The System Worked (and That's the Problem)

A systems-level autopsy of United States v. Skrmetti — and how institutions convert moral urgency into outcomes that betray their values.

This essay was written not in cynicism but in grief — and with care. It is offered in the hope that more honest accounting of how systems behave can help us design better ones, and protect the people caught in the gap between our ideals and our institutions.

"The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does" - Stafford Beer

When the Supreme Court handed down its 6-3 decision in United States v. Skrmetti, upholding Tennessee's ban on pediatric gender-affirming care, the transgender rights movement declared it a crushing defeat. Legal experts called it a tragic strategic miscalculation. Advocates mourned the foreclosure of constitutional protections for a generation.

It’s tempting to say the system failed — but what if these outcomes weren’t design flaws, but design features?

The Noble Fuel

The story of Skrmetti begins with the most human of motivations. L.W., a teenager from Nashville, faced the prospect of unwanted male puberty with genuine terror. Her parents, witnessing their child's distress, sought medical intervention that they believed could prevent years of suffering. Chase Strangio, the ACLU lawyer who would argue the case, described his own gender-affirming surgery as literal survival: "It is survival."

These weren't abstract political positions. They were visceral human experiences of dysphoria, love, fear, and hope. The movement's urgency was grounded in real stakes: young people contemplating suicide, families facing impossible choices, a community watching its children suffer while politicians debated their right to exist.

This moral energy - authentic, desperate, and undeniably righteous - became the raw material that would feed a vast institutional machinery.

The Conversion Process

Stage One: Moral Energy to Legal Strategy

The ACLU, faced with state after state banning pediatric gender medicine, converted personal stories into constitutional arguments. L.W.'s medical needs became a test case for equal protection doctrine. Her parents' love became evidence of medical necessity. The movement's urgency became litigation timeline pressure.

This conversion was neither cynical nor accidental - it was systematic. Civil rights organizations exist to transform individual suffering into legal precedent. They are designed to take personal stories and abstract them into universal principles that courts can apply across all similar cases.

The system worked, but not as its designers intended, nor as its users expected.

Stage Two: Legal Strategy to Political Commitment

The Biden administration, elected on promises to defend LGBTQ rights, converted legal strategy into governmental policy. The Department of Justice joined the ACLU's case, transforming a civil rights lawsuit into an official position of the United States government.

Rachel Levine, Assistant Secretary for Health, pressured medical organizations to modify their guidelines to support the litigation. Scientific uncertainty was converted into political certainty. The administration's moral commitment to transgender rights became institutional momentum toward Supreme Court confrontation.

The system worked, but not as its designers intended, nor as its users expected.

Stage Three: Political Commitment to Constitutional Precedent

The Supreme Court, faced with a circuit split and federal government petition, converted the political dispute into constitutional law. Chief Justice Roberts emphasized that the decision wasn't based on "ideological opposition to transgender rights" - it was simply constitutional interpretation applied to democratically enacted legislation.

Justice Sotomayor's dissent converted moral outrage into constitutional principle, arguing for expansive civil rights protections. The Court's conservative majority converted judicial restraint into constitutional precedent limiting federal power to override state medical regulations.

The system worked, but (all together now) not as its designers intended, nor as its users expected.

What The System Produced

Each institution’s purpose can be defined by what it achieved, regardless of intent or design:

The ACLU maintained its role as defender of civil liberties, generated significant media attention and donor engagement, and created a powerful narrative of fighting injustice against overwhelming odds. Win or lose, the organization strengthened its institutional position.

The Biden Administration demonstrated commitment to progressive values, mobilized LGBTQ voters, and positioned itself as the defender of vulnerable communities. Even in defeat, it could claim moral high ground.

The Supreme Court clarified constitutional boundaries, maintained judicial legitimacy by framing the decision as law rather than ideology, and preserved institutional authority to make binding precedent from contested social questions.

Conservative Legal Movement achieved a landmark victory that validates their long-term strategy of judicial capture, created precedent that can be applied to future LGBTQ cases, and generated momentum for further restrictions.

Media Organizations produced compelling content that drove engagement, created clear heroes and villains for audience consumption, and maintained relevance by covering a culture war battleground.

What The System Couldn't Produce

Conspicuously absent from this institutional “success” story:

• Actual protection for transgender youth like L.W., who now face legal barriers to medical care
• Better medical research to resolve scientific uncertainties about pediatric gender medicine
• Sustainable political coalitions that could protect LGBTQ rights through democratic processes
• Nuanced policy solutions that balance competing concerns about child welfare, parental rights, and medical ethics
• Long-term strategic thinking about how to build durable social change

The system converted human moral energy into institutional power with remarkable efficiency. What it could not do was solve the underlying problems that generated the moral energy in the first place.

The Chaos That Looked Like Design

The streamlined conversion process described above suggests a kind of institutional determinism - as if each actor smoothly performed their systemic function according to some grand design. But the reality was far more chaotic, contested, and contingent.

This wasn't a story of seamless institutional efficiency. It was a story of warnings ignored, dissent suppressed, and strategic gambles taken against the advice of experienced voices within the very organizations making the decisions.

The Fractures Were Visible

Long-time trans activists like Dana Beyer warned that "the movement is stuck. They know we've gone too far. They know we've lost the thread." Brianna Wu called the Supreme Court strategy "one of the biggest mistakes in the history of trans activism." Even within WPATH, medical professionals like Marci Bowers faced internal backlash for publicly questioning the rigor of pediatric gender care.

Legal experts outside the movement expressed "deep apprehension that taking Tennessee to the nation's highest court had been a strategic error." In private meetings of LGBTQ legal advocacy groups, "many lawyers expected a loss almost from the moment the court agreed to hear the case."

The Scientific Consensus Was Actively Unraveling

The legal strategy depended on claims of settled medical consensus precisely when that consensus was collapsing. WPATH's own internal emails revealed that standards were "drafted and contorted to win the very political and legal disputes" they were being cited in. Authors were urged to avoid phrases like "insufficient evidence" and emphasize "medical necessity" - not for medical reasons, but as "a tool for our attorneys to use in defending access to care."

Meanwhile, systematic reviews from Finland, Sweden, and the UK were finding "very low certainty" evidence for pediatric treatments. The Cass Review declared pediatric gender medicine "an area of remarkably weak evidence." Yet the Biden administration continued to claim these treatments had "overwhelming evidence" of effectiveness.

The Internal Warnings Were Overruled

Within the Biden administration, officials worried they had been pushed "onto thin scientific ice" by their advocacy allies. Some administration lawyers privately questioned whether the ACLU had overstated the medical evidence. When Rachel Levine pressured WPATH to remove age minimums from their guidelines, it created what White House officials later saw as a political disaster - suggesting the administration supported surgery for young children.

Even Chase Strangio acknowledged the uphill battle, telling ACLU supporters the day after oral arguments: "It was always going to be an uphill battle."

The Choice Points

These weren't predetermined outcomes but contested decisions made under pressure:

• The ACLU could have waited for a case on more favorable ground, as some civil rights experts suggested
• The Biden administration could have pursued incremental regulatory wins rather than constitutional confrontation
• Medical organizations could have acknowledged scientific uncertainty while still opposing blanket bans
• Movement leaders could have heeded internal warnings about strategic overreach

Why the Warnings Were Ignored

The tragedy lies not just in systemic design but in how ideological certainty overwrote strategic wisdom. The movement had convinced itself that:

• Acknowledging scientific uncertainty would betray vulnerable youth
• Strategic patience was moral cowardice disguised as prudence
• Internal dissent provided ammunition to opponents
• The stakes were too high for anything but maximum commitment

This wasn't institutional programming - it was a form of strategic theology that made doubt feel like heresy. The system didn't force these choices; it made them feel morally inevitable when they were actually strategically optional.

The Paving Over of Internal Pluralism

Alternative strategies and logics existed within trans communities - some advocated for incremental wins, others for a reevaluation of pediatric care's epistemic foundations, and still others for movement independence from federal litigation entirely. Trans voices questioning medicalization, critiquing liberal legalism, or calling for more cautious developmental models were part of ongoing community conversations.

But these voices were systematically sidelined not by ideological rejection, but by systemic design. The litigation apparatus required unity. The media required clarity. The donor class required urgency. Major institutional platforms and social media algorithms amplified rage-bait over nuance, funding networks flowed toward established advocacy organizations rather than grassroots alternatives, and once gender-affirming care was framed as suicide prevention, any internal questioning became morally impossible.

The movement, acting rationally within these structural constraints, paved over its own internal dissent - converting pluralism into performance, and treating critique not as strategy but as heresy. The system didn't need to ban alternative voices; it simply didn't route institutional energy toward them. As the NYT article notes, more complex conversations happened "largely outside of the professional advocacy world" because the professional advocacy world had developed structural antibodies against complexity.

Institutions harvested the trans community's intellectual diversity, stripped it of its internal checks, and repurposed it as rhetorical fuel for strategies that foreclosed better outcomes. Their capacity for self-correction became a liability to be managed rather than an asset to be cultivated.

The Real Systemic Problem

The language of institutional extraction — "harvested," "stripped," "repurposed" — implies conscious malice, as if systems deliberately set out to harm the people they claim to serve. But this may miss something more unsettling: systems can produce outcomes that appear malicious without anyone intending malice.

Most actors in the Skrmetti drama probably had genuinely good intentions. ACLU lawyers believed they were fighting for justice. Biden officials believed they were protecting vulnerable children. Supreme Court justices believed they were upholding constitutional principles. Medical organizations believed they were defending evidence-based care.

Yet the aggregated result was harmful to the very people these institutions claimed to help. This raises a fundamental question about moral responsibility: Can systems be evil if no one in them is trying to do evil?

The POSIWID framework suggests we should judge systems by what they actually do, not what they claim to do or what their participants intend. By this measure, our institutions don't just reward urgency over deliberation - they create conditions where deliberation feels like complicity with harm. They don't just punish uncertainty - they make uncertainty seem morally unacceptable when lives are at stake. They don't just convert moral energy into institutional power - they make that conversion feel like the only way to help the people generating the moral energy.

The cruelty we perceive may not come from malice — but from a system that produces harm as function, not design. The result isn’t the product of evil intent, but of architecture that rewards urgency, punishes uncertainty, and redirects moral energy away from those who need it most.

The POSIWID Revelation

When we apply Stafford Beer's insight - "The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does" - to Skrmetti, a disturbing pattern emerges. The system's actual function wasn't to protect transgender youth or resolve scientific uncertainty or build sustainable social change.

The system exists to convert messy social conflicts into clean institutional outcomes that maintain organizational legitimacy - regardless of whether those outcomes actually resolve the underlying conflicts or protect vulnerable people.

These systems exist to convert human moral energy into institutional power, regardless of whether that conversion actually helps the people the moral energy was originally about.

The Fuel of Good Intentions

Perhaps most disturbing is the recognition that noble intentions aren't incidental casualties of this process - they're the essential fuel that makes it run. You can't have effective political mobilization without people who genuinely care. You can't generate litigation funding without authentic moral urgency. You can't maintain institutional legitimacy without the appearance of serving higher purposes.

The caring isn't destroyed by the system; it's what powers the system.

L.W.'s parents' love for their daughter enabled the ACLU's constitutional strategy. Strangio's personal experience of gender dysphoria legitimized the legal arguments. The movement's moral urgency justified the strategic risks. The Biden administration's commitment to civil rights authorized the governmental intervention.

At every stage, authentic human concern was converted into institutional action that ultimately harmed the people it was meant to help.

Beyond Individual Agency

This analysis doesn't excuse the strategic decisions made by movement leaders, Democratic officials, or advocacy organizations. But it suggests that focusing on individual choices misses the deeper structural problem.

Even perfect individual actors - advocates with flawless strategic judgment, politicians with unlimited courage, lawyers with supernatural tactical wisdom - would still be operating within systems designed to convert moral energy into institutional power rather than solve problems.

The question isn't why good people made bad choices. The question is why our institutions systematically channel moral urgency into outcomes that betray the values that motivated the urgency in the first place.

Living in the System

This recognition generates its own form of complicity fatigue. If the systems designed to protect vulnerable people actually harm them, and if our moral energy becomes fuel for those systems, how do we respond?

In movements structured for binary outcomes, internal critique is easily mistaken for betrayal. When the only acceptable result is victory, the only acceptable posture becomes unity — even when unity is hollow, premature, or self-defeating. But moral seriousness requires more than allegiance. It demands the courage to ask whether our strategies still serve the people they were meant to protect. Not because we've lost faith, but because we haven't.

Perhaps the answer isn't to opt out of the systems - they're too pervasive for that to be possible. Perhaps it's to recognize what the systems actually do, rather than what they claim to do, and adjust our expectations and strategies accordingly.

Maybe genuine protection for people like L.W. requires building parallel institutions designed for problem-solving rather than power accumulation. Maybe it requires accepting the limitations of legal strategies and focusing on cultural change. Maybe it requires the humility to move slowly when urgency demands speed.

Or maybe it requires mourning the gap between our moral aspirations and our institutional capabilities - and finding ways to be human-sized in systems that demand superhuman moral purity while delivering subhuman practical results.

The System Continues

As this essay is being written, the systems that produced Skrmetti continue their work. The ACLU raises funds by promising to fight the decision. Conservative organizations raise funds by celebrating it. The Biden administration's successors implement their own approaches to transgender rights. The Supreme Court prepares to hear the next case that will convert human complexity into constitutional precedent.

L.W. and thousands of young people like her navigate the aftermath of decisions made by institutions claiming to serve their interests. Their lives continue in the spaces between legal precedents and political strategies, in the gap between what our systems promise and what they actually deliver.

The system worked. The question is: worked for whom?

The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does. What our systems do, with remarkable consistency, is convert human moral energy into institutional power while maintaining the appearance of serving the people who generated that moral energy in the first place.

Until we design systems that actually do what they claim to do, we will continue to be surprised when our noblest intentions produce our most tragic outcomes.