EDITED: A three-judge panel has blocked parts of a state law that force schools to keep students "gender identities" a secret from their parents
City of Huntington v. Newsom
June 22, 2026
This post was going to be about the recent news that a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has blocked parts of a state law that force schools to keep students’ “gender identities” a secret from parents. The decision is here. But that decision is not terribly interesting, for reasons that I will explain. So instead, I’m just going to whine about Twitter.
[EDITED: I’m now actually making this post about the 9th Circuit decision.]
But first …
The women of For Women Scotland have won an important victory: the Outer House of the Court of Session has ruled that the Scottish government may no longer house men in the women’s prison on the basis of their “woman gender identities.” I had no idea what the “Outer House of the Court of Session” is, so I looked it up. Apparently, the Court of Session is the highest national court of Scotland in relation to civil cases. Cases are first heard by a single judge in the Outer House and those decisions can then be heard before an Inner House. So I guess the government can still appeal.
In 2023, this guy was convicted of raping two women on two separate occasions in Scotland:
He decided that he’s a woman during the course of his rape trial, and the Scottish government decided that it was a good idea to lock him up in the women’s prison on the basis of his “woman gender identity.” He goes by the name Isla Bryson.
This is a picture of him when he was known as Adam Graham, and when he committed the offenses.
To the best of my knowledge, he’s now back in the men’s prison, serving out his sentence.
Congratulations and well done to For Women Scotland!
Unfortunately, not everything is going as well in the UK—the government has decided to move forward with its “puberty blocker trial,” despite having hit pause on it just months ago. The government is planning to deliberately put some number of children (as young as 11 for girls and 12 for boys) on puberty blockers, despite knowing the harms that these drugs cause to young bodies.
The US Department of Education has announced yet another investigation into a school district for allowing boys to compete in what are supposed to be girls’ sports, possibly in violation of Title IX. This time it’s the Buncombe County School District, in North Carolina. Buncombe County is where Asheville is. At this point, I have completely lost track of the number of pending DOE investigations into school districts that do this.
A man who calls himself a woman named Stacey Marie Laughton has been sentenced to 33 years for child exploitation. Laughton was one of the first “transgender” people to hold public office after being elected to the New Hampshire General Court (New Hampshire’s way of describing its state legislature).
This is what I had to say about Laughton in my 2023 book The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls:
Stacie Marie Laughton is a man who served in the New Hampshire House of Representatives from 2020 to 2022. According to Wikipedia, he was “the first openly transgender elected official in New Hampshire and the first openly transgender person elected to a state legislature anywhere in the United States.” In 2008, he had been convicted of conspiracy to commit credit card fraud and falsifying documents and served four months in prison. He initially ran for office in 2012, but after some controversy about whether his conviction and sentence barred him from doing so, he abandoned the effort. He was charged in 2015 with making a false report of explosives but the charge was reduced to a misdemeanor. In November 2022, he was arrested and held in jail for stalking, then released. Then, in 2023, he was arrested and held in jail again on four felony counts of distributing child pornography.
This is his 2023 booking photo:
A quick Google search tells me that the New Hampshire Department of Corrections has the following policies in place:
a. In deciding whether to assign a transgender or intersex inmate to a facility for male or female inmates, and in making other housing and programming assignments, the NHDOC shall consider on a case-by-case basis whether a placement would ensure the inmate’s health and safety, and whether the placement would present management or security problems and document such reasoning in writing.
b. All housing determinations shall be made in accordance with the Prison Rape Elimination Act (“PREA”) and its implementing regulations.
Compliance with PREA is mandatory for all states that receive federal funding under the law, which is a problem in and of itself, but that’s another story entirely. We can all thank President Obama for issuing regulations in 2012 that require prisons to house men in women’s prisons under certain circumstances, even though PREA itself does not say a word about “trans.”
So we’ll see if the fine folks at the New Hampshire DOC think that housing Laughton in the state women’s prison “would ensure the inmate’s health and safety” and whether his placement there “would present management or security problems.”
Speaking of New Hampshire, the state’s governor (Republican Kelly Ayotte) recently vetoed a bill that would have allowed businesses in the state to maintain single-sex facilities like bathrooms and locker rooms. This is the third time Governor Ayotte has vetoed such a bill. In her veto message, she said: “I have continued to ask the Legislature to address this issue in a thoughtful, narrow way while protecting the privacy, safety, and rights of all Granite Staters.” But this bill is narrow. It wouldn’t require businesses to maintain single-sex spaces; it would simply have allowed them to. Republicans like Ayotte really aren’t helping.
Finally, this has officially become my new favorite thing in the history of things:
It was made by a paid subscriber to this Substack. I’m not going to name her, but she can name herself in the comments if she wants to. If she does, paid subscribers can chat with her and thank her.
In order to fully understand that clip, you need to understand that this is a thing:
Again, this post was going to be about the recent news that a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has blocked parts of a state law that force schools to keep students’ “gender identities” a secret from parents. The decision is here.
However, that decision is not terribly interesting, for reasons I will explain briefly. Rather than going into detail about the decision, I’m going to whine about Twitter. Read on to learn more.
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