Author: Felicia Kornbluh

Felicia Kornbluh, Ph.D. (she/they) is professor of history and gender, sexuality and women’s studies, and director of Jewish studies, at the University of Vermont. She is the author, most recently, of A Woman's Life is a Human Life: My Mother, Her Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice (Grove Press, 2023) and writes regularly for the scholarly and popular press. Find them @VTFeminist on X and via the University of Vermont History Department.

Conservative Supreme Court to Rule on Right to Be Trans, Medical Care, Parents’ Rights, Constitutional Sex Discrimination—and the Right to Be Different

“I’m here to stand up for my kid,” Brian Williams told me outside the Supreme Court on Dec. 4. Williams and his wife Samantha have been fighting for their daughter—known as L.W. in the legal papers the ACLU filed to challenge Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for minors—for years.

Though difficult to sit through, the two-plus hours of argument in United States v. Skrmetti—a challenge by trans youth, their families, the ACLU, Lambda Legal and the Biden administration to Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors—was a nearly perfect distillation of this moment in our gender politics.

Stop Trashing Trans People. Get Smarter About Gender.

Throwing trans and nonbinary people under the bus is a terrible compromise to the very authoritarian ambitions that liberals say they’re stepping up to fight. We need more love and support for people who are stigmatized and under assault, not less. And we desperately need more understanding of sex, gender and sexuality.

Let’s equip ourselves with the intellectual tools that will help us understand how would-be tyrants use gender to divide us.