By Ann Rostow—
Cruel and Unusual
In the last issue we covered several transgender stories, notably the bad bill out of Kansas, as well as the Trump administration’s continuing clampdown on prisoners.
Among other things, Kansas invalidated transgender drivers’ licenses from one day to the next (unless the gender marked the driver’s gender at birth). Usually, a law will go into effect several months down the road or even longer. And, usually, a law that would require a citizen to take bureaucratic action—like getting a day off, going to the DMV, taking a number and reading the first eight chapters of War and Peace—usually that kind of law grandfathers current license holders or gives them an extended grace period. Not this time. As for the new Trump prison rules, transgender prisoners are to be denied hormone treatment, a forced de-transition that endangers their health and devastates their souls.
Now we have court challenges against both these policies, which we’ll discuss at length after I tell you about the man with three penises. I know! I didn’t believe it either, which is why I clicked on The New York Post article headlined: “How a Man Wth 3 Penises May Have Gone His Whole Life Without Knowing About the Extra Two.”
Well, right off the bat I guessed that the guy did not have three normal-sized penises just hanging about down there with the rest of his junk. He would have noticed by now. Indeed, it turns out that the two other penises were hiding in his scrotum. The anomaly was discovered in the cadaver of a 78-year-old man, who was dissected in 2024, which makes this old news. Still, we’re hooked on the story now, right?
Apparently, there’s a condition called polyphallia that affects about one in six million births. Rarer still is triphallia. According to the Post, there was only one other such case mentioned in scientific literature between the years 1606 and 2023. (Just a quick complaint. Wouldn’t polyphallia have included triphallia within its definition? Poly means many, while here we seem to be using it to mean just one extra.)
Delving deeper into the Post story, we learn that this man’s irregularity developed in utero, when the “genital tubercle” that evolves into genitals accidentally “triplicated.”
“The urethra originally developed in the secondary penis,” explained researchers. “However, when this penis failed to develop, the urethra diverted its course and developed in the primary penis instead. The tertiary penis is a remnant of the triplicated general tubercle.” Try saying that last sentence after a triplicated Bloody Mary.
So, now we know! The article was accompanied by photos of bananas, by the way. Just so you can envision it. And if you’re wondering why this rare and invisible condition is worthy of our news column, it’s because anything remotely bizarre involving penises fits under the general category of “sort of a gay thing.”
We’re Not in My Kansas Anymore
I may have mentioned that Kansas is my home state by marriage, and the home state of my extended family. So, I am more than ashamed that the fair-minded, congenial, and somewhat centrist Sunflower State has passed a suite of vicious anti-trans bills, including a two-for-one statute that simultaneously bans transgender driving licenses and forces transgender men and women to use the publicly owned bathrooms of their sex at birth. This includes not just the capitol building or a public library, but any building that is owned by the state and may be leased to a private company.
Further, this same bill allows regular citizen who are “aggrieved” by someone in the bathroom to file some kind of civil suit. I’m not sure exactly how that would work, but it evokes the Texas anti-abortion bill that allows third party randos to sue those who facilitate an abortion for $10,000. Also, it’s not clear whether someone who is “aggrieved” that, say, a transman walked into the ladies’ room as required by law, is allowed to sue as well.
This particular bill sidled through the legislative muck like a rat snake on its way to your bedroom. Vetoed by Democratic Governor Laura Kelly, the lawmakers overrode her veto to put it into action with immediate affect late last month.
Now, two transmen from Lawrence, home of the University of Kansas, have sued a range of Kansas officials in state court, remaining anonymous in court papers. One man is an administrator at KU. The other man is a PhD student.
Both men have used public restrooms at KU and elsewhere for years and drive for work and other purposes. Kansas moved to allow citizens to change their gender markers on various documents about 15 years ago, and up until the recent Trump-led anti-trans crusades, people in the state operated with a live and let live philosophy. I believe that underneath the rot of easy prejudice, they still do. But a silent majority is of little help when a loud minority takes the legislative stage.
Filed in state court by a Kansas City attorney and the American Civil Liberties Union, the lawsuit makes six claims for relief on state constitutional grounds. Among them is the right to equal protection, free expression, personal autonomy, individual privacy, and procedural due process. The complaint also objects to the violation of the single subject rule, which—as it sounds—requires a bill to limit itself to one subject that is expressed in the title. It asks the judge to issue a declaratory judgment, dismissing the law as unconstitutional and unenforceable. Failing that, it asks for a temporary restraining order, putting the law on hold until litigation can decide its fate.
Meanwhile, these men and their fellow transgender Kansan men must now saunter into the ladies’ room, and present their masculine ID cards, marked as female, to TSA agents or bartenders or whomever, effectively outing themselves as transgender and perhaps having to provide explanations. They may be endangered as well, as you might imagine, and the same goes for the transwomen who will join the guys at the urinal and undergo a Q and A at the airline counter. And for what?
Just imagine if all of us were suddenly required to switch genders on all our documents.
Cruel and Incomprehensible
Let’s move on to the situation behind bars. As we said last week, the Trump administration announced a new prison policy for transgender inmates during a court hearing on February 19. First, in the definition page, “gender identity” is defined as “a fully internal and subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological sex and existing on an infinite continuum, that does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex.”
Right off the bat, we know that the policymakers believe gender identity is a purely imaginary status. And can I ask who decided that gender identity existed “on an infinite continuum?” Did Zeno of Elea drop into a task force meeting?
As for action points, the federal prisons will no longer offer hormone therapy, although they will “taper off” those who depend upon it at the moment, and keep an eye out for long-term users registering “acute distress.” There will also be no more “social accommodation,” so no feminine clothing or accessories for transwomen, and no butchy styles for transmen.
The new rules found their way into the courtroom of District of Columbia U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth, who has been handling multiple trans prison cases ever since Trump and company began their attacks on trans prisoners in January 2025. During the February 19 hearing, Judge Lamberth also weighed complaints of retaliation from two inmates at a prison in Butner, North Carolina, Grace Pinson and Elmer Moreno, who have issued complaints against the authorities. Lamberth ordered prison officials to show cause why they should not be held in contempt given a protective order issued earlier in Lamberth’s court.
I have tried repeatedly to clean up that last paragraph, but there are parts of these ongoing cases that elude me. I gather Judge Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, has issued several rulings putting various anti-trans prison authorities on notice and blocking discriminatory actions. Pinson and Moreno filed complaints before the February 19 policy was announced. Judge Lamberth issued a protective order, and it was after that that they were punished, with one official telling Pinson: “I don’t give a f–k what that judge says, I do what I want.” Both inmates are now in solitary confinement for reasons unclear.
Reporting on the story, Law Dork Chris Geidner tells his Substack readers that an unidentified man was twice seen sitting close to the government lawyers, who consulted him on a few occasions. Asked his name after the latest hearing, the man refused to answer, even though Geidner was wearing his press pass and identified himself as a reporter. When Geidner got on an elevator with the government crew, the mystery man decided to wait for another car and everyone else got out as well. “You are all ridiculous” is what Geidner had to say as the door closed. Good for him.
Hey, if anyone really wants to understand what’s happening in Judge Lamberth’s courtroom, sign up for Geidner’s Law Dork.
An Insubstantial Court
Speaking of Geidner, he wrote a great account of the High Court’s shadow docket ruling that bans California schools from keeping a student’s thoughts on gender identity private. A district court put an injunction on the policy, forcing teachers and administrators to report any variation from the straight and narrow to a child’s parents. I don’t know the exact parameters of the law, only that the schools no longer have the leeway to exercise judgment when it comes to a vulnerable kid, perhaps from a strict family, who might struggle with gender and look to a teacher or a school counselor for help.
A group of parents and conservative teachers sued, winning the aforementioned injunction, which was temporarily put on hold by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Now, the Supreme Court has restored the injunction on behalf of the parents, but not the teachers. Two justices, Thomas and Barrett, would have restored the teachers’ claim as well, while the three liberals would have held the injunction pending future legal action.
The interesting aspect of the case, as Geidner notes, is that this Court has diminished the idea of substantive due process, the premise that the Constitution inherently protects certain fundamental rights that are intrinsic to a concept of ordered liberty. What rights? Well, the right to privacy, for one, which, in turn, brought us Roe v Wade, Lawrence v Texas, and, of course, the marriage equality cases. You may recall that Justice Thomas argued in his concurrence overturning Roe that substantive due process should be abandoned. Just a few months ago, one of the lawyers pushing the Court to take a second look at Obergefell’s right to marry decision, also condemned substantive due process as an unconstitutional contrivance.
In other words, some of these nutcases want to get rid of a long line of legal thought, root and branch. That line includes parental rights, featured in the very case we were discussing so long ago at the beginning of this section!
You may recall that, last year, the High Court ruled that parents are owed the right to remove their small kids from part of an ad hoc reading program, where storybooks were picked at random and read aloud. A few age-appropriate gay books were included in the library, and, while precedent indicates that a parent can’t force schools to take into account incidental trespass on religious faith, the Court nonetheless ruled that the parents must be allowed to opt out of exposing a child to a gay book. (Effectively, this took the innocuous books out of the lineup completely since the readings were not scheduled in advance.)
In other words, the Court likes parental rights and substantive due process at some points but not others. As Geidner tells us (because he read all the legalize on our behalf), Justice Kagan also noted that the Court accepted only one aspect of the case against transgender healthcare for Tennessee youth last year. It heard the Equal Protection claims, but chose not to hear the arguments that were based on parental rights; this time, of course, it concerned the rights of parents to choose the care for their transgender sons and daughters.
GLBT Fortnight in Review
Published on March 12, 2026
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