Brett Kavanaugh says trans kids should not be ostracized. His sports ruling does exactly that

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in writing the majority opinion in two cases announced on Tuesday that allowed states to ban transgender girls and women from school sports, wanted credit for his "compassion." If you'll recall, this is the same guy who most likely laughed along with Donald Trump's disgusting descriptions of Haitians and asylum seekers.

In the same opinion that stripped transgender kids of the right to play on a team with their classmates, he paused to note that their "desire to compete warrants respect" and that they should not be "ostracized or vilified."

I am at a loss for words, truly, over this despicable, sanctimonious garbage from perhaps the most vile member of the current Court, and I say that with all due respect (just kidding) to Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

The man who just wrote the rule book for excluding trans kids is the same one lecturing the rest of us on how to treat them. The gall of it is astonishing. Who exactly does he think he is? He handed down the exclusion and the etiquette guide to "How to Treat Trans People" in the same breath, the same opinion.

Related: States can ban transgender women and girls from sports, according to U.S. Supreme Court

It's as if he thinks his false, fake, foul "kind" tone launders the actual harm of the ruling. Does he think he's going to be the hero of the trans community for saying they shouldn't be "ostracized or vilified," then sticking the knife in their backs anyway?

My former best friend of 40 years, whom I wrote about two years ago, went on a repulsive anti-LGBTQ+ rant out of the blue. I think Kavanaugh talks the same way when he's not writing hypocritical court opinions, likely when he's donning a white robe instead of a black one.

What he did last week with the Haitian ruling screamed bigotry. This is not how the Court has talked when it has gutted protections for other groups, and that silence speaks volumes.

When the Court hollowed out the Voting Rights Act, Shelby County v. Holder, nobody on the majority paused to say this ruling doesn't mean you should look at Black voters with any more suspicion at the ballot box. Nobody said: don't "ostracize and vilify" Black people.

Related: Samuel Alito justified a Supreme Court ruling that threatens majority-Black voting districts

When the administration ended Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians last week, stripping people who built lives here of their legal footing, no one attached a footnote reminding the public not to treat them as less than human, and not after Trump spent years calling immigrants from those very countries disgusting, criminal, rapist, AIDS carriers and more.

The Court and the executive branch don't usually bother with a disclaimer when they take something away from someone. They reached for one this time, for trans kids, and that reflex does far more harm than good.

Maybe the thinking was that no decent person would treat a Black voter or a Haitian neighbor with more contempt just because the law changed under their feet.

That assumption was dead wrong. Voter intimidation didn't need Shelby County's permission to exist. It used the ruling as cover. The same dynamic is already underway with TPS holders, who are being treated as disposable the instant their protection lifts, regardless of how long they've lived here or how settled their families are.

Kavanaugh's stupidity is thinking his disclaimer prevents the cruelty. If anything, attaching one here, and only here, suggests the Court already knows exactly what's coming for trans kids once this ruling reaches the hallways of West Virginia and Idaho schools. It will only get worse for kids already ostracized and vilified to epic proportions.

Related: Idaho and West Virginia ask Supreme Court to review anti-transgender sports laws

That's the real problem with Kavanaugh's galling gesture toward decency. People take their cues from power. When the highest court in the country rules that an entire category of children can be legally excluded from something as ordinary as a school sports team, plenty of adults - and plenty of cis kids - will hear the ruling and skip right past the kind words forced onto it.

Parents who didn't like the idea of trans kids playing sports now have six justices telling them they were right. A classmate looking for a reason to be cruel now has a legal framework to justify it.

When you exclude someone, Brett, you ostracize and vilify them. That's what exclusion is.

Kavanaugh's plea not to "ostracize or vilify" trans kids is one sentence competing against the entire weight of a ruling that just told the country, in the clearest terms possible, that these children are different enough to be legislated out of the gym, out of the room, out of society. The ruling is the message. Not Kavanaugh's "advice."

Trans people are human beings. I've been saying it for years, and apparently it still needs saying. They are not a transphobic judicial decision or a political wedge issue.

The conversation around them keeps collapsing into the abstract, bathroom policy, eligibility rules, culture war shorthand, instead of staying fixed on the fact that real kids are on the other end of these decisions.

A justice who actually wanted to protect their dignity had the power to do that with his vote, not just his pathetic prose. Asking the public to be kind to a group you just whacked in the head isn't protection. It's the legal equivalent of taking something away and saying "no hard feelings" on the way out the door.

I'll bet my life savings that Kavanaugh, along with Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Roberts, and Coney Barrett, has never once sat down and spoken with a trans person, and most definitely not with a trans kid. They couldn't be bothered.

Their holier-than-thou superiority lets them treat this group as sinners, when it's these six who, in one day, committed a moral sin that will put blood on their hands. I don’t say that lightly. It will happen because it’s already happening, and after this ruling, it will just get worse.

If the Court meant what it said about respect, that respect needed to show up in the ruling, not in some self-righteous sentence appended to soften the mortal blow.

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