'Motivated Only By Bad Faith'
A judge in Massachusetts halted the regime's attack on trans people by pointing out the painfully obvious
The One Weird Trick to deflating fascist policy designs is to never, under any circumstances, take the policy makers at face value. That’s exactly what we got recently from a federal judge in Massachusetts who plainly called out the Trump regime’s wielding of bad faith to persecute trans folks.
The regime had dispatched its Justice Department thugs to acquire detailed medical records of transgender patients from Boston Children’s Hospital, which, to their credit, said absolutely not, we will fucking see you in court. Justice officials said they needed these records because they were oh-so-worried about the healthcare and well being of trans folks. District Judge Myong Joun rejected the department’s subpoena of the hospital in simple terms: The regime had given away the game with its targeting of trans Americans, and could not be believed in their eye-wateringly disingenuous concern about the health of trans people's gender affirming care.
After months of threatening to use government power to stop transgender people from receiving health care, Joun – in so many words – said the department's reasons for pursuing medical records was simply not believable to anyone who has paid attention to the regime's bad intentions, or the (public) plans for its many enemies.
The importance of rejecting the right’s baldfaced bad faith is why I started Bad Faith Times in 2022. It had become so nakedly, horribly obvious that these people – far-right activists, right-wing politicians, and the media members who legitimize them and provide cover for them – would pretend to believe shit they didn’t actually believe if it meant achieving their overarching goals, namely the unraveling of rights and freedoms that had been extended to people they hate and fear.
Pam Bondi, who plays attorney general on TV, said the regime was seeking all sorts of documents related to gender affirming care because the Champions of Children within the regime needed to hold accountable “medical professionals and organizations that mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology.” That they wanted to end healthcare for trans people because once saw a trans person on a national TV ad during the COVID era goes without saying, as everything today can be explained as a BLM/COVID revenge tour. Not a single person alive today could even pretend to believe Trump officials wanted these records out of concern and care for people receiving gender affirming care. The farce is total. It's insulting too.
Denny Carter
Judge Joun didn't have to dig deep for evidence that Bondi and the right-wing hacks who work for her department were using government power to persecute trans folks. Joun cited a comment from a Justice Department spokesperson who said the regime's final goal was to "stop" gender affirming care across the country, even in blue states, which the regime treats more as enemy territory to be tormented and conquered rather than a part of the republic. Joun may have stumbled across Bondi's chief of staff promising the Justice Department would use it's "tools" to end gender affirming services, “one of the greatest frauds on the American public.” Again, the digging did not need to be deep. These people's disdain for trans Americans radiates from them.
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In his rejection of the regime's attack on Boston Children's Hospital, Joun cited the regime's "disapproval of the transgender community" and the president's executive order pretending in bad faith to care about women's safety and healthcare as a cudgel against trans Americans.
Apparently, according to Joun, the Justice Department came out and said it doesn't really matter if we are arguing in bad faith about our concern for trans people and the healthcare they receive from Boston Children's Hospital. Give us the records anyway.
The Government argues that there is no freewheeling “bad faith” exception, citing cases that hold that a court need not make inquiries into the motives behind a lawful investigation. While that proposition is generally true, the Government’s argument misses the mark. Evidence of bad faith is relevant to whether an investigation is being pursued for an improper purpose.
Citing a 1986 case involving a government subpoena issued in bad faith, Joun said "if a subpoena is issued for an improper purpose, such as harassment, its enforcement constitutes an abuse of the court’s process." The government has to have a good-faith reason behind its actions, Joun said. If that's the case – and if other federal judges hold that line – the regime is going to smash into quite a few roadblocks in their attacks on people they hate and fear. There's a little legal glimmer for you.
Joun points out in his opinion that "Massachusetts does not ban GAC," a seemingly important little footnote in all this shit. "And there exists a diagnosis code for GAC for billing purposes. It is thus difficult to understand what exactly the Government is trying to investigate BCH for."
Joun seems to be well aware of Bondi's harassment campaign against hospitals and doctors who provide health services to transgender people. Subpoenas sent to hospitals that provide gender affirming care have scaled back or outright ended GAC programs for fear of political punishment from a rabidly anti-LGBTQ regime. “Frankly, I’m looking over my shoulder driving home,” said one Midwestern doctor who had to turn over a work cellphone to supervisors after their hospital received a Justice Department subpoena, according to The Washington Post.
Denny Carter
Dozens of hospitals and clinics contacted by Post reporters about the Justice Department's obsession with ending trans health services refused to talk to the out for fear of "government reprisal." This is the climate of sheer terror that blankets us today. You know and I know – and certainly decision makers at universities and hospitals know – that the federal government has been weaponized by radicals who care for no one and nothing beyond advancing a reactionary ideology that desperately seeks a return to a past that never existed, an extinguishing of progress that has confused and scared them for generations. We all fully understand today that the American government is being used as a weapon against its own people.
“The subpoena is a breathtakingly invasive government overreach,” Jennifer L. Levi, senior director of transgender and queer rights at GLAD Law, told the Post. “It’s specifically and strategically designed to intimidate health care providers and health care institutions into abandoning their patients.”
That Joun was clear-eyed about the actual purpose of the Justice Department's subpoena – that he called it out for its agonizingly obvious bad faith – is a refreshing shift from the bad-faith winking and nodding we get from far-right partisan hack judges who embrace the right's unreality to justify the green lighting of dangerous and undemocratic Republican policies.
This recognition and subsequent rejection of right-wing bad faith is what was always missing in the conservative legal attack on abortion clinics and providers. Judges would take seriously the farcical idea that Republican lawmakers and attorneys general were deeply invested in women's health, and only sought to limit or ban abortion care because the medical procedure posed a threat to our poor, precious women, our ladies for whom we care so much. Right-wing judges would play the right-wing game and say yes, I believe these Republican state lawmakers have women's best interest in mind; they therefore must be stripped of their bodily autonomy.
We can hope, for now, that the regime continues to have its bad faith thrown back in its fucking face by judges who won't play the wretched bad faith game.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social
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