Supreme Court Prepares to Rip Away Trans Rights in Two New Cases

The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear two cases involving transgender athletes being banned from women’s sports at the youth and collegiate level—a troubling sign of the court’s willingness to engage with the contentious culture war issues that have come to define the MAGA right.

Hecox v. Little and West Virginia v. B.P.J are the cases in question.

The first case stems from Boise State University student Lindsay Hecox, who is banned from running on the girls’ track team under Idaho’s House Bill 500. The second centers on Becky Pepper-Jackson, a transgender middle schooler who was banned completely from participating in sports by West Virginia’s House Bill 3293, which similarly bans transgender kids from participating in sports.

“Like any other educational program, school athletic programs should be accessible for everyone regardless of their sex or transgender status. Trans kids play sports for the same reasons their peers do–to learn perseverance, dedication, teamwork, and to simply have fun with their friends,” the ACLU’s Joshua Block, senior counsel for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, said in a press statement. “Categorically excluding kids from school sports just because they are transgender will only make our schools less safe and more hurtful places for all youth. We believe the lower courts were right to block these discriminatory laws, and we will continue to defend the freedom of all kids to play.”

President Trump has long mocked trans athletes, calling them “social experiments” during a speech at West Point earlier in the year. He just forced the University of Pennsylvania to wipe the records of trans swimmer Lia Thomas in exchange for the release of $175 million of funding for the university. A pro-government decision from the Supreme Court in these two cases would only increase that type of treatment nationwide.

“Our client just wants to play sports with her friends and peers,” said Lambda Legal senior counsel Tara Borelli. “Everyone understands the value of participating in team athletics, for fitness, leadership, socialization, and myriad other benefits. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit last April issued a thoughtful and thorough ruling allowing B.P.J. to continue participating in track events. That well-reasoned decision should stand the test of time, and we stand ready to defend it.”

The cases will be heard in the fall.

Lawyers for Kilmar Abrego Garcia revealed gruesome details about his treatment at the notorious Salvadoran prison where Donald Trump has exiled more than 280 deportees.

In a 40-page amended complaint filed Tuesday as part of his civil case in Maryland, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys said their client reported being “subjected to severe mistreatment” upon arrival at Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, “including but not limited to severe beatings, severe sleep deprivation, inadequate nutrition, and psychological torture.”

Lawyers for Abrego Garcia said that their client, who was deported as the result of an “administrative error,” was told upon his arrival at the notorious foreign gulag: “Welcome to CECOT. Whoever enters here doesn’t leave.”

Abrego Garcia was then forced to strip and was beaten for not changing his clothes fast enough. His head was shaved, and he was frog-marched to his cell and struck with wooden batons, leaving him with “visible bruises and lumps all over his body.”

Abrego Garcia and his cellmates were then “forced to kneel from approximately 9:00 PM to 6:00 AM, with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion,” the lawyers wrote. “During this time, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was denied bathroom access and soiled himself. The detainees were confined to metal bunks with no mattresses in an overcrowded cell with no windows, bright lights that remained on 24 hours a day, and minimal access to sanitation.

“While at CECOT, prison officials repeatedly told Plaintiff Abrego Garcia that they would transfer him to the cells containing gang members who, they assured him, would ‘tear’ him apart,” the filing stated. Abrego Garcia had repeatedly observed prisoners that he understood to be gang members “violently harm each other with no intervention from guards or personnel.”

These are the horrific conditions which the Trump administration has willfully inflicted on deportees it claims are gang members. But officials at the notorious prison could tell that not everyone fell into that category. According to the filing, after about a week, the group of detainees sent by the U.S. were divided based on who had gang-related tattoos. It was then that “prison officials explicitly acknowledged that Plaintiff Abrego Garcia’s tattoos were not gang-related, telling him ‘your tattoos are fine.’”

Trump had previously made the outlandish claim that Abrego Garcia’s hand tattoos indicated gang membership, referring to a photoshopped image of his hands with “MS-13” written on them.

The rumors about Elon Musk’s rampant White House ketamine use have circled back to a source: Donald Trump.

The world’s richest man and ousted Trump adviser was reputed to be a regular pill popper in May, when The New York Times reported that Musk’s drug use went “well beyond occasional use.” He allegedly took so much ketamine that it was affecting his bladder, took ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, and kept a daily medication box on hand stacked with Adderall, according to photos obtained by the Times. Musk has repeatedly denied the alleged drug use, posting a clean drug test on X two weeks after the story ran.

But that report, per Trump biographer Michael Wolff, was planted by the president himself.

Wolff told The Daily Beast Podcast Wednesday that he came across Trump’s recent braggadocio by catching up with the president’s associates.

“Trump speaks to them, and then they speak to other people,” Wolff said. “Whoever he calls, he says the same thing to everybody. So you know exactly what is on his mind.”

And, in the wake of the billionaire’s vocal rejection of the president’s “big, beautiful bill,” Musk was apparently on Trump’s mind. That was clear by Tuesday, when Trump threatened to deport his largest 2024 campaign financier back to South Africa via a post on Truth Social.

“In one of these phone calls—many of them—he was on about, you know, how many drugs he takes,” Wolff told the Beast. “‘He takes drugs all the time. You know that, don’t you? You know, The New York Times wrote about it. They said, he takes drugs.’”

For whatever reason, Trump had decided it was time to take credit: “‘Actually, we dropped a dime to The New York Times ... on Elon’s drug taking,’” Wolff recalled someone recounting from a recent conversation with the president.

At present, Musk and Trump’s previously buddy-buddy relationship appears to be torn to shreds. Musk is “pissed,” according to Wolff, and the billionaire is acting like it, flaming the administration and Republican lawmakers for pushing what he described as a “pork-filled” tax cut that would only serve to add trillions of dollars to the deficit.

Musk has promised to bankroll a new third party that he’s referred to as “The America Party” should Trump’s spending bill become law, using his inordinate wealth to fund primary opponents to any lawmaker that backtracked on their promises to reduce government spending.

On Wednesday night, a Fox News guest falsely accused Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident who was wrongfully deported by the Trump administration, of killing Americans.

In an appearance on Fox News @ Night, Monica Paige, White House correspondent for Frontlines, a program by Charlie Kirk’s conservative group Turning Point USA, discussed the GOP spending bill.

Paige urged Republican lawmakers to unify behind the bill, whose fate was then less certain, due to a number of holdouts whom House Speaker Mike Johnson has since reportedly won over.

Paige said, “If you’re going to vote ‘no’ on this, then you’re voting along with Democrats, especially Democrats like Maxine Dexter, who was on the Hill today, dressed in a white robe, who also visited El Salvador to go see Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who killed Americans.”

The accusation against Abrego Garcia, whom Trump deported to an El Salvador prison, where he says he was tortured, due to an “administrative error”—and who, upon his return, now faces federal charges—is a complete fabrication.

Paige apologized within a few hours on X, but, per a report from Mediaite, Gallagher failed to correct her on air, and the error remains unacknowledged by Fox, which did not immediately respond to TNR’s request for comment.

Paige’s apology states:

Tonight during an interview on Fox News, I inadvertently said that Kilmar Abrego Garcia ‘killed Americans.’

What I meant to say was that he has been connected with gang activity that has devastated the lives of many people, and killed an untold number of Americans. He has not been personally linked to the death of anyone even while being accused of gang activity including human trafficking, drug trafficking, and spousal abuse.

I misspoke and I apologize for the mistake.

While the retraction employs familiar MAGA talking points—elevating fiercely disputed accusations against Abrego Garcia, ostensibly to minimize Trump’s harrowing denial of his due process—that’s still more than can be said of Fox, which has thus far been mum on the error.

FOX News @ Night issued a correction in its segment on Thursday night, after this piece was published.

Florida Representative Randy Fine took a moment to remind people that the most important reason to pass the “big, beautiful bill” is to give Donald Trump exactly what he wants.

During a Fox News interview in the early hours of Wednesday morning, the Florida Republican tried to recenter amid lengthy deliberations over the president’s behemoth budget bill that was returned to the House.

“But what we have to understand that the American people are counting on us, and people are losing sight of what this bill does,” Fine said, before proceeding to not explain what the bill does at all.

“Imagine you’re a waitress working right now who’s depending on tips to pay your bills, or you’re an older person whose dependent on Social Security and you don’t want to pay taxes on what you earned for your whole life, or you’re one of the people who’s gonna lose all of the tax breaks they’ve had all of this time, we need to give certainty to the American people,” Fine said.

“But the most important thing is we’ve all committed to support President Trump. He is counting on us to deliver on his signature legislative achievement, and we just have to get the job done.” Fine said.

The most important thing is being transparent with the American public. The benefits of Trump’s No Tax on Tips provision are easily outweighed by massive cuts to essential programs such as SNAP, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act. Although Trump has claimed there will be no taxes on Social Security for seniors, that provision isn’t actually in his massive spending and tax bill.

Instead, seniors who are not on Social Security will get a short-term standard deduction boost, but those who do receive Social Security payments will get absolutely nothing. And the tax breaks that would be extended from Trump’s 2017 tax plan are skewed to benefit corporations and the very rich.