system—have testified to the harms these drugs can cause. Dr. Paul Hruz, an endocrinology researcher and clinician at Washington University School of Medicine, wrote that after “an extended period of pubertal suppression,” patients can’t “turn back the clock” and “reverse changes in the normal coordinated pattern of adolescent psychological development and puberty.”
Dr. Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist from the United Kingdom, explained that the effects of certain chemicals on the human brain aren’t well known, and that current science does not support “puberty blockers” for adolescents.
“As puberty is associated with very marked changes in the structure of the brain … the use of puberty blockers may have serious consequences for the development of the human brain,” Scott warned. Studies in sheep and young girls suggest that these drugs affect the size of the amygdala. Male sheep treated with the drugs showed “more risk-taking behaviors,” while treated female sheep “showed higher levels of anxiety and greater avoidance behavior.” Girls treated with the drug also showed “significant greater emotional reactivity” and “lower heart rates.” They also scored lower on IQ tests after taking the drugs.
??PANTS ON FIRE
U.S. SG Elizabeth Prelogar repeatedly lies about "gender-affirming care."
1⃣She claims "puberty blockers" are fully reversible: They are "just pressing pause."
2⃣She acknowledges that cross-sex hormones can affect fertility but suggests that kids can be… pic.twitter.com/MFwrO02Bdz
— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) December 4, 2024
2. Suicidality
Strangio, the ACLU lawyer, claimed that it is “clearly established in the science and in the record” that “the medications in question reduce the risk of depression, anxiety, and suicidality, which are all indicators of potential suicide.” (Suicidality refers to the condition of contemplating suicide.) The lawyer admitted that there is no evidence “that this treatment reduces completed suicide” because “completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare.”
Yet Strangio claimed that “there are multiple studies, long-term longitudinal studies, that do show that there is a reduction in suicidality, which I think is a positive outcome to this treatment.”
?NO EVIDENCE
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito presses ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio about whether "puberty blockers" decrease thoughts of su*cide. He rightly cites the Cass Review, which found "no evidence" for that claim.
It gets worse, however. At least one FDA study found… pic.twitter.com/zGAHhfFUUQ
— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) December 4, 2024
The evidence is not as clear-cut as Strangio suggested, however.
In one email on Jan. 25, 2022, Shannon Sullivan, clinical team leader at the FDA’s Division of General Endocrinology, noted that the agency’s Division of Metabolism and Endocrinology Products performed a “safety review of the GnRH agonist class in pediatric patients in 2016/2017.”
Sullivan noted that while the study did not find effects on bone density, “We did find increased risk of depression and suicidality, as well as increased seizure risk, and we issued [safety-related labeling changes].”
In other words, some studies show the exact opposite of Strangio’s claim—that GnRH agonists increase, rather than decrease, thoughts of suicide.
?BREAKING: A high-ranking FDA official admitted that "puberty blockers" carry an "increased risk of depression and suicidality" but called for approving them for "transgender" kids, anyway. This flips the gender ideology narrative on its head‼️https://t.co/dtbdVKEcap pic.twitter.com/4qXc6TZF06
— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) August 1, 2024
3. Puberty as Harmful
“Gender-affirming care” advocates repeatedly suggested that the natural process of puberty causes harm to people who identify with the gender opposite their biological sex.
“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,” Prelogar argued.
“So, essentially what this law is doing is saying we’re going to make all adolescents in this state develop the physical secondary sex characteristics consistent with their gender or 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 a result,” she said.
Prelogar noted that a male who goes through puberty will develop an Adam’s apple, and that may make it harder for that man to “pass” as female, thereby subjecting him to discrimination in the future.
“You have this population of adolescents, and there are documented very essential benefits for a large number of them, and maybe a small number that will regret this care just like with any other medical care,” she added.
Prelogar’s argument flips the natural course of biology on its head. She and others are suggesting that the natural process of puberty is somehow harmful and that it is better for males who say they identify as female to undergo a chemically induced artificial facsimile of the natural process than it is for them to develop naturally.
The evidence for benefits of this artificial process is flimsy, but the associated harms are manifold—and that’s the exact reason why Tennessee’s General Assembly voted to protect minors from it.
4. ‘The Same’ Medical Condition
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Jackson repeatedly suggested that the Tennessee law bans puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones (estrogen for boys and testosterone for girls, to make them appear like the opposite sex) for males who identify as female and females who identify as male, but not for males who identify as male and females who identify as female.
Sotomayor said that a boy struggling with precocious puberty—the condition of starting puberty too early—would take the same medication as a girl who identifies as male.
“The medical condition is the same, but you’re saying one sex is getting it and the other is not,” she added.
“We do not agree that the medical condition is the same,” Rice, the Tennessee solicitor general, responded. “We do not think that giving puberty blockers to a 6-year-old that has started precocious puberty is the same medical treatment” as giving them “to a minor who wants to transition.”
While the two patients would take the same drug, the intended purpose and practical effect would be different. Sotomayor and Jackson were conflating two very different conditions.
?WE DO NOT AGREE
Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson strain to compare the treatment of precocious puberty to the "treatment" of putting boys or girls on experimental drugs to "pause" puberty.
"No, we do not agree that the medical condition is the same," Matt Rice… pic.twitter.com/12V5N8v4hL
— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) December 4, 2024
5. ‘Gender Conformity’
Justice Elena Kagan argued that “one of the articulated purposes of this law is to essentially to encourage gender conformity and to discourage anything other than gender conformity.”
She cited the law’s text, which states that Tennessee has “a legitimate, substantial, and compelling interest in encouraging minors to appreciate their sex, particularly as they undergo puberty” and a similar interest “in protecting the integrity of the medical profession, including by prohibiting medical procedures that are harmful, unethical, immoral, experimental, or unsupported by high-quality or long-term studies, or that might encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex.”
She said that it “sounds to me that ‘we want boys to be boys and we want girls to be girls,’ and that’s an important purpose behind the law.”
Rice, representing Tennessee, noted that Kagan’s quotes come in the context of the state’s legislature attempting to prevent causing harm to minors. He noted studies in which minors’ mental health actually got worse after “gender-affirming care.”
“The legislature specifically noted those studies, so I think that statement was rooted in the notion that actually this is causing affirmative harm to minors that were undergoing the interventions, and that’s why they’re saying we don’t want these interventions that will cause minors to become disdainful of their sex,” he explained.
The law does not aim to set forth standards of masculinity to which boys must adhere, or standards of femininity that girls must follow. On the contrary, the transgender movement encourages boys who may have feminine traits to identify as girls and undergo medical interventions to alter their bodies. If any side is advocating conformity to gender standards, it is the transgender movement.
?NOT ABOUT GENDER CONFORMITY
Tennessee SG Matt Rice definitively strikes down the absurd claim that the TN law is all about enforcing "gender conformity."
The law aims to protect minors from harm that is encouraged by an ideology that focuses on gender conformity—with the… pic.twitter.com/LlhPbGwRdU
— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) December 4, 2024
6. Comparison to Loving
Justice Jackson repeatedly compared SB1 to the Virginia law banning interracial marriage that the Supreme Court struck down in Loving v. Virginia (1967).
Prelogar agreed that both cases involve “overbroad generalizations of how we expect them to live and order their affairs,” such that “these laws disadvantage someone who falls outside the average description.”
“When we look at the structure of that law, it looks—you can’t do something that is inconsistent with your own characteristics—it’s sort of the same thing,” Jackson argued.
?INSANE
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson strains to compare U.S. v. Skrmetti to Loving v. Virginia, suggesting that a law protecting kids from experimental medical "treatments" to make them appear like the opposite sex is similar to a law preventing interracial… pic.twitter.com/7nAQQkZzQD
— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) December 4, 2024
“In [Loving v. Virginia], those same kinds of scientific arguments were made,” Jackson claimed again when questioning Strangio.
She repeated the comparison a third time when asking Rice, Tennessee’s solicitor general.
“There, the question of can you marry this other person depended on what your race was. You could marry the other person if it was the same, consistent with your race. You couldn’t if [it wasn’t],” Jackson said. “I take your law to be doing basically the same thing. You can take these blockers if doing so is consistent with your sex, but not if it’s inconsistent.”
“In this case, the only way that they can point to a sex-based line is to equate fundamentally different medical treatments,” Rice responded. “Giving testosterone to a boy with a deficiency is not the same treatment as giving it to a girl who has psychological distress with her body.”
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Any argument about discrimination relies on confusion about the basic fact that males going through male puberty is healthy and in accordance with nature, while males going through a false, manufactured facsimile of female puberty is not.
?MATT RICE STRIKES IT DOWN
"In this case, the only way that they can point to a sex-based line is to equate fundamentally different medical treatments. Giving testosterone to a boy with a deficiency is not the same treatment as giving it to a girl who has psychological distress… pic.twitter.com/yFkAdXQQiI
— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) December 4, 2024
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
