Nicholas Roske, who plotted to murder Justice Brett Kavanaugh and other conservatives on the high court to prevent the overturning of Roe v. Wade, was sentenced in October to eight years in prison by U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman. The sentence shocked most people who were paying attention to the case, since federal prosecutors had urged a 30-year term. They noted Roske’s elaborate planning and preparation, his purchase of a knife, a gun, and burglary tools, and his clear intent to assassinate the justice—thwarted only by the presence of law enforcement at Kavanaugh’s home, which prompted Roske to turn himself in.

Why did Boardman do it? She explained her remarkable leniency by noting Roske’s recent change from the name under which he was charged, Nicholas, to “Sophie,” and his desire to transition to female. As the New York Times reported, “The judge also said that a lower sentence was warranted because of an executive order issued by President Trump mandating that transgender women be held at male-only federal facilities, which she said could interfere with her [sic] continuing to receive gender transition care.” Boardman added she was happy that Roske’s transition was now being accepted by his family.

That Roske’s opportunistic decision to identify as female was rewarded by a federal judge with a soft landing is another data point in a growing list of examples of how trans ideology is challenging most Americans’ notions of justice and fairness.

The tolerance of Americans for minorities of many types—religious, racial, ethnic, sexual—is a commendable part of our national character. But something significant is happening to Americans when it comes to the demands being made on them to acquiesce to the worldview of the trans movement.

Unlike earlier activists who have sought to expand acceptance of minorities, trans activists have made little effort to persuade most Americans that their cause is either rational or just. They and their apologists have denied or ignored evidence of its active harms, particularly to children and women. And they have increasingly been demanding not simply equal treatment, but special treatment.

For some time, trans activists and their supporters on the cultural left have treated their movement as a fait accompli. If Americans could accept homosexuality and, eventually, gay marriage, why not trans people? After yoking their cause to the hard-won effort to expand acceptance of gay and lesbian Americans—adding the T and the Q to the LGB—trans activists proceeded to advance their cause in new directions. Civil liberties organizations such as the ACLU made acceptance of trans ideology the new litmus test for inclusion. Educators and progressive lawmakers and the mainstream media quickly fell into line.

Even as all this was happening, most Americans harbored reasonable doubts about the claims of trans activists. When Americans raised questions or expressed concerns about the long-term health effects of administering experimental hormone treatment to children, or the unfairness of allowing men to compete against women in sports, or the violation of women’s right to privacy in bathrooms and locker rooms, they were not met with a willingness to engage and debate the merits. No, they came under attack as bigots and transphobes.

An increasing number of Americans now express greater support in polls for protections for girls and women from men who “identify as female” and insist on having access to women-only spaces such as locker rooms and bathrooms. Pew found that 66 percent of Americans now support laws and policies that “require trans athletes to compete on teams that match their sex assigned at birth” and 56 percent support a total ban on “health care professionals from providing care related to gender transitions for minors.”

Since Donald Trump was reelected president in 2024, in part by promising to ensure that law and policy reflected these majority views, the cultural left and the Democratic Party have had an opportunity to reflect on how their capture by trans ideology has affected their electoral hopes and how they might change course in the future.

Some have tried to rewrite the recent past to serve their own sense of moral certitude. New York Times podcaster Ezra Klein had on Representative Sarah McBride, a biological man who lives as a trans woman, to lament the fact that the “conversation” about trans rights has moved in the wrong direction. This is deliberately disingenuous. That supposed “conversation” has never taken place; in fact, the cultural left, boosted by Klein’s own employer, has done its best to suppress dissent and ignore legitimate concerns about safety and fairness for women and girls.

Later, in an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Klein complained, “We’ve just begun to lose that argument [about trans rights] terribly—and that has put people in real danger.” Coates, who once said that the firefighters who died on 9/11 at the World Trade Center “were not human to me,” captured the cultural left’s attitude. He saddled his moral high horse and declared, “If you think it is OK to dehumanize people, then conversation between you and me is probably not possible.” This was in the course of a discussion about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, allegedly committed by a man in a relationship with another man “in transition.” Kirk’s alleged assassin said he had taken action because he was “sick of the hate.” While noting that “a huge amount of the country, a majority of the country” believes differently from him and Coates, Klein simply declared that those are people “we would see as fundamentally and morally wrong.”

Democratic politicians have also doubled down. In her recent memoir, failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris defended her stance on using taxpayer money to pay for gender transition for prisoners and illegal immigrants: “There was no way I was going to go against my very nature and turn on transgender people,” she wrote.

Likewise, mainstream media outlets doggedly insist on conforming to trans ideology. NBC News reported the sentencing of Kavanaugh’s would-be assassin as “Woman sentenced to 8 years for attempting to assassinate Brett Kavanaugh” and referred to Roske throughout as “Sophie.” Both the Wall Street Journal and CNN also refused to correctly identify Roske’s sex, referring to him instead as the “person” who plotted to kill Kavanaugh.

And then there is the increase in the number of episodes of political violence committed by trans people, as well as more violent rhetoric by trans activists who call for armed resistance to those who oppose them. Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin is only one such person; at least two school shooters in the past couple of years have “reassigned” their own genders.

At the state and local level, officials in liberal enclaves continue to refuse to contend with the damaging consequences of their trans policies. In Fairfax County, Virginia, a male registered sex offender has repeatedly exploited the county’s transgender policies to expose himself to girls and women in the locker rooms and bathrooms of multiple public-pool facilities. Richard Cox “told Fairfax County rec center staff that he identified as a transgender woman and, per the county’s transgender policy, was permitted to use the women’s locker rooms,” the New York Post reported. Nearby Arlington County’s public schools also allow people to use the public facilities based on their “chosen gender identity,” and the county has fielded multiple complaints of men exposing themselves to women and girls there.

Americans may be tolerant, but not of radical claims that human beings can change the basic realities of human biology, and not of things that have proven actively harmful to women and children. It is not bigotry, but the trans movement’s own intransigence, that has led us to this place.

And it is not right that a man who sought to assassinate a Supreme Court justice for political reasons should get a pass from a judge in part to ease his path to a gender change. That is not tolerance; it is madness. Scandals like the Boardman sentence can turn into hinge moments in history. They can open the eyes of those who have not been paying close attention to the ways elite decision-makers can easily cease seeing reason and begin living in dangerous fantasy—and by acting as they do, they can turn their dangerous fantasies into catastrophic realities for the rest of us.

Photo: Omer Messinger/Getty Images

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