(Daily Signal)—Transgender activists once used maximalist legal arguments to force their worldview on American society, but now they’re arguing defensively.
Activists are accusing the government of trying to silence them and take away their health care benefits. To some degree, this strategy represents a legal response to President Donald Trump’s reelection, but it also reveals an important cultural development.
“The social and cultural permission gatekeepers on the Left have sort of lost the battle on whether or not you can speak out on these issues and have a different opinion than the Left and continue to function in civil society,” Hiram Sasser, executive general counsel for First Liberty Institute, tells the Daily Signal.
The Era of Transgender Maximalism
Not too long ago, transgender orthodoxy was on the rise. After the Supreme Court redefined marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), groups like the Human Rights Campaign demanded corporations implement policies to honor preferred pronouns.
The American Civil Liberties Union took the case of Gavin Grimm, a female student who identified as male and who sued the local school board to gain access to boys’ restrooms—and prevailed.
Even an Originalist Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch, effectively rewrote federal law in Bostock v. Clayton County, ruling that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which prohibits sex-based discrimination—also forbids employers from firing workers over their sexual orientation or gender identity.
The Human Rights Campaign urged the incoming administration of President Joe Biden to extend the ruling to apply into areas Gorsuch explicitly said it did not affect, such as sports teams and bathrooms, and Biden’s administration did so in 2021.
The Legal Landscape Today
Yet, a few years later, the Human Rights Campaign is hemorrhaging corporate allies, the Trump administration is investigating medical billing fraud for sex-rejecting procedures, and the transgender movement is making some rather interesting defensive legal arguments.
During the January oral arguments for West Virginia v. B.P.J., a case examining whether males have the right to compete in women’s sports, the ACLU effectively conceded the legitimacy of fairness concerns. The ACLU argued that, while some men may enjoy advantages over women in sports, the men who identify as women in this case had undergone medical interventions that made them less of a threat.
This marked a significant retreat from the maximalist claim that “trans women are women,” and the dismissal of any fairness concerns as bigoted. The argument effectively went from “there is no difference, bigot,” to “interventions reduce the difference.”
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health, an activist group often cited as the gold standard on transgender medicine during the Biden years, recently claimed in a legal filing that its Standards of Care represented medical opinion on a topic of “medical and scientific uncertainty.” WPATH wasn’t dismissing the standards as baseless or as “mere opinion,” but it was stating that, for legal purposes, they do not qualify as the kind of truth claims the government can regulate as consumer fraud. It also effectively conceded that there is more than one rational position on the issue.
Why Did the Transgender Movement Run Out of Steam?
Sasser, the First Liberty attorney, used a military analogy to explain the reversals. The transgender activists have “overrun their cultural supply lines,” he said.
He noted that transgender activists have not just championed the idea that a man can become a woman just by saying so, but that they attempted to silence those who disagreed. The Human Rights Campaign often claimed that there is an “epidemic” of violence against transgender people and that dissenters bear some responsibility for transgender suicides.
Yet Sasser claimed the cultural pressure led the movement to lose certain allies, such as lesbian tennis legend Martina Navratilova and liberal-leaning Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.
“That, I think, is what is beginning to make their legal strategy crack a little bit, and is giving not just the public, but also the judges, social and cultural permission to say, ‘Look this is a step too far’,” he noted.
Sasser also argues that the stories of Christians, Muslims, and others who fought for their religious freedom to opt out of endorsing transgender ideology helped educate the public and spur debate.
The pendulum will swing even farther, the First Liberty lawyer predicted.
“I could imagine judges, once who preferred pronouns, deciding not to anymore,” he explains, noting that “might become a topic of discussion” in future Supreme Court confirmation battles.
The transgender movement won’t be throwing in the towel anytime soon, but the key shift in its legal arguments illustrates how far America has come from 2021.
A decade ago, transgender activists sought to expand legal recognition into new areas of American life, from schools to workplaces, from sports to health care. It achieved this progress by dominating the heights of American culture and attempting to dictate what shall be orthodox for the rest of us.
Today, however, disagreement with transgender ideology is no longer considered beyond the pale, and the court arguments prove it.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
