“It’s a great day for transphobes to eat shit.”
That’s the first thing I saw when I opened Bluesky today. It was posted by John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats.
Darnielle was responding to an article by Erin Reed about a federal judge ruling against the Trump administration regarding gender-affirming care for transgender youth.
“U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai issued a blistering 49-page written opinion vacating the Kennedy Declaration,” Reed writes, “the December 2025 declaration that threatened to revoke all federal funding, including Medicare and Medicaid, from any hospital or provider that offered gender-affirming care for transgender youth, a virtual death sentence for any hospital system.”
Reed continues that this ruling applies nationwide “eliminating the legal basis that roughly 40 hospitals cited when they shuttered their trans youth care programs earlier this year. It also bars the Trump administration from implementing the Declaration or any materially similar policy threatening providers’ federal funding for offering gender-affirming care.”
In other words, it’s a great day for transphobes to eat shit. In fact, every day is.
You know, when I started writing this column I had no idea that I would still be writing it over 20 years later. Not that I thought the world would someday run out of anti-LGBTQ+ creeps. There was no long term plan. Over the years I have celebrated and lamented many good and bad moments of LGBTQ+ history. Though, for obvious reasons, the focus is usually negative. It is called Creep of the Week, after all.
So it’s nice to have some good news to talk about. Because I definitely have plenty of bad news to choose from.
Obviously you should go read Reed’s entire story (and support her journalism by becoming a paid subscriber if you can swing it). But I must applaud U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai for his no-fucks-given approach. He, as my dad liked to say, ripped RFK Jr. and the Trump administration a new one.
Reed called the opinion “scathing” (she also links to the full decision at the bottom of her story).
“Unserious leaders are unsafe,” Judge Kasubhai wrote. “This case highlights a leader’s unserious regard for the rule of law. This case demonstrates how disregard for the rule of law does not merely result in an abstract infraction. Rather, and tragically, this case is one of a long list of examples of how a leader’s wanton disregard for the rule of law causes very real harm to very real people.”
This could, of course, apply to 99% of the things that the Trump administration has done. But I want to emphasize the use of the phrase “very real people.” Because the Trump administration doesn’t see trans youth, or trans people of any age, as real people, let alone very real people. After all, it’s a lot easier to eradicate a group if you don’t see them as human in the first place. And the fight against gender-affirming care is absolutely intended to do just that.
Judge Kasubhai states plain as day that “the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., unlawfully issued a declaration threatening to cut federal funding to medical providers who provided gender-affirming care to minors” causing “chaos and terror.”
Judge Kasubhai continues, “Secretary Kennedy’s unlawful declaration harmed children. This case illustrates that when a leader acts without authority and in the absence of the rule of law, he acts with cruelty.”
Cruelty is, of course, the basis of just about everything that Trump and his administration does. They think that cruelty is a sign of strength. It is, in fact, the epitome of weakness. And it’s nice to see a judge call their asses out.
Some fun facts about Judge Kasubhai. Not only is he the first Muslim to serve as a federal judge in the U.S., but he was also appointed by Joe Biden. So I’m sure Republicans will be very normal about this decision. May they all continue to eat shit each and every day.
The written decision details how the Trump administration argued that RFK Jr. did nothing wrong and that the Kennedy Declaration was just RFK Jr. expressing his opinion that gender-affirming care is bad and is therefore protected speech under the first amendment. But Judge Kasubhai literally writes that he will not let the administration gaslight him and his written decision includes pages and pages of the administration’s own social media posts threatening to yank funding from hospital after hospital that provided gender-affirming care.
“The Kennedy Declaration’s text, Secretary Kennedy’s public comments at its announcement, the statements on HHS social media accounts, and HHS’s actions since its enactment make clear that immediate compliance was demanded,” he writes.
I have to say, it is pretty satisfying to see their own words being used against them.