One Gay Judge Just Told Montana Women Their Privacy Is Bigotry

Montana’s elected lawmakers passed a bill to protect women. The governor signed it. And one gay judge in Missoula struck it down—declaring, in effect, that safeguarding women’s privacy is unconstitutional bigotry.

On April 2, Judge Shane Vannatta issued a temporary restraining order against House Bill 121, a law requiring that bathrooms, locker rooms, and sleeping quarters in public facilities be based on biological sex. The bill was modest in scope, allowed commonsense exceptions for emergencies and maintenance, and affirmed what used to be obvious: that women deserve private spaces free from male intrusion. Judge Vannatta not only disagreed—he branded the law “motivated by animus,” a label typically reserved for statutes scrawled in crayon by cartoon villains.

To Vannatta, a century of legal precedent—Title IX, judicial recognition of sex-based privacy, and the mundane reality of separate facilities in schools, shelters, and prisons—amounts to “no evidence.” Biological difference, cultural consensus, and institutional custom were tossed aside in a few short pages, replaced with abstraction and ideological cant.

This isn’t an isolated opinion. In 2023, another Missoula judge, Judge Donald Molloy, blocked a ban on sex-change procedures for minors, citing “privacy.” In 2024, Vannatta himself struck down a law defining sex as male or female, calling it vague. Now, with HB 121, Montana’s judiciary continues its role as the enforcement wing of gender ideology.

The Legislature attempted to rein in this trend. In March, it passed House Bill 409 to end the judiciary’s use of the so-called “sliding scale,” a standard that let judges block laws based on speculative harm and ideological vibes. HB 409 restored the traditional four-factor test for injunctions. Vannatta sidestepped it entirely. His ruling leaned on precisely the sort of hazy risk-balancing that lawmakers had just rejected.

He also invoked the plight of intersex individuals—statistically rare, medically distinct, and legally peripheral—as reason to void protections for everyone else. It is a strange constitutional alchemy where the rare becomes representative and the norm is cast as suspect. This isn’t jurisprudence. It’s cultural signaling dressed in a robe.

There is no constitutional right to invade women’s privacy. There is no clause in the Montana Constitution requiring us to pretend that gender identity overrides biological sex. But that is the regime Judge Vannatta seeks to install. One that treats a man’s lipstick as more legally potent than a woman’s right to undress in peace.

What began as a civil rights movement—focused on fairness in employment, housing, and personal liberty—shifted with the redefinition of marriage. That moment, sold as a final destination, proved to be just one of an unlimited number of horizons.

The acronym ballooned. The demands metastasized. The trans movement didn’t arrive by accident—it was the next phase of a project that refused to stop.

There is always another struggle, another letter to add, another norm to upend, another cultural touchstone to destroy and rebuild—with lipstick. The creative destruction of meaning is not a side effect; it’s the point.

Womanhood is disassembled and rebranded as costume. Biology is erased and replaced with ideology. And now, under that ever-expanding banner, fringe activists push to rebrand pedophilia as “minor attraction,” cloaking deviance in therapeutic jargon.

The slippery slope, it turns out, was real. Conservatives were right to warn about it—and Judge Vannatta isn’t just along for the ride. He’s greasing the wheels.

Montana’s ACLU, once a defender of the right to say “God Hates Fags,” now acts as the legal arm of the gender lobby. It was the ACLU that filed the request for the temporary restraining order against HB 121—the very ruling Judge Vannatta granted. Once an organization committed to defending speech in principle, even offensive or unpopular speech, it now prosecutes dissent from gender ideology as if it were heresy.

And like so many lawsuits in this arena, the effort was fueled by out-of-state money. National donors and legal networks treat Montana not as a sovereign state, but as a proving ground. The result? Women in Billings, Kalispell, and Dillon are told what to believe by lawyers in Brooklyn. The ACLU insists women must surrender their boundaries in the name of inclusion—and they’ve found judges willing to enforce that demand.

Judge Vannatta once told reporters, “I hope people know me as a good judge who happens to be gay, and not the gay judge.” That was in 2019.

Then he blocked a women’s privacy law, struck down the legal definition of sex, and sided with the ACLU against biological reality—in service to the alphabet mafia.

With a record like that, what else would you call him?

HB 121 mirrors President Trump’s federal order restoring sex-based protections in schools and colleges—policies grounded in reality, not rhetoric. Far from extreme, they reflect a growing national consensus that women’s spaces should remain women’s spaces, and that children deserve protection from adult fantasies.

Judge Vannatta has no mandate to nullify that consensus. But he did. The Legislature spoke. The governor agreed. The people supported it. And one judge, waving the rainbow flag from the bench, vetoed them all.

This isn’t merely judicial overreach. It’s cultural capture in a black robe. And it isn’t quiet—it’s loud, well-funded, often violent, and enforced from the top down. It’s the imposition of a worldview that denies nature, distorts law, and demands submission—not through consensus, but through coercion.