The federal judiciary doesn't appear to want to touch "gender identity"

July 15, 2022

The post below, from June 29, 2022, concerned my views about the U.S. federal judiciary’s seeming lack of interest in tackling the enshrinement of “gender identity” in the law. This is an update, for both the paid subscribers who received the original June 29 post and those who have subscribed since that date.

On July 14, 2022, I received this notification from the 9th Circuit (the notification is publicly available and was sent to all parties and attorneys of record on amicus briefs):

Filed clerk order (Deputy Clerk: AF): On June 24, 2021, this Court filed an order remanding to the district court for the limited purpose of determining whether Lindsay Hecox’s claim is moot in light of her changed enrollment status at Boise State University (BSU). We vacated submission of this case, and held further proceedings in abeyance pending the district court’s decision on the remanded issue. We ordered the parties to advise this Court within seven (7) days of the date of the district court’s decision. There has been no report from the parties on proceedings. IT IS ORDERED THAT the parties shall file a joint status report within thirty days of the date of this Order apprising the Court of the status of the issue on remand and the status of this appeal. This Order does not supersede the parties’ prior obligation to advise this Court within seven (7) days of the district court’s decision.

(The Court is referring to Lindsay Hecox as “her,” but Lindsay is a man.)

What this suggests to me is that Court has made ZERO progress determining the status of this case. I am not an experienced federal civil litigator, and am not in a position to speculate about what it might mean, but I have never heard of anything like this happening in any federal litigation.

This case has been sitting on the 9th Circuit’s docket since June 2021, with no action having been taken.

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June 29, 2022

This post is available to paid subscribers only. As always, thank you for your generous contribution, which helps me continue the fight to protect women’s sex-based rights. Your paid subscription gets you first hand content that delves deeply into the legal and political fight to protect women and girls against the assault of “gender identity.”

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Back in April, I predicted that it’s not going to be lawsuits that are going to win the war against “gender identity,” but rather, TERFs winning in the court of public opinion.

I have no idea whether I was right about that, but at this point, I am getting the distinct feeling that the federal judiciary doesn’t want to go anywhere near considering the implications of enshrining “gender identity” in the law. Why would it?It seems to have gotten a glimpse into the toxicity of the entire “gender identity” program and decided to take as long a pause as possible and hope that the issue just goes away.

I was chatting with another lawyer about this and mused about my thinking that the federal judiciary doesn’t want to touch the topic. He agreed and said: “They don’t.  There is nothing in it for them. They have to deal with a media that has swallowed the bigotry nonsense as if the media were trout hitting a hook with a tasty bait.”

In this post, I’ll start with the case of Bostock v. Clayton County, which the Supreme Court decided in 2020, and explain how it got us into our current mess. Then I’ll examine the status of Soule v. Connecticut Association of Schools and Hecox v. Little, both of which have been stalled at the appellate level for around one year. Finally, I’ll take a look at Tennessee v. Department of Education, which was filed last August and has gone exactly nowhere since then.