To begin: Good for the United States Supreme Court! Very good for the United States Supreme Court! In fact, glory be, and the bar’s open, folks.

I find it impossible, though you never know in our present chaotic age, to see how the court could have negated Tennessee’s right as a sovereign state—however debilitated the sovereignty idea these days—to forbid unproven and conceivably perilous medical treatments for minors: our children, over whom we are charged to watch with all diligence.

The court’s 6-3 decision in United States v. Skrmetti, handed down June 18, is by modern standards a remarkable step in the nation’s provisional, slow, and sometimes grudging movement toward plain old everyday common sense in the face of brazen, over-confident ideology.

Consider. Tennessee’s legislature in 2023 looked at the cultural trend— ratified by a host of self-deputized experts, including many doctors—to gratify doubts about personal sexual identity through the use of puberty blockers and hormones. That is, if a girl increasingly saw herself as a boy, her friendly neighborhood physician would help her “transition” to the male state. Males who saw themselves as largely or maybe even entirely female in orientation could un-man themselves, so to speak. Your body, your choice! Who’da thunk it—I mean even 20 years ago, when American culture still wobbled mentally over a woman’s asserted right to abort her unborn baby? Tennessee, for reasons that clashed with the new ideology but resonated with experience, judgment, and the imparted wisdom of the human race, said, er, no . . . we’re not having any of that around here. An adult—that was different. Adults make their own choices. But children: sorting out new knowledge, new experiences, new personal understandings day by day. Not0 for them, the propaganda about “gender choice.”

What society, careful of its children’s well-being, could encourage, far less allow, irreversible judgments that deviated from the state in which a particular child entered the world?

Our society hasn’t done that. Not yet. And one feels better about the future, given the Skrmetti decision; still, one has to reckon with the clamor remaining at certain levels of life to let people decide for themselves who and what they are, irrespective of who and what they may be in the context of a civilization grounded in—forgive the antiquated word—Reality; that which IS, as distinguished from that which we might see ourselves called to remake, in a different pattern.

The transgender activists are harrumphing about someday winning what they see as their right to recognition as a put-upon constituency meriting government assistance and public affirmation. The New York Times quoted one prominent activist saying, prior to Skrmetti, “One thing I’m certain of is that this organization stays on an issue like water on stone. We don’t win this in a couple of weeks, I’m sure my organization is going to be on it for the next 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years.”

On what issue, exactly? The right of personal sex choice for all and one? The only criteria being anxiety, fear, or pulsating emotions? And afterwards, what new choices lie ahead, awaiting affirmation?

It’s a crazy age, but the high court, by flagging the Tennessee law through cultural traps and blockades, has brought us a little nearer the recovery state for which many Americans long. Adults may if they like continue to change their sexes medically. Christine, née George William, Jorgensen set the worldwide example for that in the 1950s, and along since have come others, the most notable, maybe, being the Olympic gold medalist Bruce, presently Caitlyn, Jenner.

It is, as the saying goes, a free country: howsoever expansive the definitions of freedom with which we work in the 21st century. Transgender enthusiasm is not going away any time soon: maybe never. But for Tennessee children, and children in the 26 other states that presently bar sex transition for minors (none of them on the West Coast if you were really wondering)—there are no puberty blockers, cross-sex surgery, nor other medical urgencies.

At the age of responsibility they may choose for themselves, as is surely a right the Supreme Court would affirm. Until that day, officious “rights” campaigners and with-it physicians, always ready to believe something new, and abetted by worried but naïve parents, cannot allow minors to “change” on the basis of possibly changeable fears and emotions.

That seems good enough for Justices Amy Barrett and Clarence Thomas, who wrote in concurrence: “The prospect of courts second-guessing legislative choices in this area should set off alarm bells.”

We should all be alarmed if it doesn’t. Volubly so. Judicial subservience to the changing fashions of our time—intellectual, cultural, religious, you name it—not only would further divide Americans—vide the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections—but also fuzz up the kind of robust discussions we need more than ever about questions of life and death.

In today’s conversation—especially that which passes for “conversation” on social media or in university classroom byplay—you’re either a MAGA maggot or an anti-semite who probably shouldn’t be in the country anyway. (Why, I ask in passing, don’t people use a good, depreciatory word like “Yahoo” anymore? Jonathan Swift gave us that serviceable word in Gulliver’s Travels for slouching, smelly types we all deplore.)

Mr. Justice Thomas, in a separate concurrence, dilated on our growing tendency to accept the judgment of those designated—by the intellectual establishment—“experts,” their voices amplified by a credulous, encouraging media.

The “experts” in pediatric medicine have lined up largely with the exponents of gender transition for minors, declaring, among other things, that a change of one’s gender can lessen the chances of suicide.

Wrote Thomas: “[T]here are particularly good reasons to question the expert class here, as recent revelations suggest that leading voices in this area have relied on questionable evidence and have allowed ideology to influence their medical guidance.”

“Ideology” is the right word all right—the declaration (characteristic of our times) that thus and so, whatever someone may have once said, is Truth itself. On what basis? Well, on the basis of I-say-so. I know! I’m right! Follow me! One thinks of famous figures throughout human history, not all of them with toothbrush mustaches and a love of straight-armed salutes, who build their careers on such declarations.

Relief should be our first take on Skrmetti. But after that, reflection.

It is well that 27 states have undertaken to protect the not fully mature, the still developing, from decisions that could mar, or destroy, their future lives. More states should (and probably will now) follow Tennessee’s lead.

But the essential questions aren’t decided: Who are we? What are we? And what do we do about it? These were not the questions before the U.S. Supreme Court. Nor could they have been. Courts are instruments of the self-government to which a free people—us—is entitled.

What the court said, in essence, is that the Constitution upholds a state’s right—so long as that right fails to overshadow another, federally protected one—to legislate for its people’s perceived benefit: the benefit, in this case, of Tennessee’s people; and by extension those living elsewhere under similar laws.

Yes, yes. That’s Political Science.

But the “trans” matter at bottom isn’t about Political Science or its adjunct preoccupation, politics and polls. It is about—well, Reality itself: what is, as opposed to what isn’t, and the way we are caught up in it through our incidents of birth.

Something large happened way “out there”—far longer ago than onceupon-a-time. And man came onto the face of the earth. And woman. The Old Testament tells the story in a fashion that is not exactly second-nature to grasp in its fulness and beauty, but which never surrenders our attention. We are still working through it all, putting in place pieces in a gigantic puzzle unlikely to be solved—at least by us.

So you could say if you wanted to that we are guessing, acting with only partial knowledge—whatever “full” knowledge might mean, given the tendency of new “facts” constantly to present themselves to human gaze.

We are not guessing, nevertheless, when we say, “That’s a boy.” And, “That’s a girl.” Our eyes tell us. The brain kicks in.

So it has ever been. That is Reality.

I take into account, in saying this, medical indications of sexual ambiguity in particular children. The thing is, ambiguity explains nothing larger than the ambiguity itself. It cannot speak to concentrated experience and observation over millennia of existence. There are boys; there are girls. To riff on the political scientist Willmoore Kendall, this is a thing we know “in our hips.” If we do not know this basic fact of human existence, we know nothing whatever, and the Lord help us.

The oddity of recent years—that is putting it mildly—is the widespread and very, very ideological argument that we can invent our own Reality, as in the plea for a different sex than the one with which we entered the world. It is the argument inspiring those who demand public ratification of the value and worth of puberty blockers and the other appurtenances of sex change. They know!—a large assertion we can swallow or not, just as we like.

Feminism, a creed all its own, which has brought particular benefits, marred by particular potholes and muddy stretches, is chiefly responsible for elevating transgenderism to national cause status. Joe Biden called transgender equality “the civil rights issue of our time.” Shall we pass on by, averting our gaze?

Feminism is chiefly responsible for the rise of “gender” as mandatory substitute for “sex.” I found this out when I corrected a panelist high in church circles about using “gender”—a grammatical term—when she clearly meant “sex.” No, no, I was informed, gender is the new understanding, among . . . I can’t remember exactly her words; she meant, Those in Process of Personal Development, seeking to define themselves over against the artificial constructs of yesteryear.

No, lady!, I ought to have said. Or, perhaps, no, ma’am. You’re a mile from home plate. And, furthermore, paving the field for Trouble.

Trouble we got all right—the “choose-your-pronoun” nonsense (I don’t need to rehearse that, do I?), the question of how to regulate restroom choice, the sad0 spectacle of ex-boy swimmers competing against undoubted girl swimmers. But on it went, until it got to be too much. The New York Times, in an objective—I’m serious, folks—magazine piece July 6 by Nicholas Confessore, quotes a Maryland physician and trans rights activist as saying (just before the Skrmetti decision), “People know the movement is stuck. They know we’ve gone too far. They know we’ve lost the thread.”

The thread—it is too alluring an image to drop. A thread binds, it connects. Lost, it loses all utility, as maybe in the trans rights brouhaha. In declaring children and teenagers reliable enough to assess their own sexuality with parents and white-coated doctors standing ready to approve their choice, the trans movement has embraced a kind of personal autonomy unknown to, unthought of by, virtually any who ever have inhabited this planet.

A thread, at the same time, has other, more fruitful applications. As with Ariadne, the Greek beauty loved by Theseus, a thread followed properly can lead upward to the light, out of the dark lair of Minotaurs and similarly disagreeable beasts, to fresh air, true understanding—and reaffirmation.

Such a thread may lie somewhere in our political capitals, on the ground, on a monument, in a museum, who knows, ready to be laid strikingly along a path of cultural recovery from the delusions that keep us in carefully supervised captivity.

The first delusion: That I am enough. Me! I suffice. I know what I need, which is something no one else can know.

The second delusion: That the rest of society, including government, embraces, or should, my choices, my aims, my ideals.

The third delusion: That what was said and believed in the past is flushable down the drain, inasmuch as I wasn’t there. I didn’t contribute to saying and thinking it.

The fourth delusion: That opponents of my views have nothing useful to say, thus don’t deserve time or space to say it.

The idea that the state of Tennessee offends instead of enables, and in the end protects, its youngest citizens has no root in understandings older than America itself: the understandings that undergird our community.

Skrmetti provides an occasion—whether we grasp it or not, like Ariadne’s thread is beyond knowing—namely, to stop. To look around. To think. To rub the eyes. Where are we anyway?! How did this sort of thing get started? Have we as a culture after all been chasing a chimera of “equality” and “justice” based on coercion, contrary to realities we used to embrace with joy and satisfaction. I leave the matter where I started. Good for the high court; and, waiter, waiter, make mine a double!

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Original Bio:

William Murchison, a former syndicated columnist, is a senior editor of the Human Life Review. He will soon finish his book on moral restoration in our time.