My Friend
Beginning in the late 1990s, I developed a friendship with a fellow professional about my age. We first worked together—I had referred a few clients to him—but over time, we became genuine friends. A friend I valued.
One thing we shared, I suppose, was a history of failed romantic relationships. He had been divorced twice, both times after brief marriages, and I think that fact weighed on him. He genuinely wanted a home, a family. And I think he felt the absence of those things—deeply.
He enjoyed grabbing a beer or going to a hockey game with me, but what he really wanted was to be home, in the backyard, playing with his kids.
Finally—and I thought, suddenly—he’d found the “one.” Without any notice, at least not to me, my buddy was married. He seemed happy, and I was happy for him.
Then I met his new wife and instantly disliked her. I suspect the feeling was mutual.
She was a down-the-line radical progressive. Every square on the “woke” bingo card was filled in—but it wasn’t just her politics. She was arrogant, dismissive, and had a default presumption of bad faith in any discussion that didn’t begin with, “You’re right. Of course, you’re right.”
As far as I could tell, there wasn’t a single deviation in her thinking from standard socialist orthodoxy. Despite being intelligent and well-educated, I came to believe she had never had an original thought in her life.
I also got the distinct impression that she insisted that this point of view be adopted by my friend, who previously had, again in my estimation, a nuanced, heterodox politics—closer to libertarianism than to either left or right.
Eventually, our friendship fell away, and my only contact with my once very close friend was through social media.
There’s no way they couldn’t have children. How could you bring children into a world that was collapsing due to a climate catastrophe driven by greedy corporations and a government dominated by fascists? I’m speculating, of course. But, hey, it’s on the bingo card.
Finally, they adopted a beautiful little girl. And, while we had not seen each other in some time, I felt my friend come to life. And she was precious.
Blonde hair, gigantic blue eyes, I started referring to her, in my comments, as Cindy Lou Who—from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. As she got a little older, I would often comment on the photos my friend would post that I was sure glad that I wasn’t that child’s daddy, because it wouldn’t be long before every boy in town would be lined up at his front door.
They adopted a second child—another adorable little girl—and I concluded that he finally had what he always wanted. A family. A beautiful family. To the extent such a thing is possible from a distance, I felt and very much shared my friend’s joy.
Then something happened—something I considered then, and still believe, to be unimaginable, grotesque, evil.
When she was—I’m guessing—around nine, she started appearing in photos on her dad’s social media…
As a boy.
Her hair was cut short. She wore boys’ clothes.
She even had a new name. A boy’s name.
This was probably 2017 or 2018. Well before the current debates regarding gender identity had become a part of the national psyche. In this regard, my friend’s wife was very much in the vanguard of the radical progressive left.
I thought it was a tragedy. Obviously, I didn’t know the whole story—I didn’t know any of the story—but it struck me as performative virtue signaling.
Virtue signaling on the body and soul of a beautiful little girl.
I had long before ceased any kind of personal contact with him. Everything was on social media by that time. But, I’d bet my last dollar my friend had nothing to do with this “decision.” I’d bet he very much opposed it, while feeling a desperate need to keep the peace. Eventually, I blocked his accounts. This child is now a teenager. I have no idea how the story has played out. I have no desire to know.
I believed it was a tragedy—the triumph of a twisted, broken, and failed ideology over anything resembling common sense.
I believed it was a tragedy. But at no point, then or now, did I believe it was any of my business.
Lines We Shouldn’t Cross
It was none of my business, and civilization depends on people knowing what is—and what is not—their business. And tending only to their own.
The Court Weighs In
Earlier this week, the Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law that prohibits medical professionals from providing gender-affirming care—including puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgery—to individuals under the age of 18. The case, United States v. Skrmetti, centered on whether the law violates the constitutional rights of transgender minors and their families, or whether it falls within the state’s authority to regulate medical practice in the interest of protecting children.
In a 6–3 decision, the Court rejected the argument that such treatments are constitutionally protected, holding that states have broad latitude to draw lines in areas of scientific uncertainty, especially when it comes to the health and welfare of minors. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts noted that while gender identity is a deeply personal matter, the Constitution does not mandate any specific course of medical care, nor does it prohibit states from setting age-related restrictions on controversial procedures.
Justice Sotomayor, in dissent, argued that the law intrudes on parental rights, medical judgment, and the dignity of transgender youth. She warned that the decision opens the door to majoritarian interference in intimate, individualized decisions that have profound implications for a young person’s life and identity.
The ruling effectively green-lights similar laws in other states and marks a significant moment in the ongoing national debate over gender identity, parental rights, and the limits of medical autonomy.
Perhaps the Republican government of Tennessee—and the conservative majority on the United States Supreme Court—agree with Hillary Clinton. Maybe, when it comes to who gets to decide what’s best for your children, it really does take a village.
The Ghost of Roe
In Roe v. Wade (1973), the Supreme Court held that there exists a constitutional right to abortion. The Constitution itself says nothing about abortion, and the historical record on the subject is unclear. Even some on the progressive left found the decision troubling—among them Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who would, in 1993, be appointed to the Court by President Bill Clinton. Ginsburg supported the policy outcome of Roe but questioned the decision’s legal foundation and scope.
Nonetheless, Roe was the law of the land. Abortion was a right. To their credit, many opponents focused their arguments on moral grounds rather than legal ones. And over time, those moral arguments, in my view, began to bear fruit.
As is often the case in social change, monocausal explanations typically fail. But it’s clear that while abortion remained legal, the cultural and ethical case against it gained traction. The number of abortions surged in the years following Roe, peaking in the late 1980s or early 1990s. But since that time, the numbers declined sharply.
Ironically, after the Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe, the number of abortions has spiked once again.
It seems the moral case helped reduce abortions over time. The legal arguments may have had the opposite effect.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s this: the heavy hand of government often, perhaps always, yields unintended consequences. In a civil society, persuasion—not laws and threats of punishment—may be the better path.
That’s a lesson I believe should be applied to the gender identity debate as well.
A Dangerous Power
Clearly, the advocates for this kind of care—and their lawyers from the ACLU, who argued the case—wildly overplayed their hand. The scientific “studies,” such as they were, read like political diatribes wrapped in the language of academia. Indeed, that’s what they are.
They deserved to lose. But freedom took a loss as well.
When it comes to minors, gender-transition surgeries and drug therapies strike me as medically, psychologically, and morally wrong. But I have enough intellectual humility to admit I might be mistaken—especially in any particular case.
Maybe it’s wrong. Maybe it’s not. But I trust the kids themselves—and their parents—far more than I trust the corrupt, self-serving legislators in Nashville or nine black-robed judges in Washington, D.C., to make that call.
And a government that can ban a healthcare procedure—even a controversial one—can ban anything it wants. It can ban abortion pills and telemedicine. It can ban electric cars. It can ban peaceful protest. It can ban homeschooling, meat consumption, or shower heads that actually work.
The deeper problem, as I see it, is the idea—shared across the political spectrum—that our particular vision of the ideal society must be imposed on everyone else. At the point of a gun, if necessary.
Maybe it’s that impulse—the urge to point guns to effect cultural change—that ought to be banned.
The Road Not Taken
My view on the legality of abortion is more nuanced than what either side of the current debate typically argues. But, I do believe that, after a very brief window, abortion becomes morally wrong. But I also believe that the Court in Roe v. Wade was right to recognize that no constitutional prohibition exists—and that the right, while unenumerated, still exists.
What I wish is that the Court that decided Roe had had the courage of its convictions. It recognized an unenumerated right to abortion. But it stopped there.
It could have gone further. It could have recognized other unenumerated rights—like the right to sell your organs, to work for any wage you freely accept, to use politically incorrect intoxicants, or to seek a physician’s help in dying. All of them expressions of individual autonomy. All of them rooted in the same logic. All of them have come before liberal courts and all of these unenumerated rights were denied.
If the Court had consistently applied that principle—if it had expanded Roe’s logic even when it led to outcomes it didn’t like—then we wouldn’t be having this argument about trans kids today.
Fifty years on, the idea of individual human autonomy—something the Founders largely overlooked—might have become part of our shared legal and cultural inheritance.
Instead, we have the State of Tennessee sticking its nose into the personal lives of its citizens as they wrestle with difficult, life-altering decisions—decisions that are none of our business.
To this day, my heart goes out to Cindy Lou Who. And to her father, my friend. But that child’s fate, one way or the other, has had absolutely no impact on my life. If they’d asked me, I would have argued—vigorously—against transitioning her.
But I would not have pulled a gun.
That would have made things worse.
