A school district in Fargo, North Dakota, will conceal the gender identities of students from parents in spite of a state law prohibiting the policy.
“We will not openly out any student because of one law if we know that that’s going to cause harm to that child,”said Fargo Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Rupak Gandhi, who is backed in the decision by the school board.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican, signed the bill earlier in May that banned schools from withholding or concealing “information about a student’s transgender status from the student’s parent or legal guardian.”
Some parents expressed outrage at a school board meeting about the decision.
“The way I see it, the way I heard it is that you want to protect kids from their parents,” said one father. “Instead of encouraging everyone to talk more, you are suppressing talk.”
Another parent accused them of trying to take away authority from parents.
“I really urge you all to pay attention to what we’re setting as a precedent,” said the mother. “Whose kids are these? Do they belong to you as a school board? Do they belong to Fargo Public Schools? Or is each child’s parent ultimately the decision-maker in their family over what is allowed and what is safe for that child?”
Critics of the law said that revealing a student’s gender identity to the parents might lead to dangerous confrontations. Gandhi cited suicide statistics put out by an LGBTQ advocacy group to argue that hiding the gender identities from parents was protecting the students.
“You teach your kids that nobody who asks you to keep a secret is safe,” said another mother at the meeting. “Now, this is going the other way. This is an adult saying that they’ll keep a child’s secret.”
Here’s more about gender laws in North Dakota:
Governor of North Dakota Bans Transgender Pronouns in Government & Schools | EWTN News Nightly www.youtube.com
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Some Loudoun County, Virginia residents — including one community member who spoke out against teaching LGBT practices in local schools — has received death threats online, according to WJLA.
“It shocked me,” Loudoun County resident Mark Winn said after he learned of messages threatening his life and his livelihood from a Facebook group called “Loudoun Love Warriors.”
Winn wasn’t the only person affected by the online threats. “They went after my job,” Scott Mineo, a Loudoun County parent said. “That happened in early February. They referred me to the FBI, IRS, and DHS all because they don’t like my opinion.”
“They’re probably going to sit back and celebrate the fact that I’m unemployed,” Mineo told WJLA. “I’m having a hard time finding a job. And who knows what’s next with the IRS and the FBI? I don’t know. But they’ve done more than just put me out of a job. It’s impacting my family, my kids.”
“It shocked me,” Loudoun County resident Mark Winn said after he learned of messages threatening his life and his livelihood from a Facebook group called “Loudoun Love Warriors.” (Screenshot / WJLA)
Some of the angry and threatening comments in the “Loudoun Love Warriors” group included ones like these, according to WJLA.
“Lives needs to be ruined beyond repair,” read one comment.
“Lets actually destroy them. Grind them,” another person wrote.
“If he had said that s— about black kids or autistic kids I would shoot him,” someone else posted in the group.
The “Loudoun Love Warriors” group includes people who appear to be associated with Loudoun County Commonwealth’s Attorney Buta Biberaj, County Supervisor Juli Briskman, School Board Chair Ian Serotkin, school board member Brenda Sheridan, school board member Atoosa Reaser, school board member Erika Ogedegbe, school board candidate Anne Donohue, sheriff candidate Craig Buckley, and Chair Phyllis Randall. None of these elected officials personally made any threats.
A spokesperson for the Loudoun County Public Schools directed Fox News Digital to statements that some Loudoun County officials have made in public regarding the controversy.
“Violent threats are never acceptable and at times can be criminal. I personally condemn all violent language and my office will be investigating whether a crime was committed. Due to the possibility of a criminal investigation, I can not comment further at this time,” Loudoun County Commonwealth’s Attorney Buta Biberaj said in response to the news.
Loudoun County Commonwealth’s Attorney Buta Biberaj told WJLA that she condemns “all violent language” and that her office “will be investigating whether a crime was committed.” (FOX 5)
Winn and other Loudoun County community members were attacked after they criticized local schools.
Winn said at a school board meeting back in Dec. 2022 that “[LGBT] behaviors should never have been promoted, taught, or encouraged in the schools that you oversee,” before paraphrasing Jesus in the Gospels.
“If any man or woman causes one of these little ones to stumble, it would be better for [them] if a millstone to be put around your neck and thrown into the lake,” Winn said, adding, “Get back to reading, writing and arithmetic and quit grooming and pimping.”
At the time, Winn’s comments provoked 19-year-old Loudoun County community organizer Andrew Pihonak to start a petition banning “hate speech” at future school board meetings.
Pihonak’s petitiongained nearly 1,000 signatures and says statements like Winn’s “empower people to commit acts of violence” against the LGBTQ+ community.
“Platforming hate speech like this empowers people to commit acts of violence against oppressed groups of people, and causes people like me in the LGBTQIA+ community to be bullied (often into suicidal ideation or suicide), tortured, and killed. I demand policy in the School Board that requires them to cut off a person speaking during public comment the second hate speech is spoken,” it concluded.
Fox News’ Kristine Parks contributed to this report.
Jeffrey Clark is an associate editor for Fox News Digital. He has previously served as a speechwriter for a cabinet secretary and as a Fulbright teacher in South Korea. Jeffrey graduated from the University of Iowa in 2019 with a degree in English and History.
A far-left transgender reporter was mocked and ridiculed after she inadvertently proved critics of Chelsea Clinton right after she criticized restrictions on controversial LGBTQ books in public schools. Clinton waded into the contentious debate over inappropriate books about gender and sexuality in libraries meant for children, and a reporter from Media Matters for America came to her rescue.
“Over 50% of the attempted book bans last year involved books with LGBTQ+ characters & themes. Books are a vital way that children, adolescents and adults learn about themselves and our world. Bans such as these are nothing but harmful,” Clinton tweeted with an article about the book restrictions.
Over 50% of the attempted book bans last year involved books with LGBTQ+ characters & themes. Books are a vital way that children, adolescents and adults learn about themselves and our world. Bans such as these are nothing but harmful: https://t.co/eblRSU7tZk
In the thumbnail of the image was prominently displayed a controversial book entitled, “Gender Queer,” a book that has been targeted by those opposing inappropriate LGBTQ books for children. The book is described in the NBC News article as a chronicle of “nonbinary author Maia Kobabe’s journey of self-identity,” but it doesn’t mention a very graphic scene of oral sex in the book, a graphic novel.
The article does quote Kobabe as saying that the book’s message is “vital” and “lifesaving” for some children, even though Kobabe admits that some parts are not appropriate for grade school children. When Clinton was called out by Seth Dillon of the Babylon Bee, the Media Matters LGBTQ director reflexively defended her.
“Chelsea Clinton has come out in favor of porn for kids,” tweeted Dillon.
“Weird way to tell us you’re yanking it to children’s books, Seth,” responded Ari Drennen.
Dillon then posted a page of the very graphic sexual imagery from the book that Chelsea Clinton was supporting, and Drennen called it out for what it was.
“Imagine how sick and depraved you have to be to call this a children’s book,” replied Dillon.
“Hey Seth I think you meant this for my DMs, you just sent me an unsolicited drawing of a blowjob,” Drennen tweeted.
“So, your position is that you’re sexually harassing another man and you think *that* will go over better with your audience? Stop sending me this stuff Seth, it’s creepy,” Drennen said in another tweet.
In 2021, the book was targeted by critics after it was found at the library of the Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia. The author defended the book by citing ancient Greek poetry and pottery art.
Here’s more about the LGBTQ book controversy:
11-Year-Old SILENCES School Board As He Reads From DISTURBING Book Found In School Library www.youtube.com
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We all know what perverts like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein think of young people. But did you know Bill Gates in among the sickest of the perverts in the land of leftists?
Several stories link Gates with Epstein, as do several mutual “friends,” or as I would call them, victims. Gates’ efforts in preserving eugenics is racist, infantile, and disturbing to say the least. Truly, I wasn’t sure Gates could do much worse than work towards “breeding the black” out of people. But I was wrong. This is definitely worse.
The evil on the left is so grotesque that those of us who have been smeared, defamed, libeled because of our opposition wear our ruin as a badge of honor. When the history books are written, we fought for the good against insurmountable evil.
Washington and California have both moved to allow state-sanctioned kidnapping to help confused kids transition
The UN says that minors can now consent to sex
Big Medicine advocates for genital mutilation of underage youth
Planned Parenthood ripped after approving ‘woke’ sex education
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donates millions annually to a nongovernmental organization which claims that children are born sexual and should learn about “commercial sex work” under 10 years of age.
The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) – a separate entity from the U.S. nonprofit – wields significant influence on global sex education. The NGO comprises 120 independent organizations in over 146 countries and has received – including its European network – over $80M from Gates. Other significant donors included the World Health Organization.
A toolkit released in 2017 showed an insight into how the NGO teaches sex education to children around the globe.
“Sexual activity may be part of different types of relationships, including dating, marriage or commercial sex work, among others,” IPPF said about children under 10 should be taught, which was first flagged by Nicole Solas of the Independent Women’s Forum.
Children under 10 should also be told “As you grow up, you might start to be interested in people with diverse gender identities,” the toolkit said. Bill Gates funded an organization which claimed children are born sexual.
The IPPF suggested in multiple instances that children are born sexual.
Children under 10 should be taught that “Sexuality is a part of you from the moment you are born. Your sexuality develops and changes throughout your life.”
“[S]ex positivity acknowledges that human beings, including adolescents and young people, are autonomous sexual beings.”
Sex educators, according to the NGO, should have an “Understanding of young people as sexual beings.”
A House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Wednesday will feature the testimony from a whistleblower who will warn lawmakers that the U.S. has become the “middleman” in a multi-billion dollar migrant child trafficking operation at the border.
The hearing, “The Biden Border Crisis: Exploitation of Unaccompanied Alien Children,” will be held by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security and Enforcement and will examine the surge in unaccompanied children (UACs) at the southern border.
According to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics, the number of UACs who came to the border shot up from 33,239 in FY2020 to over 146,000 in FY 2021 and 152,000 in FY 2022. So far in FY 2023 there have been over 70,000 encounters of unaccompanied children.
When child migrants are encountered at the border, they are transferred into the custody of Health and Human Services (HHS) and then united with a sponsor — typically a parent or family member already in the U.S.
But the Biden administration has been rocked by a number of reports that officials have been unable to make contact with over 85,000 child migrants, and more recently that administration officials ignored signs of “explosive” growth in child labor. A number have been forced into indentured servitude to pay back smugglers and have worked in dire conditions.
Thank God for the Whistleblowers!
Otherwise, we might never know what our administration is willing to ignore.
The Wednesday hearing will hear from three witnesses: Tara Lee Rodas, a whistleblower and former employee at HHS; Sheena Rodriguez, founder and president of Alliance for a Safe Texas; and Jessica Vaughn, director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies.
Rodas will warn of a problem that predates the administration, but that has increased significantly during the recent migrant crisis, according to a copy of her written testimony obtained by Fox News Digital.
“Today, children will work overnight shifts at slaughterhouses, factories, restaurants to pay their debts to smugglers and traffickers. Today, children will be sold for sex,” she will say. “Today, children will call a hotline to report they are being abused, neglected, and trafficked. For nearly a decade, unaccompanied children have been suffering in the shadows.”
She will talk about her volunteering at an emergency intake site in California to help HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) identify sponsors for minors who have come across the border.
“I thought I was going to help place children in loving homes. Instead, I discovered that children are being trafficked through a sophisticated network that begins with being recruited in their home country, smuggled to the U.S. border, and ends when ORR delivers a child to a sponsor – some sponsors are criminals and traffickers and members of Transnational Criminal Organizations. Some sponsors view children as commodities and assets to be used for earning income – this is why we are witnessing an explosion of labor trafficking,” she will say.
“Whether intentional or not, it can be argued that the U.S. Government has become the middleman in a large scale, multi-billion-dollar, child trafficking operation run by bad actors seeking to profit off the lives of children.”
These are real-life, modern day stories, happening right here, right now, under OUR watch.
This is not okay. Yet, this is what the Biden Administration is busy allowing, while pretending we have a worthy president deserving of a second term.
This right here should be the only thing we need to prove Biden doesn’t belong in public service. Of course, why would we expect more from a man that drove his daughter to addiction after their uncomfortable shower sessions together?
Rodriguez, of the Alliance for a Safe Texas, will share her experiences at the border encountering unaccompanied children, including teenage boys who she said told her that cartel cooperatives transported children through Mexico and held them at warehouses with armed guards. She will also call for the investigation of federal agencies responsible and for the ending of releasing migrants to sponsors.
“We can no longer turn a blind eye and pretend this isn’t happening. Congress has the power to stop this, which is why I am calling on you to do what is right,” her testimony says.
Vaughn will call too for congressional action, including the ending of legal loopholes that she says force the government to “to operate a massive catch and release program for illegally-arriving alien children.”
“They have been carelessly funneled through the custody of U.S. government agencies and contractors, and handed off to very lightly vetted sponsors (who are usually also here illegally) in our communities without regard to their safety and well-being,” she will say. “There is no question that the system for processing minors who cross illegally is dysfunctional, and has been for some time, and needs to be fixed.”
Wow. It’s only April, but I think we just got the understatement of the year.
Image source: Middleborough Educational Television YouTube channel screenshot
A middle school student who says he was sent home for wearing a T-shirt that said “there are only two genders,” bravely, brilliantly, and bluntly addressed the matter at a Middleborough Public Schools Committee meeting.
“I never thought that the shirt I wore to school … would lead me to speak with you today,” 12-year-old Liam Morrison said, having lowered the microphone to deliver his statement.
Young Liam is a seventh-grader at Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts, Fox News Digital reported.
Liam explained that he was taken out of gym class in March for what turned out to be a “very uncomfortable talk.” He said two adults told him the shirt he was wearing was making some people feel “unsafe” and that he would have to remove it to return to class.
The preteen said that though he was told he was not in trouble, it felt like he was.
When he said he did not want to remove his shirt, school officials called his father to pick him up, according to Liam’s account.
“Thankfully, my dad supported my decisions,” Liam said.
“What did my shirt say? Five simple words: There are only two genders. Nothing harmful, nothing threatening. Just a statement I believe to be a fact.”
Then Liam got to the heart of the matter, and the young, bespectacled gentleman held nothing back.
“I was told that my shirt was ‘targeting a protected class.’ Who is this protected class? Are their feelings more important than my rights?”
Liam said he didn’t complain when he saw diversity posters and pride flags in the school “because others have rights to their beliefs just as I do.”
Liam said no students or staff told him they were bothered by what he was wearing. To the contrary, he said. Some students said they supported him and wanted a similar T-shirt.
Despite being told his shirt was a “disruption to learning,” Liam said no one stormed out of class or burst into tears.
“I experience disruptions to my learning every day. Kids acting out in class are a disruption, yet nothing is done,” Liam said. “Why do rules apply to one but not another?”
“I feel like these adults were telling me it wasn’t OK for me to have an opposing view.“
“Their arguments were weak, in my opinion,” Liam said, briefly looking up from his papers, directing his gaze at the adults on stage.
“I have learned a lot in this experience. … I learned that adults don’t always do the right thing or make the right decisions.”
“I know I have the right to wear a shirt with those five words. Even at 12 years old, I have my own political opinions and I have a right to express those opinions, even at school. This right is called the First Amendment to the Constitution.”
“I hope you will speak up for the rest of us so we can express ourselves without being pulled out of class,” Liam concluded, thanking the committee for its time.
Watch 12-year-old Liam Morrison address the Middleborough Public Schools Committee meeting starting at 09:40 below.
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Colorado Democrat Gov. Jared Polis signed a new law last week to circumvent red-state bans on abortion and transgender treatments.
While Republican lawmakers ramp up protections for vulnerable teens caught in America’s contemporary transgender craze, Polis aims to make Colorado a destination for impressionable minors to seek permanent procedures from puberty blockers to surgery.
“Here in Colorado, we value individual freedoms, and we stand up to protect them,” Polis said at the bill’s signing ceremony. “I’m excited by the work of advocates and legislators to further Colorado’s reputation as a beacon of freedom, a beacon of choice, a beacon of individuality where we live on our own terms.”
Senate Bill 23-188, signed into law Friday, opens the door for “trans tourism” in the state, allowing minors to seek abortions or “gender-affirming health care services.” In other words, teens seduced by transgender ideology in Kansas, where lawmakers are preparing to ban interventions for minors, may travel to Colorado for sterilizing procedures under Polis’s protection with parental consent. Similar legislation is under consideration in Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas.
Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed a bill to bar underage transgender surgeries earlier this year but included provisions in the legislation to make the new law toothless.
The Colorado Senate bill signed last week, titled “Protections For Accessing Reproductive Health Care,” also allows minors to abort pregnancies without parental consent.
The new law protects people seeking abortions and transgender interventions who travel to Colorado by prohibiting state or local agencies from penalizing complicit medical providers. The legislation also nullifies extradition requests in other states where such procedures are banned and refuses to recognize out-of-state criminal or civil proceedings relating to these procedures. Previously, Colorado already established itself as a go-to destination for women seeking abortions from Texas and Oklahoma, where it is banned.
While policymakers in other blue states already passed laws to establish their states as abortion “safe havens,” Colorado’s protections for transgender minors seeking life-altering surgeries is a first-of-its-kind. The new law comes as transgender surgeries are expected to become a $5 billion-dollar industry by the end of the decade, according to a report last year from Grand View Research.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Netflix subscriptions. Marriage. Terms of service agreements. Text messages. Social media posts. Pregnancy. Amazon purchases. Aging.
According to our consumerist social catechism, each of these actions is reversible. Click “cancel.” Get a divorce. Dig through your privacy settings and revoke permissions (even though you know you’re never going to). Unsend. Delete. Get an abortion. Return for free with a preprinted label. Get plastic surgery.
For young people raised in this “Ctrl-Z” world, unfamiliarity with the irreversible breeds suspicion, which translates to avoiding commitments. It’s no surprise few of my generational peers are getting married and having kids — although the culture tells us those commitments are still changeable, they’re actually messy to get out of and necessarily close other doors.
We are taught to believe limitations are inherently oppressive and therefore bad. Keeping your options open, on the other hand, is liberating and therefore desirable.
Some limitations, like those of becoming a parent, we choose to enter into and therefore can choose to avoid — which young people increasingly do. Other limitations are innate and unalterable. But to the restriction-averse, that inescapable nature makes those even more threatening. One of those fearsomely unchangeable limits is our biology: We are afraid to be limited by our natural sex.
Here’s how Amelia Blackney, a 13-year-old girl who decided to start going by the plural pronouns “they/them” and identifying as “non-binary,” explained her decision to CNN:
That way it’s like I’m not a part of any gender or I can be both genders at the same time. My pronouns now put me at a place where I can decide between different genders. That feels right.
If limitations are to be avoided — or overthrown — why would you tie yourself down to being either a girl or a boy? Why limit your prospects to growing up to be either a man or a woman? If you could be gender-fluid, all doors remain open to you. You don’t have to choose to be a she or a he, you can be they! Your options become unlimited. Subscription to being a woman, canceled.
Another child, 14-year-old Sylvia Chesak, described how she was “uncomfortable” thinking of herself as “just” a “she,” and chose to use “any pronouns” as a result.
These children, or the adults who egg them on, revolt against the sex they say was “assigned” in infancy. The nonsense language of “assigned at birth” doesn’t only make the wrong assumption that sex is nonexistent until it’s decreed by a doctor. It also makes the subtle implication that by doing the “assigning,” a doctor is imposing a category — a limit — on an infant that is inherently restrictive and must be abolished. Physical limitations like a man’s inability to get pregnant don’t matter, just like the physical limitations of a kid with Coke-bottle glasses who wants to become a pilot don’t matter to the adults telling him he can “be whatever he wants to be.”
One mother wrote in Time magazine about choosing not to call her child, named Zoomer, either a boy or a girl because she didn’t want to impose the “chains” and “restrictions of the gender binary.” Even after her child expressed a desire to be treated as a particular sex, the woman insisted on calling her child “they” in the article.
Elsewhere, she says, “The aim isn’t to create a genderless world; it’s to contribute to a genderfull one.” In other words, rejecting the sex binary isn’t about erasing sexuality, but removing all of its categorical limits.
A Swedish mother similarly explained that she refused to acknowledge her child’s sex “just as I don’t want to decide what they grow up to do…”
Telling children they can be and do “anything” helped create a generation petrified of narrowing their own options. They date around indefinitely to keep options open in case something better comes along. In the same way, kids learn to keep open the “option” of being a boy or a girl or a xe. Your natural sex is bad because it limits your possibilities.
Of course, your possibilities become far more limited when a doctor chops off your breasts or genitals or pumps you with hormones that may permanently alter your voice and body and keep you from ever having children. But just examine the messaging those hormones are marketed by: They’re reversible. You can just stop taking them. Here’s what Google would tell a curious teen, though the fine print is far more complicated than the highlighted answer suggests:
The messaging for puberty blockers is even more overt. Delay puberty, St. Louis Children’s Hospital tells kids, if you want “more time to explore [your] options.” What teen wouldn’t want that?
The reality is, of course, that some limits are outside our control. As for the limits we choose by the commitments we make, it’s far more paralyzing to artificially keep every option open than to choose wisely and live within the natural limitations of an ordered life. For kids getting transed into oblivion, that paralysis may be literal. But for all of us, refusing to commit to decisions worthy of our commitment will leave us lonely, exhausted, and bitter. Eventually, people who don’t want to limit their “options” by getting married usually realize one day that they don’t like any of the options left. Those who never put down roots typically end up adrift.
Thankfully, accepting our finitude is liberating. By recognizing the divine order that confines us, we are freed from struggling against it, and freed to do well in the things that are within our power.
In that latter realm, we have the gift of making choices and commitments, not so that we will avoid ever making them, but so that we may choose what is good. From choosing to work hard, to be loyal friends, to profess our faith, to raise children, to be faithful to our spouses, good choices place obligations on us, many of which are permanent. The fulfillment of those obligations enriches our lives, offering a depth of meaning and satisfaction that “keeping our options open” can never provide.
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
From high interaction with homeschooled families and graduates in multiple environments, professional and personal, I’ve definitely noticed differences.
Homeschooling rose to 1 in 10 American kids in 2021 due to lockdowns, and the number has remained high even as lockdowns abated. Most families who began homeschooling due to lockdowns say they don’t plan to go back.
Despite the steady increase in homeschooling since its revival in the 1980s, families who choose this way of raising their children often face fearful responses from family and friends. Chief among the concerns is what people often call “socialization.” Sometimes, they mean, “Will your kids have any friends?” Other times, they mean, “Will your kids understand social cues and how to get along with normies?”
Yes, you can find homeschooling kids who dress oddly and don’t know how to carry on a basic conversation. But you can find people like that anywhere. As anyone who attended a public school can confirm, people who can’t make eye contact and are otherwise antisocial persist in that environment, too.
From high interaction with homeschooled families and graduates in multiple environments, professional and personal, I’ve definitely noticed differences. On balance, these differences tend to favor homeschoolers. Here are just seven I’ve observed that are also often obtainable in small schools.
1. Independent Thinking
It’s common for the “good” kids in public school to work hard to learn what the teacher wants and give it to her. They have a tendency to become compliers. “Just tell me what you want, and I’ll do it.”
Now, homeschooled kids often also want to please Mom and Dad, but the ability to negotiate with a parent in ways one can’t with a teacher often encourages mental independence. They have freedom to read widely and extra free time in which to develop and personalize their sense of self. They also tend to get more long conversations with their parents because of homeschooling’s extremely small class sizes.
All these cultivate independent habits of thought. They teach people to develop their interests and personalities, and to follow arguments all the way to their conclusions. These things also teach students to spend time comparing and contrasting ideas for real, in a way that shapes one’s soul for life, not as a human version of ChatGPT.
Homeschoolers are also used to being unusual. They’re used to being asked questions like, “Do you have any friends?” and given the cold shoulder by public-school kids at events like sports and family gatherings.
Sometimes this turns a homeschooled kid desperate and makes him more peer-dependent, especially if he’s a sociable child and doesn’t spend enough time with friends. So he’s desperate for friends and therefore works overly hard to conform to negative peer pressure. I’ve seen this also with conservative kids. They accept peers’ or culture’s shaming and rejection of their social differences and therefore can more easily turn into antagonists against their own group.
Thus we have entities like Homeschoolers Anonymous, which argues that because some homeschooling families are abusive, homeschooling rather than the family is the problem. (You don’t hear that same argument about public schooling, which has a far higher rate of child abuse than homeschooling does. But I digress.)
If parents observe and address these social dynamics, mostly by helping their children find friends who build them up instead of savage their family’s choices, homeschoolers do tend to emerge into adulthood as independent thinkers. They tend to be quite comfortable with nonconformity, bringing new perspectives into their communities. This strengthens our society, especially now, as political correctness is metastasizing into a totalitarian social credit system.
2. More Practice with Multi-Age Relationships
Since they are so strongly family-oriented, homeschoolers break out of our society’s artificial, factory-school model of corralling people with those who happen to be born in the same calendar year. Homeschooled kids are far more comfortable making friends with anyone, not just those their exact same age.
They drop by for tea at the old lady’s down the block (true story). Bigger kids play comfortably with babies and toddlers. They know how because they have little siblings and cousins they are around more often because they’re not in school all day. This makes many homeschoolers even more socially capable than peers who falsely believe that one can only be friends with a person who looks and acts just like them. It expands their horizons and their relationship skills.
Freedom from same-age exclusivity has academic benefits as well as social benefits. Everyone understands that no person is exactly mentally on track with every other person his age. An 8-year-old may be strong in math but weak in spelling, compared to those of his age. Homeschooling allows the flexibility to meet children academically outside of the “average” peer.
Being too far ahead of one’s class makes bright kids bored, and being too far behind his class makes struggling students despair. Teaching right at a person’s actual level instead of his artificially imposed level is the most effective instruction possible.
3. More Prosocial Habits and Expectations
For decades, parents have moved to the suburbs to raise their kids because they didn’t want their children in environments shaped by poverty. As Thomas Sowell and others have chronicled, America’s urban and rural poor share many antisocial behaviors that keep them down and drag others with them. These include higher rates of violence and nonmarital sex and other coarse and life-damaging behavior such as openly disrespecting authority.
Homeschooling takes the protection of moving to the suburbs a step further. That’s an increasingly prudent step as our entire culture seems hell-bent on downward mobility.
Simply the widespread adoption of smartphones for children immediately degrades entire social ecosystems such as schools, because children are too immature to handle attention-destroying notifications and open internet access. Ten-year-old girls don’t need to see pornographic drawings and get propositioned to join a threesome because their badly parented peers watch YouTube videos of lesbian sex (true stories — from the suburbs).
In an environment like this, sometimes the only possible way to ensure your child actually has a childhood is to homeschool. It would be better if our society decided to protect children from living in social cesspools like this, but most of our parents and institutions have so far refused. That leaves it up to sane parents and churches. Homeschooling is one way to allow children an innocent childhood so they encounter this world’s violence and sex when they are ready.
4. Better Ability to Choose Friends
It’s always been prudent to select one’s companions carefully. Friends strongly affect who you are. Families who pay $50,000 a year for so-called “elite” private schools and then send their children to morally bankrupt Ivies know this. Their values are degraded, but the underlying impetus is correct: One’s companions can determine the course of one’s entire life. This is true for adults and even more so for children.
The thing about public school is that anyone can and does go there. We don’t live in the 1950s, when one could more reliably count on both the average parent and most institutions to be sane and responsible.
Today’s average parent is checked out and lets his kids be mentored by creepy strangers on the internet and other kids who are mentored by creepy strangers on the internet. Today’s average institution is run by apathetic box-checkers whose lack of moral fiber tends to let antisocial people and woke inmates turn everything into an asylum.
This means parents today can’t count on most other people to encourage their families toward the good. Sending children to public school (and allowing them unsupervised internet access) not only prevents parents from carefully selecting their children’s major influences but also ensures their impressionable children will repeatedly encounter sick perversions they are too immature to handle.
Homeschooling (and private schooling) families have far greater control over their companions than do those who allow our degraded public square to mess with their kids’ minds, and therefore can more intentionally manage this key determinant of a family’s character.
5. Better Family Relationships
A complaint I often hear about homeschooling that unintentionally reveals its speaker’s lack of character is: “I just couldn’t be with my kids all day long!” Parents shouldn’t avoid helping their kids mature by farming out their parenting to others. Others don’t do as good a job of it as parents will. It’s also an abdication of their responsibility that has bad consequences for them, their children, their community, and all of society.
Yes, children are annoying. Every person is annoying sometimes. Mature adults realize we’re also annoying sometimes and that a currently annoying person will usually get over it. This isn’t a children problem, it’s a people problem.
Yes, children can be more directly annoying than adults because they are more actively driven by their passions. That’s one top characteristic of immaturity. Yet kids’ natural immaturity isn’t worse because it’s more obvious than most adults’.
When an adult seeks arousal, he might use internet porn, blast loud music in public spaces, or zone out on a video game. A child seeking arousal might wander around whistling or run in circles around the kitchen. He might bang the same song on the piano 20 times a day or tease his sister 30 times just to get a reaction (guess how I came up with these examples).
But Jordan Peterson is right that kids are mostly as annoying as their parents allow them to be. Some parents allow their children to maintain habits of complaining, whining, arguing with parents when they say no, teasing siblings, or fighting. Other parents build and enforce appropriate behavior boundaries in their family life.
By putting family members in more constant direct contact with each other, homeschooling gives parents increased opportunities for character building and habit formation. If parents do this work, it definitely pays off. It also tends to pay off both short- and long-term.
Children who are required by active parents to daily practice self-discipline tend to become better adults — better fellow citizens, better parents, better neighbors, mothers, and fathers. Unlike unparented children, they are also mostly a pleasure to be around — just like adults.
6. More Creative Hobbies and Entrepreneurial Instincts
Because they don’t have to waste so much time being controlled as part of a herd in large classes and schools, homeschoolers tend to have a lot more free time that they don’t spend watching TV. This makes homeschoolers extremely creative and active people, on average, which lends itself to entrepreneurial instincts.
With all the free time they gain from not having to move at a pace constrained by 22 other people, homeschoolers tend to develop strong hobbies and skills. The average homeschooler is involved in more than five community activities such as piano lessons, scouts, and karate, and is more likely to volunteer than public-schooled kids, according to studies.
Cultivating personal interests is not only good in itself, but it also leads to other goods, such as a penchant for social and economic entrepreneurship. Homeschooled students are used to being self-directed and managing their own time and interests. That makes them more likely to develop their own creative pursuits and I think explains why there are so many homeschooling families running high-traffic channels on YouTube.
7. A More Individual Personality
Some combination of the high personalization and high control of one’s time in homeschooling, as well as the lack of personality flattening that comes from harsh peer pressure, seems to make homeschoolers often very much more developed individuals. This reality is a bit ineffable, partly because it’s so varied in its expression.
While most people seem to come out of public schools slotted into some mass marketing consumer profile — punk, valedictorian, LGBT, SJW, jock, geek, nerd, or some other role defined and assigned by corporate conglomerates — homeschoolers tend not to fit into these kinds of boxes very easily.
Partly I think it’s because they have less awareness that these boxes even exist, because of their lower exposure to mass media through both screens and peers. Partly I think it arises out of their years of freedom to deeply explore nooks and crannies of human existence that aren’t part of mass culture, like Victorian clothing, historical re-enactment replicas, or Scottish literature.
Sometimes this reality manifests in slight oddities, like wearing nonstandard clothing, taking longer pauses in a conversation (or being more likely to monologue at people), knowing swing and folk dance steps, and not getting pop culture references. But I prefer these kinds of oddities to encountering a bearded man in a dress or to hearing some crappy song blare out of someone’s speakers that sounds essentially like every other crappy song that has blared out of speakers since the 1960s.
This also makes homeschoolers really interesting people to talk to. They have actual interests in their lives and unusual ways of seeing the world because more of their ideas haven’t come to them via the dreary mass marketing that in our society badly substitutes for legitimate culture. So no, often homeschoolers don’t act like zombies who download their brains from the corporate cloud, but that’s a good thing.
Biden is putting the final nail in the coffin of Title IX for women’s sports.
Under President Joe Biden’s pernicious proposed rule announced last week, female athletes will no longer have federal protection against sex discrimination in the women’s category of sport. From elementary through middle school, teams designated for girls only are essentially banned. For policies at the high school and college levels, female athletes will have to prove they are at an unfair disadvantage to keep any trans-identifying male off the team and out of their locker rooms.
Despite what Biden claims, Title IX was never about “fairness” as the controlling standard. From its inception until now, Title IX protection has always been about equal opportunity for female student-athletes denied the same benefits as their male peers on the basis of our natural sex.
Biden will have none of that. Men are the new women. Transgender identity is the new sex. Real women had better make way for any men claiming our identity. Males declaring “womanhood” have the upper hand in civil rights claims under his proposal. A male’s feminine feelings and desire for sports participation are prioritized over any psychological turmoil foisted on female athletes suffering the injustice. The disadvantage in sports goes one way, keeping female athletes off the playing field and faced with sexual intimidation in the locker room.
When Biden finalizes these rules, Title IX will be Title None, offering none of the equal opportunity assurances this landmark civil rights law has guaranteed women and girls for the past 50 years.
The perverse rendering of Title IX categorizes a trans-identifying male as a female athlete. Lia Thomas, who swam for three years on the University of Pennsylvania men’s team as Will Thomas, is now “female.” Under Biden’s rules, any “sex-related criteria,” such as having a penis, has nothing to do with defining who can be on a female team.
President Has Not Found Middle Ground
The president hasn’t found a “middle ground,” as some are claiming. Biden is caught in the snare of a binary sex reality of XX and XY chromosomes that no human can re-construct. Title IX requires male and female teams; therefore, all participants are either male or female. Any biology student understands that even a lifetime of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and mutilating surgeries that try to mimic the body parts of women will never make a male into a female.
Nevertheless, Biden world wants you to think it is possible to have “fairness” in women’s sports by declaring “sex-related criteria” are merely secondary to being a woman athlete. Let’s be real, no Lia Thomas menstruates, and any Lia Thomas can manipulate performance in competition to claim entry would be “fair.”
Women Betrayed
Sadly, some “women’s organizations” such as Champion Women, the Women’s Sports Foundation, and the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, who claim to represent the interests of female athletes, are now betraying us. They’ve surrendered our status as women — naturally born human females — to the ideology of a trans-crazed culture declaring that any man can make a better female athlete in women’s sports, so long as it is “fair.”
If every women’s team has a Lia Thomas or two, that’s all it would take to make it fair. I bet some coaches are already scouting, salivating at the chance to bring their teams from the bottom of the pack to near the top of the conference, like UPenn did with Thomas on the team.
Liberated women need to wise up to the insidious sex discrimination that these so-called women’s sports organizations are condoning. They are betraying your dignity and equal opportunity under federal law. There is no middle ground in a federal mandate that sidelines female athletes in their own sports — at any age, sport, or level of competition. You might as well scrap sex-separated sports altogether — which is what Biden’s rule is apt to force many to do.
Title IX is Title None under this perverted version of sex discrimination. It’s the reason 20 states and counting have already passed protections for female athletes, keeping girls’ sports for girls only — all of which could be tossed out under Biden’s Title IX policy, throwing women and girls under the bus.
Until then, you have the chance to weigh in and oppose Biden’s Title None rule. Any self-respecting woman unwilling to sacrifice our status on the altar of trans-madness and any father who cares about his daughter’s opportunities should make their voices heard.
Doreen Denny is senior advisor to Concerned Women for America, the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization.
Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, is the largest individual creator on YouTube. His main channel has 144 million subscribers. His most popular video, a recreation of the Netflix hit “Squid Game,” has amassed an astonishing 401 million views. He is admired for his generous charity work and trusted by millions of parents worldwide, who allow their children to watch his kid-focused videos that consist of pranks, over-the-top challenges, and reaction videos.
However, an emerging controversy involving one of his closest friends and longtime co-creator Chris Tyson — who has recently come out as being on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) — is threatening his brand. Millions of young children are being groomed into uncritically accepting transgenderism and trans activism at an impressionable age, unbeknown to many parents who allow them to watch MrBeast videos unsupervised.
My two older kids — aged 7 and 9 — have been fans of MrBeast for some time. The content was wholesome and we’ve had some wonderful conversations about giving back while watching some of his charity videos. I try to make sure that they watch educational videos where possible, but to be honest, most videos on MrBeast’s main channel are just big, loud, dumb, vacuous stunts that have zero educational value and are just fun. Kids need that too.
But the fun stopped six months ago. Chris started wearing nail polish in a video. He grew more and more effeminate, wore ladies’ sweaters, grew out his hair, and manicured his nails. My children started noticing. My daughter commented on Chris’ over pronounced hand gestures to show off his nails. Both she and my son began talking about it. My son said, “He’s acting weird.” My daughter said, “He wants everyone to see his nails and hair. He keeps showing them off. He drops things on purpose just so he can pick them up with his nails.”
After Chris’ shocking transformation in this video, it was no longer possible to ignore the issue. This, of course, is what he wanted. He projected his transformation into our home and demanded that we “have more conversations” about his new lifestyle choices “in the future.” So we did. We spoke about why he thinks he’s a woman, what will happen to his wife and child, and if we still want to watch MrBeast. The result was that my children just wanted silly videos. They found his transformation weird and they felt overwhelmingly sad for his wife and kid. They didn’t want to watch it anymore. MrBeast was always just mindless fun, after all.
All Fun and Games
It has always been the eclectic cast of supporting characters that have made the videos so engaging. There is Chandler (who first appeared in 2018), who is childish — he is afraid of pickles and counts goldfish crackers with sliced cheese melted over the top as a meal. He often appears in videos with his fun and relatable family. Then there is Nolan, a newer member of the group (he first appeared in 2020) who is impish and cheeky and often elevates videos with his all-in, high-energy persona.
At the center of the MrBeast universe are Jimmy and Chris. The pair are childhood friends, and in a 2020 interview, Jimmy revealed that Chris was the very first subscriber to his channel. Chris is integral to the MrBeast brand and he has recently taken over as the host of the highly popular MrBeast Reacts channel. My kids enjoyed watching Chris from the start. He was the most masculine and outdoors-orientated of the group.
In one popular video from 2020, the group goes camping and the humor is largely derived from how soft and incompetent the rest of the team is compared to Chris, who acts like a tour guide, scout leader, and parent to the whole group. While the group flounders, Chris, who grew up enjoying an outdoors lifestyle in North Carolina, states “I’m a mountain man, I’m enjoying myself, we’re going to make it to the top.” Needless to say, when the group hunkers down for the night, tent-raising duty falls to Chris.
This parental instinct came naturally to Chris, who welcomed his first child in June 2020 with his wife Katie, whom he married in 2018. Because of this practical masculinity and sense of humor combined with his general southern-man sensibilities, it came as a massive shock to fans of the show when five months after the birth of his child, Chris announced he was bisexual.
Sexuality Becomes a Theme
Chris’ announcement dovetailed with a broader introduction of mature themes into the MrBeast universe. Also in 2020, core member Karl Jacobs was added to the group. In several interviews, Jimmy has stated that he added Karl after pressure from Chris, who had formed a close bond with him. Karl often presents a childlike and camp persona in MrBeast videos. In 2020, he stated that he believed he was asexual, then in 2021 he awkwardly claimed to be heterosexual. Regardless of his sexuality, what mattered was that the dynamic of the MrBeast crew and content had changed. Sexuality was to the fore and became increasingly visible onscreen.
The close relationship between Karl and Chris fueled rumors that the two were in a relationship. This is something Chris has denied. Still, many fans have blamed Karl for Chris’ evolution, giving rise to the term “the Karl effect.” Speculation surrounding their relationship has increased after Chris finally confirmed in March 2023 that he and his wife Katie had separated. Immediately after the announcement, he reaffirmed that he is bisexual but that he is not involved with Karl. On April 6, Chris announced that he is gender non-conforming and on HRT.
Public Transition
As expected, the backlash online has been intense. There has been abuse directed at Chris by former fans who feel betrayed by his actions. Chris, for his part, has leaned into the typical culture war talking points, mentioning how proud he is “seeing conversations started” because of his actions. His conversion has aligned with a new political awakening and his Twitter account is now littered with the usual talking points one would expect to find from a recent convert — he supports defunding the police and gun control, advocates for trans rights, calls conservative news outlets “grifters,” and thinks orange man bad.
The issue is neatly summed up in a viral tweet by influential drama news channel host Keemstar, who, after chastising critics who left negative comments, stated “This decision is a decision only Chris can make. Do better!” Of course, Keemstar is correct that mindless abuse is unacceptable, but he pushes the completely false idea that Chris’ decision is a private matter. It isn’t. His transition has been playing out in millions of family sitting rooms worldwide.
And make no mistake, despite his good charity work and overall pleasant demeanor, Jimmy is complicit in projecting this adult content into millions of homes. Jimmy is MrBeast and all editorial decisions start and end with him. He has taken a political stance on a massively divisive topic and quietly slipped it into his programming under the radar of many trusting parents. Further, both Jimmy and Nolan have made their support public. Karl has been even more vocal, saying of fans who have questions about the transition: “F-ck the goofy mother f-ckers keep runnin your own stuff.” YouTube has expressed support as well, so it appears unlikely that Chris will leave the show.
What MrBeast is doing is sinister and will have far-reaching consequences. He is grooming an unsuspecting generation of children into uncritically accepting transgender and trans activism at a vulnerable age. Due to the unrivaled reach of MrBeast and the unparalleled and often unmonitored access he has to millions of kids across the globe, he is now, without a shadow of a doubt, the leading source of child-focused, transgender content in the world.
It is imperative that all parents are made aware of this and given the choice of whether they consent to this content. After all, Chris said he wants to have a conversation. Parents need to know that this time, it isn’t an invitation, it’s an ultimatum.
Dr. Eoin Lenihan is an independent educator and extremism researcher. His work has been featured on AlJazeera and Fox News. He has also written for Arutz Sheeva, Quillette, The Post Millennial, and The Daily Caller. His peer-reviewed paper “A classification of Antifa Twitter accounts based on social network mapping and linguistic analysis” was published in Social Network Analysis and Mining, and it is the largest academic quantitative analysis of Antifa to date. You can find more from Eoin on Twitter: @EoinLenihan and on his website: http://www.eoinlenihan.weebly.com.
In a surreal moment at the Country Music Awards last week, co-host Kelsea Ballerini joined with several drag performers to belt out a campy version of her single, “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too),” an anthem taking aim at Tennessee laws denying wrongly named “gender-affirming care” for children.
The performance was steeped in queerness, both in the pretend “oppression” of performers literally center stage at a nationally-broadcast awards show and in the academic sense, where drag serves as a kind of postmodern harlequin dance. Choreographed to confront its audience, the unspoken subtext of the number was that it’s time for you to pick a side, and you had better be careful which side you pick.
This was a brazen show of strength. Think “shock and awe,” only with lots of bedazzling.
A Vicious Activist Cult
The left picked their side. And the side they picked was the side of a school shooter who became for them an emblem of their cultural movement: Cast as a victim of “hateful” traditional religious values, a tragic figure broken by her desire to “be seen,” the shooter was sainted, her death a kind of religious redemption play. The narrative coalesced around her supposed suffering because the left was never going to surrender its stranglehold on politicized victimhood. That’s where all the power is.
At the tip of the cultural Marxist spear today is the trans cult. Just a year ago, it was the racialist cult of Black Lives Matter. Their presence is smothering in cultural spaces by design. In fact, their defiance of norms is predictable. After all, over the last seven years or so we’ve seen veneers of civil comradery peeled back, or else worn so thin as to become transparent.
A public pause to mouth the platitudes of togetherness is no longer required in a society so clearly divided along ideological lines. Indeed, such niceties are ridiculed as a sign of weakness or inauthenticity. “Where was your Christian god that day?” the left sneered. “Guess your church can’t protect you, after all.”
In glib taunts that displayed their misunderstanding of God’s earthly role in traditional religions, they laid their ideology raw before the bodies of three 9-year-olds were even cold. And that ideology, like the martyr it created when it embraced the killing of Christians as a blasé bump on the road to their utopia, now wants to be seen. The devil wants his due. There can be no other explanation for the leftist urge to celebrate the “visibility” of a vicious activist cult, or to claim“transgender Americans shape our Nation’s soul,” especially in the immediate wake of the slaughter of Christians by a trans person. Their ostentatious obeisance to these damaged people was a liturgy performed with rapturous audacity on the American stage. It, too, was meant to “be seen.”
Whether it’s a country music drag act, a trans-identified light beer, a trans-allied wizard, or a march by college students demanding the surrender of natural rights to the state, the memetics of cultural Marxism is performative, phony Maoist struggle sessions delivered in swarms to project strength and to dispirit opponents by displaying the inevitability of the mob and its power. It’s a cultural troll. It’s their way of telling you that they are in charge and that you are helpless. You will conform. You must. What else is there?
It was in response to this attempted coup against Western liberal culture and the Enlightenment itself that I’ve written what I believe to be a clarion call for the individualist; but it, too, was something of a performance: It proclaimed, but it didn’t explain.
Cultural Marxism Demands Cultural Hegemony
Briefly, we must reject the premises of the cultural Marxist because cultural Marxism itself cannot live peaceably with federal republicanism or individual autonomy. In fact, it demands the opposite: All things are constrained by the state and its desires. Rule must be universal. Governing individuals is like herding cats, whereas ruling over a collective molded by both state pressures (law, force) and social forces (shame, shunning) is a more gratifying task, especially because the molding, if done well, creates a populace that reflects back the will of the state to itself. The state is now God, and its citizens, made in the state’s image, are its supplicants.
The whole of the cultural Marxist project is to create and maintain cultural hegemony. It’s that sameness we saw in the uniformed Maoists with identical haircuts, and the sameness we see in our own social justice Red Guard with their ubiquitous cotton-candy hair and tribal piercings. There can be no deviation from the new standards, built atop the rubble of old traditions the Marxists seek to destroy. To create the New Man, you must kill off the Olds. To arrive at Year Zero, you must erase all those years that came before it. To save the culture, you must first destroy it completely.
Cultural Marxism is dystopia peddling utopia through grievance narratives and rank emotionalism. It grants the self-styled dispossessed enormous power over those it casts as oppressors, which is itself determined by an intersectional calculus among victim groups.
Yet this power is temporary. Because what its authors seek, ultimately, is authoritarian. The useful idiots will soon be replaced by a ministerial elite, who will guide the filthies during The Great Reset. With policed conformity. Asceticism. Sameness. Every thought you think, every word you utter, and every move you make, must be approved by the state. And you’ll beg them for that privilege.
Blinded By ‘Being Seen’
The useful idiots enjoy wielding power, but they never seem to recognize that once they’ve ground down all opposition and extirpated all difference, once they’ve rooted out every intolerance they can conjure, there are no more battles to fight, no more ideas to be born, no more purpose left to live. To speak in a language they understand, their project reduces us to the means of production, slaves to the most successful oligarchs, earthly deities who delight in our serfdom, providing us safety and sustenance in exchange for conformity, and a surrender of self to a greater good they determine. Enlightened feudalism, in short. And we’re tilling their fields.
But that’s the endgame, and those who’ve embraced the cultural Marxist paradigm can’t see it coming. Their identity politics and the power their “oppression” yields appeal to their egos. They are blinded by the narcissism of “being seen,” and by the thrill of cultural control, however temporary. They revel in bullying.
All of our major institutions have taken up the trans cause for the same reasons they took up the cause of BLM: to gather power, destroy norms, attack traditions, and create the conditions of tribalism that must exist before the collective comes together out of the ruins of universal cancellation. The last man standing is the New Man, the perfect servant to a benevolent master.
Where we once were conceived of statist authoritarianism as an iron boot forever pressing on our necks, today it’s a Christian Louboutin red-bottomed pump, worn by a dude in a lace dress and zebra thong, stomping on our faces forever. Only we’re compelled to dig the kink.
The revolution will be accessorized, and you’ll learn to like it, or else.
Jeff Goldstein is a lapsed academic and writer living in Colorado. He likes tacos, ’79 Cabernets, and his favorite color is magenta.
A new report reveals that gender dysphoria has the highest prevalence among youth of European descent, with discomfort with one’s gender most common among children, especially girls with “exceptionally high intelligence” and a history of mental health issues.
A website called Parents of ROGD kids.com, which has formed a support group for families with gender dysphoric children, surveyed parents who believed they had children experiencing rapid onset gender dysphoria. The survey results, which collected responses over nearly four years, were compiled into a report by website creator Suzanna Diaz and J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern University’s Department of Psychology on Wednesday. The 1,774 responses to the survey were collected from Dec. 1, 2017, through Oct. 22, 2021.
Examining the demographics of youth who developed rapid onset gender dysphoria reveals that three-quarters of the children (75%) were female, while just 25% were male. Additionally, the overwhelming majority (78.9%) were of European descent, while much smaller shares were ethnically mixed (16.2%), Asian (2.8%), Indigenous (0.8%), African American (0.6%), Middle Eastern and East Indian (0.4%).
The results of the survey measured the average age when children first experience gender dysphoria as 14.8 years old. The report details how, on average, girls began to develop gender dysphoria at 14.1 years, while boys were an average of 16 years old when they first began to experience discomfort with their sex.
The survey asked parents to evaluate their child’s “social adjustment” before they began to experience gender dysphoria. A majority of both males (57.6%) and females (56.7%) had “a few good friends” before they developed gender dysphoria. Responses from parents showed that similar percentages of boys (33.7%) and girls (33.9%) “got along with other kids” before they began to question their sex.
While one-third of parents (33.3%) of sons experiencing gender dysphoria indicated their child was bullied before becoming gender dysphoric, just 26.3% of parents with daughters experiencing gender dysphoria said the same. According to parents of girls with gender dysphoria, 27.3% said their child was “well-liked,” in contrast to 22.7% of parents of boys.
As nearly 10% of parents who believe their daughters have gender dysphoria reported that their child had “many good friends,” just 3.9% of parents whose sons have gender dysphoria said the same. Parents of boys (16.8%) were slightly more likely than their female counterparts (14.3%) to report that their child was “not well liked by peers,” as similar percentages of parents with daughters (17.4%) and sons (15.8%) recalled that their child had “one good friend.”
Extremely small shares of parents with girls answered in the affirmative when asked if their daughters had others fight or instigate arguments with them (4.7%), instigated fights with others (2.3%) or bullied others (2.2%), while 5.4% of parents with boys reported that their son found themselves in fights or arguments instigated by others. Less than 1% of parents with sons maintained that their child “bullied others.”
When asked to evaluate their child’s level of intelligence, 35.6% of parents reported their child had “exceptionally high intelligence,” while just 15.5% characterized their child’s level of intelligence as “average or below average.”
A majority of parents (57%) said their gender dysphoric children had a history of “mental health issues,” while 42.5% insisted otherwise. Parents of girls (59.4%) were slightly more likely to report a mental health history in their children than parents of boys (51%). On average, mental health issues first began to arise 3.8 years before gender dysphoria.
The most common mental health issues experienced by females with gender dysphoria were anxiety (47.3%), depression (33.2%), difficulty socializing with peers (26.5%) and difficulty coping with stressful situations in general (23.2%). Among males, the most frequently reported mental health issues included anxiety (35.2%), difficulty socializing with peers (28.1%), depression (25.1%) and difficulty coping with stressful situations in general (19.2%).
A majority of the 390 parents (51.8%) who answered a question asking whether they felt pressure from a “gender clinic or specialist” to transition their child socially or medically reported experiencing pressure. By contrast, just 24.6% said that they did not feel any pressure to “transition” their child and an additional 23.6% responded that they were “unsure” if they felt pressured to transition their child.
When asked if their children were friends with others who “came out as transgender around the same time,” 55.4% of the 917 respondents who answered the question responded in the affirmative. Among parents of girls, that figure increased to 60.9%.
Respondents reported that their children spent an average of 4 ½ hours a day “on the Internet and social media.” However, it was determined that the number of hours per day on the internet and social media “was not significantly related to the likelihood of social transition.”
The report’s publication takes place as the medical establishment and popular culture continue to embrace the “Affirmative Approach,” which touts puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and body-mutilating sex-change surgeries as solutions for gender dysphoria. Parents of ROGD Kids condemn the Affirmative Approach as a “lie.”
The release of the survey comes as states across the U.S. are working to sex-change procedures from being performed on minors. Currently, 12 states have implemented prohibitions on some or all forms of sex-change procedures in light of concerns about their long-term impacts: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia.
The American College of Pediatricians has identified some of the potential side effects of puberty blockers as “osteoporosis, mood disorders, seizures, cognitive impairment and, when combined with cross-sex hormones, sterility.” Potential longterm impacts of cross-sex hormones include “an increased risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, blood clots and cancers across their lifespan.”
Sex-change surgeries include chemical and surgical castration, double mastectomies on girls, orchiectomy (removing testicles) for boys, the construction of a fake vagina (vaginoplasty) for boys, and removal of skin and tissue from girls’ forearms or thighs to create a fake, flaccid penis that doesn’t function.
Several detransitioners have come forward to discuss their trauma and regret from having these life-altering medical procedures, with 18-year-old Chloe Cole among the most prominent.
Cole, whose gender dysphoria has since subsided, has announced her intention to sue the medical professionals who treated her for gender dysphoria. As a letter announcing her intent to sue explains, although doctors advised Cole that “the distress she experienced because of her gender dysphoria would resolve as she transitioned,” she discovered that her “distress always came back worse” after a burst of “initial relief” following “each phase of transition.”
She has also maintained that the double mastectomy she underwent at the age of 15 caused her mental health to deteriorate and led to suicidal thoughts.
Suppose a troubled teen girl “identifies” as a boy and wants to change her body to match it. Most people balk at the thought of pumping her with testosterone or cutting off her healthy breasts. But many of these same people think using puberty blockers isn’t so bad for even younger kids. In fact, activist groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics suggest drugs like Lupron can “pause” puberty without harm.
Even some conservative lawmakers, such as Georgia state Sen. Carden Summers, have bought this claim. As a result, the bill he sponsored, just signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp, partially restricts “gender-affirming” hormones and surgeries for minors but says nothing about puberty blockers.
Is it really safe to give these drugs to kids? Mounting evidence says “no.” And even some on the left are starting to sound the alarm.
Last month, a stunning report in the British Medical Journal, written by a former editor of Ms. Magazine, argued that only a contrived medical consensus, not scientific evidence, props up wrongly named “gender-affirming care” for minors. That’s the protocol that starts with social transition, moves on to puberty blockers, then wrong-sex hormones, and finally surgery. The article pointed to disagreement within the medical community about how to best treat kids with gender dysphoria. Indeed, the publication of such an article, in a major medical journal, is itself evidence of such disagreement.
Two weeks earlier, Jamie Reed, a self-identified “queer socialist” married to a “transman,” blew the whistle on the work of the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. She confirmed what critics have long been saying: These treatments are uncontrolled experiments with children as subjects.
“These treatments are uncontrolled experiments with children as subjects. “
Lupron
Consider Lupron. First approved by the FDA to treat prostate cancer, doctors later used the drug to chemically castrate sex offenders and stop early-onset puberty.
Today, it’s the primary “off-label” drug used to “block” puberty. Lupron stops the body’s normal hormonal process, including the development of ovaries and testes, by “blocking” the brain’s ability to communicate with the pituitary gland. The pituitary controls the release of hormones. Without it, the sex hormones can’t direct puberty as they otherwise would.
Lupron’s side effects are so severe that doctors tend not to prescribe it for even mild (non-metastatic) cases of prostate cancer. Would you be shocked to learn it might not be great for young girls, either? In fact, after taking the drug, girls may develop osteoporosis and osteopenia, problems that mostly afflict older women. Many doctors found that Lupron decreased minors’ bone density so much that they could no longer recommend it.
Not Reversible
Some gender-activist doctors will admit their guidance is not based on long-term studies. Rather, they claim it’s based on expert consensus.
But that consensus is highly stage-managed. Because of the known dangers and lack of long-term data, the Finnish, French, and Swedish governments have either banned or limited Lupron’s use for minors. Similarly, the British National Health Service now urges caution, and argues most gender-confused minors are going through a “transient phase.”
The report in the British Medical Journal shows this regimen for minors is not based on sound science. The Endocrine Society found that little evidence supports its own guidance regarding Lupron. The Swedish government confirms Lupron does not help these minors. In fact, it “may lead to a deteriorating of health and quality of life,” and can cause irreversible harm.
When used for minors with gender distress, over 95 percent will move on to cross-sex hormones and never go through natural puberty. Even when puberty blockers are discontinued, their dangers to a child’s development don’t disappear. After all, no one can reverse time. It’s no surprise New Zealand’s ministry of health recently scrubbed the words “reversible” from its online discussion of puberty blockers.
Jamie Reed’s firsthand testimony is damning. Patients in Reed’s clinic could access hormone blockers after only one meeting with a therapist. Some of these minors had severe mental illnesses that went untreated. Instead, they were fast-tracked with transgender drugs toward transition surgeries.
States Start to Respond
Fortunately, the word is getting out. Some states are now restricting these weapons in the “gender-affirming” arsenal. Since 2022, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and Iowa have passed legislation to restrict Lupron as a puberty blocker. (Alabama and Arkansas’ bans are on hold in federal district court.) Several more states will likely do so in the coming weeks.
Florida followed another path to ban this use of Lupron. The state’s medical boards reviewed the literature and found these transition procedures lacked a solid scientific basis. The legislature is now working to secure their boards’ judgment in law.
Other states should follow Florida’s lead and pass health policies and laws that follow scientific evidence, not the activists’ spin. Until this happens, troubled children will continue to be sacrificed on the altar of toxic ideology.
Samuel Silvestro is a member of The Heritage Foundation’s Young Leadership Program. Jay W. Richards is the director of Heritage’s DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family.
The facts of life haven’t changed, but sex education is entirely different now from what you likely learned in school. Sex ed in middle school now includes graphic lessons on anal sex, oral sex, and masturbation, with stick figures to illustrate body positions. Supplemental reading in middle school libraries includes “Sex, Puberty, and All That Stuff,” a book explaining foreplay and how to rub the clitoris to produce pleasure. Massachusetts’ curriculum tells seventh graders how to use cling wrap as a dental dam around their teeth for safe oral sex.
A majority of states now require sex education be labeled as “comprehensive,” thanks to aggressive lobbying by activists. Planned Parenthood, the largest producer of sex ed curriculum for public schools, argues that children are entitled to know how to “experience different forms of sexual pleasure.”
Does it bother anyone else the Planned Parenthood is so wrapped up in sex ed, and transgenderism? Remember, they are the disciples of Margaret Sanger, who was the leader of the sect that warned about “world overpopulation”. She was the mother (founder) of Planned Parenthood with the determination to wipe out societies’ “undesirables”. That could be a reason they are behind transgenderism and the destruction of children’s bodies, neutering them.
Eugene, Oregon, high schoolers were recently assigned to write a sexual fantasy featuring massage oil, flavored syrup, a candle, music, feathers or a boa. How about teaching them math and English instead?
Nationwide, these racy lessons are outraging parents. Last week, protests forced the Gwinnett County, Georgia, school board to shelve voting on a proposed sex ed curriculum. Holly Terei, a parent, explained that it’s one thing to monitor social media and the movies kids watch, and it’s another to have to worry about “our children being exposed to curriculum that teaches them how to perform sexual acts.”
Sex ed is the most controversial issue in many school board elections. Contests are nominally nonpartisan, but generally, Republicans are demanding parental controls. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is becoming the poster child for adolescent promiscuity.
Expect this to be a defining issue in next year’s national elections. In Iowa last week, former President Donald Trump warned the crowd that schools “are focused on sexualizing our children.”
Most sex ed lessons are not published by textbook companies. Instead, sex ed has been hijacked by left-wing, well-funded groups with their own agendas. These include Sex Ed for Social Change, Advocates for Youth (an LGBTQ group) and the American Civil Liberties Union, which argues that children have sexual rights. They all press for Comprehensive Sexuality Education. The word “comprehensive” is misleading. What the curriculum stresses is pleasure.
Many Massachusetts districts use Planned Parenthood’s “Get Real” curriculum. The eighth grade teacher’s manual suggests discussing a hypothetical scenario about two middle school boys who “enjoy the sexual part of their relationship.”
In Florida, the Leon County School Board tabled voting on a sex ed curriculum early this month when parents like Brandi Andrews objected. She says a cartoon video of a laughing clitoris, part of the curriculum, would encourage young girls to be promiscuous.
Michigan parents protest school board over explicit books in school library. (Fox News)
Michigan parents protest school board over explicit books in school library. (Fox News)
Advocates for CSE argue that “how-to” information about sex keeps children safer. Don’t believe it. A review of 60 studies of sex education in U.S. schools, published in the scholarly journal Issues in Law and Medicine, found that comprehensive sex education more often resulted in more harm, including more unplanned pregnancies and STDs.
Those are physical harms. Kids can also suffer emotional and spiritual harm. Educators in Fairfax County, Virginia, want to teach middle school sex ed in coed classes. Parents know better — a staggering 84 percent oppose this. What about modesty? What about embarrassment for the kids who are developing the fastest?
The backlash against extreme sex ed is exploding. Proponents insist they just want to provide information. Nonsense. When lessons include more than biology, someone’s values are being imposed.
Comprehensive sex education is an ideology or religion, stressing gender fluidity, sexual experimentation and pleasure seeking, while repudiating parents’ roles and traditional values. Some families share those views, and many don’t.
Recently, hundreds of Muslim Americans protested a Dearborn, Michigan, school board meeting, holding signs with messages such as “Keep your porno to yourself.” Christians, Jews and Muslims have all been told they must keep their religious teachings out of public schools.
Allowing CSE in school is no different from entrusting sex education to a priest or a rabbi, to the exclusion of all other views.
Parents, it’s time to take control of what our kids are being taught.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths. Follow her on Twitter @Betsy_McCaughey.
Republican Georgia and Iowa lawmakers sent bills banning sex-change procedures for minors to their governors’ desks this week. Iowa has passed its bill into law, while Georgia’s bill awaits Gov. Brian Kemp’s signature. Kemp has not said whether he’ll sign it.
Georgia Senate Bill 140, which passed along party lines, prohibits injecting children with hormones and surgically mutilating their bodies “for the treatment of gender dysphoria.” Doctors may still be able to prescribe puberty-blocking drugs, however, as the bill only blocks “irreversible procedures or therapies.” Puberty blockers do inflict irreversible physical damage, but their proponents claim otherwise.
Parental rights advocates still welcome the bill as a step in the right direction.
“This new measure will give Georgia children the legal protections they desperately need,” Kimberly Fletcher, founder and president of Moms For America, said in a press release. “Too many states continue to defend sexual mutilation of children by refusing to implement laws that would properly protect them. This must change.”
On Wednesday, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed SF538 into law, which states that Iowa medical professionals “shall not knowingly engage in or cause any” treatments “for the purpose of attempting to alter the appearance of, or affirm the minor’s perception of, the minor’s gender or sex, if that appearance or perception is inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” The law also prevents doctors from removing a healthy or non-diseased body part or tissue, as well as banning the prescription of hormone blockers to complicate puberty.
“Children should not be pushed to receive experimental medical treatments that can leave them permanently sterile and physically marred for life,” Jeff Edler, a Republican state senator, told The Des Moines Register. “Iowa has a duty to protect its citizens, especially our children.”
In addition to banning body mutilation surgeries for children, Reynolds also signed SF482, a law that would prevent transgender-identifying students from using the opposite sex’s public-school bathrooms.
“Denying the truth that we are either male or female hurts real people, especially vulnerable children,” Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Matt Sharp said in a press release. “By enacting this legislation, Iowa has taken critical steps to protect children from radical activists that peddle gender ideology and pressure children into life-altering, experimental procedures and drugs. Young people deserve to live in a society that doesn’t subject them to risky experiments to which they cannot effectively consent.”
Georgia and Iowa join eight other states that have passed protections for children from sex-change surgeries, including Mississippi, Florida, Utah, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, South Dakota, and Tennessee. Missouri and Kentucky’s legislatures have passed similar bills that are awaiting their governors’ signatures.
Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.
A hand holds up a small transgender pride flag. The blue and pink stripes represent the colors for a boy and girl, while the white stripe represents self-declared gender identities, such as transitioning, intersex, neutral and undefined gender. | Getty Images
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has implemented an emergency regulation imposing what his office calls “guardrails” on gender transition interventions for minors as the push to ban the controversial practices continues on a state-by-state basis.
In a statement Monday, Bailey said he is “issuing an emergency regulation clarifying that, because gender transition interventions are experimental, they are covered by existing Missouri law governing unfair, deceptive, and unconscionable business practices, including in administering healthcare services.”
“As Attorney General, I will protect children and enforce the laws as written, which includes upholding state law on experimental gender transition interventions,” Bailey said. “Even Europe recognizes that mutilating children for the sake of a woke, leftist agenda has irreversible consequences, and countries like Sweden, Norway, and the United Kingdom have all sharply curtailed these procedures. I am dedicated to using every legal tool at my disposal to stand in the gap and protect children from being subject to inhumane science experiments.”
The new regulation “clarifies that state law already prohibits performing experimental procedures in the absence of specific guardrails.” The guardrails require medical professionals to inform patients that “the use of puberty blocker drugs or cross-sex hormones to treat gender identity disorder or gender dysphoria is experimental and is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)” and that “the FDA has issued a warning that puberty blockers can lead to brain swelling and blindness.”
The Attorney General’s office characterized the move as “necessary due to the skyrocketing number of gender transition interventions despite rising concerns in the medical community that these procedures are experimental and lack clinical evidence of safety or success.”
The emergency regulation will hold the force of law for either 30 legislative days or 180 days, “whichever is longer.”
Additional mandatory disclosures outline how Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare determined in a February 2022 report that the risks associated with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones “outweigh the possible benefits.”
The regulation also urges providers to cite the Endocrine Society’s finding that “the large majority (about 85%) of prepubertal children with a childhood diagnosis did not remain GD/gender incongruent in adolescence.”
“One scientific study notes that an individual whose friend identifies as transgender is ‘more than 70 times’ as likely to similarly identify as transgender, suggesting that many individuals’ incorrectly believe themselves to be transgender and in need of transition’ because of social factors,” the release from the attorney general’s office states.
The regulation also bans gender transition interventions if the patient has not “received a full psychological or psychiatric assessment” consisting of at least 15 hour-long therapy sessions over a period of 18 months “to determine, among other things, whether the person has any mental health comorbidities.”
An additional requirement imposed on providers seeking to perform gender transition interventions on minors seeks to ensure that “any existing mental health comorbidities of the patient have been treated and resolved.”
The regulation also stipulates that doctors must “adopt and follow a procedure to track all adverse effects that arise from any course of covered gender transition intervention for all patients beginning the first day of intervention and continuing for a period of not fewer than 15 years.” Doctors seeking to provide such interventions must also screen patients for autism and examine whether or not their gender dysphoria results from “social contagion” on an annual basis.
The regulation comes after the attorney general announced an investigation into the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital after a former employee submitted a sworn affidavit stating that the clinic has sterilized hundreds of children and even lied to parents. The clinic has denied Bailey’s request for a moratorium on prescribing puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones as his office investigates the claims.
The new regulation is opposed by LGBT advocacy groups, including Planned Parenthood. Dr. Colleen P. McNicholas, the chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, called the claims made in the announcement “medically false and harmful.”
“Scientific evidence shows — and the medical community agrees — that gender-affirming care is safe, effective, and life-saving,” McNicholas said in a statement shared on Twitter. “We denounce this government interference in the practice of medicine, and we demand politicians leave health care between providers and their patients. Shame on any politician who uses trans youth for political theatrics.”
More than a half dozen states have implemented bans on some or all gender transition interventions for minors, specifically Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee and Utah.
In the absence of action by the state legislature, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Texas Commissioner of Family and Protective Services Jaime Masters have issued formal opinions characterizing gender transition services as a form of child abuse. The moves by state legislatures and executive officials related to gender transition interventions for minors come in response to concerns about the long-term impacts of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and gender transition surgeries.
The American College of Pediatricians has identified the potential side effects of puberty blockers as “osteoporosis, mood disorders, seizures, cognitive impairment” as well as sterility. The organization has listed “an increased risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, blood clots and cancers across their lifespan” as some of the potential long-term impacts of cross-sex hormones.
As for gender transition surgeries to remove and/or create synthetic body parts in order to align a person’s sexual organs with their stated gender identity, graphic images posted on social media last week by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office reveal scars left behind from double mastectomies that remove healthy breasts from trans-identified females as well as scarred forearm tissue used to create synthetic penises in trans-identified females.
Last year, the U.K’s National Health Service proposed new guidelines warning doctors not to so easily encourage minors to socially transition by changing their names and pronouns because many children dealing with gender dysphoria may be going through a “transient phase.”
The proposed guidelines followed an independent review led by Dr. Hillary Cass, the former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, which found that “social transitioning” is not a “neutral act” and could have “significant effects” in terms of “psychological functioning.”
“The clinical management approach should be open to exploring all developmentally appropriate options for children and young people who are experiencing gender incongruence, being mindful that this may be a transient phase, particularly for prepubertal children, and that there will be a range of pathways to support these children and young people and a range of outcomes,” the guidelines state.
Detransitioner Chloe Cole has emerged as a prominent voice for a community of young adults who formerly identified with the opposite sex but saw their gender dysphoria subside as they got older.
Cole is suing doctors, attributing the suicidal thoughts and deteriorating state of mental health she experienced as a teenager to the life-altering double mastectomy she received at the age of 15.
While Cole was “advised that the distress she experienced because of her gender dysphoria would resolve as she transitioned,” she discovered that her “distress always came back worse” following the “initial relief” that occurred after “each phase of transition.”
A Canadian pastor was arrested for the second time in weeks after protesting drag queen storytime for children at public libraries. Pastor Derek Reimer, 36, was arrested and charged Wednesday with one count of breaching a release order that prohibited him from being within 200 meters of events involving the LGBTQ community, a spokesperson for Calgary Police Service told Fox News Digital.
Reimer had been previously arrested on March 2 following a Feb. 25 incident during which three men physically tossed him out of Seton Library for protesting a Reading with Royalty event that was put on by the Calgary Public Library and featured local drag performers reading to children.
Reimer was charged with one count of causing a disturbance and one count of mischief, and also faces six counts of harassment under the city’s bylaw governing public behavior. Each charge carries a penalty of up to $10,000 and up to six months imprisonment if payment cannot be made, according to Livewire Calgary.
Pastor Derek Reimer, 36, was arrested and charged Wednesday with one count of breaching a release order that prohibited him from being within 200 meters of events involving the LGBTQ community. (Courtesy Nathaniel Pawlowski)
Footage of Reimer’s most recent arrest in a parking lot outside the Signal Hill Library in Calgary shows police cuffing him and dragging him across the asphalt before hauling him away in a police vehicle. Bystanders protested his treatment and questioned whether he had gotten within 200 meters of the event. He remains in prison and awaits a court appearance Friday.
The Calgary City Council on Tuesday revised a bylaw and introduced a new one in response to increased protests at drag events, according to the CBC.
The Calgary City Council passed a bylaw Tuesday prohibiting protests within 100 meters of a recreation facility or library entrance. (miroslav_1 via Getty Images)
The modifications included adding the term “intimidation” to the current public behavior bylaw, and the new Safe and Inclusive Access Bylaw prohibits protests within 100 meters of a recreation facility or library entrance. Some councilors reportedly raised concerns about the speed with which the new bylaw was passed.
Earlier this week, Reimer was also issued a 30-day trespass notice following a silent prayer session in the Municipal Building in protest of the new bylaw.
“Mr. Reimer was warned on a previous occasion that he could not hold a religious event inside the Municipal Building unless he has a permit,” a city spokesperson told the CBC.
BREAKING: Pastor Derek Reimer has been issued a trespass notice for holding a silent prayer inside of Calgary's city hall.
Pastor Artur Pawlowski, who knows Reimer and made international headlines himself when he was repeatedly arrested for keeping his Calgary church open during the pandemic, told Fox News Digital that Reimer’s arrests indicate the government’s “open hatred toward Christianity.”
“Everyone who is visible, everyone in Canada who is boldly proclaiming Christianity, has become an open target,” he said.
“Calgary was immune for a little bit from the drag queen perversion — because that’s what it is: it’s a sick, twisted perversion, and you can quote me on that,” he said. “An adult man who dresses as a woman in a sexual manner and has the urge to do that in front of little children is a pervert, end of story.”
Pastor Artur Pawlowski, who is friends with Pastor Derek Reimer, faced multiple dramatic arrests for keeping his church open during the pandemic. (Artur Pawlowski)
Since drag events involving children have begun proliferating in Calgary, Pawlowski said that Reimer “decided he felt that God is calling him to expose that, to stand against that.” He noted that Reimer has communicated with him from prison, and that he is calling on Christians to rise up and vocally oppose what he described as perversion while they still can.
“I’ve warned Canadians for a very long time — and I’m warning Americans, as well — that you will be ruled by what you tolerate,” Pawlowski said, noting how the way authorities enforced COVID-19 protocols in Canada is now being used to enforce ideology.
Every time Brandon Showalter checks his inbox or listens to his voicemails, he’s dismayed by what he sees and hears. Since he began covering the battle over transgender ideology in 2016, he’s received countless messages from parents grieving over the mutilation of their daughters and the castration of their sons, photos from detransitioners regretting their irreversible surgeries, and firsthand accounts from families shattered by the medical scandal of transgenderism.
Get tickets to CP’s event ‘Unmasking Gender Ideology: Protecting Children, Confronting Transgenderism’ here. Download ‘Exposing the Gender Lie’ here.
“Over the years, I’ve lost count of how many moms and dads have called me absolutely devastated, at the end of their rope, because … within 30 minutes of a telehealth consultation, their daughters and sons are given drugs that could render them sterile” or they’re encouraged to have surgeries that will leave their bodies disfigured. “They’re living in a world of confusion,” said Showalter, a writer and social commentator for The Christian Post.
“They sent them off to a university and they became indoctrinated. I’ve had some of them in my home for dinner to try and console them as they’re just grieving. This has just devoured and shattered their families, and that’s not being hyperbolic.”
As a journalist and Bible-believing Christian, Showalter knew he couldn’t just look away when faced with the horrors of the transgender movement. Over the years, he’s written countless articles and even launched a podcast raising awareness about the topic, and this month, releasedExposing the Gender Lie: How to Protect Children and Teens from the Transgender Industry. Showalter penned the free e-book with Jeff Myers, president of Summit Ministries.
“We wanted to be able to equip pastors and lay leaders, youth and youth ministers to be able to have the philosophical tools to understand this ideology. And most importantly, protect children and teenagers and young adults from its destruction,” Showalter shared.
“The book will show you the various ways in which this ideology has molded our understanding of what sex and gender is, how language is warped, and it’ll clue you in as to how pervasive this is.”
According to Showalter, most people are unaware of just how insidious the transgender movement truly is — or how much it is fueled by the greed of pharmaceutical companies. Terms like “gender-affirming” care and politically-correct euphemisms popularized by many in the media, he said, are both dangerous and misleading. He slammed the idea that children experiencing gender dysphoria frequently die by suicide as “manipulative,” adding: “Suicide is a very complicated phenomenon. You cannot reduce it down to just one cause.”
Showalter detailed how, after a prepubescent child is diagnosed with gender dysphoria, they are prescribed puberty blockers such as Lupron, a drug that has been used to treat prostate cancer in men and endometriosis and women and has been used to chemically castrate sex offenders.
“There’s never been an FDA stamp of approval for that use,” he said. “Even the FDA just last year slapped a warning label that this drug causes vision loss and brain swelling. There are disastrous side effects. It impedes brain development. It basically freezes your endocrine system from allowing the pubertal signaling in the brain to happen.”
Children are given cross-sex hormones, such as testosterone for girls and estrogen for boys, and then undergo surgery to change their bodies to appear as the opposite sex. Showalter described this process as “grotesque,” involving the removal of healthy breasts and creating flaccid penises out of skin from another part of the body, such as the forearm or leg.
“These are highly complex, body-disfiguring surgeries with extremely high complication rates, and it’s in service to a material falsehood. You can’t change sex. Your sex is stamped in the nucleus of every single cell. All you’re doing is altering the body in a way that it was not designed to function,” he said. “Biomedical ethics seems to have just completely died with the incursion of this movement.”
Since speaking out about the horrors of the transgender movement, Showalter has experienced a good amount of pushback. He’s been called a “bigot” and a “hater” — but the insults and attacks seem insignificant when he grapples with what he sees as a “demonic” attack on God’s creation of male and female and, thus, on children.
“I don’t know exactly what might cause this ideology to end,” he said. “But I do hope and pray that God, in His infinite mercy, will bring it down. There are days when I just think the solution has to be supernatural because it’s just so wicked. It’s evil. And you don’t have to be a Christian to perceive that.”
Trans ideology has seen increasing visibility in the media, even in children’s programming. For example, an animated pride parade from the Nick Jr. show “Blue’s Clues and You!” featured a cartoon beaver wearing a pink and blue transgender armband and bearing chest scars from a mastectomy. The target demographic for “Blue’s Clues” is preschoolers, children ages 3 to 5.
“PRESCHOOLERS. CHILDREN 3 TO 5 YEARS OLD”
“They are marketing this by way of all media: TikTok, media programming, social media, YouTube, Tumblr, you name it, to get children to believe that somehow their bodies are not fine the way they are,” he said, challenging parents to pray tirelessly over their children and monitor their media consumption.
But despite the narrative pushed by many media outlets, it’s not just conservatives or people of faith opposed to the trans movement, he said. Working at CP, Showalter has heard from countless atheists, those who identify as gay and lesbian and even political leftists who share his and other Christians’ concerns for the next generation.
“The media continues to frame this as a right versus left kind of dynamic, when in fact, the polling indicates that many people across the political spectrum, left and right alike, do not want this done to children,” he said.
“The vast majority of doctors, I’m convinced, do not [support this], but far too few of them are actually being brave and speaking up about it. Many of them are keeping their head down because of this culture of fear we live in,” he added.
Showalter challenged other believers to stand up and declare a biblical worldview regarding sex and gender and urged churches to reach out to families hurt by the transgender movement and de-transitioners in need of recovery care.
“We need to understand the wickedness, the depravity that this is. And we need to be bold,” he stressed. “Now’s the time to show great courage and to be relentlessly honest about what’s happening. We can’t cover our eyes or cover our ears anymore. We have to ask God to give us His heart for hurting families and for children, and to stand up and be counted.”
He added, “I hope and pray that the day is coming soon when this great evil that has overtaken so much of our society will be brought to an end. But until then, and not one moment sooner, we have to keep pushing and keep declaring the truth with as much enthusiasm and boldness as we can possibly muster.”
Get tickets to CP’s event ‘Unmasking Gender Ideology: Protecting Children, Confronting Transgenderism’ here. Download ‘Exposing the Gender Lie’ here.
Parents — not the government — are responsible for teaching morals and fundamental values to their children. School administrators seem to have forgotten this. Throughout our commonwealth and country, local school districts are attempting to supplant parents with government officials, who they believe know what is best for our children.
The reality is these officials are interested in indoctrinating our children with their own version of what morality and values should be; it is destructive to children’s upbringing and to the American family unit at large.
Parents are responsible for instilling moral, religious, personal, cultural and other values that they deem appropriate in order to prepare their children for success and happiness in life. Some parents, like us, believe this should be rooted in our Christian faith. No matter the source, we believe that parents are foremost responsible for establishing a moral foundation in their children.
With a strong moral foundation being built at home, parents then entrust their local school districts with educating their child in reading, writing and arithmetic. Parents do not, however, expect government bureaucrats to infiltrate their child’s classroom and teach them their own concept of morality.
In our own community, the West Shore School district has engaged with “CharacterStrong” to teach “Social and Emotional Learning” (SEL) to our children. This curriculum is aligned with the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) whose chief priority is to implement SEL with “equity and excellence” in mind. This may sound relatively harmless to the untrained listener, until you find out more about these organizations and their disturbing goals.
CharacterStrong states that their goal is to “partner” with parents in teaching moral and fundamental values to their children. The organization’s overt goal is to co-parent children by helping them to identify their own “values and virtues” and to reflect on those values to “help guide their decisions.”
We, like the majority of parents across the country, are not interested in coparenting with a government contractor. The government is not the parent of my child. We raise our children consistent with the values of our Christian faith and expect those values not to be meddled with.
The West Shore School District should be focused on teaching rigorous academics and training our children to think critically. It should be focused on preparing our children for the academic rigors of high school, college, and the real world. Instead, it is focused on promoting the CharacterStrong curriculum which, through CASEL, has made “equity” essential to the SEL curriculum.
The reality is these officials are interested in indoctrinating our children with their own version of what morality and values should be; it is destructive to children’s upbringing and to the American family unit at large.
My child’s school should not be focused on gender ideology, race, or undermining the core values I teach my children. Unfortunately, the school district has decided to continue to push this dangerous ideology and indoctrination scheme.
Thankfully, parents have strong parental rights here in Pennsylvania. Chapter four of the Pennsylvania School Code authorizes parents or guardians to “have their children excused from specific instruction that conflicts with their religious beliefs.”
My fellow district parents recently exercised their rights under this provision but were met with denials. Worse, West Shore School District repeatedly demanded that our friends justify their religious objections to the chosen religion of the West Shore School District.
The school district has no discretion. It must grant the parents’ request and properly accommodate their children. Notably, the district did in fact permit some exemptions to the curriculum but denied others.
Parents who have decided to exercise their rights under both our state and federal constitutions should not be vilified. These parents should be praised for paying close attention to their children’s curriculum and ensuring that no one — especially the government — gets between parents and their children, before it’s too late.
Allison Shipp is the leader of the Cumberland County, Pennsylvania Chapter of Moms for Liberty.
The project creates video game-like avatars with which people can envision specific body parts they want to target with surgery to make themselves look more masculine or feminine.
The National Institutes of Health is funding a study to create 3D avatars for transgender-identifying people to envision the body they imagine they should have and then medically alter their figure accordingly. Another NIH-funded project aims to allow trans folks to adopt a voice congruent with their sex-denying identity. Multiple taxpayer-funded studies on transgender issues focus on “intersectionality,” disparity, and HIV.
The NIH Reporter database, which lists active federally funded research projects, shows 75 with “transgender” in the title, totaling more than $26 million of taxpayers’ money annually.
The NIH is wasting taxpayer dollars on a project titled “Personalized 3D avatar tool development for measurement of body perception across gender identities,” which purports to help people with gender dysphoria by mapping the difference between their actual physical embodiment and what they believe their body to be. But instead, it indulges their illness by defying science and denying the immutability of sex.
The tool (a prototype is pictured here) would scan individuals to create personalized 3D visualizations with which they can interact on mobile and desktop devices. Those behind the project say they are trying to create technology that “can potentially improve clinical outcomes by identifying specific sets of body parts as targets for treatments to improve body congruence.” In other words, the research project will create video game-like avatars with which people can envision specific body parts they want to target with surgery — which includes removing healthy organs, shaving facial bones, and more — to make themselves look more masculine or feminine.
The study is at the University of Toronto, Canada, and has received $288,000 so far. It began in 2021 and is scheduled to run through 2024.
Other Taxpayer-Funded Research on Ideal Voice, Acne, and Sex Ed
Another taxpayer-funded study addresses how transgender-identifying people experience challenges in adopting a voice characteristic of their so-called identity. Trans individuals “report that producing a voice congruent with their gender identity is crucial to affirming their gender identity. There are a variety of gender affirming services available, but medical interventions, such as surgery or hormones do not … ensure satisfaction with vocal gender.”
A third NIH-funded study looks at acne in the trans-identifying population. “Little is known about the interplay of endogenous and exogenous hormones on acne incidence, severity, impact, treatment, and experience,” the summary says.
NIH is also funding “A fully functional online interactive sexual education tool” for “transgender and gender expansive (TGE) youth.” Such children “are at high risk of several sexual health outcomes that have life-long impacts including sexually transmitted infections, early, unwanted pregnancies, and unwanted sexual contact/intimate partner violence. … [C]urrent educational and clinical structures largely ignore their experiences,” according to the project summary. The tool will clarify “that gender-affirming medical interventions do not prevent unintended pregnancies.” It will also address what it calls “difficulties navigating partner consent because it is often described in heteronormative, binary terms in sexual education classes.”
The bluehead wrasse, a small fish and sequential hermaphrodite, meaning it contains both types of reproductive organs, will be the subject of another taxpayer-funded transgender study: “Organisms that naturally undergo sex transformations in response to changes in their social environment provide excellent systems in which to investigate mechanisms of behavioral sex specification.” Adult female bluehead wrasses can rapidly switch sex in response to changes in social structure, according to the project.
Four ongoing NIH-funded studies related to transgenderism mention “disparities” in their project titles and three mention “stigma.” NIH even issued a Notice of Special Interest in understanding how so-called “intersectional stigmas” harm health. About half of all NIH-funded transgender research, including that which has been completed, relates to higher rates of HIV among the transgender population, totaling approximately $80 million since 1985.
Despite all the possible health risks, President Joe Biden has issued executiveorders charging “HHS to work with states to promote expanded access to gender-affirming care.” The administration has issued directives that federal health insurance benefits must “provide comprehensive gender-affirming care.”
Taxpayers are already paying for transgender procedures, as they are covered by some insurers and Medicaid in some states.
Woke Waste
House Budget Committee Republicans have announced “woke waste” is among the spending cuts they want in a debt limit deal. According to the House Budget Committee:
The recent omnibus included millions of dollars in funding for woke policies that American taxpayers shouldn’t be footing the bill for, including $1.2 million for “LGBTQIA+ Pride Centers,” $1 million for a space for “gender-expansive people of color” … and $750,000 for “Transgender and Gender nonconforming and Intersex (TGI) immigrant women in Los Angeles.”
Under the Republican plan, billions of dollars in savings would also come from ending the Environmental Protection Agency’s “environmental justice” programs, enacting new work requirements for welfare, halting Biden’s student loan forgiveness, and getting back unspent Covid-19 pandemic funds.
This byline marks several different individuals, granted anonymity in cases where publishing an article on The Federalist would credibly threaten close personal relationships, their safety, or their jobs. We verify the identities of those who publish anonymously with The Federalist.
NIH is funding many studies premised upon how little research has been conducted on the long-term health risks of cross-sex hormones. Yet HHS is pushing for more transgender ‘care.’
As the Biden administration pushes the Department of Health and Human Services to make “gender-affirming health care” more widely available, HHS’s own National Institutes of Health is funding multiple studies premised upon how little research has been conducted on the long-term risks of taking cross-sex hormones and whether they improve mental health. The NIH research on transgender issues also emphasizes intersectionality and about half has been on HIV prevention.
The NIH Reporter database, which lists active federally funded research projects, shows 74 with “transgender” in the title, totaling more than $26 million of taxpayers’ money annually. Several NIH-funded studies examine specific health risks of cross-sex hormone treatment — such as associated bone loss and possible increased risk of thrombosis, drug overdose, heart attack, and stroke.
Onlyafew studies evaluate the risk of infertility, even though “the impact of long-term cross-sex hormone therapy on reproductive health is largely unknown,” as one such project states and experts have warned. In contrast, seven studies examine stigma and disparities in health care for transgender people, in response to NIH’s Notice of Special Interest in understanding the role of alleged intersectional stigmas and how they harm health.
Manystudiesaddresshigherincidence of sexually transmitted infections in transgender people, and whether hormone therapy might increase that risk. About half of all NIH-funded research on transgender health, including that which has been completed, relates to HIV prevention among the transgender population, totaling approximately $80 million since 1985.
Transgender males “have some of the highest concentrated HIV epidemics in the world, with a pooled global prevalence of 19% and a 49-fold higher odds ratio of acquiring HIV than non-transgender adults,” according to one project summary. Behavioral factors contribute, another project says, but the role of sex hormones needs further study, since they “are known to modulate the immune response, resulting in changes in host susceptibility to pathogens, vaccine efficacy and drug metabolism.”
Many Ongoing Projects Highlight Lack of Research
While suicide prevention is often cited as a major reason to give dysphoric children puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, only one of the current studies is focused specifically on suicide risk, although several emphasize the lack of long-term studies of cross-sex hormones administered to children and their relation to mental health.
Medical professionals “say more specific research is needed to determine whether medically transitioning as a minor reduces suicidal thoughts and suicides compared with those who socially transition or wait before starting treatment,” according to Reuters.
One NIH-funded project summary acknowledges that the long-term effect of puberty suppression on mental health needs further study and will evaluate children already taking puberty blockers.
During puberty, hormones change the structure and organization of the brain. Puberty blockers “may also disrupt puberty-signaled neural maturation in ways that can undermine mental health gains over time and impact quality of life in other ways,” the Nationwide Children’s Hospital project summary says. “The overall impacts” of puberty blockers “have not been systematically studied,” the summary says.
One of the larger NIH-funded transgender studies, funded at $743,000 annually, is at Boston Children’s Hospital. It notes, “Little is known [emphasis added] about how pubertal blockade, the first step in the medical management of a young transgender adolescent, affects bone health and psychological well-being. … In an exploratory aim, we will also consider the effect of pubertal blockade on anxiety, depression, and health-related quality of life.”
Another research project, “Psychological consequences of medical transition in transgender youth,” begun last year at Princeton University and anticipated to end in 2025, notes the lack of quality research in this area:
Five studies to date have longitudinally examined the relationship between one or both of these interventions [puberty suppression and hormone therapy] and mental health in transgender youth. However, these studies have had relatively small samples, none have been able to isolate the effects of endocrine interventions, none have included a cisgender [non-transgender] comparison group, and none have examined the mechanisms by which endocrine interventions might improve mental health.
A longitudinal study that began in 2015 and will run through at least 2026 acknowledges, “Transgender children and adolescents are a poorly understood and a distinctly understudied population in the United States. … Continuing our current research is imperative to expand the scant evidence-base currently guiding the clinical care of TGD [transgender and gender diverse] youth and thus, is of considerable public health significance.”
As the summary of one ongoing NIH-funded research project on sex hormones’ effects on the developing brain says, “There is little to no empirical data guiding clinical practices” of cross-sex hormone therapy in early pubertal adolescents, “highlighting the need for further research to address the critical knowledge gap.” The research, funded at $3 million so far to Stanford University, “will provide a much-needed foundation for understanding the longitudinal impact of treatments that are already being used [emphasis added] in clinical settings.”
The project will elucidate “how sex hormone therapy alters sex-specific risk for disease … and [its] impact on neural networks implicated in psychiatric disorders.” The research proposed “has never been conducted in early pubertal adolescents,” the summary reads.
NIH Acknowledges Limited Evidence, FDA Hasn’t Approved
The NIH, the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, told Reuters that “the evidence is limited on whether these treatments pose short- or long-term health risks for transgender and other gender-diverse adolescents.” Additionally, the Food and Drug Administration has not approved puberty blockers and sex hormones for children’s transgender medical interventions. As Reuters reported:
No clinical trials have established their safety for such off-label use. The drugs’ long-term effects on fertility and sexual function remain unclear. And in 2016, the FDA ordered makers of puberty blockers to add a warning about psychiatric problems to the drugs’ label after the agency received several reports of suicidal thoughts in children who were taking them. More broadly, no large-scale studies have tracked people who received gender-related medical care as children to determine how many remained satisfied with their treatment as they aged and how many eventually regretted transitioning.
Countries such as Finland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have begun to limit children’s access to transgender health interventions. Early, foundational research from 2011 on transgender medical interventions has been criticized as failing to meet basic research standards.
Before 2012, “there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty-one ever having developed gender dysphoria at all,” according to Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage.” Studies show most children grow out of gender dysphoria, Shrier says.“There are no good long-term studies indicating that either gender dysphoria or suicidality diminishes after medical transition,” according to Shrier.
Meanwhile, despite all the possible health risks, President Joe Biden has issued executiveorders charging “HHS to work with states to promote expanded access to gender-affirming care.” The administration has issued directives that federal health insurance benefits must “provide comprehensive gender-affirming care.” The administration also opposes “conversion therapy — efforts to suppress or change an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.”
Taxpayers are already paying for transgender procedures, as they are covered by some insurers and Medicaid in some states.
I’ll ask again. WHY ARE THESE MENTAL PATIENT LEFTEST SO HYPER ABOUT MUTILATING AMERICA’S CONFUSED CHILDREN? WHAT IS THEIR END GAME?
HHS’s Office of Population Affairs, which is overseen by transgender Dr. Rachel Levine, states there’s no debate: “Research demonstrates that gender-affirming care improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse children and adolescents.” Other proponents acknowledge a lack of research on these hormones’ effect on brain development, but say the pros outweigh the cons.
Growing Transgender Identification
The number of transgender adults in the U.S. is estimated at 1.4 million to 2 million, with an estimated 150,000 to 300,000 transgender children. The number of American children who started on puberty blockers or hormones totaled 17,683 from 2017 to 2021 and has been increasing, according to Reuters.
From 2019 to 2021, at least 56 patients ages 13 to 17 had genital surgeries, and from 2019 to 2021, at least 776 children that age had mastectomies, not including procedures that weren’t covered by insurance, according to Reuters.
The transgender surgery industry grosses more than $2 billion annually and expects to double that by 2030.
Debate Among Medication Providers
“Puberty delay medications are safe and effective,”according to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), a pro-transgender organization that sets standards for trans medical interventions. “Every person, including every TGD person, deserves an opportunity to be their true selves and has the right to access medically-necessary affirming care to enable this opportunity,” WPATH says.
When WPATH recently updated its guidance, authors “were acutely aware that any unknowns that the working group acknowledged — any uncertainties in the research — could be read as undermining the field’s credibility and feed the right-wing effort to outlaw gender-related care,” The New York Times reported. The newspaper is in the midst of an internal fight about its coverage of transgender issues, with some saying it has been too critical of transgender medical interventions.
A draft of the WPATH chapter for adolescents included minimum recommended ages for hormone treatments and breast removal or augmentation, but after criticism from providers and transgender activists, “it was determined that the specific ages would be removed to ensure greater access to care for more people,” WPATH said.
The final guidelines also walked back a recommendation that preteens and teenagers should provide evidence of several years of persistently identifying as transgender, to differentiate from kids whose change in identification is recent, and changed it to a vaguer “sustained” gender incongruence. “In the end, the chapter sided with the trans advocates who didn’t want kids to have to wait through potentially painful years of physical development,” according to the Times.
The final guidelines acknowledged that because of the limited long-term research, treatment without a comprehensive diagnostic assessment “has no empirical support and therefore carries the risk that the decision to start gender-affirming medical interventions may not be in the long-term best interest of the young person at that time.”
Reuters found that gender facilities across the country are not conducting recommended months-long assessments before administering hormones to children. Parents of 28 of 39 minors who had sought transgender interventions told Reuters they “felt pressured or rushed to proceed with treatment.” Gender-care professionals also said some of their peers are “pushing too many families to pursue treatment for their children before they undergo the comprehensive assessments recommended in professional guidelines.”
Studying Causes of Gender Dysphoria
Some of the taxpayer-funded studies may bring clarity to the issue of gender dysphoria by examining its causes. One study will examine social media’s influence on children becoming transgender. A second will study “the life history calendar to examine young transgender women’s trajectories of violence, mental health, and protective processes.”
Another government-funded study will help determine how chromosomes, sexual organs, and hormones combine to create sex differences. Another will “uncover genetic underpinnings of female sexual orientation.”
This byline marks several different individuals, granted anonymity in cases where publishing an article on The Federalist would credibly threaten close personal relationships, their safety, or their jobs. We verify the identities of those who publish anonymously with The Federalist.
Poor mental health and suicidal ideation and attempts have increased among high school students over the last decade, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and more than half of girls struggle with “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.”
The CDC’s findings are reflected in the latest Youth Risk Behavior Survey prepared by the health agency’s Division of Adolescent and School Health. The report highlights trends in adolescent health and well-being using data collected every two years among a nationally representative sample of U.S. high school students.
“Nearly all indicators of poor mental health and suicidal thoughts and behaviors increased from 2011 to 2021. The percentage of students who experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, seriously considered attempting suicide, made a suicide plan, and attempted suicide increased,” the report says. “The percentage of students who were injured in a suicide attempt did not change.”
In 2021, the report says, “some 42% of high school students felt so sad or hopeless almost every day for at least two weeks in a row that they stopped doing their usual activities.”
Nearly 60% of female students were found to be more likely to experience these feelings, followed by Hispanic and multiracial students who were more likely than Asian, black and white students to harbor these feelings. The report added that nearly 70% of LGBT-identified students or students involved in same-sex relationships reported feelings of sadness or hopelessness, making them the most at-risk category of students.
Researchers found that the percentage of female students who seriously considered attempting suicide, made a suicide plan, and attempted suicide also increased. Some 10% of female students attempted suicide even though, for example, only 3% of students overall attempted suicide in 2021.
“In 2021, 3% of high school students made a suicide attempt that resulted in an injury, poisoning, or overdose that had to be treated by a doctor or nurse during the past year. Female students were more likely than male students to be injured in a suicide attempt. American Indian or Alaska Native students were less likely than students from most other racial and ethnic groups to be injured in a suicide attempt. Black and Hispanic students were more likely than Asian and white students to be injured in a suicide attempt,” the report says.
Increased percentages of suicide attempts were found in black and white students but decreased for Asian students. There was no change registered for Hispanic and multiracial students.
While the report sounds the alarm on poor mental health among high school students, researchers also highlighted a number of factors to help improve the situation.
“School connectedness, which is the feeling among adolescents that people at their school care about them, their well-being, and success, has long-lasting protective effects for adolescents. Youth who feel connected at school are less likely to experience risks related to substance use, mental health, violence, and sexual behavior,” the report explains. “School connectedness also protects against the co-occurrence of these risks.”
Researchers measured school connectedness by asking whether students felt close to people at their school.
Parental monitoring was also identified as another “important protective factor for adolescents.”
“High parental monitoring, defined as parents or other adults in a student’s family most of the time or always knowing where they were going or who they would be with, is associated with decreased sexual risk, substance use, experiences of violence, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors,” the report says.
Housing stability was also highlighted as a factor impacting student health.
“Housing stability is one important social determinant of health,” the report notes. “Youth who are unstably housed are more likely than their stably housed peers to experience violence, use substances, and have higher rates of poor mental health.”
Last week, a whistleblower came forward in The Free Press to expose how the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital engages in experimental interventions (aka “gender-affirming care”) on children that are “permanently harming the vulnerable patients in [their] care.”
The stories Jamie Reed outlines are horrific. Young girls were given testosterone, with gruesome side effects. Mentally ill individuals were chemically castrated with virtually no attempt to find another alternative. Parents were kept out of the loop, and people permanently altered their bodies as children, only to regret the decision shortly after. For the majority of these individuals, it is already too late.
Let’s get this straight. They are taking children who are sexually “confused” and feed them more information that ADDS to their confusion, then support that confusion by talking them into having life altering surgeries, WITHOUT PARENTAL KNOWLEDGE (in some cases), and then leave them alone to fend for themselves as a mutilated creature. We need to apologize to Dr. Frankenstein.
Many of us have heard these stories before and have been desperately trying to get people to pay attention. Calling out the transgender agenda for what it truly is, an experiment on our nation’s children, of course, comes with backlash from trigger-happy leftists who deem this language “hateful,” “transphobic,” or “anti-LGBT.” For conservatives, that reality is something we have learned to live with.
The risk for the whistleblower was far greater. Reed describes herself as “a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders” and is “married to a transman.” Her social and political circles are undoubtedly populated by people of similar viewpoints who are likely very supportive of so-called “gender-affirming care.”
This background is important — to come out as she did and to expose the horrors she witnessed at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital will almost certainly earn her a scarlet letter from her social and professional circle. She will likely face the realities of unemployment and social humiliation for standing up for the truth. She already knows the risks yet also knew that standing up on this issue was far more important.
Not only is this incredibly courageous, but it should be a message to others on the left who listen to the antics of glory seekers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and her ilk, who have blamed the pushback for these practices on the “radical right.”
The whistleblower’s story is gut-wrenching in and of itself, but it reveals the endgame of drugs and surgery to chemically castrate and irreversibly damage children physically and mentally. That endgame does not happen in isolation.
It begins at school.
Schools Indoctrinate Early
In the early years of children’s K-12 education, they get to read books like “It Feels So Good to Be Yourself,” an illustrated book for ages 4-8 that encourages kids to question their sex at any age. One example in the book is Ruthie, a biological boy who tells his parents that the doctors got it wrong, and he is now a girl. Ruthie is 5 years old.
As children get older and enter puberty, the books encouraging this only grow more plentiful. Students will often see titles such as “Beyond Magenta: Transgender and Nonbinary Teens Speak Out” prominently displayed in their school libraries.
Meanwhile, school policies are changed to allow students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of the sex with which they “identify,” to compete in sex-segregated athletic events pursuant to the sex with which they “identify,” and to be referred to by the “pronouns” they desire, regardless of whether other students and teachers have religious or moral objections.
Students who “identify” as a different sex are effectively given rights above and beyond everyone else. It’s no wonder young adolescents would deal with their growing pains in a way that gives them a feeling of acceptance, validation, and being part of a new “civil right.” In other words, a social contagion takes root.
Children are especially vulnerable to this phenomenon. When this was highlighted in Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage,” the transgender lobby went on the attack, and her book was pulled from the shelves of Target. Those who dare suggest a social contagion is at play will be met with articles from corporate media citing so-called “experts” denying its existence. But now even a far-left whistleblower tells us of “clusters of girls” arriving at the clinic “from the same high school,” and says that “the doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion.”
As this is all going on, schools work overtime to keep parents in the dark. Don’t like books encouraging transgenderism? Too bad, the book stays on the shelf and you had better hope you like being branded a “book banner.”
Even worse, schools require that staff not share with a student’s parents that their child is identifying as a different sex while at school. The reason? They consider transgender interventions to be health care, as articulated by President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services. Therefore, if you are not providing such health care to your child, you are a child abuser. They often won’t say this out loud or call Child Protective Services on you, but make no mistake — it’s coming.
Resisting the Profit Seekers
None of this is to say there aren’t actual cases of gender dysphoria that occur when a person feels a persistent incongruence or disconnect between their biological sex and the one with which they identify. These cases are extremely rare (in .06 percent of the population), and approximately 75 percent of children with gender dysphoria will age out of this condition.
Further, and as noted first by Shrier and then by the whistleblower herself, prior to the 2010s the vast majority of cases involved boys, but beginning in 2015, “teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone.”
Dealing with the rare cases of gender dysphoria is not what is happening, however. Rather, the powers that be have set up academia to become a pipeline for a dangerous ideology that is gruesomely taking advantage of children and their parents. That ideology denies biology to provide customers for a rapidly expanding market that has experienced exponential monetary growth and is on pace to grow 11.23 percent over the next 10 years to become a $5 billion industry.
If you speak out, you will face repercussions. The activists in the space do not play by the rules, and they will seek to cancel and destroy you for daring to question the mutilation of children. But if we have learned anything from the St. Louis Children’s Hospital whistleblower, it is that people must stand up to stop this unethical, dangerous, and anti-science war of physical destruction being waged on children, regardless of politics.
Ian Prior is a senior advisor to America First Legal and author of upcoming book “Parents of the World Unite!”
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference held in the Hyatt Regency on February 27, 2021, in Orlando, Florida. Begun in 1974, CPAC brings together conservative organizations, activists, and world leaders to discuss issues important to them. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has signed a bill into law that bans sex change surgeries and experimental puberty blockers for children and teens who struggle with their sexual identities and can be influenced into having irreversible procedures, such as chemical castration.
Noem signed House Bill 1080, also known as the “Help Not Harm” bill, on Monday, days after the state Legislature overwhelmingly passed the legislation.
“South Dakota’s kids are our future. With this legislation, we are protecting kids from harmful, permanent medical procedures,” said Noem in a statement. “I will always stand up for the next generation of South Dakotans.”
The signing of the bill received praise from groups like the American Principles Project, which noted that South Dakota was the seventh state to pass such legislation.
“The transgender industry’s assault on vulnerable children is appalling,” stated APP President Terry Schilling. “Kids rushed into dangerous, life-changing procedures without fully comprehending the consequences. Parents [were] misled or even outright cut out of the process. It is truly a horror show.”
“Noem and South Dakota legislators deserve a great deal of credit for acting to protect children in their state from this medical malpractice. The momentum for this movement fighting the transgender industry continues to grow, and we’re just getting started.”
The American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota, which supports the trans-ing of kids, by contrast, denounced the signing of HB 1080, claiming in a Facebook post that “Noem signed a law banning gender-affirming health care for any transgender person under 18.”
“This ban won’t stop South Dakotans from being trans, but it will deny them critical support that helps struggling transgender youth grow up to become thriving transgender adults,” the ACLU said.
“As much as Gov. Noem wants to force these young people to live a lie, we know they are strong enough to live their truth, and we will always fight for communities and policies that protect their freedom to do so.”
The ACLU of South Dakota vowed to continue to fight on behalf of trans-identified youth, pointing out that courts have blocked similar laws in Alabama and Arkansas.
According to the new law, “a healthcare professional may not, for the purpose of attempting to alter the appearance of, or to validate a minor’s perception of, the minor’s sex, if that appearance or perception is inconsistent with the minor’s sex.”
This prohibition includes banning puberty blockers, the administering of “testosterone, estrogen, or progesterone, in amounts greater than would normally be produced endogenously in a healthy individual of the same age and sex” and surgeries that involve castration or sterilization.
The law provided exemptions for treatments involving a child that was “born with a medically verifiable disorder of sex development, including external biological sex characteristics that are irresolvable ambiguous,” any minor “diagnosed with a disorder of sexual development” or a child that needs “treatment for an infection, injury, disease, or disorder that has been caused or exacerbated by any action or procedure prohibited” by the law.
Additionally, if a medical professional began performing sex reassignment surgeries for a minor before July 1 and it is determined that “immediately terminating the minor’s use of the drug or hormone would cause harm to the minor,” then the drugs can be “systematically reduced” during a period that “may not extend beyond December 31, 2023.”
Two Dutchstudies touting the great success of “gender-affirming” medical intervention on youth have been deemed bad research by experts at the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. In the report “The Myth of ‘Reliable Research’ in Pediatric Gender Medicine” published earlier this month, researchers describe how the 2011 and 2014 studies that formed the foundation of the transgender industry in the U.S. should never have been accepted by the professional community, falling “unacceptably” short of modern research standards. The studies led to a global movement of wrongly named “gender-affirming care,” resulting in hormone experimentation on youth and, in some cases, irreversible mutilation.
The Dutch studies had several major flaws, according to the report. Study authors only recorded the cases with the best outcomes, concluded without evidence that gender dysphoria disappeared solely as a result of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and failed to properly examine the risks of the interventions, with disastrous effects.
The American College of Pediatricians responded to the report in a press release on Jan. 25 calling on organizations to “reconsider current protocols for gender dysphoric children.”
“The entire pediatric transgender industry is based on these two Dutch studies,” Michelle Cretella, immediate past executive director of ACPeds and advisory board spokeswoman for Advocates Protecting Children, told me. “This open access report is critical because it exposes the fraudulent foundation of pediatric transgender medicine in the United States.”
The Dutch studies were so foundational to the U.S. movement that the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States was opened by Dr. Norman Spack, a pediatric endocrinologist who was convinced of the necessity of “gender-affirming” interventions after visiting the Dutch physicians who published them, Cretella said.
But if these studies had been published today, the authors conclude, the research would have been recognized as very low quality and would not have encouraged the use of puberty blockers, wrong-sex hormones, and surgery in confused children and young adults in general medical settings.
‘No Evidence’ of Genetic Cause
The report criticizing these studies was published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, and authors E. Abbruzzese, Stephen B. Levine, and Julia W. Mason have years of experience studying so-called gender identity. Levine has worked in the field as a psychiatrist since 1974.
“We had no bias, we are just responding to and trying to articulate the limitations of the studies,” Levine told me. “We are doing harm to an unknown percentage of kids, and the data that is supportive of this work does not really address the issue. The real issue here is what happens to these children when they get into their 20s and 30s.”
Youth who have been hormonally and surgically “transitioned” have major obstacles to their happiness and productivity later in life, Levine said.
“After people have sex reassignment surgeries … they want more surgeries,” according to Levine. “It’s very clear they have continued gender dysphoria. The idea that they are being ‘cured’ by affirmative care is an artifact, it’s a myth.”
Hormone and surgical treatment, and subsequent medical intervention, leads many people to assume this must be a “medical problem” but “we don’t have any evidence that this is genetically determined,” Levine said.
“Just because we have hormone treatment doesn’t mean there is a hormonal defect in the person,” he said. “People believe, erroneously, that there is some genetic, pre-determined factor here, but we have not been able to find a genetic cause.”
Cultural, interpersonal, psychological, and developmental factors all contribute to the development of a person’s behavior, Levine said. Gender dysphoria can be a resulting psycho-social problem.
Biased, Uncontrolled Studies
Though the Dutch studies were found to have selection bias and multiple, uncontrolled variables, they were broadly applied in the U.S.
“The Dutch study researchers only took healthy kids from supportive and reasonably healthy families,” Levine said. “They carefully screened kids, so if they had major developmental problems they were not included in the studies. But in the U.S. … the vast majority of these kids have a history of psychiatric issues before they developed gender dysphoria. The Dutch rejected these kids from their research.”
The Dutch study had 196 participants initially and only put 70 in the protocol. Only 55 then completed the protocol. As well as having selection bias, the study was uncontrolled.
“Wisely, the Dutch people gave these kids and their families continued psychotherapy during this protocol,” Levine said. “Is the positive results they found due to the psychotherapy, improvement as they got older, or affirmative care? This is an uncontrolled study. They cannot make conclusions about what caused what. But the world took this as scientific evidence.”
In the U.S., youth who had rapid-onset gender dysphoria and didn’t even meet the baseline criteria for the Dutch study began receiving interventions in pediatric clinics, with doctors utilizing the studies as justification. Furthermore, when the Dutch began this project there was also much less awareness of autism, Levine said. A very large percentage of these kids that have come to American facilities are on the autism spectrum, according to Levine.
Courageous Pediatricians Have Resisted
ACPeds physicians have spoken out against sexual disfigurement and medical intervention in youth with gender dysphoria for years.
“There are a handful of us physicians within ACPeds and across the country who have the courage and expertise to speak out on this issue,” Cretella said. “When we are able to do so in an environment open to dialogue, we are met with significant appreciation and affirmation by fellow physicians and laypersons alike.”
Most colleagues, Cretella said, appreciated ACPeds’ stance, acknowledging that the studies affirming medical intervention in gender dysphoric youth were likely flawed or fake; but too many feared losing their jobs to speak out against transgender interventions.
“Trans interventions are big money,” Cretella said. “Billionaire elites promote trans ideology over truth across all public institutions and media platforms, and [in America] a severe cancel culture results in everything from severe harassment and doxing to ending one’s career.”
Fortunately, signs of sound medical ethics triumphing over junk science are breaking through, Cretella said.
In the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Finland, cultures that embraced transgender interventions for youth early on have reversed course. France has urged greater caution in these cases.
In the United States, Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., has rooted his administration in medical ethics and utilized the best science to establish pro-child treatment of gender confusion with psychotherapy, Cretella said.
Currently, about 13 other states are attempting similar legislative efforts.
Ashley Bateman is a policy writer for The Heartland Institute and blogger for Ascension Press. Her work has been featured in The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, The New York Post, The American Thinker and numerous other publications. She previously worked as an adjunct scholar for The Lexington Institute and as editor, writer and photographer for The Warner Weekly, a publication for the American military community in Bamberg, Germany. Ashley is a board member at a Catholic homeschool cooperative in Virginia. She homeschools her four incredible children along with her brilliant engineer/scientist husband.e who lives in Virginia.
Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed new legislation over the weekend that appeared to bar permanently deforming transgender surgeries for minors, but things aren’t always what they seem. Senate Bill 16, titled “Transgender Medical Treatment and Procedures,” was a top priority for lawmakers who introduced the measure two days after the legislature opened on Jan. 17.
Despite immediately receiving praise from numerous figures critical of transgender ideology, including a detransitioner, the bill signed into law Saturday certainly isn’t perfect. In fact, it doesn’t do much of anything.
The new law signed by the Utah governor, who has a history of introducing himself by stating his so-called preferred pronouns, only bars transgender procedures and hormone interventions for minors who have not been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. In other words, minors can find a sympathetic physician steeped in wrongly named “gender-affirming care” who will give them a diagnosis that enables them to pump their bodies full of wrong-sex hormones and amputate their healthy organs. Teens focused on gender-bending can even be diagnosed online.
“who have NOT been diagnosed with gender dysphoria.“
Furthermore, under the new Utah law, once individuals turn 18, they’re free to do whatever they want. They can even schedule transgender surgeries on their 18th birthday.
“Legislation that impacts our most vulnerable youth requires careful consideration and deliberation,” Cox said in a press release after his signature. “More and more experts, states and countries around the world are pausing these permanent and life-altering treatments for new patients until more and better research can help determine the long-term consequences.”
Cox also thanked the legislation’s sponsor, State Sen. Michael Kennedy, while giving a passing mention of the deficiencies in the new law. “While not a perfect bill, we are grateful for Sen. Kennedy’s more nuanced and thoughtful approach to this terribly divisive issue,” Cox said.
Ideally, Cox would have sided with lawmakers a year ago in their attempt to fight back against the transgender craze. In March last year, the statehouse had to override the governor’s veto of legislation prohibiting men from invading women’s sports.
“We will continue to push the Legislature for additional resources to organizations that work to help this important Utah community,” Cox said on Saturday. “While we understand our words will be of little comfort to those who disagree with us, we sincerely hope that we can treat our transgender families with more love and respect as we work to better understand the science and consequences behind these procedures.”
Despite its reputation as a deep-red state, Utah has been no exception to cultural currents imposing transgender ideology on children across the nation. Last fall, a Utah LGBT group sponsored an “all ages” back-to-school drag show with performers whose names sound like “anal leakage” and “genitalia” when pronounced aloud.
A drag queen named “Jenna Tailia” performed at an “all ages back to school drag extravaganza” in Provo, Utah pic.twitter.com/2OkdmXFhTE
Last spring, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson mocked Cox’s use of pronouns after the Utah governor’s veto of transgender sports legislation.
“Bright red Utah is now led by a cut-rate Gavin Newsom imitator named Spencer Cox,” Carlson said. “He’s beyond belief.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
My daughter ‘was terribly bullied, but no one told me. … Please don’t let ideology harm another child,’ pleaded the mother of a 14-year-old girl who was isolated from her parents by school and court authorities and sex-trafficked twice.
A subcommittee in the Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill on Monday that mandates public educators notify parents if their child “self-identifies” as something other than his or her natural sex. Introduced by Republican Dels. Dave LaRock, Tara Durant, and John McGuire, the measure (HB 2432) would provide parents with greater oversight into their children’s lives at school and increase transparency in public education. According to a summary of the legislation, if a school official “has reason to believe” that a student “is self-identifying as a gender different from the student’s biological sex,” said official is required “to contact as soon as practicable at least one of such student’s parents to ask whether such parent is aware of the student’s mental state and whether the parent wishes to obtain or has already obtained counseling for such student.”
Under the bill, school officials, such as counselors and clinical social workers, are barred from “encouraging or coercing a minor to withhold from the minor’s parent the fact that the minor’s perception of his or her gender or sex is inconsistent with the minor’s biological sex” or “withholding from a minor’s parent information relating to the minor’s perception that his or her gender or sex is inconsistent with the minor’s biological sex.”
Monday’s subcommittee vote came along party lines, with five Republicans voting in favor and three Democrats opposing.
Known as Sage’s Law, HB 2432 was introduced after it was revealed that a then-14-year-old Virginia girl ended up in the hands of sexual predators after her school failed to disclose her gender dysphoria to her mother. As The Federalist previously reported, the chain of events began in August 2021 when Sage began identifying as a boy and suffered intense bullying and harassment at school. Eventually, Sage ran away and was “found nine days later in Maryland, a victim of sexual assault.”
Appomattox County High School, which affirmed Sage’s new “identity” without notifying her mother, was following model guidelines issued by then-Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam’s administration on so-called gender affirmation. Such guidance has since been terminated by current GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
Throughout Monday’s hearing on Sage’s Law, witnesses supporting the bill discussed its importance in keeping parents involved in their children’s livelihoods, especially in the school classroom. During her testimony, Sage’s mother Michele called on the subcommittee to put commonsense before ideology.
“If I had known [what was going on], this would be a much different story. [Sage] was terribly bullied, but no one told me,” Michele said. “Please don’t let ideology harm another child. Let parents do our jobs. We know our children best and we love them a million times more.”
Also called to testify at the hearing was Dr. Erin Brewer, a former “trans kid” who spoke about the importance of schools helping children through their gender dysphoria without affirming such confusion or concealing it from parents.
“I was insistent that I was a boy when I started first grade after a brutal sexual assault. If I had been affirmed by my teachers, it would have allowed me to completely dissociate from myself as a girl and create a new persona who could pretend that the horrible trauma that triggered my gender dysphoria hadn’t happened to me,” she said. “Instead of encouraging my confusion and hiding it from my mother, the school contacted my mother, got permission for me to be assessed by the school psychologist, and they came up with a comprehensive program to help me resolve my gender dysphoria. … I [one] hundred percent support this legislation.”
Erin Friday, a lifelong Democrat and co-founder of Our Duty, a national and international parent and child advocacy group, also spoke in support of Sage’s Law. Throughout her remarks, Friday noted her personal experiences with a gender-dysphoric daughter and stated that “schools should never keep secrets from parents.”
Opponents to Sage’s Law also spoke at the hearing, with one man claiming to be a “trans woman” arguing that such legislation is “ridiculous” and that schools should be able to conceal a child’s gender dysphoria from that child’s parents.
“It should be that child’s own choice,” he said. “If we wanna tell who we wanna tell, like, that’s on us.”
Despite leftists’ support for deceptively-termed “gender affirmation” and the “transitioning” of children, research has shown that “upwards of 80 percent of gender dysphoric childrenembrace their sex as they emerge from puberty” and that “children who are ‘affirmed’ as the opposite sex … particularly if puberty blockers are used, consistently go on to further medicalization.” Children who undergo such protocols are subjected to lifelong damage to their bodies. The practices are so horrific that nations around the world, such as England, have ended the disfiguring practices that are falsely labeled as “gender-affirming care” for minors.
“Parents should never be the last to know [about what’s going on in their children’s lives],” said Durant during the subcommittee meeting. “It’s a very strange, strange place to me that we’re in now where parents are being told to step aside, to sit down, that ‘we as educators, as counselors know better [for] your own child’ — and that’s just simply not true.”
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
On Tuesday, Iowa became the second state in the country to pass universal school choice, directly providing families with funds to support their children’s education. Arizona was the trendsetter for this new wave of educational freedom after Gov. Doug Ducey signed universal school choice into law on July 7, 2022.
Now the race is on to advance educational freedom, with several red states looking to follow suit. The significance of these developments can hardly be overstated. What was once a pipe dream for many education reformers — the enabling of school choice at scale during their lifetimes — is now becoming a reality.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, true to her word, wasted no time in the 2023 legislative session by introducing the Students First Act in her Condition of the State address on Jan. 10. Within two weeks, the bill was signed into law. It took less than 24 hours for debate in the House and Senate, followed by Reynolds’ signing. The education savings account (ESA) program will provide parents with approximately $7,600 annually to allocate toward approved educational avenues. Most families are eligible in years one and two, and the benefit will be extended to all families statewide in year three.
Of course, powers beholden to leftist teachers unions should not be expected to go down without a fight. Even in pioneering state Arizona, new Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs seeks to undo its universal school voucher expansion law in her 2023 budget proposal. With Republicans controlling both state legislative bodies, her proposal will likely go down with the same fate as her massively failed veto referendum that sought to stop the law from taking effect while she was secretary of state last fall. For a politician, Hobbs is remarkably insensitive to the views of Arizona voters, 67 percent of whom support the state’s ESA program (the number jumps to 77 percent of Arizona parents of school-aged children).
States with a Republican governor and GOP majorities in both their House and Senate, on the other hand, are leading the charge across the United States to empower parents with options. The goal is universal school choice — through ESAs — to provide flexibility for families to select their desired educational avenue. Funds can be spent on school tuition, homeschool expenses, online learning, tutoring, special needs therapy, learning materials, and other education-related expenses.
ESA programs not only afford parents options outside of government-run, union-controlled public schools, but they save the state money because typically only a portion of the student state funding is provided. For example, in Arizona, instead of upwards of $12,000 spent per student within the public system, the ESA provided to families is only $7,000.
As the race to pass universal school choice picks up speed, several states could be heading to the home stretch in the coming weeks and months.
Utah is positioned extremely well to join the universal school choice ranks as the House and Senate have both passed the “Utah Fits All Act” as of January 26. If signed into law by Gov. Spencer Cox, families would have access to roughly $8,000 each year for educational expenses.
Florida is historically a national leader in school choice, with almost half its students learning in an option outside of their assigned traditional public school. Current legislation is calling for universal school choice. With Republican lawmakers holding supermajorities in both the House and Senate, and Gov. Ron DeSantis at the helm, it’s only a matter of time.
Oklahoma is a contender in the educational freedom race. The Education Freedom Act is currently in the Senate, which has a 40-8 Republican supermajority. The House has an 81-20 supermajority. Once the bill hits educational freedom champion Gov. Kevin Stitt’s desk, it will be signed into law. It will grant all families statewide access to an ESA based on the state’s per-pupil education expense. State Superintendent Ryan Walters is a fierce supporter of empowering Oklahoma families with educational freedom to select the schools that will best serve their children.
Texas, traditionally lagging behind other red states on school choice, is not to be counted out this session in advancing ESAs. In May 2022, Gov. Greg Abbott urged lawmakers to empower parents through state funding following students. As the months passed, the groundwork was laid, including debunking the notion that school choice does not benefit rural areas or that it hurts rural school districts.
West Virginia was the national leader prior to Arizona passing universal school choice in 2022. In West Virginia, roughly 93 percent of students have access to the Hope Scholarship to date. There is the possibility to expand it to 100 percent of the state’s children within the next three years. Despite the state’s families having negligible educational freedom options until 2019, West Virginia is now among the leaders.
Indiana has efforts underway to expand the state’s existing ESA program to all students statewide while also increasing the grant amount from 90 percent of the per-student state funding to 100 percent. That would translate to an average of $7,500 allocated per student for educational expenses of the parents’ choosing.
Arkansas shouldn’t be overlooked this session. Newly elected Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has stated her support for plans to “empower parents with more choices … so no child is ever trapped in a failing school.”
The tide is turning, and the implications are tremendous. No longer will families be at the mercy of government-run, union-controlled traditional public schools. Parents in an increasing number of states will be empowered as decision-makers in their children’s education.
The question is: Which state will be next to achieve universal educational freedom?
Dr. Keri D. Ingraham is a Fellow at Discovery Institute, Director of the American Center for Transforming Education, and a Visiting Fellow at Independent Women’s Forum.
Demonstrators lead the way at the 2022 March for Life in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 21, 2022. | The Christian Post/Nicole Alcindor
For those of us who have been working for years on the pro-life cause, this is a very special and joyous Sanctity of Human Life Month.
It’s the first one since the Supreme Court in June 2022 struck down Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion. Instead of the latest protest against Roe’s cruelty and unconstitutionality, this month-long observance and the annual March for Life on January 20 will be celebrations.
We still have much to do to protect innocent human life from the abortion industry. The battle is underway state by state and even city by city.
But Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is a game changer. The highest law of the land as interpreted by the highest court in the land is no longer hostile to the pro-life viewpoint. It’s no longer defensible to pretend that a baby in the womb is not human and is therefore disposable. Those who continue to advocate for abortion must make the immoral case that some human lives are not worth protecting. That should be a steep hill to climb in a nation with a Christian heritage.
Like slavery, abortion violates the moral law given us by our Creator. God’s law states that all human life is sacred because we are made in His image. Many of America’s founders, including Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, predicted that slavery’s inherent conflict with God-given liberties would one day end it. It took a terrible civil war, but slavery was finally abolished.
The arguments for abortion are also unsustainable. That’s why the pro-life movement has never given up. Pro-life doctors, nurses and scientists have been reminding everyone that at the moment of conception, a new human life springs into being with his or her unique genetic code.
So what if academia, Hollywood, the media and corporate America use their enormous clout to push the fiction that human life is not in fact human? Proverbs 31:8 admonishes those of us who have voices to “speak out for those who cannot speak.”
We must tell the truth, promote adoption, provide more help to mothers who keep their babies, and shore up marriage, the surest family structure in which a child can thrive.
We need to make sure that the legal system, as the enforcement arm of the representative democratic republic in which we live, is no longer abused to justify the taking of innocent human life.
This means persuading millions of our fellow Americans that abortion is not the answer to an unwanted pregnancy. It means letting women who have had abortions know that Jesus offers forgiveness, peace, and new life.
I recall vividly the day that my wife, Bonnie, and I saw the film “Silent Scream” at a theater in Orlando around 1990. This powerful movie depicts a fetus — a tiny human being — desperately trying to avoid the abortionist. Few people can watch it and walk away unaffected.
Our growing faith and clarity about abortion were driving forces in the creation of an investment fund, in 1994, for Bible-believing Christians, Timothy Plan, which pioneered Biblically Responsible Investing.
Other powerful films have also carried the pro-life message. In 2018, Timothy Partners, Timothy Plan’s advisor, bought out a theater in Orlando to show the movie “Gosnell” to our local community. Starring Dean Cain, the film exposes the evils committed by Kermit Gosnell. He was a West Philadelphia-based doctor convicted of murdering infants who were born alive and of manslaughter for the death of a woman patient.
In March 2019, our firm bought out seven theaters in Orlando to show the movie “Unplanned.” It’s about the story of former Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson, who became a pro-life champion. We gifted 500 tickets that were snapped up within 24 hours. At the movie’s conclusion, we asked the audience to remain for a couple of minutes while we introduced the directors of 11 pro-life, crisis pregnancy centers that we support.
I am sharing this to encourage others to use whatever tools and influence they have to steer us toward a truly pro-life culture in which all lives are deemed sacred.
The end of Roe is a huge victory we should celebrate. It is also a clarion call to “speak out for those who cannot speak.”
Art Ally is the founder of the Timothy Plan family of Biblically Responsible Investing funds.
It seems like every time I turn around, an editor assigns me a story related to the mental health crises of our children. Most of the health experts I speak to correlate Covid lockdowns and our children’s fragile state. Closing schools played a major role in this phenomenon, but what if other crucial factors are being overlooked?
Another story, seemingly unrelated to the mental health crisis, is making the rounds in the corporate press. Church attendance is on a rapid decline. The “nones,” survey respondents who say they have no religious affiliation, are the fastest-growing group in the United States every year. We now have a generation of adults that grew up not attending worship services weekly, and they are raising their children in a similar fashion.
The “nones” seem to prefer a parenting style that says: “We’re fine without church and worship and religious instruction and institutions, thank you very much.” But they are not fine. Their children are not coping and managing the day-to-day stresses and inconveniences thrown at them. They are fragile and increasingly so.
The “nones” will tell you it is because we need to better embrace children’s differences and preferences (like their pronouns) while empowering them with positive affirmations and encouraging personal acceptance through self-esteem workshops. We clutter their calendars with sports, theater, STEM clubs, and dance classes. If none of that pans out, we allow our kids to self-medicate with hours spent on social media.
Parents will do all of this, but won’t take their families to church. Yet research shows that children who attend weekly worship services have higher GPAs, score higher on standardized tests, and are less likely to be held back a grade. They also are more likely to achieve a bachelor’s degree in college.
So why aren’t parents taking their children to weekly worship?
When surveyed, parents often respond that their children and teens do not want to attend worship. This democratic approach to family decision-making only seems to apply to church attendance, however. For other important decisions like wearing a seatbelt or vaccinations, parents balk at giving their children voting privileges. A child’s vote carries more weight when it aligns with a parent’s desire to stay home in pajamas on a Sunday morning.
Why should church attendance be considered a powerful tool for parents to boost their children’s mental health? We can look to the research for the answer.
In a 2018 study, Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health found some surprising benefits to children and adolescents who attend weekly worship. It turns out that children and teens who attend church grow up to be young adults with higher rates of reported happiness and life satisfaction. They were less likely to suffer from anxiety and depression, less likely to use illicit drugs, and less likely to engage in early sex and contract sexually transmitted infections.
In addition, these same young adults were more likely to embrace volunteering and reported feeling a sense of mission and purpose than their non-church-attending counterparts.
With all of these positive outcomes for children who attend weekly worship, should we be surprised that children who do not have a similar structure in their lives experience an inverse phenomenon? Is it any wonder that anxiety and depression among children and teens are on the rise when every day, their still-forming brains are bombarded with information about doom and destruction while they drown in a sea of gender confusion and racial animus?
We think we can combat all the negativity by telling children: “You are perfect! You are awesome! You keep being you!” We put these pithy platitudes on T-shirts and backpacks and stickers with unicorns and rainbows. At the end of a bad day, our kids know that this is no substitute for the real deal.
Each of us knows these sentiments are superficial. We are poor, miserable sinners in need of forgiveness. Where do we go with all our baggage when the church is not an option? We go to therapists and pharmacists, but trends show that the last place parents want to go is the place actually offering a solution.
What could families find at church that they won’t find anywhere else? Hopefully, something that is woefully lacking in the world around them: the truth.
Newsflash, kids! You are not perfect! You know that mean thing you did to your classmate in the cafeteria? That was a sin. And that nasty thought you had about that person? That was a sin. And the snide comment you made to your mom when you were hangry? Yep. Are you starting to see a pattern here?
Good news: you’ve come to the right place! Jesus came for sinners. As a matter of fact, the church is filled with them. Each week, they come to hear the message that even though we are sinful human beings, Jesus died for those sins. When we confess those nasty thoughts and horrible things we did, we can receive forgiveness — a clean slate!
Will we mess up again on Monday? Of course. But that’s why we can look forward to church. Can we try harder to be better people? Kinder people? Yes, we can. Does our forgiveness depend upon what we do and how we perform each week? Nope. You are forgiven because God loves you that much, so much that he sent his son to take the punishment that should have been yours and mine.
Imagine what a burden could be lifted from our children if they had a place to go each week that offered them that grace. How much better could they cope with a bad day, knowing that each moment offers a fresh start? How much more resilient could our children become?
Parents, we put our children at a disadvantage when we do not give them the very thing they need for their mental and spiritual health. It is time to put a new priority on the family calendar every Sunday. If we won’t do it for ourselves (and we should), let’s do it for our children. The next generation depends on it.
Mary Rose Kulczak is a writer for various parent and child publications. She is a wife and mother of three sons, and currently resides in Saline, Michigan.
In 2010, Bill Gates famously articulated a four-part equation to reducing the world’s carbon output. Seemingly bizarrely, his first component was reducing the population — through vaccination. “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about nine billion,” bemoaned Gates in his now infamous TED Talk. “Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10% or 15%.” Until recently, I thought this must have been a gaffe. After all, how could vaccines reduce the world’s population? Well, enter the COVID jabs – if you even want to call them vaccines – and we might have our answer.
Questions about fertility issues, stillbirths, and neonatal deaths began to be raised last winter when Scotland experienced a month of higher infant mortality than at any time over the past three decades. Then in the spring of 2022, roughly nine months after most young adults were jabbed with the COVID shots, COVID data analysists began noticing unusual drops in birth rates. The hope was that these numbers were just short-term aberrations due to some unknown transient cause. But months later, the evidence is growing too strong to ignore, suggesting a much longer-term problem, which bizarrely has garnered little concern from policymakers, governments, the medical establishment, or the media. It ranks alongside “died suddenly” both in terms of its magnitude to humanity and the shocking degree of silence in response.
In fact, some media outlets were even celebrating the low birth rates without expressing any curiosity as to the sudden cause. While it’s impossible to prove definitively that the correlation equals causation, it’s stupefying that these shots are not under suspicion given that they are already tied to heart problems, blood clots, massive inflammatory syndromes, and menstrual irregularities and that the lipid nano particles are deposited largely in the ovaries and the testes.
When you are dealing with 1-in-1,000-year anomalies, it takes a civilization-changing event to account for the anomaly. COVID itself cannot be a factor in the sudden drop, because the birth rates were not declining nine months after COVID hit or even in the first year and a half. The other culprit could have been lockdowns, which perhaps disrupted travel, relationships, and cohabitation. But if that were the case, by now we should be seeing a bounce-back effect. Instead, as my friend “Gato Malo” points out on his Substack, the numbers are getting worse.
Sweden is a perfect country to study because it never locked down and should not have been affected socially by the lockdowns. Yet not only did the Swedes experience a sharp decline in births nine months after their vaccination program, the numbers are further deteriorating over time. According to Statistics Sweden, live births are down 8.1% for the year (8.7% per capita), but as Gato observes, the worst month was October 2022 (the most recent month with data), which saw a 13.2% per capita decline. What on earth could explain the fact that this trend is getting worse, other than … you know what? He collated the data from 25 years, and this data, which is in plain sight, raises the question of why there is no policy concern whatsoever.
He further demonstrates that the plummeting birth rates correlate perfectly with the uptake of the vaccines in Sweden among the childbearing population.
Furthermore, any hypothesis as to the cause of the plummeting birth rates would also have to logically account for the rise in neonatal deaths. For example, lockdowns would not explain why the babies being born are experiencing more health problems. The spike protein embedded in the babies’ blood, however, would. Israeli researcher Josh Guetzkow obtained neonatal death data from Israeli health insurance fund Maccabi, which covers 25% of Israelis. He found a tripling of neonatal deaths in two of the quarters post-vaccination.
The timing is very peculiar, according to Guetzkow:
In February, 2021, the Israeli Ministry of Health started to officially recommend COVID-19 vaccines for pregnant women in their 2nd and 3rd trimesters, so the timing of the second quarter spike would coincide with women being jabbed later in their pregnancy 2-4 months prior.
The 4th quarter spike coincides with the booster vaccination campaign in Israel in August and especially September — a drive that aggressively targeted pregnant women. Unfortunately the health insurer claimed not to have information on the vaccination status of pregnant women, so we are not able to differentiate by vaccination status.
This clearly rules out COVID as the culprit, because the neonatal deaths in the earlier quarters in 2020 were low. He goes on to note that this data complements earlier findings he publicized from two major Israeli hospitals showing a sudden increase in stillbirths, miscarriages, and abortions (collectively, SBMA) around the same time. The insurance data does not illuminate the vaccination status of the mothers suffering these reproductive problems, but his earlier data showed a 34% higher rate of SBMAs in Rambam hospital in Haifa among vaccinated women through October 2021.
Obviously, we all understand that you can’t definitively prove causation from correlation, but the lack of any curiosity from the medical community or the government is appalling, especially when the mechanism of action of the spike protein can logically cause these complications (including low sperm count and motility). We have now entered a new era of “speed of science” in which governments can foist novel products upon our bodies with multiple glaring and blaring safety signals setting off alarm bells all over the world, yet until we can prove conclusively the therapeutics are responsible for 100% of the anomaly, they will continue to be promoted. That is completely backward and represents a flagrant violation of the Nuremberg Code.
In a sane world, the makers of these therapies would be behind bars, but instead they are getting a promotion to concoct even more products with this same dangerous technology. Last week, the U.K. announced the formation of a 10-year partnership with Moderna to invest in more R&D for mRNA technology and to build a vaccine manufacturing center that can produce 250 million vaccines a year, particularly for the very problematic RSV shot the company is planning to release next year. In the irony of all ironies, the U.K.’s Health Security Agency will be overseeing this partnership. The UKHSA was the first health surveillance body in the world that published comprehensive weekly COVID updates showing negative efficacy of the shots almost a year and a half ago.
Typically, failure of a corporate partner is an impetus for a government to break the partnership. In the case of vaccines, however, the more they fail, the more they are elevated, subsidized, and even mandated. Unless their definition of failure is the opposite of how humanity would define it.
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Schools across America are affirming the gender dysphoria of children without parental consent. While some educators have been exposed for intentionally confusing children on matters of sex and identity, entire school boards are doubling down, with some battling in court to keep facilitating students’ so-called transitions without telling parents.
When Jennifer — who omitted her surname for the sake of her child’s privacy — caught her school covertly transitioning her 10-year-old daughter; she rescued her little girl and began homeschooling.
In many similar cases, the cards appear stacked against parents, particularly those unable to homeschool but wary of strangers confusing their kids and putting them on paths to sterile, drug-dependent, and disenchanted lives.
Jennifer recognized that while her little girl was spared, she wouldn’t be the last targeted; that educators, school administrators, pharmaceutical companies, psychologists, and other power- and profit-incentivized parties were just getting started. Recognizing that other parents may need help and that this is a battle worth winning, Jennifer and other parents are now going on the offensive.
TheBlaze recently spoke to Jennifer about the fight her volunteer organization, Partners for Ethical Care, is taking to the loose coalition of bad actors apparently eager to transmogrify children, usurp parental rights, and turn a profit at the expense of innocence.
What are the details?
In November, Jennifer told Wesley Yang, who runs the Substack “Year Zero,” about how her school first socially transitioned her 10-year-old daughter without informing her.
“The school was using a name that she made up, so not her name that was given to her, and different pronouns,” said Jennifer.
Jennifer’s daughter no longer used the girl’s bathroom. Had she been 13 or older, she would have been able to use boy’s facilities without Jennifer knowing, but as she was still only 10 at the time, she instead used the office washroom.
A school therapist would regularly meet with Jennifer’s daughter, ultimately in excess of five hours.
In these meetings, the therapist would reportedly employ biologically inaccurate pronouns in reference to the little girl and egg on the child’s temporary identity crisis.
One teacher went so far as to suggest that Jennifer’s little girl be assigned to a boys’ cabin at camp.
For the most part, the school elected not to keep Jennifer’s family in the loop.
“It just felt so much like an injustice,” she told TheBlaze. “I knew I was gonna try to do whatever I could to push back against it.”
Despite fearing that Child Protective Services might break up her family, citing her refusal to accommodate the so-called transition, Jennifer ultimately pulled her daughter out. CPS fortunately never came, and Jennifer now homeschools her child.
Her daughter’s previous confusion, exacerbated by her LGBT friend group and by social media, dissipated over time.
While her battle for her daughter’s well-being was over, Jennifer’s war against the “medicalization of children” was just beginning.
Partners for Ethical Care
While Jennifer and her family enjoyed the requisite stability to homeschool, she recognized that not all parents have that as an option. She also suspected that soon, CPS and other state agencies would be weaponized against families antipathetic to the medicalization of their children.
“I do remember at some point, my mother’s saying to me, ‘This is so huge. … What are you going to be able to do?’ I said I don’t know, but if I don’t, who will do something?” said Jennifer. “Everything has to start somewhere, right?”
Jennifer noted that at the time, she wasn’t aware of some of the other groups committed to protecting children from the transsexual agenda but is now well acquainted with the work of Stephanie Davies-Arai of Transgender Trend and others in the U.S. extra to the “vast underground network of parents” committed to the fight.
Keen to do undertake an initiative of their own, Jennifer, Alix Aharon of the Gender Mapping Project, Jeannette Cooper, and several others banded together in fall 2020.
Jennifer recalled the sentiment early on: “We’re like, let’s start this organization. Let’s fight. Let’s fight the medicalization. … We were looking to create awareness because there didn’t seem to be much outside of our tiny bubble. And to gather stories to potentially help [in legal efforts].”
The group they founded is called Partners for Ethical Care.
“No child is born in the wrong body” is the understanding underpinning the work undertaken by the volunteers behind PEC, all committed to stopping the “medicalization of children.”
As part of its campaign to raise awareness, PEC shares testimonials on both its website and podcast from families adversely affected by transsexual ideology as well as from those who have “desisted” (i.e., ended social and or medical transmogrifications.)
PEC also provides parents with resources detailing methods by which they can opt their kids out of gender education programs and find “gender-critical” therapists as well as what to look out for in the way of deceptive practices widely employed by school administrators and educators.
The awareness and resource campaign is critically important, suggested Jennifer, since the fight against the medicalization agenda targeting minors and the true nature of the underlying problem is “under a media blackout, especially in left-wing media, mainstream media.”
Best practices
Jennifer highlighted three major ways parents can confront this threat posed to their children.
First, she suggested that parents should regulate and monitor their kids’ interactions online.
“The biggest thing is for parents to keep their kids off the internet for as long as possible,” she said. “My daughter did learn some of these things in an online forum — a drawing forum.”
Whether it’s on Discord or in online games, “The internet is a predator’s playground right now.”
According to Jennifer, both predators and the ideologically-motivated seek out the vulnerable online.
Narrowing kids’ exposure to content that inspires and promotes gender dysphoria online is important but only a partial measure.
Second, Jennifer suggested that parents need to stand up for their kids in their school districts.
Any ground conceded by parents regarding how their children are to be raised is ground that will ultimately be taken by bad actors. Thus, parents need to keep “standing up for their kids and trying to change the harmful policies” in schools.
“I will say it’s scary for a lot of people to go up [against school boards and educators],” she said, noting how parents critical of transsexual bathroom policies and the crimes they enabled in Loudon County, Virginia, “got framed as terrorists.”
Jennifer suggested that the PEC, like the parental rights movements combatting transsexual propaganda and policies in Virginia and the coalition of Muslim and Christian parents who recently sued a school board in Ohio, are not, contrary to the suggestion of some LGBT activists, “powered by hate.”
“We are not getting paid. We’re doing this out of love. We’re doing this because we care that much,” she said.
This can be hard, she said, because oftentimes schools keep their real intents and policies hidden.
The foundation for these three tactics is awareness.
We’re proud to announce our first event—and it’s a big one. Join us in Austin, TX on April 20, 2023 to learn from a panel of experts from around the world going step-by-step through the process of how Gender Inc Manufactures Trans Kids. Tickets: https://t.co/9WjVuO3RGG
— Partners for Ethical Care (PEC) (@ethical_care) December 5, 2022
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Parents Defending Education, a grassroots parental rights group, obtained and released a North Carolina school board presentation that detailed the district’s transgender policy, which explained how faculty should hide a student’s gender identity from the student’s parents.
On August 17, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District Board of Education met to view an 84-slide presentation that covered a wide range of topics, including student discipline, teacher salaries, and the district’s transgender policy. The presentation used CDC statistics to estimate that of the district’s 2,146 students, approximately 43, or 2%, likely identify as transgender. The school board also estimated that of those 43 transgender students, 15 had likely attempted suicide. According to district policy, children can request to change their names and pronouns without parental approval. Teachers are not permitted to share a child’s gender identity with the child’s parents or peers without express permission from the student.
“Preferred name can be changed at student’s request – parent/guardian consent not needed,” the presentation stated.
The policy asked educators to consider that a student’s parents may disapprove of the student’s gender identity, which could lead to abuse, neglect, dependency, depression, anxiety, substance abuse, self-harm, and suicide.
“There is never a justification for a policy that calls for the deliberate withholding and concealment of information from parents about their own child,” Erika Sanzi, director of outreach for Parents Defending Education, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “This policy is based on an ideology; it has no place in schools.”
Educators must refer to students by their preferred names and pronouns, although the policy noted that “inadvertent slips or mistakes” are excusable. However, when speaking to parents, teachers are instructed to use the student’s legal name unless the child has stated otherwise.
Students are permitted to use the bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identities, the policy noted.
When going on field trips, educators are asked to “consider the transgender student’s privacy and comfort” and whether sex segregation is necessary. Teachers are also asked, “What will you do if you go to a place that enforces sex stereotyping?”
According to district policy, school staff must follow the students’ lead on the confidentiality of their gender identities.
“In deciding whether to involve a student’s parents or guardian in developing a plan, school staff should work closely with the student to assess the degree to which, if any, the parent or guardian will be involved in the process and must consider the health, wellbeing and safety of the student,” the policy stated. “Currently no duty for school to report transgender status to parents.”
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District Board of Education did not respond to a request for comment, the DCNF reported.
WASHINGTON — A new survey reveals that most Americans support religious liberty protections for medical professionals and institutions opposed to participating in procedures that violate their beliefs and commitment to “do no harm,” even as younger Americans express more skepticism about religious liberty protections.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty unveiled the top findings of its 2022 Religious Freedom Index at its headquarters Tuesday. The fourth annual survey, conducted in conjunction with Heart and Minds Strategies, is based on responses collected from 1,004 adults in the United States from Sept. 28 to Oct. 5. The full report is slated for release Wednesday.
As Becket Fund for Religious Liberty President and CEO Mark Rienzi explained, the Religious Freedom Index asks “the same questions year after year [to] a big number people to get a sense of how the American people are feeling about religious liberty for themselves, for other people, for people of minority faiths, [and] people of faiths that they don’t necessarily share.”
One question on the survey asked respondents to react to statements related to religious objections to assisted suicide, abortion and sex change procedures within the medical community. Seventy-three percent of those surveyed agreed that “individual physicians should be allowed to opt out of assisted suicide, elective abortion, or sex change procedures” if performing such procedures goes against their religious beliefs or their commitment to “do no harm.”
When asked if they believed that “hospitals and healthcare systems which have ethical objections or are run by religious organizations should be allowed to refuse to perform elective abortions,” 62% answered in the affirmative. Additionally, a majority (59%) of those surveyed believed that “medical students should be able to opt out of instruction regarding physician-assisted suicide, elective abortions, and sex change procedures during training.”
Only half of respondents expressed support for allowing “hospitals and healthcare systems with religious objections to assisted suicide, elective abortions, and sex change procedures” to “only employ medical professionals who agree with that position.”
Achieving 74% support, the most popular idea introduced in the Religious Freedom Index states that “Patients and families should have access to healthcare facilities that share their beliefs about controversial procedures such as assisted suicide, elective abortion, or sex change procedures.”
The release of the 2022 Religious Freedom Index comes after the Biden administration has found itself in court over a mandate it issued forcing medical organizations to perform gender transition surgeries. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit struck down the mandate and the Biden administration did not appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, leaving the decision in place.
Last year’s survey included a question measuring support for “freedom for healthcare workers with religious objections to abortion to not participate in abortion procedures.” Seventy-five percent of respondents either completely or mostly accepted allowing healthcare workers to opt out of performing abortions if they could not do so in good conscience.
At the same time, 44% of those surveyed believed that hospitals and healthcare systems run by religious organizations should have the ability to “set policies and standards that reflect the organization’s religious beliefs.”
The questions about the conscience rights of hospitals and healthcare workers constitute a small fraction of the inquiries posed to Americans in this year’s Religious Freedom Index. As in previous years, the survey asked Americans for their views on religion and policy, religion in action, religion in society, religious pluralism, church and state and religion sharing.
Based on responses to a series of questions, Becket calculated a dimension score on a scale of 0 to 100 for each of the subcategories examined, with 0 indicating “complete opposition for the principle of religious freedom at issue” and a score of 100 demonstrating “robust support for the same principle.” The Religious Freedom Index is a composite score calculated after combining the dimension scores.
Heart and Mind Strategies CEO Dee Allsop elaborated on the dimensions examined in the Religious Freedom Index at the event Tuesday. According to Allsop, questions about religious pluralism examine respondents’ views about “freedoms to choose your religion, and to be able to pray and pursue your beliefs.” The religious sharing dimension measures Americans’ beliefs pertaining to the ability to “talk about and preach about your faith.”
Questions about church and state survey public opinion about “government being involved in religion and religion in government.” The religion in society dimension seeks to determine “whether or not religion is part of the problem or part of the solution” to societal problems.
The religion and policy dimension queries respondents for their views about marriage and whether or not religious beliefs “should be guiding the way that we vote.” The religion in action dimension is based on responses to questions about whether or not there should be “freedom for people of faith to follow their own religious beliefs when they’re at work and in their profession.”
As panelists explained at the press conference, the overall Religious Freedom Index stood at 68 this year, showing no change from 2021. However, the changes in the index dimension scores from 2021 varied widely.
As in previous surveys, respondents demonstrated the highest level of support for religious pluralism. The dimension score for religious pluralism came in at 84 in 2022, an increase from 80 in 2021. The dimension scores for religious sharing and religion in action barely budged from 71 to 72 and 67 to 68, respectively.
On the other hand, support for religion in society, religion and policy, church and state and religion in action declined compared to last year. The dimension score for religion and policy dropped by three points from 68 to 65 between 2021 and 2022. The religion in society dimension score also decreased by three points, from 65 to 62.
Mirroring the results of previous surveys, the dimension dealing with church and state received the lowest score in 2022, dropping from 58 to 56 over the past year.
A group of panelists, moderated by Becket Law Executive Director Montse Alvarado, discussed the findings from the Religious Freedom Index and their implications for American society as a whole at the event Tuesday. With the U.S. Supreme Court case 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis case in the news, Americans indicated that they “overwhelmingly support” the right of a photographer not to participate in a same-sex wedding if doing so conflicts with their religious beliefs, regardless of what those beliefs are.
The 303 Creative case centers on Colorado-based website designer Lorie Smith, who is challenging Colorado anti-discrimination law out of concern that it would force her to create websites for same-sex marriages in violation of her religious convictions about marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Oral arguments in the 303 Creative case took place Monday.
One panelist, Nick Tomaino of The Wall Street Journal, expressed gratitude for “the durable support for people like Lorie,” noting that the Religious Freedom Index found “about seven in 10 people thinking that Lorie Smith and others like her should be able to practice their faith.” At the same time, he highlighted a trend from the survey revealing that “Gen Z women aren’t registering their support.”
Other panelists also cited Gen Zers’ beliefs about religious freedom issues as a cause for concern going forward. Stephanie Slade of Reason Magazine pointed to statistics illustrating “abstract” support for religious liberty among the youngest Americans that fades when respondents are presented with a specific example: “Among Gen Z, you have a very high number (86%) who say … they support freedom of people or groups to choose not to participate in actions or work that violate their sincere religious beliefs and conscience.”
“When you put a specific example to them and you ask ‘should an individual physician, for example, be able to opt out of providing, say, being involved in abortion or physician-assisted suicide’ or something like that, support drops 50% among the Gen Z cohort,” she said.
Another panelist, Josh Good, director of the Faith Angle Forum at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, attributed the hostility toward religious liberty among younger Americans to a “blind spot when it comes to religion” in American newsrooms. Tomaino suggested that having “religious practitioners in newsrooms” could help address this “blind spot.”
Tomaino contended that “there might be a caricature that newsrooms treat religion as something of a strange species.” Alvarado lamented the Religious Freedom Index’s finding that “37% of Americans had never heard of pregnancy centers being in any way being affected by post-Roe reality,” such as vandalism and bombings, as a consequence of media bias.
Alvarado and Slade suggested that had these people known about the targeting of pro-life pregnancy centers following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which determined that the U.S. Constitution did not contain a right to abortion, they would have become more sympathetic to arguments in favor of religious liberty.
“Story selection is a form of bias,” Slade asserted. “These stories are not getting the coverage that they deserve and they are not getting the coverage they would get if … when there are, in some cases, violence or any kind of harassment or attacks on an abortion provider, for example, these same journalists would know that this is a story and it deserves coverage and it’s a big deal.”
According to Slade, “In a healthy media ecosystem, we need people who are going out and just reporting the facts that are true.” She portrayed the current state of American media as focused on “the pure outrage-inducing opinion cable news-style journalism as opposed to reporting the facts,” where journalists see themselves on an “existential mission to represent the good against the evil.”
Slade also acknowledged that the irreligiosity of Gen Z compared to other generations might also play a role in their apparent hostility toward religious liberty: “Gen Z is much less religious themselves, they’re much less likely to think that religion’s part of the solution rather than part of the problem.”
“They’re much less supportive of freedom for people to run their businesses the way they want, for religious nonprofits to make employment decisions based on the tenets of their faith, which is a really important part of being a faith-based nonprofit, they’re much less likely to … support freedom to believe that certain behaviors are sinful.”
After Slade reiterated that Gen Z has “less sympathy and understanding of the value of religion in society,” Tomaino pointed to academic influence as a reason why. “The water they swim in universities tends to be overtly hostile to the faith,” he concluded. He circled back to the role the media plays in shaping public opinion: “Having news coverage of the positive contributions that faith organizations make is especially important.”
When Tomaino clarified that “males registered slightly more sympathy to religious causes” than females, Alvarado responded, “they’re more religious themselves.” Alvarado and the other panelists repeatedly stressed the importance of religious liberty in a pluralistic society, with the Becket Fund Executive Director sharing a quote from noted theologian Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: “The Tree of Liberty has religious roots and don’t think that you can sever those roots and have the Tree of Liberty survive.”
For his part, Good offered up his opinion that “People being more religious, not less religious, is the key to understanding pluralism better.”
Discussing other takeaways of the 2022 Religious Freedom Index, Allsop noted that when asked if “religion is part of the solution to the problems we face in our society or part of the problem,” respondents were split down the middle. This constituted a dramatic drop from the 61% who saw religion as a solution to societal problems in 2021.
“Catholics in particular and non-Catholic Christians overwhelmingly say that they feel completely or a good amount accepted in our society,” he said. Stressing that feelings of acceptance were “not quite the same for those that are religious, non-Christians,” he reported that “less than half of them are feeling that high level of acceptance in our society.” Additionally, 89% of Americans agree that “sacred sites and religious practices of Native American Indians ought to be protected.”
When asked about the First Amendment, “Less than half of Americans recognize that freedom of religion is one of the protected rights in the First Amendment,” Allsop added. “Most Americans, even though they can’t find it in the First Amendment, they nevertheless feel that religious freedom plays a really important role and provides an important good in our society.”
About a year and a half ago, I noticed that my son — let’s call him Andy — was putting rainbow stickers on his phone. And a friend alerted me that Andy rebuked her daughter in a group chat for being “so cisgender.” I did some delicate digging, and it became clear: My child, then 13, was flirting with going “trans.”
He’s not alone. The number of transgender-identifying kids is up 20 to 40 times since a decade ago, to 1.5 percent of all teens. And the gender facilities that say they are the experts have been unmasked. Videos and statements have revealed that doctors in these so-called clinics are willing to give 15-year-old girls double mastectomies and call it treatment.
I wasn’t about to send my son off for experimental medical interventions that didn’t treat any underlying psychological issues. In this, I think I’m representative of the silent (and bullied) majority. Still, what could I do?
The first thing I had to do was to realize that the gender cult is powerful, and I can’t control the choices and feelings of my kid. I had to accept my limits, but that didn’t mean I was helpless. Parents are still the most important influence on their kids.
Finding a New School
I was lucky: My son was at a private school that did not push kids, behind their parents’ backs, into exploring alternate sexualities and getting “treated” by lifetime medicalization. If my son had been at a trans-affirming school — which means just about any public school — I would have been undermined at every turn.
At this school, however, he did have a cohort of “rebel” friends who all seemed to identify themselves as gender-questioning. And the school itself was not academically challenging enough for Andy. So I focused on academics, and we looked for a new school that would be a better fit on that score — and still supportive of my values. Finding one gave him a fresh start and a new peer group.
Building Real Identity
Next, I decided I would not provoke Andy by debating gender and trans issues. Maria Keffler in her book “Desist, Detrans, and Detox” reminds parents that transgenderism in adolescents is less about sex and more about identity, identity, and identity. A few decades ago, Andy probably would have worked through his teenage crises by going goth or arguing with me about religion. These days, becoming one of the letters in LGTB is the shortcut to being interesting, not “basic.”
Well, I didn’t want to make gender-bending the way he was going to differentiate himself from his parents. If he had been openly claiming a different so-called gender identity, maybe I would have been more confrontational about it. But since he was just flirting with being trans, not yet eloping, I decided not to make the topic of the sexes even more important than it already was. Instead, I focused on helping him build an identity in a healthy way.
I made it a priority to compliment him, every day, praising him for all the good things he is. Every time I “caught him” being funny, smart, helpful, generous, thoughtful, or kind, I noted it out loud. Every day, multiple times a day. I tried to help him see that these things are more important to his identity than some exotic “gender.” I also tried to help him feel more at home in his skin. He was given lessons in a sport he enjoys, so he could experience his body being strong and agile. Whatever reduced his alienation from his body, I encouraged.
Open-Ended Questioning
Next, I focused on building our relationship. I asked a lot of open-ended questions, and I made goofy jokes. We laughed a lot. I learned about him and signaled that I was interested in learning more. De-escalating tension and increasing the joy between us was key.
If Andy wanted to wear a vintage shirt that looked like it belonged on a French aristocrat from a few centuries ago, I just shrugged and let it pass. As long as what he chose was somewhere within the boundaries of socially acceptable male clothing, I didn’t make a fuss. After all, being a man (or a woman) is large enough to encompass differences in style, personality, and interest. It’s the trans movement that stereotypes the sexes, telling us that a sensitive, artistic boy must actually be a girl. Nonsense! My son could be a man and wear pastels.
When opportunities arose in everyday life, I pointed out the differences between men and women. In talking about school athletics, I would casually observe, “Oh, in high school, the athletic teams are divided by sex, because by puberty, boys develop more muscles and have more lung capacity than girls.” I never made these into arguments, just objective remarks.
In fact, we didn’t talk about so-called gender much, although I was prepared to. I coached myself on how to respond with neutrality and interest. I was determined only to ask questions. “I’m not clear how, if gender is socially constructed, that it is also an infallible identity deep inside the person?” “Help me understand. If gender is fluid and changeable, why should people get surgeries to alter their bodies permanently?” Books and essays pointing out transgenderism’s inconsistencies helped me clarify my thoughts. Still, I vowed I would only provide my own answers when Andy asked me a question — only, that is, when he was truly curious about my thinking.
I did take Andy to one talk on gender by a speaker who was calm and sympathetic but still supportive of my values. When he asked why he had to go, I simply said, “It’s an important topic, and this point of view is not well-represented in the culture.” Afterward, when I asked him what he thought, he said, “It was fine,” in a tone of voice that indicated the opposite. I dropped it; the talk still gave him a lot to chew on, even if he didn’t want to admit it.
Limiting Technology
One other piece was key: technology. Much trans proselytizing happens online, with anonymous adults love-bombing vulnerable kids. These adults sell the idea that acceptance can be found only in their new trans family and not in their real home. Some parents need to take drastic steps regarding their kids’ online presence. Fortunately, the screen problem was one I had been addressing for a long time, so I could be more moderate.
Andy did not have a smartphone, although even flip phones these days have internet browsers. I gave him a new phone designed for kids, one that had some carefully curated apps but no internet browser. For computer time, he was limited to an hour a day, and I trusted the internet filters I managed on his computer to keep him off the porn sites and the sexually explicit forums that cater to trans-questioning kids. All that limited (but didn’t eliminate) his exposure to pro-trans pressure. As a bonus, I got a much more cheerful kid at home who wasn’t always in front of a screen.
The point of all of this was threefold: to be the good guy, to distract him from all gender talk all the time, and to provide other identity options than the trans one.
Upping My Parenting
Lastly, I played the long game. Even when I didn’t believe it, I kept repeating to myself that the universe wouldn’t give me a kid that I couldn’t care for. That I had his best interests at heart — and online trans gurus didn’t — and I could wait this out with patience. I prioritized him when we had downtime in the evenings, not my phone. And I did the things I needed to, like sleeping enough and getting my own support system, so I could be available to him. Should I have been doing all of this all along as a parent? Well, of course, and in fact, it’s not like I had to do a total 180 when this emergency happened. Some of these things I was already doing, sort of. But I still needed to level up my parenting.
This summer, when he decorated a new phone, there were no rainbow stickers on it.
I wouldn’t say we are out of the woods, but he seems uninterested in the whole gender question. His wardrobe choices are less outrageous, and he’s not anxious, angry, and approval-seeking. Instead, he’s engaged and happy at school and at home, and he doesn’t need to be “different” according to the trans script. He’s happier being different just as himself. That makes me one happy parent.
This byline marks several different individuals, granted anonymity in cases where publishing an article on The Federalist would credibly threaten close personal relationships, their safety, or their jobs. We verify the identities of those who publish anonymously with The Federalist.
Children’s Wisconsin’s recent chaplain hires are full-fledged left-wing activists who twist religion to advance their preferred social Marxist policies.
Wisconsin’s premier children’s hospital has had its fair share of scandal, particularly with regard to religious liberty and leadership, but the bar just keeps getting lower: Children’s Wisconsin is now hiring trans activists as chaplains and “spiritual care interns.”
Children’s staff members were first notified of such new hires when fliers were posted around the inpatient units advertising, “Meet Your New Chaplain: Kate Newendorp.” The first tip-off to Newendorp’s beliefs about the sexes was featured prominently on the posters, with a proclamation of her pronouns as “she/her/hers” and those of her fiance, a female who goes by “they/he.”
“Working in a pediatric hospital is a dream come true!!” Newendorp is quoted on the flier. “I am so excited to be working alongside everyone and am pumped to be part of the team. Think of me as your friendly next-door neighbor!”
The poster is just your garden-variety job announcement, but a deeper dive shows that Newendorp’s social Marxist views aren’t confined to a push for preferred pronouns. The new chaplain is all-in for transgender surgeries, abortion, and a rejection of religious teaching when it cuts against her personal comfort.
Despite biblical Christian doctrine affirming the sanctity and humanity of life in the womb, the existence of only two distinct sexes, and the immorality of same-sex relations in both the Old and New Testaments, the new “chaplain” proudly rejects all of this.
“Love Jesus. Be gay. Get ordained,” she wrote on Facebook in June, with pictures of herself in rainbow garb. “What better way to celebrate Pride than being ordained?! Many thanks to my church and classis for being willing to stand for queer folks being included in ministry and for allowing me to follow God’s call.”
Several months later, on Oct. 17, 2022, after announcing her engagement to her female fiance who identifies as transgender, the Children’s Wisconsin “chaplain” spouted off about her church online. “Also, your casual reminder that my validity as an ordained minister is currently under review by my denomination because of the love I feel for my fiancé. Do better Church, because I’m not going anywhere. I was called,” she wrote.
Newendorp doesn’t just reject biblical relationships in her own life; she’s a full-fledged left-wing activist who twists religion to advance her preferred leftist policies. Her Twitter bio announces that she’s a “Chaplain desiring to shake things up” and says she’s “Daydreaming about … a time where God isn’t referred to with male pronouns.” On Facebook, she shared a blasphemous poem called “Jesus at the Gay Bar”:
But she’s also used her religion card to proclaim that loving your neighbor looks like “getting vaccinated and masking up” and voting for Democrats, and that “Abortion is a religious freedom.”
“People of all genders and sexualities have and need abortions. Abortion is healthcare,” Newendorp wrote with misinformation about maternal deaths. “I am an ordained minister who supports a person’s right to choose what is right for their life and their body. I am pastor [sic] who is pro-choice.”
In January, Newendorp started a GoFundMe “on behalf of Jennifer London” to help her fiance “Jensen” undergo a double mastectomy, known in the transgender-activist world by the euphemism “top surgery.”
Since moving to Wisconsin for her role at the children’s hospital, Newendorp appears to have become friendly with the other chaplains, posting pictures of herself going wedding dress shopping with fellow Children’s chaplain Ian Butts. This indicates Newendorp is not the only anti-Christian person installed in a religious role at the hospital to help families deal with life-and-death medical situations.
If Butts’ name sounds familiar, that’s because he was the chaplain who interrogated Children’s staff members who submitted religious exemption requests over the disastrous Covid shot mandate that left many hospitals dangerously understaffed. As part of the invasive vetting process, Butts grilled employees about their religious beliefs to determine whether their theology met his standards for being allowed their First Amendment rights and freedom to make their own medical decisions.
As I reported in these pages at the time, “The questions included the specifics of the employees’ personal religious convictions and their vaccination record, with Butts pressing on what he considered to be contradictions. Two particularly leading questions regarded the specifics of how the employees would keep their patients safe without being vaccinated, implying a moral implication of refusing a vaccine, as well as how they could square working for a hospital that mandated something so contrary to their personal convictions as a condition of employment.”
“We have already seen that Children’s holds little value for respecting deeply held religious beliefs, given their recent COVID Religious Waiver Committee. But this feels like a step too far. This feels like they have actively recruited activists into this field to further their progressive agenda,” one former Children’s Wisconsin employee told The Federalist of the trans activist chaplains. “I think this situation really calls into question who do we want guiding the spiritual development of our children — especially children who are stuck in a hospital, isolated, sometimes alone, and extremely vulnerable and easily impressionable.”
Children’s also recently posted a flier for a “Spiritual Care Intern” named Meg Trimm, who demanded to be referred to by the third-person plural pronouns “They” and “Them.” This chaplain intern was “an LGBTQ+ community educator and LGBTQ+ teen safe space facilitator” who believes “a professional chaplain’s job is not to convert anyone or preach religion, but to empower each person to find and use the hope and resilience systems they already have.”
Like Newendorp, Trimm rejects biblical teaching such as the concurrent depravity and creation in God’s image of people of all skin colors to instead espouse the most radical of left-wing political and theological views. Trimm has shared numerous TikToks of herself “deconstructing my white supremacy,” explaining that “gender is infinite,” proclaiming, “God is TRANSGENDER!!!” and saying, “God has a purpose for your life, and it might be fricken queer!”
“I am deeply concerned with this new infiltration of trans activists into our chaplain and faith-based services,” the former Children’s employee told The Federalist. “We have already witnessed the erosion and lost of public trust in fields of psychology, psychiatry, social work and general mental health counselors due to the rise of activists in these areas. Now parents have to worry about this as well?”
TRANSFORMING
Like other pediatric hospitals that have recently come under fire for mutilative transgender interventions, the “Gender Health Clinic” at Children’s Wisconsin advertises medical interventions and surgeries for children up to age 16, with no specified age the hospital deems too young. It advertises that its services include “top surgery” (meaning a mastectomy that mutilates a child’s healthy and developing breasts), wrong-sex hormones, and allegedly “reversible” puberty-blocking hormones, although that isn’t what the experts and “science” say.
While the National Health Service used to claim such gender-bending interventions were “reversible,” it has since backpedaled, admitting:
Little is known about the long-term side effects of hormone or puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria. … It’s also not known whether hormone blockers affect the development of the teenage brain or children’s bones. Side effects may also include hot flushes, fatigue and mood alterations. … [Gender-affirming] hormones cause some irreversible changes, such as: breast development (caused by taking oestrogen), breaking or deepening of the voice (caused by taking testosterone). Long-term cross-sex hormone treatment may cause temporary or even permanent infertility.
If health-care workers in the “Gender Health Clinic” at Children’s Wisconsin decide it’s “appropriate,” they prescribe puberty blockers to children at their first visit, even if they’ve never been evaluated by a mental health professional. And while the hospital says it doesn’t pump kids full of wrong-sex hormones on the first visit, it “can work to quickly start hormones at a follow-up clinic visit, usually within a few weeks.”
Furthermore, the pediatric hospital states on its “gender health history” form: “We offer gender-affirming Spiritual Support to all our patients.” Andy Brodzeller, an external communication director for Children’s, failed to explain what “gender affirming Spiritual Support” means despite being asked repeatedly.
“Our chaplains are trained to support and engage families of various faith and personal backgrounds in a health care setting,” Brodzeller said in response to a Federalist inquiry. “They only interact with patients if specifically requested by a family. Families are also always free to seek the services of their own personal faith leader. Regarding your question about parental involvement related to care for gender diverse kids, parents and guardians are essential to all care decisions. Clear, informed consent of all parents/guardians is required before proceeding with all treatments.”
But with trans activist “chaplains” like Newendorp and Trimm stacking the pediatric hospital’s spiritual support bench, and a promise from Children’s to “offer gender-affirming Spiritual Support to all our patients” (emphasis mine), people in the Children’s community are rightly concerned.
“We have many parents and families at Children’s who are deeply religious and hold traditional Judeo-Christian values. Will these new chaplains be able to serve the need of these families objectively?” the former Children’s employee added. “How will they properly support a grieving parent who is dealing with a child’s traumatic injury? How will they properly counsel a child who may be alone in the hospital due to a single parent working to make ends meet and maintain insurance?”
How indeed.
Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
Imagine the Environmental Protection Agency decides that, instead of setting air pollution standards, it will outsource oversight to an industry group called the “Emission Standards Coalition,” which, despite its innocuous name, is funded and staffed entirely by coal companies. Or, closer to home, imagine that city councilmembers in your quiet suburb decide that henceforth all speed limits will be set by the local auto racing club. We all would promptly object, haranguing the government for abdicating its most basic responsibility to citizens. “Foxes shouldn’t guard henhouses,” we’d say. Rules meant for public health and safety shouldn’t become tools to advance special interests and profit seekers. Lifting pollution and speed limits may benefit factory and Ferrari owners, but the public at large will have to cope with the resulting damage.
Farfetched as these examples might seem, something like this is happening in health care. Along the new frontier of “transgender health,” novel and even destructive “standards of care” are being set by ideologues and billionaire-backed foundations — all with the government’s blessing.
Earlier this year, President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published a proposed rule under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act. Behind its 190-plus pages and innocent-sounding name (“Nondiscrimination in Health Programs and Activities”) hides a radical agenda that would reshape the nation’s health care in alarming ways. HHS is proposing new national standards for what it calls “gender affirming care,” mandating that doctors provide these services and insurance plans cover them. What is “gender affirming care” exactly? HHS never really says. Its proposed rule neither defines the term nor identifies objective standards — such as age limits — that might apply. Instead, HHS incorporates guidance from medical societies and a group calling itself the “World Professional Association for Transgender Health,” or WPATH.
WPATH is not a government agency. It is a trans-activist group. Its president is Dr. Marci Bowers, a man identifying as a woman and self-described “pioneer in the field of Gender Affirmation Surgery” with her own transgender reality show, “Sex Change Hospital.” WPATH’s staff appears to be largely borrowed from Veritas, a for-profit company that does marketing and public relations for medical societies. WPATH’s funders include the Arcus Foundation (“one of the largest LGBT funders in the world”), the Soros-backed Open Society Foundations, and the Tawani Foundation, headed by transgender billionaire Jennifer Pritzker.
‘Standards’ Reflect Radical Backers
In 2018, the Tawani Foundation gave WPATH $200,000 to develop its so-called “Standards of Care,” a gift that earned Pritzker the WPATH “Philanthropy Award.” And Pritzker is heavily invested in trans causes. While the foundation has been funneling money to groups like WPATH and the National Center for Transgender Equality, its for-profit arm, Tawani Enterprises, is making financial bets on medical devices, implants, and surgical cutting tools. With the transgender surgery market expected to grow by billions of dollars over the next decade, one careful observer notes that “it is hard to avoid the impression of complementarity” here.
No surprise, then, that the WPATH standards that HHS hopes to enshrine into law reflect the radical views of its backers. On the list of WPATH “treatments” are mutilating surgeries (mastectomies, vaginectomies, penectomies), “chest binding,” “genital tucking,” “aesthetic procedures” like “body contouring” and “voice surgery,” and puberty-blocking drugs for children. There’s no minimum age requirement for these procedures. WPATH even calls for “psychotherapy” for prepubescent “gender diverse children” to “explore their gender,” with parents involved “as necessary” and excluded if their involvement is “contra-indicated.” WPATH says it’s “committed to advocacy” for “social and political climates that ensure social tolerance, equality, and the full rights of citizenship.”
This isn’t medicine. It is the destruction of healthy bodies, the indoctrination of children, and the dissolution of parental rights. It is radical sexual ideology under the guise of science.
Rest of the World Backs Away
Even to call WPATH’s guidance “standards of care” is misleading. As the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine explains, a true standard of care “is a treatment approach that all reasonable providers would use in a particular clinical situation,” but no such consensus exists for so-called “gender affirming care,” especially for kids. And the mounting damage this form of “care” is doing to both kids and adults is well-documented. It’s why countries around the world are backing away from it, even as HHS bureaucrats are strangely doubling down.
WPATH published its latest guidance in its “partner” journal, the recently renamed “International Journal of Transgender Health.” Among its authors is Susie Green, who heads the United Kingdom-based group Mermaids focused on “gender-diverse kids.” Green is not a medical professional. She spent several years as an IT consultant before famously helping her 16-year-old son undergo transgender surgery in Thailand. Another contributor to the WPATH guidance is Laura A. Jacobs, a self-described genderqueer “activist” and “heretic” whose “psychotherapy specialties” include “LGBTQIA+” adolescents, “BDSM,” “kink,” and “sexwork.”
It isn’t shocking that a bunch of well-funded activists could come together, give their glossy PDFs a veneer of academic credibility, and market their views as a new sexual orthodoxy. What is shocking is that they’ve managed to capture the federal bureaucracy. For HHS to uncritically platform WPATH, mandating shoddy science and destructive medicine as law, is an alarming development that deserves greater scrutiny.
Ultimately, this is a lawless effort. HHS has no power to override the states and the medical profession by imposing “standards of care” for the entire country. Nor can HHS force these standards on health care professionals in violation of their ethical and religious convictions. And purporting to delegate these tasks to billionaire-backed ideologues with no democratic accountability is worse yet. Just as racing enthusiasts don’t set speed limits and coal companies don’t set pollution rules, transgender activists shouldn’t be setting national medical standards.
Douglas G. Wilson Jr. is the chief executive officer of the Catholic Benefits Association and founding board member of the Catholic Health Care Leadership Alliance.
In a direct rebuke to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s radical abortion agenda, the City Council of Hobbs, New Mexico, unanimously voted last week to become a sanctuary city for the unborn. Overwhelming support for and passage of the ordinance mean abortion is now classified as murder and outlawed within Hobbs city limits. It also means that any blue politicians or abortion facilities that try to go against the city’s wishes could face an uphill legal battle.
The vote was vehemently opposed by Lujan Grisham, who called the architects of the ordinance “out-of-state extremists.” The governor’s reaction is no surprise considering her own history of abortion extremism.
Shortly after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, Lujan Grisham signed an executive order designating $10 million in taxpayer funds toward the development of an abortion facility in Doña Ana County, an area that shares a border with El Paso, Texas. That was just a couple of months after Lujan Grisham signedan executive order “protecting medical providers from attempts at legal retribution” for granting abortions and refusing to comply with other states’ abortion extradition laws.
“As more states move to restrict and prohibit access to reproductive care, New Mexico will continue to not only protect access to abortion, but to expand and strengthen reproductive health care throughout the state,” Lujan Grisham said in a statement. “Today, I reaffirm my resolve to make sure that women and families in New Mexico — and beyond — are supported at every step of the way.”
Since then, abortion dominated the state’s political scene and even became a focal point in Lujan Grisham’s re-election race against Republican challenger Mark Ronchetti.
Amy Hagstrom Miller, the CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, one of the nation’s largest dealers of abortion, previously told Reuters that Lujan Grisham’s friendliness toward abortion led her to consider relocating some of their Texas facilities closer to the border with New Mexico.
The goal was to offer abortion to women in neighboring Texas cities such as Lubbock, which voted to become a sanctuary city for the unborn in May of 2021, following the Lone Star State’s ban on abortion via the Texas Heartbeat Act.
Residents of Hobbs, a nearly 40,000-person town, however, weren’t taking any chances on getting swept up in Lujan Grisham’s pro-abortion executive spree. The pro-life community in Hobbs as well as the nearby city of Clovis revolted with the introduction of ordinances designed to protect unborn babies.
The threat of legal challenges thanks to widespread support for those sanctuary city ordinances, Hagstrom Miller confessed, “has given her pause about operating in eastern New Mexico.”
“In this post-Dobbs era, where anti-abortion folks are emboldened, I want to be sure we’re in a place where our patients can be safe, where our doctors and our staff can be safe,” she said.
The Clovis City Commission postponed its vote on the ordinance allegedly so it can “perfect the language to better protect against litigation.” “We hope this sends the message to our state legislature that there are pro-life cities out there and we want to self-determine on this issue,” Clovis Mayor Mike Morris said shortly after a vote to advance the ban.
If Clovis passes the ordinance, it will join Hobbs and a myriad of other towns that all recently decided to push back against Democrats’ abortion extremism.
“Between Governor Abbott’s resounding defeat of Robert Francis O’Rourke to four more municipalities joining over fifty towns with existing sanctuary city for the unborn ordinances, this is an exciting time for Texans as we work to end abortion,” Texas Right to Life President Dr. John Seago told The Federalist. “Additionally, as the abortion industry looks to target Texas women from just outside our borders, it is equally exciting that Hobbs, New Mexico has joined the fight and passed the ordinance to keep the desperate abortion industry out of their city limits.”
The pro-life movements in Texas and New Mexico have been so effective recently that they’ve even earned the wrath of the Biden White House.
“We have been very clear about what MAGA extreme Republicans are trying to do when it comes to a woman’s rights to choose,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during a recent trip to New Mexico with President Joe Biden. “They’re trying to take that away, clearly, and in the most extreme ways. What it’s doing is it’s putting women — women and girls’ lives at risk.”
This article was updated on 11/16 to reflect that members of the Clovis City Commission are no longer unanimously “expected to vote in favor of the ban.”
“The Ordinance, as it stands now, is ready. The commission, however, is unready and unwilling,” Mark Lee Dickson, founder of the Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn Initiative, told The Federalist.
Dickson also said that Clovis Mayor Mike Morris is facing backlash after he was “pressured by several Republicans to push things past the election and even past the legislative session.”
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
A court has ruled against the Biden administration’s requirement that healthcare providers perform sex-change procedures, concluding that federal Title IX’s definition of sex discrimination does not include sexual orientation or gender identity. The case centered on two Texas physicians who filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s Notification of Interpretation and Enforcement of Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which interpreted Title IX’s definition of sex to include sexual orientation and gender identity. The physicians sued, arguing that the Notification forced them to provide services such as body-mutilating surgeries on people suffering from gender dysphoria, such as castration and double mastectomies, and that it violated federal administrative procedures.
In a decision released Friday, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas, Amarillo Division, ruled that “Title IX operates in binary terms — male and female — when it references ‘on the basis of sex.’”
“If ‘on the basis of sex’ included ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity,’ as Defendants envision, Title IX and its regulations would be nonsensical,” Kacsmaryk ruled. “Title IX expressly allows sex distinctions and sometimes even requires them to promote equal opportunity.”
“Defendants’ reinterpretation of Title IX through the Notification imperils the very opportunities for women Title IX was designed to promote and protect — categorically forcing biological women to compete against biological men.”
Kacsmaryk also rejected the claim by the defendants that their reinterpretation of Title IX was justified in light of the 2020 U.S. Supreme Court v. Clayton County, in which the high court concluded that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protects against employment discrimination, applies to sexual orientation and gender identity.
“Title IX is not Title VII,” Kacsmaryk continued. “The Court will not reflexively apply new Title VII precedent in the Title IX context.”
In May 2021, the HHS announced that it was going to interpret Title IX’s explicit prohibition on sex discrimination to include sexual orientation and gender identity. Under the new interpretation, the HHS Office for Civil Rights would enforce Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act to protect “the civil rights of individuals who access or seek to access covered health programs or activities” and stop discrimination “against consumers on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.”
The proposed reinterpretation of Title IX was met with multiple lawsuits, with a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit unanimously deciding to block the implementation of the rule back in August.
Co-founders of Moms for Liberty Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich (Photo by Octavio Jones/Getty Images)
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In Tuesday’s midterm elections, grassroots parental rights organizations successfully secured key victories in school board races across the country, reported the Daily Caller News Foundation. Moms for Liberty, a group fighting to preserve parental rights in the public education system, and the 1776 Project PAC, a political organization fighting against critical race theory in classrooms, supported school board candidates in several races. While not all midterm election results have officially been called, the organizations reported that many of their endorsed nominees already won and successfully flipped school boards to conservative majorities in Florida, Maryland, Indiana, and Michigan.
“Last night was a disappointing night for Republicans in many parts of the country, but we’re happy to say we were very successful in key races in Florida, Oklahoma, Ohio, Maryland, which were by far the biggest places we targeted,” Aiden Buzzetti, head of coalitions and candidate recruitment for the 1776 Project PAC, told the DCNF. “We also officially flipped our 100th school board since our first election in November 2021.”
The 1776 Project PAC reported that four of its endorsed candidates in Brandywine, Michigan, were victorious in Tuesday’s midterm elections, which successfully turned the school board majority. Similarly, the Carroll County school board majority flipped after all three endorsed candidates won their races.
Of the 67 candidates Moms for Liberty supported in Florida school board elections, 41 won. The organization stated that it backed more than 270 school board contenders across 15 states in the midterm elections.
“We’re thrilled,” Tiffany Justice, Moms for Liberty co-founder, told the DCNF. “We were able to endorse over 500 parental rights candidates so far this year with 270 on the ballot yesterday. For us, starting an organization a little less than two years ago, and then having chapters across the country that have vetted and endorsed candidates in 270 races was a really big deal. That was an accomplishment in and of itself.”
Leading up to the midterm elections, Justice urged citizens to “vote like a mother” and elect officials who would give parents the most say in their children’s education.
“There’s no truer love than that of a mother for their child,” Justice told the DCNF. “When we say, ‘vote like a mother,’ it means vote, unabashedly, for parental rights and for your children’s future. Don’t allow the hate or the noise to take you away from what you know to be true and right and good.”
Americans ages 11 to 18 play online for an average of 10 hours per day, according to a study out today by a research team that includes psychologist Jean Twenge, author of “iGen” and “Generation Me.”
The researchers surveyed 1,600 Americans ages 11 to 18 in May 2022. On average, the study participants reported using digital media an average of 10 hours and four minutes per day, on such entertainment activities as social media, video chat, texting, shopping, and gaming.
That’s a total of 70 hours per week spent online, approximately double the average time spent in school. If teens were suddenly banned from screen time, they could use the time freed from solely that to instead hold down both a full-time and a part-time job. Some of this average may include multitasking, such as texting while scrolling Instagram, the study said, but this total of 70 hours per week spent on screens also did not include time spent watching TV.
Low-Class Behavior Rampant in Middle Class
The researchers say their Institute for Family Studies and Wheatley Institute study is the first to examine the effects of family structure on young people’s screen time. They found that teens living with their own biological and married parents still spent an astonishing amount of time on screens, at an average of nine hours per day. Still, that was nearly two hours fewer per day, on average, than children living without a biological parent, who spent an average of 11 hours per day online.
“The adolescents most likely to be depressed, lonely, and dissatisfied with life are heavy digital media users in stepparent, single-parent, or other non-intact families,” write study authors Twenge, Wendy Wang, Jenet Erickson, and Brad Wilcox. “The link between excessive technology use and poor mental health is larger for youth in non-intact families compared to those in intact families.”
So, according to this study’s findings, children in intact families spend an average of 63 hours per week amusing themselves online, while children in broken families spend an average of 77 hours per week amusing themselves online. The study discovered “especially large differences by family structure in youth time spent on gaming and texting. For example, youth in stepfamilies report spending about 50 minutes a day more texting than youth in intact families.”
Other studies on children’s screen use reinforce this finding — that America’s young people are wasting almost all of their waking free time on entertainment instead of personal growth or service to others. As this IFS/Wheatley study points out, this shift has happened extremely quickly, and it’s not all because of the 2020-2022 Covid lockdowns that also arrested American children’s development. Between 2009 and 2017, “the time high school students spent online doubled.”
The study points out that high screen time for adolescents is correlated with depression, loneliness, lack of sleep, and negative body image. It does not mention the opportunity cost of diverting young people’s free time to entertainment consumption instead of personal development that benefits others, such as learning to repair bicycles, playing outside, testing out jobs through work and internships, or working to save for college or marriage.
The study recommends that parents keep electronic devices out of kids’ bedrooms at night, limit screen time to a few hours per day, delay smartphone access to age 16 or 18, keep kids off social media as long as possible, and arrange for their kids to make friends with kids in families with similar boundaries about tech use to help their children socialize with people instead of robots.
Unchallenged mass tech addiction is one more way our morally bankrupt ruling class incentivizes destructive lower-class behaviors instead of encouraging lower classes to raise their standards. This works to erase the middle class by indulging laziness, like the shameful “quiet quitting” PR campaign. This is another form of societal suicide. Laziness cannot maintain, let alone keep advancing, the United States’ world-class level of scientific and cultural advancement.
Nothing worth having comes without strenuous and sustained effort. Internet addictions erase not only willpower but also self-discipline, excellence, and the communication skills needed to work with others and sustain key relationships such as marriages, as Twenge and others’ academic work shows.
This Is a National Crisis
If a child played with Legos for 10 hours a day, every day, his parents or teacher would have him screened for autism and developmental delays. If a child played pretend for 10 hours a day, at any age, he’d be sent to the school psychologist.
If your child did anything for 10 hours a day, you’d be worried about him and work strenuously to bring some balance to his life, for his own good. Parents need to man up and do the hard work of tightly restricting the addictive side of the internet from their kids, for not only their own good but for the sake of our country. Even 30 hours of screen time a week is obviously excessive for kids. Seventy hours of screen time a week is completely out of control, the willful destruction of our future.
“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war,” wrote the National Commission on Excellence in Education in the famous 1983 report, “A Nation At Risk.” “As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.”
The same sentiment applies to today’s American youth, but in a far more advanced condition. If a foreign nation had imposed on Americans the destruction of our mental and moral capacity that results from such rampant internet addiction as this study explores, we’d consider it an act of war. In fact, it’s pretty clear that our top foreign adversary created an addictive social media app for the same reason it helps Mexican drug cartels ship fentanyl across our border: because China knows that if they destroy America’s future, they rule the world.
The only thing standing between them and your kids is you, parents. Maybe a few elected officials could stand with us and take down these internet monopolies that make bank strip-mining our future, or at least require real proof of parental consent for children to use addictive tech products, such as a tiny credit card payment. But don’t wait for others to do your job for you. Put down your phone, grab your kids, and make your family motto the title of one of my childhood books: “Do Something Besides Watching TV.”
If your children enter adulthood having done nothing with 25,000 hours of their lives they can never get back, and with their brains destroyed by internet slot machines, that’s on you. You’re the one paying for their phone and letting them self-destruct. Tell them to get a job or read some books or do anything but sabotage themselves and our society. If you don’t, you deserve to be judged the same way as moms who put Mountain Dew in their babies’ bottles.
A new report suggests that chest reconstruction surgeries performed on adolescents with gender dysphoria increased nearly 400% from 2016 to 2019 as concerns about the ethics and consequences of medical interventions for trans-identified youth persist.
The Journal of the American Medical Association released the report Monday examining the frequency of gender transition surgeries involving the human chest among adolescents in the United States. The report, authored by Rishub Karan Das, Dr. Galen Perdikis and Dr. Salam Al Kassis of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, analyzed data from the Nationwide Ambulatory Surgery Sample on youth with gender dysphoria who underwent “top” surgeries between 2016 and 2019.
The research analyzed the incidence of both masculinizing and feminizing chest reconstruction surgery. Masculinizing chest surgeries involve the removal of the breasts, while feminizing chest surgeries involve the augmentation of breast tissue designed to make the organs more visible in biological males who identify as females.
The report found that the number of chest reconstruction surgeries performed on minors increased from about 100 in 2016 to 489 in 2019, a 389% increase in three years. The number of chest reconstruction surgeries has steadily increased over the years, surpassing 200 in 2017 and eclipsing 300 in 2018. The study analyzed a weighted estimate of 1,130 operations performed. According to the research, masculinizing chest surgeries accounted for the overwhelming majority of chest reconstruction surgeries in the three-year period. Feminizing chest surgeries comprised just 1.4% of the total.
While the majority of children who had the surgeries were 17 years old, about 5.5% were under 14. The median age for recipients of the surgeries was 16 years old.
The research did not provide statistics about “bottom” surgeries among minors, which involve the removal of the sex organs that correspond with the patient’s biological sex and/or creating artificial sex organs that match their stated gender identity.
Many children’s hospitals, including the one at Vanderbilt University, have come under fire for performing life-altering procedures on children. Vanderbilt announced that it will halt those surgeries following backlash to reporting indicating that the hospital offered them.
While the authors contend that “gender-affirming surgery may improve the functioning and mental health” of teens with gender dysphoria, other medical organizations remain skeptical about the benefits of gender transition procedures.
The American College of Pediatricians, which describes itself as a “national organization of pediatricians and other healthcare professionals dedicated to the health and well-being of children,” warns about the long-term and short-term impacts of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, which are commonly prescribed to youth with gender dysphoria. The organization identified the side effects of puberty blockers as “osteoporosis, mood disorders, seizures, cognitive impairment and when combined with cross-sex hormones, sterility.” Additionally, the medical organization states that cross-sex hormones come with “an increased risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, blood clots and cancers across their lifespan.”
Concerns about the negative consequences of surgical interventions for trans-identified children have prompted several states to outlaw the performance of such procedures on minors. Alabama, Arizona and Arkansas have passed laws to that effect while the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton have classified gender transition surgeries on minors as a form of child abuse.
Critics contend that the gender-transition procedures offer a permanent solution to what might be a temporary problem for many adolescents suffering from gender dysphoria. Detransitioners, those who formerly struggled with gender dysphoria and have since come to regret the gender transitions they underwent, have become increasingly outspoken about sharing their stories.
Last week, Chloe Cole, an 18-year-old who underwent a double mastectomy at 15, discussed the regret of having her breasts removed when calling into a Conejos Valley Unified School District board meeting in Ventura County, California.
“Very quickly, I was given what I wanted, but it was far from what I needed. Two years later, I was still suffering from major complications,” she explained.
Cole suggested that as a minor, she lacked the maturity to understand the ramifications of her life-altering decisions.
“I will not be able to breastfeed any children I have in the future, and my sexuality has permanently been affected because I was allowed to make adult decisions starting at 13 and then again at 15,” she said.
Cole characterized her experience as an example of “what happens when we treat children like adults and expect them to have the mental faculties for proper long-term decision-making.”
A sign outside a classroom taken in 2016. | REUTERS/Tami Chappell
A group of detransitioners spoke at a recent school board meeting in California amid concerns about public schools exposing students to gender ideology, warning that such content increases the likelihood that minors will rush to embrace “irreversible” decisions to their long-term detriment.
Three young adults who formerly identified as trans spoke at a school board meeting for the Conejo Valley Unified School District in Ventura County, California, last week. Chloe Cole, an 18-year-old woman who has launched a support group for individuals who have come to regret undergoing gender transitions called Detrans United, was among three detransitioners who told their stories to the school board at a recent meeting.
Detrans United shared their testimonies on its Twitter account Thursday, noting that the purpose of their remarks was to “voice our concerns about their policies that allow confused children to come to harm.” Cole indicated on her Twitter account that the distribution of a book introducing 8-year-olds to the word “transgender” was the primary reason she decided to call into the school board meeting.
Cole shared screenshots of the book, titledCall Me Max, which declared that although “transgender is a long word,” it “means something simple.” The book laid out how “trans means going across” while “gender means being a boy or girl or a little of both.” Another page of the book adds, “When a baby is born, a grown-up says, ‘IT’S A BOY!’ or ‘IT’S A GIRL!’”
Call Me Max embraced the idea that trans-identified children know that they were born in the wrong body from birth: “If a brand-new baby could talk, sometimes that baby might say, ‘NO I’M NOT!’ When a baby grows up to be transgender, it means that the grown-up who said they were a boy or a girl made a mistake.”
Will be calling in to give my public comment at a Conejo Valley USD board meeting. The meeting is at 6PST and I could be allowed my two minutes as late as 6:45PST. This was reading material given to an 8 year old student w/o parental consent. LINK—> https://t.co/hH0IPzag06pic.twitter.com/l8wym6GBNZ
The school board meeting that Cole and the two other detransitioners called into was held on Oct. 11, which coincided with National Coming Out Day, an occasion that encourages LGBT youth to come forward about their sexual identities. One speaker addressed National Coming Out Day in her remarks.
“Growing up, I hated dresses and skirts. I hit puberty at 9 years old and I hated my developing breasts,” Cole recalled. “I hated growing into a woman. I didn’t identify at all with the women around me.”
Cole explained that her discomfort with her biological sex led her to decide that she “wanted to become a boy.” She began socially transitioning by adopting a boy’s name for herself, cutting her hair and wearing boys’ clothes.
“My parents were supportive but they weren’t sure what to do with me, so they sought the help of mental professionals who manipulated them into allowing me to do whatever I wanted to do with myself,” Cole said. She began to take puberty blockers at age 13, and had her breasts amputated at age 16.
Cole lamented the lack of time between her initial referral to receive the double mastectomy and the surgery itself, which amounted to six months. “Very quickly, I was given what I wanted but it was far from what I needed. Two years later, I was still suffering from major complications,” she added. While Cole did not specify when exactly she began to regret taking significant steps to change her gender, she elaborated on the long-term consequences of her hasty decisions.
“I will not be able to breastfeed any children I have in the future and my sexuality has permanently been affected because I was allowed to make adult decisions starting at 13, and then again at 15.This is what happens when children are sexualized and exposed to developmentally inappropriate and confusing content and ideas from a young age. This is what happens when we treat children like adults and expect them to have the mental faculties for proper long-term decision making.”
Cole concluded her testimony with a message to the school board: “You are placing children in direct harm. Children deserve better.”
A round of applause followed Cole’s remarks. After Cole finished speaking, another detransitioner, Cat Cattinson, began to outline her concerns about gender ideology in public schools in remarks delivered via telephone: “I was introduced to gender ideology when I was 13 years old. I began identifying as the opposite sex, a man, and believing this negatively affected me for the next 15 years.”
“For the record, coming out as gay is entirely different than coming out as another gender,” she suggested. Cattinson condemned surgeons who are performing mastectomies on underage girls, saying it’s an “irreversible procedure that will prevent this person from ever breastfeeding.” In addition to her status as a detransitioner, Cattinson used her experience as a molecular biologist to dismiss the central idea of gender ideology.
Cattinson added: “Humans cannot change sex. It’s impossible and trying to appear as the opposite sex comes with significant health risks such as infertility, osteoporosis and many more as well. Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries are irreversible.”
As her remarks came to a close, Cattinson contended that “there is a serious lack of quality research that any of these interventions improve mental health or prevent suicide in the long term.” Like Cole, Cattinson’s remarks drew a round of applause.
Abel Garcia, a male detransitioner, also addressed the board to speak out against “the push that they are doing right now to our children with the transgender ideology.” Garcia stressed that “we cannot expect children as young as they are right now to believe that they can change their sex with cross-sex hormones and irreversible surgeries.”
Garcia detailed how he had breast implants at age 21. Implying that he did not have the maturity to make such a decision, the detransitioner told the board: “I cannot expect a child, a high school male or elementary child, to understand the full extent of damages that will be done to their bodies if an adult like myself wasn’t able to.”
For her part, Conejo Valley Unified School District Trustee candidate Lisa Powell insisted in a Twitter post shortly after the board meeting concluded that “CA state law requires schools to support and affirm transgender students.” “As a trustee, I will support and affirm our transgender students — not only because it’s the law, but because it’s the right thing to do,” she vowed.
CA state law requires schools to support and affirm our transgender students. As a trustee, I will support and affirm our transgender students – not only because it’s the law, but because it is the right thing to do.— Lisa Powell (@Powell4CVUSD) October 12, 2022
At the previous school board meeting on Sept. 20, a parent slammed the Conejo Valley Unified School District for its response to a seventh-grade boy masturbating in class. She attributed his inappropriate behavior to the school district’s sex education curriculum.
Conejo Valley USD board member justifies a 7th grader MASTURBATING in front of the entire class claiming it is not “anything outside the norm.” The boy was back attending school the NEXT DAY. pic.twitter.com/htrzt9ETcX
“It does not take an expert to figure out what happens to a 13-year-old boy when he’s staring at mostly naked girls wearing underwear to school and being exposed to concepts like oral and anal sex in seventh grade,” she said. “They let children write the dress code. The Teen Talk comprehensive sex ed is not age-appropriate and neither are supported by parents and teachers have spoken out adamantly against this.”
In a statement published Monday, the Conejo Valley Unified School District has decried what it has described as “on-going social media warfare and print disinformation campaigns” as part of an effort to “create false narratives from email snippets, social media posts, half statements made at Board meetings, and printed disinformation.”
According to district leadership, “What was once lively discourse at our Board of Education meetings during public comments and agendized topics has escalated to a concerted and organized effort to create chaos and further narratives that are unfounded and simply have nothing to do with current action items nor Board duties and business.”
Besides noting that district officials experienced death threats, the statement did not provide specific examples of actions it found troubling. It did, however, proclaim that the “sensationalizing of rumors and months-old reported incidents must stop,” in what appeared to be a veiled reference to the remarks at the Sept. 20 board meeting regarding the in-class masturbation that took place in May. District officials suggested that “these fictitious narratives are being wrongly used to politicize incidents involving our students.”
The Conejo Valley Unified School District crafted a fact sheet, which was last updated on Oct. 14, to respond to parental concerns about the sex education curriculum. It states that parents can opt out of the curriculum if they so choose.
Screenshot taken from video posted on Old Nick’s Pub Facebook page
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Old Nick’s Pub in Eugene, Oregon, is advertising an upcoming event where an 11-year-old drag queen will be among those performing.
“Are you excited for Drag queen story time brunch this Sunday morning!? Well, lets meet our performers! Vanellope is here to show you what a 11-year-old drag queen can do. With all the charm and sweetness of a bowl of sugary cereal, Vanellope is here to brighten up your morning with all her drag talent,” a Facebook post reads.
The event is being billed as open to people of all ages. According to a Facebook post, the event will be free for kids under the age of 11.
“Join us for an all-new journey into Fantasy and Story with local favorite drag queen, Maliena! She will enchant us with fairytales new and old! With special guest queens and performances woven within, this is a new All Ages Drag event you won’t want to miss!” a post on the establishment’s website reads.
According to the Daily Mail, the child has performed at the establishment before — the outlet refers to the child as a girl. In September, the pub posted what appears to be a photo of the child reading a book. “Move over Maliena because Vanellope may be our new favorite!” the post declares. The pub is standing behind its move to allow the child to perform and is arguing that drag is not necessarily sexual in nature.
“Dear friends, our youngest drag queen is being targeted by a hate campaign on Twitter right now. We LOVE AND SUPPORT VANELLOPE. Drag is an art form. It is not an inherently sexual act to dress in drag, and those sexualizing her are falling into a very typical societal trap of misogyny that views any female performance as sexual,” the pub declared in a Facebook post. “We think she’s gonna be a star on the big screen someday, so if you can come pack the house on Sunday and show her how loved and supported she is, we will force the darkness out once again with our light.”
Old Nick’s posted a video last month advertising a drag queen story time event. In the video, a drag queen said there would be “queens of all ages” at that event.
Children in America are in need of protection now more than ever. The leftist tide is coming at them in full force, pushing a radically sexualized agenda on minors both mentally and physically, robbing them of their innocence and their childhood. That’s why legislators like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., are introducing legislation to protect children from dangerous experimental procedures such as puberty blockers, wrong-sex hormones, and ill-named “gender-affirming” surgeries.
Instead of being allowed to enjoy the innocence of childhood, develop imagination, cultivate friendships, develop curiosity, and enjoy the satisfaction of learning facts, figures, and formulas, children are assaulted with sexualized content fueled by a radical agenda. If you think it’s not having an effect, just look at a sampling from Maryland schools. According to school surveys in Montgomery county, over the last two years, the number of students identifying as gender nonconforming has increased by 582 percent. This survey includes children in elementary school.
At the very least, parents should be fully aware of any and all exposure their children have to sexualized content, and they have the primary right to know of any confusion or distress their children may be experiencing in school. Yet somehow it is becoming more to push policies to keep parents in the dark. Most schools cannot even prescribe aspirin to a child without parental consent, yet they see no issue with socially transitioning a minor without parental involvement. The disparity gives every cause for concern.
And when the parents do know about their child’s gender confusion, the agenda becomes even more radical, pushing parents to “affirm” their child’s choices to extreme degrees. Whether you embrace the ideology, no amount of parental concern can justify even the slightest delay in transitioning a child.
Compliance, Not Concern
One lesbian couple had already transitioned their eldest son when their second boy started asking to be called a girl. Unlike their first child, who had preferred playing with girls and had a gentler side, the younger acted like a typical boy, so his mother suspected that he was simply mirroring his older sibling’s behavior. But what happened when she voiced her concerns to a gender therapist?
“She [their gender therapist] expressed that it was transphobic to believe there was anything wrong with our younger son wanting to be like his older transgender sibling. When I pushed back, and asserted that I was not yet convinced our younger son was transgender, she told me that if I did not change his pronouns and honor his identity, he could develop an attachment disorder,” the mom recalls.
Instead of addressing the mother’s fears, the therapist merely preyed on them further.
It’s horrible to emotionally blackmail loving parents while blatantly ignoring their genuine concerns, but this is mild compared to the psychological manipulation that’s been waged on other parents, who have been told “comply or they die,” with doctors insisting that any questioning of their child’s feelings will result in further depression and suicide.
Meanwhile, these “experts” are not basing their methods in science at all.
So Much for Science
According to the recent Heritage report, “Puberty Blockers, Cross-Sex Hormones, & Youth Suicide” by Dr. Jay Greene, stats show that the exact opposite may be the case. He writes, “Starting in 2010, when puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones became widely available, elevated suicide rates in states where minors can more easily access those medical interventions became observable.”
That’s right, here it seems that access to these “life-saving drugs” has actually increased suicide rates. The fact is, there is no golden standard study proving the “lifesaving” claims of transition, yet left-wing politicians insist that it is the only path forward.
There isproof that these drugs are dangerous on their own, and there is no certifiable data proving the long-term harmlessness of puberty-blocking drugs and wrong-sex hormones, despite leftist claims to the contrary.
This isn’t health care. This isn’t science. We need to stop using children to wage ideological warfare, and we must stop the progressive tide before every child pays the price.
A Reason for Hope
Rep. Taylor Green is trying to do just that. She recently released the Protect Children’s Innocence Act (H.R.8731), which, if passed, will charge anyone who knowingly performs “gender-affirming care” — including the administering of puberty blockers and wrong-sex hormones — with a class C felony.
The bill will prohibit the federal taxpayer funding of so-called gender-affirming care, forbid institutions of higher education from providing instructions on such care, and will prevent aliens who have performed such procedures from receiving a visa. If they already have a visa, they will be eligible for deportation. It is designed to protect children from abusive experimental procedures from every angle.
Victims of surgery who realize their mistake and choose to detransition have recourse to the courts through a private right of action levied against anyone who took an active part in their transition, including administering puberty blockers and performing surgeries. There is no statute of limitations, ensuring that anyone involved in destroying a child’s life will be held accountable in perpetuity.
This bill also looks out for those victims who have already suffered at the hands of misleading therapists, doctors, and propaganda. While it does ban transition attempts on minors, it explicitly states that it in no way prohibits doctors from helping patients handle complications due to those interventions, regardless of whether they were received illegally. In every aspect, this bill holds the health of these patients as its primary object, not monetary benefits and soul-sucking propaganda.
Fighting on defense in the culture isn’t enough. We’re losing — more and more children are being subjected to these horrific “treatments” every single day. We need to fight back legislatively. We need to protect the innocence of children and demand justice for those who have already been deprived of that privilege. If the battleground is in our backyard, this bill gives us the chance to push back enemy lines, to establish a first line of defense that will allow our children the space they need to grow and thrive.
The character of our country will be determined by whether we are willing to defend our innocents. Children being mutilated and castrated openly is the moral issue of our time. Will we stand up and fight? Or will we let these evil monsters continue to wreak havoc on the helpless?
Sandra Kirby is the Government Affairs Manager at American Principles Project. Follow her on Twitter @SandraK1776.
U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss signaled support for a police investigation into the trans charity Mermaids, saying it should be “properly looked at” during prime minister’s questions in the Commons Chamber.
The Department for Education in England has stopped referring schools to the controversial charity, which promotes transgenderism to youth, amid increased scrutiny of the organization’s health recommendations for children and a scandal involving one of its trustees giving a speech for an organization that promotes resources for pedophiles.
As The Times reported Wednesday, the Charity Commission is assessing complaints against Mermaids following a report by The Daily Telegraph last week that the group sends “chest binders” to girls as young as 13 without their parents’ knowledge. Binders are often used by girls seeking to flatten their breasts to resemble a boy, and they can potentially cause breathing difficulties, damage healthy breast tissue and lead to cracked ribs.
On Wednesday, Miriam Cates, the MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, asked the prime minister: “Does my right honorable friend agree that it has taken far too long for these concerns to be taken seriously and does she also agree that it is high time for a police investigation into the activities of Mermaids?”
Truss replied: “What I would say on the subject of the investigation she raises, of course those matters should be … properly looked at.”
Earlier this month, The Times also reported that Jacob Breslow, a trustee for Mermaids, resigned after it was discovered he spoke at a U.S.-based B4U-ACT event in 2011. The organization promotes resources for individuals who are sexually attracted to children. In his presentation, Breslow reportedly claimed that pedophiles are misunderstood.
Andrea Williams, the chief executive of the Christian Legal Centre, credited parents Nigel and Sally Rowe for the Education Department’s decision to stop promoting Mermaidsas a mental health resource in schools. The British charity affirms children’s gender confusion and is led by Susie Green, whose son identifies as female and was put on puberty blockers at age 12.
Williams noted that the focus must now be directed toward the Church of England, which still utilizes Mermaids’ strategies in its “Valuing All God’s Children” (VAGC) guidance. In 2017, VAGC cited Mermaids as a model of care. While this citation was removed in 2019, the content reportedly still influenced the current trans-affirming approach, according to CLC. Over 4,000 of the Church of England’s primary schools utilize the VAGC guidelines, according to a November 2017 Daily Mail report.
“The Church of England has over one million children under its care — will senior leaders finally listen and scrap this untenable advice?” Williams asked.
Christian Concern, the organization associated with CLC, launched a petition Tuesday that will be delivered to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, calling for the Church of England to scrap its trans-affirming policies. The petition currently has over 12,150 signatures.
In addition to instructing schools not to require students to wear uniforms that may “create difficulty for trans pupils,” VAGC discourages using faith or the Bible to justify refusals to accept a child identifying as the opposite gender.
You can’t be serious?!?! Valuing All God’s Children, supposedly a Christian organization, does not want scripture used to make the point that all this transgenderism is NOT of God. Do we really look that stupid? – Jerry Broussard
Last week, the Rowes penned a letter to the archbishop, urging the Church of England to discard its VAGC policies, expressing concern that the guidance allows children as young as 5 to identify as the opposite sex.
“In U.K. law you cannot change legal gender until you are 18 years old. Scientifically, you cannot change your biological sex,” the parents wrote.
“Furthermore, basic Christian teaching is that we are all created male or female and that the differences between the sexes are beautiful, designed and complementary, and should be respected in society. We are all created male and female (Genesis 1:27).”
Despite opting to homeschool their children, the parents wrote that they remain concerned about the effect that the school’s policies may have on other children. According to the Rowes, much of the “confusion” and “distress” their sons experienced in school from having to refer to their friends as the opposite sex has lifted since their parents pulled them out.
The letter follows a $24,956 (£22,000) settlement the Department of Education paid the Rowes in September for “legal costs and a commitment from the government to reform transgender policies,” according to the Christian Legal Centre.
The CLC supported the parents’ taking legal action against the department in 2021 after the Church of England’s Portsmouth Diocesan Board of Education dismissed their complaint in 2017, citing the VAGC guidelines. One of the Church of England’s primary schools had labeled their son “transphobic” for refusing to abide by the school’s trans-affirming policies.
The parents also raised concerns about the school allowing two 6-year-old boys in their sons’ classes to identify as girls without a psychological assessment. In opposition to the school’s policies, the Rowes decided to homeschool their children instead.
The letter cites an August speech at the Policy Exchange by Suella Braverman, who was then the attorney general, and said there is no “absolute legal obligation” to affirm children who might be questioning their gender identity. She noted that schools sometimes allow children to use pronouns or compete on sports teams designated for the opposite sex without their parents’ knowledge.
“Anyone who questions such an approach is accused of transphobia. In my view, this approach is not supported by the law,” Braverman said.
The Rowes contended in their letter that this statement from the then-attorney general proves that the Church of England’s VAGC policies in schools have no legal basis.
“We, therefore, ask you to commit to scrapping the Valuing All God’s Children guidance as a matter of urgency so that staff and children in Church of England schools are properly safeguarded and protected from harmful transgender ideology and practice,” the parents wrote.
“We also request a meeting with you to discuss these points and what the Church of England will do about them at your earliest convenience.”
In July, the Church of England responded to a question from the General Synod, the denomination’s legislative body, about its definition of a woman. The Rev. Robert Innes, the denomination’s bishop in Europe, responded that “There is no official definition, which reflects the fact that until fairly recently definitions of this kind were thought to be self-evident, as reflected in the marriage liturgy.”
Innes cited the church’s “Living in Love and Faith” project, which the church website describes as a “discerning way forward” for the church regarding “identity, sexuality, relationships, and marriage.”
Pointing to “the marriage complexities associated with gender identity,” Innes claimed that the project “points to the need for additional care and thought to be given in understanding our commonalities and differences as people made in the image of God.”
Brittany Mayer, a mom and who is from the Christian-based parental rights group Rooted Wings, speaks to the Encinitas Union School District Board in San Diego County, California. | Screenshot / Twitter
Parents are rallying behind a mother who blasted a Southern California school district for its plans to host a “family-friendly” Halloween drag show, which she said amounts to “pimping out our kids” in an already “hyper-sexualized” culture.
In a video that went viral on social media, Brittany Mayer from the Christian-based parental rights group Rooted Wings spoke at the Encinitas Union School District Board meeting in San Diego County, California, accusing them of acting as “groomers and activist pimps” for the “Boo Bash” drag queen show planned for the Saturday before Halloween, Fox News reported.
“What is it about a grown man costumed in a sparkly bra with augmented boobs busting out and wearing a miniskirt barely covering his twerking a** with duct tape on his front while spreading his fish-netted legs as he writhes on the ground, grinding his groin next to a minor, family-friendly?” she asks the board in the video.
On Twitter, Mayer revealed that the drag queen show was sponsored by a local San Francisco gender reassignment surgery center in collaboration with a popular gay nightclub. “While we have a culture that has a huge problem with child porn and with sex trafficking, Encinitas Union School District in CA, made the decision to feature an event to sexualize young children,” she wrote.
She told the board, “You all played the activist pimp for Align Surgical center and for a 21-plus gay bar. It makes you groomers and activist pimps and we won’t have those sitting on a school board that oversees the education of our children.”
Elected San Diego Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer criticized the parents, saying on Twitter that they “should be ashamed of themselves for pushing hate and intolerance on all of us.” She also said she would be taking her 3-year-old to the event.
Carrie Boller, a mother of two and a community activist, pulled her kids out of the district, ABC 10 reported. The Encinitas Union School District said it’s not hosting or sponsoring the Oct. 29 event but shared it on a community information hub called Peachjar to notify parents about opportunities for families in the district.
However, Boller said, “Our message is very clear. We don’t want strip shows, we don’t want drag shows, and definitely not sent out inviting the parents and kids in our district.”
Justin Ried, a parent of two children who is also running for school board, was quoted as saying, “We certainly want to be an inclusive community and support groups of all kinds, but the question is where do we draw the line?”
The district said the flyer had been taken down as it did not meet district approval criteria, and it has reviewed and adjusted procedures for approving fliers in the future. But parents are demanding to know who approved it for promotion and want the district to apologize.
Mayer told Fox that she and dozens of other parents showed up at the school board meeting last Tuesday to confront the leadership, which had been requested several times to stop promoting the event and issue an apology.
“We asked the board again and again to reconsider and to issue an apology and an explanation, which they didn’t, which is why we decided to show up,” she was quoted as saying.
She added that the planned show was not an isolated incident.
“This is coming to every school across the nation,” she said, adding that “… We’re not going to play by the rules, that we’re supposed to be afraid, that we’re going to be punished if we don’t speak up now.”
In less than one month, if Proposal 3 passes, children will have a right under the Michigan constitution to walk into one of Planned Parenthood’s 12 so-called “gender affirming” facilities in the state and, without parental knowledge or consent, obtain puberty blockers. And with Planned Parenthood of Michigan promising “gender affirming” care “via telehealth in the coming months,” Michiganders’ kids won’t even need to leave their house to obtain these sterilizing drugs.
Passage of Prop 3 will also give boys a constitutional right to be castrated and girls the right under Michigan’s constitution to be sterilized by way of a hysterectomy or the removal of their ovaries — all without their parents’ consent.
Deceptive marketing by Planned Parenthood and far-left politicians, such as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, hides this reality from Michigan voters, leading Prop 3 to be uniformly referred to as “the abortion amendment” even though the expansive language of the proposed constitutional amendment reaches far beyond abortion. And on abortion alone, notwithstanding proponents’ claims that “passing this amendment simply restores the same protections that Michiganders had for five decades under Roe v. Wade,” Prop 3 goes far beyond the controlling Roe-Casey precedent: If passed, the constitutional amendment would create an extreme regime in Michigan of abortion on demand, at any time, for any reason, without informed or parental consent, and paid for by taxpayers.
The expansive and legalistically worded language of Prop 3, crafted by Planned Parenthood and left-wing backers, however, extends beyond abortion to create a constitutional right to several aspects of what transgender activists call “gender-affirming care,” despite it being neither affirming nor caring. And Prop 3 extends that right to all individuals, including children.
This is not merely a political point, and it is not a worst-case-scenario argument based on how some liberal activist judge or justice might interpret Prop 3. This reality flows from the plain language of Prop 3 and rests on general legal principles of constitutional construction.
It’s Right in the Text
Here is the pertinent language Prop 3 would etch into the Michigan constitution as Article 1, Section 28, with the key language underscored:
“(1) Every individual has a fundamental right to reproductive freedom, which entails the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion care, miscarriage management, and infertility care. An individual’s right to reproductive freedom shall not be denied, burdened, nor infringed upon unless justified by a compelling state interest achieved by the least restrictive means. …
(2) The state shall not discriminate in the protection or enforcement of this fundamental right.
* * *
(4) For the purposes of this section:
A state interest is “compelling” only if it is for the limited purpose of protecting the health of an individual seeking care, consistent with accepted clinical standards of practice and evidence-based medicine, and does not infringe on that individual’s autonomous decision-making.
* * *
(5) This section shall be self-executing….
Prop 3 Applies to Men and Women AND Boys and Girls
By its express terms, Prop 3 applies to “every individual” and guarantees an “individual’s right.” The proposed constitutional amendment further provides that “the state shall not discriminate in the protection or enforcement of this fundamental right.”
As a matter of constitutional interpretation, then, the rights guaranteed by Prop 3 would be rights that both adults and children possess as “individuals,” and the rights apply equally to males and females.
This proposal represents a huge demarcation from controlling Michigan law, under which minors must have parental consent to obtain medical treatment or receive prescription medications, with the only current exception being the judicial bypass provisions governing minors seeking abortions. Specifically, Michigan law currently provides that to obtain an abortion, females under the age of 18 must have the written consent of one parent or legal guardian, but the law allows a girl to seek permission for an abortion from a judge, called a “judicial bypass.” A court must grant a judicial bypass if the judge finds either that “the minor is sufficiently mature and well-enough informed to make the decision regarding abortion independently of her parents or legal guardian,” or “the waiver would be in the best interests of the minor.”
In the context of abortion, Prop 3 guts Michigan’s requirements for either parental consent or a judicial bypass, first by declaring that the amendment applies to all “individuals” and second by expressly providing that “the state shall not discriminate in the protection or enforcement of this fundamental right.” Treating females under 18 differently than those 18 or over is a textbook example of discrimination.
Section 4 of the amendment further cements the reality that minors must be treated equivalent to adults for purposes of the rights Prop 3 would establish. That section of the proposed amendment expressly limits the justifications allowed for regulating abortion or the other rights Prop 3 would inscribe in the constitution.
Under Section 4, the state may only regulate abortion and the other rights covered by the proposed constitutional amendment if it is necessary to “protect[] the health of an individual seeking care,” and “does not infringe on that individual’s autonomous decision-making.”
The rights of parents do not matter; Mom and Dad have no rights. And even the health of the girl does not matter because, under the plain language of the amendment, the state’s interest cannot “infringe” on the “individual’s autonomous decision-making.”
This legal analysis flows straight from the plain language of Prop 3, but case law from other states where a state constitutional right to abortion exists confirms this analysis. For example, in Alaska and Florida, courts have declared parental consent and parental notification statutes unconstitutional. And courts in California, Massachusetts, and New Jersey have struck parental consent statutes.
Prop 3’s grant of such “autonomous decision-making” is not limited to abortion, however. Rather, the plain language of the proposed constitutional amendment provides that the right to “reproductive freedom,” “entails the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to … sterilization … or infertility care.”
Under Michigan law currently, minors cannot be chemically or surgically sterilized (or rendered infertile) without their parents’ consent, and even then most physicians would refuse to sterilize a minor — except in the case of transgender-identifying patients.
The modern medical community has embraced the transgender ideology that teaches that human beings can be born “in the wrong body,” and that the appropriate treatment for such individuals consists of making their bodies appear to conform to their “internal sense” of gender.
The first step in such wrongly named “gender-affirming” medical response consists of prescribing puberty blockers to children. Puberty blockers, at a minimum, render children temporarily infertile by preventing them from maturing sexually, and a longer-term use renders them sterile. The surgical procedures used under the guise of “gender confirmation” — castration, hysterectomy, and the removal of ovaries — likewise sterilize the patients.
In fact, it is this very destruction of children’s future fertility and the medical rendering of them sterile that has led to several states banning the use of puberty blockers and surgical “gender confirming” procedures on minors. For instance, in Iowa, the Legislature made these legislative findings to explain its proposed ban on puberty blockers and surgical procedures that sterilize children:
Puberty blockers prevent gonadal maturation and thus render children taking these drugs infertile. Introducing cross-sex hormones to children with immature gonads as a direct result of pubertal blockade is expected to cause irreversible sterility. Sterilization is also permanent for those who undergo surgery to remove reproductive organs[.] … For these reasons, the decision to pursue a course of hormonal and surgical interventions to address a discordance between an individual’s sex and sense of gender identity should not be presented to or determined for children who are incapable of comprehending the negative implications and life-course difficulties resulting from these interventions.
But in Michigan, if passed, Prop 3 guarantees children the right to “make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to … sterilization,” and without “discrimination,” giving boys and girls the right to obtain puberty blockers and surgical sterilization without parental notice or consent.
If passed, Section 4 of the proposed constitutional amendment will further guarantee that the Michigan Legislature cannot interfere in transgender minors’ decisions to obtain puberty blockers or surgical “gender reassignment” through castration, removal of ovaries, or a hysterectomy. That section, as excerpted above, provides that the state may only regulate such procedures for the limited purpose of “protecting the health of an individual seeking care, consistent with accepted clinical standards of practice and evidence-based medicine,” and then, only so long as it “does not infringe on that individual’s autonomous decision-making.”
But the “accepted clinical standards of practice” by the supposed “mainstream” medical organizations is, at a minimum, to provide puberty blockers to children, with a steady movement toward the cash cow that is surgical interventions for minors.
Planned Parenthood Targets Kids One Way or Another
Again, these conclusions flow directly from the plain language of the proposed constitutional amendment. But here the public would be wise to note two significant facts: Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan helpedlead the ballot initiative to amend the Michigan constitution through the passage of Prop 3, deceptively described as the “Reproductive Freedom for All” amendment, and Planned Parenthood nowrepresents “the second largest provider of ‘gender-affirming hormone therapy.’” In fact, less than two weeks ago, Planned Parenthood launched an ad marketing puberty blockers to minors.
What Planned Parenthood and its extremist political partners don’t want publicized, however, is that a “Yes” vote for Prop 3 will not merely make abortion-on-demand, for any reason, at any time, and without informed or parental consent the law of Michigan: It will guarantee that children have an unfettered “right” to “transition” by obtaining puberty blockers and surgical sterilization, parents be damned.
With less than one month to go before Michiganders cast their final ballots, little time remains to give proof to the left’s lie that Prop 3 is about codifying Roe. It is not. It is about sacrificing the children of the state — both born and unborn.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Parents in San Diego, California, are outraged over a flyer that was sent to public school children advertising the “queerest” Halloween party with a “family-friendly” drag show and sponsored by a gay bar and a gender reassignment surgery center. The flyer for the show was sent to parents of students in the Encinitas Union School District using its email platform. The event is being organized by Trans Family Support Services; a group based in San Diego that helps provide transgender support services for people across the country. The flyer advertised a “family-friendly drag show” as well as other Halloween events like a costume contest and trick-or-treating.
The school district explained that the email went out through PeachJar, a service that offers optional information about other events in the district. It added that the emails contained the notice, “Distribution of this flyer does not imply endorsement by the Encinitas union school district, its schools or staff and is distributed in compliance with federal and state law.”
Some parents are planning to attend the school district’s board meeting to protest the event and to denounce a comment made by a district employee calling them homophobes. Attorney Paul Jonna told KGTV-TV that a concerned parent called him and that he was requesting information from the school district.
“A lot of people are just generally not comfortable with the idea of pushing drag queen shows on little kids, but separate and apart from that, I think the biggest concern with this event are the sponsors,” Jonna said.
“We submitted a public records request to find out more about their involvement, their communication with these sponsors and sort of this event,” he added.
He added that the event was sponsored by Align Surgical Associates, which advertises as offering “gender confirmation surgery for transwomen, transmen, non-binary, and gender diverse individuals.” He said another sponsor, Rich’s San Diego, advertises itself as “San Diego’s largest and most popular gay nightclub.”
Kathie Moehlig, the founder and executive director of Trans Family Support Services, said they will not cancel the show.
“We’re not going to back down from doing what we know is right and appropriate to support these youth and their families, just because some people think they can use it as their mega piece to get talking points and get attention,” said Moehlig.
Here’s more about the planned drag show:
Parents to protest Encinitas Union School District for hosting ‘Queerfest’ drag show Halloween event www.youtube.com
Image used for illustration only. | Pixabay/PublicDomainPictues
In August 2011, I participated in a brainstorming session held at Liberty University together with a number of conservative leaders, all of whom had been on the front lines of confronting LGBTQ activism.
As we discussed the impact of this activism on the nation, we asked ourselves what words we could find to help awaken the national conscience. What slogan or saying would capture our concerns and would appeal to the masses? One phrase we agreed on was: “Stop sexualizing our children!”
Now, more than 10 years later, that cry must rise from coast to coast, from all concerned parents from all stripes and backgrounds, and it must speak to heterosexuals activists and LBGTQ activists alike: “Stop sexualizing our children! They do not belong to you, and you will not continue to influence them and degrade them and pollute them and pervert them. Enough is enough! This must stop, and it must stop now.”
From the heterosexual side, the attack has come through sex-ed curricula in schools, presenting inappropriate subjects in inappropriate ways, beginning with the youngest school children. It has been going on for a long time.
In her 1989 book Sex Education: The Final Plague, Catholic author Randy Engel cited Dr. Melvin Anchell’s 1981 statements, noting that:
“When sex educators devalue parental influence … they in effect devalue the student’s conscience. At the same time, they are instrumental in ‘removing societal inhibitions,’ they intensify their efforts for ‘sexual openness’ and they teach the students ‘to rely entirely on their own inexperienced and immature judgments and those of their peers.’
“One of the results of this indoctrination process, charges Dr. Anchell is the formation of a ‘horde culture,’ which is characterized by ‘sexual indulgences … devoid of love.’ ‘The indoctrinated show no guilt, nor do they display concern for morality.’ They are in effect the new barbarians!”
Anchell made these remarks more than 40 years ago, yet some parents are still unaware of just how pervasive this curriculum is in some of their schools. Isn’t it beyond time to wake up?
The heterosexual sexualizing of our children also continues apace through movies and music and social media, where it seems that nothing is sacred anymore.
As I wrote in 2011 after attending that conference at Liberty, “The recent cover of the French edition of Vogue magazine caused considerable controversy, and it was not because of the all too typical, female model featured in a sensual pose. Instead, it was the fact that the model this time was a 10-year-old girl.
“The headline of an article appearing on JewishJournal.com announced that, ‘Vogue Blurs the Line between Fashion & Pedophilia with 10-Year-Old Model,’ and the article’s author, Ilana Angel, rightly noted that, ‘A 10 year old is not able to distinguish between playing dress up in mommy’s make-up and high heels and proving a sexual aid to pedophiles.’ How true!
“But this is only one, extreme example of the way our kids are being sexualized. How many children watch MTV and VH1, mimicking the moves and memorizing the lyrics of the latest song by Britney Spears or Lady Gaga, having no clue that the moves they are making and the words they are mouthing are sexually charged. These kids are too young to have any understanding of sexuality, and yet it is no secret to the TV execs that these same children are a major part of the viewing audience.”
Fast forward to 2019, when I wrote (and here’s a reader alert for graphic content coming), “It was not enough for Teen Vogue to celebrate anal sex, promote prostitution and teach kids how to have an abortion without parental permission. Now this popular young people’s magazine is offering guidelines on ‘sex spells,’ guaranteed to ‘make your orgasms magical’ (What wholesome reading for teens!)”
Tragically, this is barely the tip of a massive, destructive iceberg.
As for the LGTBQ+ sexualizing of our children, much of it comes in the form of indoctrination. Gay is good. Queer is cool. Being trans is something to celebrate. And your kids need to know this starting in pre-school, if not earlier. In fact, let’s normalize drag queens for toddlers!
As I wrote in 2011, it is outrageous “to introduce the categories of adult homosexuality and bisexuality to elementary school children, and now is the time to draw the line. Otherwise, your 8-year-old daughter might come home from school to tell you that she just learned that Joan of Arc was transgender. (After all, wasn’t she a cross-dresser?) Or perhaps your little boy will tell you how exciting it was to learn about the drag queens who started a riot at the Stonewall Inn in 1969.
“The fact is that our educational system is having a hard enough time teaching our kids the three R’s. Must they now learn LGBTQ’s? Now is the time to stop sexualizing our children. They should not be casualties of the culture wars. Do you agree?”
Do these words seem eerily prophetic today?
No wonder, then, that a March 2022 article was titled, “Joan of Arc: Cross-dressing warrior-saint and LGBTQ role model.” Your kids might well have heard about this too. And I already mentioned the perverse new fad of drag queens reading to toddlers. Should I add that they do so with the enthusiastic affirmation of the American Library Association?
This past July, I wrote an article titled “The Only Surprise is That Parents are Just Now Learning About LGBTQ+ Curricula in Their Children’s Schools.”
What, then, prompted me to address this topic yet again?
It was reading about “Gays Against Groomers, an organization comprised entirely of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and even transgender people, launched in 2022 [which] has had meteoric success at attracting followers to their cause exposing the harms done to children by some radicals hiding behind the LGBTQ banner.” Yes, these are gays (and others) who are against the grooming of children. They, too, recognize what is happening.
It was also this story that got my attention: “In Chicago, the city’s largest children’s hospital offers ‘kink’ and ‘trans-friendly’ sex toys for minors.”
Enough with this unbridled assault on our children. However, one may attempt to justify this madness, it must stop, and it must stop now. Parents, grandparents, educators, influencers, politicians, pastors, and other spiritual leaders, whoever you are, whatever stage of life you are in, it’s time that we stand together and raise our voices as one, shouting: “Stop sexualizing our children!”
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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