Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
The influence of transgenderism in the United States is waning. Basic biology and plain old common sense are once again coming to the fore.
Under pressure from the Trump administration and a religious liberty lawsuit, for example, Massachusetts dropped its unconstitutional mandate that individuals seeking to become foster parents must “affirm” the “sexual orientation and gender identity” of children in their care. Massachusetts’ Department of Children and Families (DCF) had enforced this mandate against two religious families who refused to sign the LGBTQI+ affirmation, stripping one of them of their foster care license. According to DCF’s updated policy issued on December 12, 2025, foster parent applicants must now simply affirm that they will support the “individual identity and needs” of the children in their care. How the DCF will apply this more general standard in specific cases remains to be seen.
On July 2, 2025, a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a Florida public high school teacher’s challenge to a state law forbidding transgender teachers from using their preferred pronouns with students in the classroom. The transgender woman claimed that the law prohibiting this teacher from using the honorific “Ms.” and the gendered pronouns “she,” “her,” and “hers” in exchanges with students during class time violated ‘her’ First Amendment right to free speech. The majority opinion rejected the premise of the challenge since the teacher who identified ‘herself’ to students in the classroom in this way “did so in her official capacity as a government employee, and not as a private citizen.” First Amendment protection did not apply in such circumstances.
Unfortunately, there are still activist progressive judges who are pushing the transgenderism agenda. On May 27, 2025, a United States Magistrate Judge in the U.S. District Court, N.D. California (San Francisco Division) dismissed the complaint of a former public-school teacher who was terminated for refusing to use a student’s preferred pronouns. The plaintiff, a devout Catholic, believed that it is against her religion to use pronouns that differ from a person’s “divinely-intended gender.” The judge rejected the plaintiff’s constitutional free speech and free exercise of religion claims.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court has the final say and is restoring sanity to the law defining where “transgender rights” claims should be rejected because they would intrude on other people’s legitimate rights and potentially endanger their health and safety.
In June 2025, the Supreme Court ruled that religious parents with kindergarten through fifth-grade children could opt their children out of their public-school district’s classroom story time using “LGBTQ+-inclusive” storybooks containing sexuality and gender themes. “A classroom environment that is welcoming to all students is something to be commended,” the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito stated, “but such an environment cannot be achieved through hostility toward the religious beliefs of students and their parents…The Board’s introduction of the ‘LGBTQ+-inclusive’ storybooks, along with its decision to withhold opt outs, places an unconstitutional burden on the parents’ rights to the free exercise of their religion.”
Also in June 2025, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Tennessee’s law prohibiting certain so-called “gender-affirming” treatments for purportedly transgender minors. “This case carries with it the weight of fierce scientific and policy debates about the safety, efficacy, and propriety of medical treatments in an evolving field,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the Court’s majority opinion. “The voices in these debates raise sincere concerns; the implications for all are profound. The Equal Protection Clause does not resolve these disagreements. Nor does it afford us license to decide them as we see best. Our role is not ‘to judge the wisdom, fairness, or logic’ of the law before us (citation omitted) but only to ensure that it does not violate the equal protection guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment. Having concluded it does not, we leave questions regarding its policy to the people, their elected representatives, and the democratic process.”
The scientific evidence is increasingly casting doubt on whether the asserted benefits of so-called “gender-affirming” hormonal and surgical treatments for minors experiencing gender dysphoria outweigh the risks.
A report commissioned by England’s National Health Service issued in 2024 characterized the evidence concerning the use of puberty blockers and hormones to treat purportedly transgender minors as “remarkably weak.” The report concluded that the “current understanding of the long-term health impacts of hormone interventions is limited and needs to be better understood.”
In November 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an updated “peer reviewed” version of its earlier report. The HHS’s updated report expressed concern about the potentially significant, long-term harms from gender transitioning medical treatments for minors, including puberty blockers, hormones, and surgical operations, which too often are not carefully tracked.
“The evidence for benefit of pediatric medical transition is very uncertain, while the evidence for harm is less uncertain,” the HHS report said. “When medical interventions pose unnecessary, disproportionate risks of harm, healthcare providers should refuse to offer them even when they are preferred, requested, or demanded by patients. Failure to do so increases the risk of iatrogenic harm,” which means the risk of an adverse condition in a patient resulting from the medical treatment itself.
Based on the HHS peer-reviewed report’s findings, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. signed a declaration concluding that the “sex-rejecting” procedures on children discussed in the report do not meet professionally recognized standards of health care. Under the declaration, practitioners who perform such procedures on minors, including puberty blockers, surgeries, and hormone therapy, would be deemed out of compliance with those standards. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will release a notice of proposed rulemaking to bar hospitals from performing “sex-rejecting” procedures on children under age 18 as a condition of participation in Medicare and Medicaid programs. The proposed rules will have to go through a public comment period and will most certainly face legal challenge if put into effect.
Indeed, the American Civil Liberties Union has already vowed to challenge the Trump administration in court, as it has done so many times before. Chase Strangio, co-director of the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Rights Project, said the administration’s proposals are “cruel and unconstitutional attacks on the rights of transgender youth and their families.”
Making children who are confused about their gender identity guinea pigs for invasive, unproven, and potentially irreversible treatments, including surgeries that amount to bodily mutilation, is cruel child abuse that does not deserve any constitutional protection.
One transgenderism issue that is still being debated around the country involves whether biological males identifying as females should be allowed to compete in sports contests reserved for females. Those who say no argue that an unfair playing field is created when biological males, who are generally stronger physiologically and anatomically than biological females, are allowed to compete against biological females. They are right. At last, a sense of basic fairness is beginning to override orthodox transgender ideology in setting rules and policies governing major girls’ and women’s sports competitions.
For example, the NCAA announced in February 2025 that its Board of Governors voted to update the Association’s participation policy for transgender student-athletes by limiting competition in women’s sports to student-athletes assigned female at birth only. The International Olympic Committee plans in early 2026 to roll out a new policy that could significantly restrict, if not exclude, transgender women from competing in Olympic Games women’s competitions. International Olympic Committee president Kirsty Coventry said that “we are going to try our best to ensure that when we are talking about the female category, we are protecting the female category and we are doing that in the most fair way.” The United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee has already changed its eligibility rules to bar transgender women from competing in Olympic women’s sports in compliance with President Trump’s executive order entitled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.”
The Supreme Court will be considering this term whether states can ban transgender girls and women from participating in girls’ and women’s sports at publicly funded institutions. The Supreme Court’s decision upholding state laws banning certain so-called “gender-affirming” care for purportedly transgender minors may serve as a precedent for the Court to uphold state bans on biological males identifying as females from participating in female sports.
Transgender people constitute approximately one percent of the U.S. population. Yet trans activists and their allies on the Left have managed to impose extreme transgender ideology in shaping harmful public policy dictates. These dictates have often resulted in unfair and unsafe consequences and, in some cases, have violated other people’s First Amendment constitutional rights. Thankfully, the tide is turning against this malignant trend.
