Students and faculty walk through an open area outside the School of Medicine on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on August 18, 2020, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. | Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images
The University of North Carolina has seemingly scrubbed multiple pages of information from its website offering transgender consultations and other so-called treatments for children as young as 4 years old. An archived page for the UNC Department of Psychiatry’s Gender Equality Psychiatry Clinic stated that the clinic serves patients ages 4 to 30 years old who are “undergoing or exploring all forms of “gender affirming care,” an industry euphemism for chemical and surgical castration and double mastectomies for young girls, among other irreversible procedures.
However, as of Tuesday, the UNC Psychiatry site no longer serves the link for the page with “child/adolescent patient care” under its apparently defunct Gender Equality Psychiatry Clinic, which also has a broken link.
Wayback Machine/UNC Psychiatry
Both pages result in a “404” or “not found” message reading, “Sorry, but the page you were trying to view does not exist.”
Likewise, Google results for the psychiatry school’s “UNC Gender Diverse Programs” and “About Our Team” pages — which state the Gender Equality Psychiatry Clinic “provides gender-affirming services to children, adolescents, young adults, and families” — also resulted in broken links.
A screenshot of a page on the University of North Carolina’s School of Medicine which formerly linked to a child/adolescent “gender equality” page. | Screenshot/UNC.edu
Through a student-run “gender affirming care clinic,” UNC also offers “free, culturally humble, gender-affirming care” once a month, including prescriptions for hormone therapy, letters of support for surgery, and other resources.
UNC’s Campus Health services also offer opposite-sex hormones using an informed consent protocol, meaning students are not required to present a letter from a mental health professional to begin so-called hormone therapy or other procedures, such as puberty blockers, according to the school’s website.
It was not clear whether these links were taken down or moved to another location on the UNC website.
As of Tuesday evening, The Christian Post was awaiting a response to a request for comment from UNC. This article will be updated once a response is received.
Last month, following a Democratic state lawmaker’s move to join the Republican Party, North Carolina Republicans looked to capitalize on their new supermajority with several pieces of new legislation aimed at banning sex-change procedures for minors, according to The Associated Press.
Some psychologists, including Dr. Michael J. Bailey of Northwestern University, have argued that one form of gender dysphoria, known as child onset dysphoria, may lead to some young children expressing a desire to identify as the opposite sex. According to Bailey, these children typically outgrow this confusion.
Despite Bailey’s conclusion, proponents of allowing children to socially transition have questioned the validity of the research into this phenomenon, asserting that there’s no need to delay a child’s social transition.
In October, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service proposed new guidelines for health professionals, advising them to be cautious about encouraging gender dysphoric children to socially transition by changing their names or pronouns.
The NHS warned healthcare professionals that these children might be going through a “transient phase,” and it recommends taking a more watchful approach.
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
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Indiana’s GOP legislature is poised to increase funding 2,000 percent for an agency that oversaw abortion businesses after whose services three women died in 2022.
Indiana abortion records The Federalist obtained this week indicate that in 2022 three women died after abortion procedures and two babies were born alive after chemical abortions. They also suggest Indiana abortionists failed to report four abortions on girls aged 15 and younger, as legally required. One of the minors not referred for a state abuse investigation after her abortion, a violation of state law, was just 13 years old, the records say.
The Indiana Department of Health receives legally mandated Terminated Pregnancy Reports on each abortion committed in the state. More than 100 of these from January to November 2022 indicate that abortion facilities in the state may have committed crimes and health violations, according to recordkeeping from Voices for Life, a Hoosier pro-life organization.
IDH has shut down no abortion facilities since January 2022, however, even facilities where records show women died after abortions. As for the 22 abortionists named in these numerous recent reports indicating potential medical malfeasance, “I am not aware of any doctors who have lost their licenses,” Voices for Life Executive Director Melanie Garcia Lyon told The Federalist Wednesday.
IDH communications personnel did not respond to any questions about these records from The Federalist.
GOP to Reward Incompetent Health Agency
Indiana’s Republican governor and Republican-dominated legislature are poised to increase taxpayer funding for the health department by 2,000 percent this week, from $7 million a year to more than $150 million. IDH also pushed Indiana families into lockdown and covid testing chaos across two school years despite early-available evidence children were at low risk from Covid-19 exposure.
Gov. Eric Holcomb is now using the damage his lengthy Covid shutdowns caused, including mental distress, obesity, and academic catastrophe, to amp up funding for the shutdowns’ top enabler and enforcer in Indiana. That enforcer also happens to be low-energy in investigating abortion businesses whose services have resulted in Hoosier women’s deaths.
Voices for Life and their national partner Students for Life collect these records and file complaints about apparent violations with IDH and the state attorney general’s office, Garcia Lyon told The Federalist. Forty percent of the potential violations the group found from January to November 2022, Garcia Lyon said, were from Planned Parenthood locations.
After receiving such complaints, the office of Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita investigates, then submits a summary or a complaint to Indiana’s medical licensing board, said Rokita Press Secretary Kelly Stevenson. The board hears complaints and decides whether to sanction the investigated abortionist or facility. Indiana’s governor oversees that board and appoints its seven members.
On Saturday in Indianapolis, Students for Life and Voices for Life will highlight the state-reported health and safety violations related to an abortion facility that may move across the border to Illinois. That’s the Clinic for Women, currently in Indianapolis.
In September, Indiana banned abortions, except for very small babies who are the claimed results of rape and incest. The law is currently suspended by two injunctions pending litigation. Garcia Lyon noted that the law “still allows for abortion at hospitals. And the same people making these violations often do abortions in hospitals already. [So] code violations will still be relevant once the law goes into place, because it’s still the same people, just moving places.”
Records: 15-Year-Old Girl’s Womb Evacuated By Infamous Abortionist
One of the abortion reports, dated April 21, 2022, shows a chemical abortion on a 15-year-old girl performed by abortionist Deborah Nucatola in Bloomington, Ind. at a Planned Parenthood. Nucatola was infamously recorded on a 2015 undercover video discussing how to “crush” a child to death during an abortion to leave his organs intact for sale.
The state report suggests this abortion was not reported, as legally required, to the state Department of Child Services for investigation as the potential result of child rape. The space on the form for the date of reporting this abortion to IDH is blank. Legally, the form states, the abortion should have been disclosed to DCS within three days of the child’s death.
One of the four underage girls whose 2022 abortions weren’t reported to child services, as legally required, was 13 years old when her child was aborted, according to state records. That surgical abortion on a seven-week-old baby was performed at a Planned Parenthood branch in Indianapolis by abortionist Cassandra Cashman, the record states.
DCS also failed to answer any Federalist questions about these reports.
Records: 3 Women Died After Indiana Abortions in 2022
According to three TPRs from 2022, three women died in Indiana after abortions at facilities overseen by the Indiana Department of Health. At the Indianapolis Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Hospital, a 31-year-old married woman died after an abortion on June 25, 2022, says one TPR.
The record says she was given abortion pills when her baby was 21 weeks of gestation, an age at which babies can survive outside the womb in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The baby was diagnosed via ultrasound with a chromosomal anomaly, says the record, which IDH received on July 22, 2022. The physician committing this abortion was listed as Amy Caldwell in the report.
Caldwell was also the abortionist listed on the April 24, 2022 report of another Hoosier woman who died after an abortion at Planned Parenthood-Georgetown in Indianapolis. The 29-year-old unmarried woman was given abortion drugs to kill a 7-week-old baby, say the state records.
The third Hoosier woman to die after an abortion in 2022 undertook a surgical abortion in Bloomington, Indiana, by abortionist Rhiannon Amodeo, says another state record. The baby cut to pieces inside her was an estimated eight weeks old. His mother was 31 years old. The Indiana Department of Health received the report of this double death on November 23, 2022.
Caldwell is also listed as the physician on a January 7, 2022 report that says she delivered a baby alive during an abortion procedure. That baby was also potentially viable in a NICU: she was listed on the report as 20 weeks old when her mother and an abortionist ended her life.
Indiana Department of Health Blaming Data ‘Errors’ Since 2018
In March 2022, Hoosier pro-lifers said the Indiana Department of Health stopped releasing Terminated Pregnancy Reports for a South Bend facility after local conservative news highlighted TPRs indicating multiple illegal abortions at the Whole Women’s Health facility.
“Over the past four years, IDOH has taken zero action on reported abortions that indicate they were illegally performed,” wrote state Rep. Jake Teshka in a March 2022 letter to the agency about the incident.
More than 50 Indiana lawmakers wrote to Holcomb in 2021 complaining about the IDH’s history of alleged data errors and lackluster follow-up on abortion reports that indicate potential crimes. The letter noted that since at least 2018 the department has claimed several abortion reports that indicate criminal or health-violating activity were false, due to “computer error.”
“We submit complaints all the time about things that are reported on Terminated Pregnancy Reports, and the excuse nearly every time is, ‘Oh, it was an error. Oh, it was an error,’” Jackie Appleman, a Voices for Life board member, told a local newspaper in February after the department used the excuse again over reports of unlicensed abortions occurring in Indiana. “We’ve been getting this excuse back from the (Indiana) health department for the last, I don’t know, three or four years.”
The December 2021 letter from elected officials notes that despite multiple postabortion deaths of women and abortions performed at unlicensed facilities, Indiana abortionists have failed to lose their medical licenses and IDOH has failed to resolve investigations into such cases. The officials asked Holcomb to update them on “on all open cases relating to abortion clinics” and to investigate why complaints “are not examined and resolved.”
Holcomb responded in January 2022, providing no update on IDH investigations of abortion facilities nor announcing any investigation into why IDH fails to secure penalties for abortionists after procedures that lead to women’s deaths. One year later, he moved to reward the badly discredited IDH with hundreds of millions more taxpayer dollars. Holcomb’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Instead of demanding that IDH prove competence at stopping criminal and human rights violations under its purview before any expansion of its duties, the Indiana legislature is cooperating with Holcomb in rewarding IDH with a 2,000 percent increase in taxpayer funding.
This week, Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., went back to work after spending several weeks away from Congress due to being hospitalized for severe depression. But while Democrats, who were sorely pressed to maintain their narrow majority in his absence, celebrated his return, C-Span video of him chairing a Senate subcommittee provided sobering evidence of the recovering stroke victim’s limitations. Much like his disastrous election debate last October, at the hearing, Fetterman’s halting speech, barely understandable comments, and inability to communicate without electronic aid illustrated his incapacity.
But while Democrats are quick to slam as bigots anyone who had the temerity to notice Fetterman’s problems, they are not feeling quite so generous about another member of their Senate caucus. The double standard creates an ominous precedent that ought to hang over the 2024 presidential election.
While they’ve been circling the wagons around Fetterman, Democrats have been pressuring Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., to resign due to the perception that she lacks the physical energy or the mental acuity to do her job. But unfortunately for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and the California Democrats who want to replace her, the ailing 89-year-old has refused to step down, though she has already announced she won’t run for re-election next year.
Feinstein vs. Fetterman
Feinstein was hospitalized for shingles in February and has remained absent since then. With no date set for her return, the vacancy on the Judiciary Committee, where her absence leaves the Democrats without a majority, has created a serious problem for the efforts of the Biden administration and Schumer to confirm federal judges. The duel between the ailing Feinstein and her party has, at least for the moment, benefited Republicans. But the implications of the controversy go beyond its impact on her desire to stay on until her term expires in January 2025.
There are currently four senators who are over 80, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who returned this week from an extended medical absence after a fall. Thirty senators are in their 70s. Whatever one thinks about the question of elderly senators serving, the campaign to push Feinstein out of her seat sets an interesting precedent.
Democrats have reacted to questions posed by Fetterman’s obvious limitations as a senator with both denial and an attempt to shame skeptics with pious rhetoric about ableism. They have attempted to depict him as a poster child for tolerance for those who suffer from mental health issues.
But they are indifferent to criticisms of their effort to push Feinstein out of her seat on the grounds of ageism, which have just as much validity as their defense of Fetterman.
Feinstein vs. Biden
Even worse, their belief that Feinstein’s diminishing capacities render her ineligible for a seat in the Senate stands in even starker contrast to the position President Joe Biden’s mental state has placed Democrats in.
Ever since Biden became their presumptive presidential nominee in March of 2020, ignoring his decline has become a political necessity for Democrats, and even more so with each passing month. At the very least, his never-ending stream of gaffes, frequent confusion in public, and erratic behavior raises questions about his mental acuity. Yet the corporate media treat questions about his health as off limits and proof of the bad morals of conservatives.
Still, as was the case with Feinstein until recently, the 80-year-old Biden remains fit enough to silence inquiries from Democrats. As president, it’s far easier to shield him from public scrutiny. More importantly, most in the party are coming to terms with the fact that they may be stuck with him for the 2024 election.
No matter his mental state, having spent his entire life working to become president, Biden clearly has no intention of giving up after only one term. He will have to be dragged from the White House kicking and screaming. The obvious alternatives — Vice President Kamala Harris or California Gov. Gavin Newsom — lack much appeal for the party’s grassroots or its donor class. So, many on the left are convinced Biden may be their best bet for victory next year, especially if the election is a rematch of the 2020 race against former President Donald Trump.
Double Standard
Yet whether you think Democrats’ decision to get rid of someone who can’t do her job is sensible or insensitive and nasty, it does raise questions about the same standard not being applied to Fetterman and most especially to Biden.
Feinstein has met her Democratic colleagues halfway by asking to be replaced on the Judiciary Committee so they can continue confirming leftist judges at an even faster pace than McConnell confirmed conservatives during the Trump administration. But replacing her on the committee requires GOP acquiescence and, for understandable reasons, Republicans are only too happy to let the current stalemate created by her absence continue. That’s led to mounting anger from Democrats, who think Feinstein is being selfish.
The empty seat on the Judiciary Committee has turned the issue into a crisis for Democrats, but many of them have been pushing for her resignation for years. Feinstein’s voting record can’t be criticized by the left, but she has at times engaged in collegial or commonsensical behavior that they regard as insufficiently woke.
Feinstein Too Reasonable for Some
In 2019, she enraged global warming extremists when she brusquely lectured a group of visiting schoolchildren about the importance of compromise when they began to virtue signal to her about not supporting the most alarmist environmental measures.
Just as bad from their point of view were allegations that she behaved decently toward conservative judicial nominees such as Justice Amy Coney Barrett, which some characterized as treating her with “kid gloves.” That’s despite the fact that Feinstein had intolerantly targeted her for her Catholic faith, saying that “the dogma lives loudly within you.”
That goes a long way toward explaining why Feinstein’s incapacity has been an issue for left-wingers who have no problem tolerating a leftist like Fetterman, who, leaving aside his hospitalization for depression, also still needs special equipment to be able to understand his colleagues and who appears to converse only with difficulty.
But there’s more at stake in this discussion than the Democrats’ hypocrisy on the question of fitness for office.
What if Biden’s Health Can’t Be Hid?
Democrats appear to be serious about asking the American people to re-elect an already diminished man who will be 82 in January 2025 and presumably serve until he’s 86. So, the idea that the questions they are currently raising about Feinstein can’t be raised about Biden ought to be a bridge too far even for inveterate Trump haters.
Just as important, they need to ask themselves in the coming year what they will do if Biden’s health continues to decline and ultimately puts him in the same position as Feinstein, where the problems can no longer be concealed. By declaring that questions about Biden’s mental acuity are off-limits or in bad taste, they are essentially setting up a situation where Harris being forced to step in and govern is a realistic possibility sometime in the next five years.
The only realistic alternative to simply hoping and praying Biden will continue to decline at a slow enough rate that his problems can continue to be concealed or smoothed over without political consequences is to begin asking the same hard questions about his health that they are currently posing to Feinstein. It remains to be seen whether anyone of consequence in the party has the guts or the wisdom to point this out before it is too late.
Jonathan S. Tobin is a senior contributor to The Federalist, editor in chief of JNS.org, and a columnist for Newsweek. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.
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.
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.
The facade of “safety” around hormonal birth control continues to crumble: Researchers at Oxford Population Health’s Cancer Epidemiology Unit have recently shown that progestin-only hormonal contraceptives, long billed as the “safest” birth control option because of their lack of estrogen, definitively raises one’s risk of breast cancer, similarly to combined hormonal contraceptives (which contain both synthetic estrogen and progestin).
Furthermore, the Oxford researchers found that breast cancer risk, while it declines after discontinuation of hormonal birth control, still remains elevated for ever-users of hormonal birth control (when compared to never-users). Of course, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) still won’t cop to increased risks for breast cancer for ever-users of birth control — just for current users — and they are also currently evaluating whether to make a progestin-only pill the first-ever over-the-counter birth control pill in the United States.
Unsurprisingly, in another instance of “nothing to see here, folks,” headlines abounded with the results of the Oxford study for a few weeks, carefully emphasizing the “slight” or “small” increase in breast cancer risk. And the experts, of course, were quick to chime in with all the benefits of hormonal contraception, insisting women shouldn’t see this as a reason to go flushing their pills.
So listen, I talk to women about this every single day. You have to talk about risk vs benefit. It is clear that hormonal contraception lowers the risk of ovarian and uterine cancer, but it increases the risk of clotting. When you put that head to head, it’s about individualizing that risk-benefit and option-risk for the woman. If you talk to any OB/GYN, they will say, we have a line, ‘pregnancy is much higher risk than any associated risk with birth control pills or hormonal contraception.’ So you have to have that conversation based on you and your health-care provider.
While I agree that health-care decisions should be made between a woman and her doctor, is it really true, with everything we know about the risks and side effects of birth control (and we know an awful lot), that it’s really that much “safer” than a nine-month pregnancy? Women, after all, tend to be on birth control for years — perhaps even decades — at a time. And the oft-touted benefits of hormonal birth control reducing ovarian and uterine cancers? Well, Dr. Ashton might be surprised to learn that pregnancy has those, too.
It’s also worth mentioning that while ovarian and uterine cancers can undoubtedly be devastating diseases, the average woman’s baseline risk for breast cancer is far greater than her risk for ovarian or uterine cancer; in fact, breast cancer is now the world’s most commonly diagnosed cancer. In other words, elevating the average woman’s risk of breast cancer even a little bit should be a serious consideration for doctors and health-care institutions indeed. In fact, one might argue they have a moral imperative to help women lower their risks for breast cancer.
Unfortunately, despite increasing, high-quality evidence of the harms of birth control (of which breast cancer is only one among a lengthy list of risks), health-care organizations such as the FDA are loath to give women true informed consent about these drugs. In 2019, the Contraceptive Study Group (CSG) submitted a Citizen Petition to the FDA requesting they add a black box warning to hormonal contraceptives given the mounting evidence for breast cancer risks for ever-users of these drugs (evidence the Oxford study has yet again corroborated).
Yet in a partial response to the CSG’s petition, published a full three years later in 2022, the FDA refused to supply women with this warning. One wonders what leg they have to stand upon now, and if they’ll continue to ignore these significant risks to women — which can be entirely avoided through the use of highly effective, drug- and side-effect-free measures for family planning known as fertility awareness-based methods.
With the publication of the Oxford study, the FDA has once again proven itself at odds with the best scientific evidence on this matter, which even the National Cancer Institute acknowledges. Again, this is largely because of the “benefit” of preventing pregnancy, which evidently trumps all other considerations — even ones that could take the lives of women.
Grace Emily Stark is a freelance writer with published work in multiple outlets, and she is the Editor of Natural Womanhood. Grace is also a current Ramsey Institute Fellow at the Center for Bioethics & Culture, and a former Novak Alumni Fund Journalism fellowship recipient. Follow her writing at GraceEmilyStark.com.
In his 67-page straight-talking opinion, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk stuck to the facts — something Americans desperately need to hear after decades of euphemistic discussions about abortion.
“Unborn humans.” “Eugenics.” “Head, hands, and legs, with defined fingers and toes.” “Shame, regret, anxiety, depression, drug abuse, and suicidal thoughts.”
Federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s Friday decision freezing the FDA’s approval of the abortion-pill combination, mifepristone and misoprostol, included these phrases and more. And while the left is already attacking Kacsmaryk’s 67-page straight-talking opinion in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA by framing it as filled with anti-abortionrhetoric, the Trump appointee stuck to the facts — something Americans desperately need to hear after decades of euphemistic discussions about abortion.
After a brief introduction in which Kacsmaryk highlighted the FDA’s two decades of stonewalling that delayed a legal challenge to the 2000 approval of the abortion drugs, the court opened with the basic facts. The plaintiffs — doctors and medical associations that provide health care to pregnant and post-abortive women and girls — sued the FDA, challenging several administrative actions related to the approval of the chemical abortion drugs.
‘Unborn Humans’
The court then explained the drugs and their functioning: “Mifepristone — also known as RU-486 or Mifeprex — is a synthetic steroid that blocks the hormone progesterone, halts nutrition, and ultimately starves the unborn human until death.” But “because mifepristone alone will not always complete the abortion,” the court continued, “the FDA mandates a two-step drug regimen: mifepristone to kill the unborn human, followed by misoprostol to induce cramping and contractions to expel the unborn human from the mother’s womb.”
Calling an unborn human an “unborn human” immediately triggered abortion activists, but as Kacsmaryk explained in a footnote, such terminology is scientifically correct, whereas the lawyers and courts “often use the word ‘fetus’ to inaccurately identify unborn humans in unscientific ways.”
“The word ‘fetus,’” Kacsmaryk explained, “refers to a specific gestational stage of development, as opposed to the zygote, blastocyst, or embryo stages.” And because the FDA’s approval of the abortion drugs applies at multiple “gestational stages,” the word “fetus” would be inaccurate.
It is understandable that abortion activists want to hide the humanity of unborn humans, but that doesn’t make the science less real: It just means girls and women who have bought the “clump of cells” narrative will suffer when faced with the truth, which chemical “at home abortions” force.
“The mother seeing the aborted human ‘appears to be a difficult aspect of the medical termination process which can be distressing, bring home the reality of the event and may influence later emotional adaptation,’” the court wrote, based on the record evidence. “For example, one woman was surprised and saddened to see that her aborted baby ‘had a head, hands, and legs’ with ‘[d]efined fingers and toes.’”
Another woman alleged that “she did not receive an ultrasound or any other physical examination before receiving chemical abortion drugs from Planned Parenthood.” According to the record, “The abortionist misdated the baby’s gestational age as six weeks, resulting in the at-home delivery of a ‘lifeless, fully formed baby in the toilet,’ later determined to be around 30-36 weeks old.”
Harm to Women
Beyond exposing the reality that abortion kills an unborn human, Kacsmaryk’s opinion also refuted the “popular belief and talking points” that using the abortion pill is “as easy as taking Advil.” Here, the federal judge detailed the factual evidence. Among other things, “bleeding from a chemical abortion, unlike surgical abortion, can last up to several weeks,” and by being done at home, “without physician oversight,” it can lead “to undetected ectopic pregnancies, failure of rH factor incompatibility detection, and misdiagnosis of gestational age — all leading to severe or even fatal consequences.”
The opinion also countered the claim that side effects are rare by highlighting evidence that “over sixty percent of women and girls’ emergency room visits after chemical abortions are miscoded as ‘miscarriages’ rather than adverse effects to mifepristone.”
The evidence also shows emotional and psychological injury, Kacsmaryk stressed, with 77 percent of women who underwent a chemical abortion reporting “a negative change” after the at-home abortion, and 38 percent of women reporting issues “with anxiety, depression, drug abuse, and suicidal thoughts because of the chemical abortion.”
While the abortion industry prefers to cite its own evidence, as Kacsmaryk noted, those studies are flawed both because of the miscoding of chemical abortions as miscarriages and because the FDA stopped requiring the reporting of non-fatal adverse reactions.
Eugenic Roots
The left also didn’t like Kacsmaryk exposing the eugenic beliefs of the Population Council, which had sought FDA approval for the abortion drugs. John D. Rockefeller founded the Population Council in 1952, “after he convened a conference with ‘population activists’ such as Planned Parenthood’s director and several well-known eugenicists,” the court wrote. Attendees of that conference discussed “the problem of ‘quality,’” and concluded that “[m]odern civilization had reduced the operation of natural selection by saving more ‘weak’ lives and enabling them to reproduce,” thereby resulting in “a downward trend in … genetic quality.”
“[m]odern civilization had reduced the operation of natural selection by saving more ‘weak’ lives and enabling them to reproduce,” thereby resulting in “a downward trend in … genetic quality.” …….. “Natural Selection”????? Can you say, “disciples of Margarete Sanger”?
Many Americans remain oblivious to the historical backdrop eugenics played to the abortion movement, and activist groups prefer they remain in the dark. The sunlight Kacsmaryk shined upon that truth infuriates them.
Political Pressure
Judge Kacsmaryk also exposed the political pressure placed on the FDA to approve the abortion drug — something Americans are likely to appreciate more today in the aftermath of the FDA’s hasty approval of the Covid mRNA shots.
In the case of the abortion pill, the FDA took the unprecedented step of arranging a meeting between the French pharmaceutical company that owned the patent rights and the eventual drug sponsor, the Population Council. “The purpose of the FDA-organized meeting was ‘to facilitate an agreement between those parties to work together to test [mifepristone] and file a new drug application.’”
Evidence further shows the Department of Health and Human Services “initiated” another meeting to determine how the Clinton administration “might facilitate successful completion of the negotiations” between the French firm and the Population Council to ensure the group secure patent rights and eventual FDA approval.” In fact, Clinton’s HHS secretary “believed American pressure on the French firm was necessary.”
Then after the Population Council submitted a new drug application, the FDA proposed detailed restrictions to address safety concerns, including that the drug be administered by doctors “trained and authorized by law” to perform surgical abortions; trained in administering mifepristone and treating adverse events; and able to provide treatment at a medical facility that had the equipment necessary to perform surgical abortions, resuscitation procedures, and blood transfusion, within one hour’s drive. The FDA’s restrictions were leaked to the press, prompting a political firestorm.
So Much for Safety
The FDA later abandoned the above safety mandates and approved the drug for use to kill unborn humans aged seven-weeks gestation or younger. The FDA further required three “in-person office visits: the first to administer mifepristone, the second to administer misoprostol, and the third to assess any complications and ensure there were no fetal remains in the womb.” All adverse events were also required to be reported.
In 2002, the FDA removed even more of the safety restrictions, increasing the maximum gestational age from seven-weeks gestation to 10-weeks gestation, reducing the number of office visits from three to one, increasing the drug dosage, allowing non-doctors to prescribe and administer chemical abortions, and eliminating the requirement for non-fatal adverse reactions to be reported. Then in 2019, the FDA approved a generic version of the abortion pills, and on April 12, 2021, the FDA announced it would allow abortion pills to be dispensed through the mail.
“Whether FDA abandoned its proposed restrictions because of political pressure or not,” the court wrote, “one thing is clear: the lack of restrictions resulted in many deaths and many more severe or threatening adverse reactions.” But “due to FDA’s lax reporting requirements, the exact number is not ascertainable,” Kacsmaryk stressed.
Straight Facts
But it was not on politics that Kacsmaryk based his decision to freeze the FDA’s approval of the abortion pill. Rather, in his methodical opinion, the federal judge explained that the FDA lacked the authority to accelerate approval of the drug under what is called “Subpart H” of the FDA. That subpart only allows for accelerated approval of drugs that treat “serious or life-threatening illnesses” — something pregnancy is not.
Kacsmaryk also concluded the evidence the FDA supposedly relied upon to approve the abortion drugs failed to support the conclusion that they were “safe and effective under particular conditions of use.” And finally, Kacsmaryk held the FDA’s approval of mail distribution violated the 1873 Comstock Act, which makes it illegal to use the mail to deliver any “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.”
The Biden administration has already filed a notice of appeal with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and in issuing his opinion in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, Kacsmaryk entered a temporary stay, which he or the court of appeals will likely make permanent pending resolution of the case. Thus, abortion pills will remain available for now.
How the Fifth Circuit and eventually the Supreme Court will rule remains to be seen, but what is clear now is the abortion-loving left is desperate to keep the truth about abortion from the public and is furious that Kacsmaryk dared to expose the reality: Abortion kills unborn humans.
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.
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.
Nobody disagrees at this point that there is a plethora of excess deaths and a dearth of births, a trend that should be the number-one alarming public policy issue. Yet when any of us suggest that the gene therapy ubiquitously given to the world right around the time of the jump in these numbers might be responsible, people look at us like we are from Mars. However, it turns out, based on newly released FOIA documents from the CDC, that our government knew about and even anticipated massive reports of injuries from these shots from day one.
Throughout the past two years, the government and media have concocted a conspiracy theory that somehow the CDC’s own VAERS reporting is scammed with fraud by people who have nothing better to do with their lives but spend hours filling out fraudulent vaccine injury reports. They pretend it’s a sort of ex post facto anomaly that nobody expected and that has no credibility in their eyes. Except, as Hebrew University Professor Josh Guetzkow reveals, not only did the CDC know about the vaccine injuries blowing up VAERS at record levels (even before the general public had access to them), the agency contracted with defense contractor General Dynamics to handle the database in anticipation of record use. Then, when the vaccines were released, the CDC had to up the contract to account for even more entries, yet showed no moral qualms about continuing with the campaign without disclosing these revelations to the public.
Guetzkow, who has secured numerous FOIA’ed documents both in the U.S. and Israel throughout COVID, posted 69 pages of FOIA’ed documents and contracts from General Dynamics Information Technology to the CDC’s immunization safety office. Thanks to his work, we already know from the previous FOIA’ed documents that the CDC’s $9.45 million contract with General Dynamics in August 2020 stated that officials anticipated 1,000 adverse event reports a day, with 40% of them being serious. Yet, like a cold serial killer soullessly counting his casualty list, the CDC was completely fine with going through with this campaign, as if it were the price that had to be paid to worship the spirit of the age – the modern-day Moloch. However, this document shows that as early as Jan. 15 – when most people still could have avoided these shots – the CDC was aware of record-setting reports that crushed even the agency’s initial cold-hearted, morbid expectations.
As you can see from page 8 of the pdf, General Dynamics warned the CDC that VAERS had blown through the expected 1,000 cases per day and even reached a level above 4,500 – to the point that GD couldn’t process the data. Mind you, they were never concerned with the human toll, just the logistics of the contract labor. They predicted a need for “reforecasting of staffing needs” to process all these reports.
Already in December 2020, when the shots were only available for select people like doctors, there were over 19,000 reports and close to 344,000 website visits. It’s hard to see how this wasn’t organic from people genuinely in pain because there was no organized campaign in the United States to inform people of VAERS at the time. I myself (who obsessively focused on this) hadn’t heard of it until two months later.
By Feb. 15, General Dynamics reported a continued record-setting pace of reports and website visits, to the point that workers had to expand their VAERS ID reports to allow for seven digits instead of six. In April, officials reported that they had to hire an additional 200 staffers to deal with the backlog and continue to process 25,000 reports per week, well beyond the threshold they originally contracted for. As eligibility for the shots expanded for all age groups, they continued to process over 30,000 injury reports a week, yet the CDC never said a word about it. Not only did officials not take the products off the market, they began mandating them over late summer 2021, with some mandates that remain in place to this very day.
It’s nearly impossible to astroturf these sorts of injury reports. Clearly, our government saw how organic they were and how they coincided perfectly with the uptake of the vaccine. Indeed, the FDA had access to the infamous Pfizer document in Feb. 2021 – before almost any younger adult was vaccinated – showing that the shot killed over 1,200 people and was associated with over 1,400 categories of serious maladies that were chronicled in a list eight pages long.
Now, keep in mind that after the government observed all these adverse events, and after officials knew about the 7.7% clinical injury rate from the CDC’s own V-SAFE program, perfectly corroborating the VAERS data, they accelerated the approval of these shots for children and then the mandates for everyone. Emails released via FOIA show that in July 2021, when the shots should have been canceled, Peter Marks, head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, pressured Marion Gruber, then head of the office of vaccines research and review, to truncate the already accelerated timeline to fully approve the Comirnaty shot (which is still not commercially available 2.5 years later).
A copy of the July 19 email response from Marion Gruber is below:
A week after the infamous Aug. 23 approval, which triggered the mandates, Gruber resigned from the agency in protest. But notice how even Gruber couched her reticence to approve this thing in terms of not undermining “confidence in the vaccine,” rather than expressing actual concern this was already killing and maiming people in droves.
We’re at the point where at a minimum, the government doesn’t care how many people die from this experimentation. Dr. Tom Merritt, who was part of the Oxford University team who developed the AstraZeneca vaccine, best summed up the sentiment of the biomedical state toward the people when he admitted that those injured by the gene therapy were “collateral damage to the bigger scheme.” He added: “Some tragically died, a number had their lives changed forever. They believed in vaccines; now they don’t.”It’s all a matter of what the bigger scheme really is.
This April marks 40 years since my therapist told me a “sex change” was the only answer to my persistent mental difficulties. Unfortunately, I followed his advice, obtained cross-sex hormones, and underwent surgery. As I learned through my painful experience, “gender-affirming treatment” (GAT), also known as “gender-affirming care,” is medical fraud and malpractice.
A person’s sex cannot be changed. I know. I lived and identified as a woman for eight years. Hormones and surgery didn’t change my sex. I was a man before surgery, and I remained a man after surgery, illustrating the truth of God’s perfect design — two separate and distinct sexes, male and female, innate and unchangeable.
Every step I took to identify as a female did not make me a female but devaluated me as a man, father, and husband. Each step dehumanized my male body and identity. So-called gender-affirming treatment destroyed my life and relationships, as well as those of my family.
The same thing is happening to people today, except at younger ages. I know. I get their emails.
In the decades following my surgery, instead of the “gender” industry dying out, it has run rampant — devaluing, dehumanizing, and destroying thousands of lives. When I fell for the scam, the patients were exclusively adult men. Today, the industry targets vulnerable adolescents of both sexes influenced by the emotional and physical throes of puberty, who can’t be expected to grasp the long-term consequences, such as infertility, bone density loss, and heart problems.
Parents are told their child will die by suicide if the child is denied medicalization, but it’s a myth. The Child and Parental Rights Campaign gathered the scientific evidence: “[T]here is no long-term evidence that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones or ‘transition’ surgeries prevent suicide. On the contrary, the best long-term research shows that individuals who do go through medical transition kill themselves at a rate 19 times greater than the general population.”
A Path to Sterilization
GAT includes many destructive and devaluing procedures. With social transition, a person adopts a new name and pronouns that erase his original identity. Puberty blockers — drugs with severe, well-known side-effects that stop normal growth and maturation — are administered.
Those are followed by cross-sex hormones — powerful drugs with destructive, known medical side-effects that impose a cross-sex appearance. The final step is surgeries — invasive, destructive procedures to remove healthy breasts and wombs in girls and healthy genitalia in boys.
It’s a path to sterilization. Sperm and eggs don’t mature without going through puberty. When puberty blockers are followed by cross-sex hormones, the teen is permanently sterilized. Some refer to this as chemical castration. Furthermore, to state the obvious, surgically removing testicles or wombs ends any possibility of having biological children.
Affirming a child in the opposite sex is emotional and psychological child abuse. Experimenting on healthy children with powerful drugs and sterilizing surgery is the epitome of medical malpractice and horribly barbaric.
‘Regret Is Rare’
After living eight years identifying as a woman, I still experienced extreme emotional distress and made the decision to detransition, i.e., to go back to living and presenting as the man I am. When I told my gender therapist and sex change surgeon, they assured me I was the only one they had ever heard of who went back.
Curious how I could be the only case in which “sex change” failed to fix gender issues, I launched a website, SexChangeRegret.com, to reach out to others. It turns out my experience wasn’t rare. Over the last ten years, I have heard from hundreds, maybe thousands, of people like me who found that GAT wasn’t the answer.
Research tells a similar story. Regrettable outcomes made the headlines almost 20 years ago. In July 2004, The Guardian reported the results of a review of 100 medical studies in an article tellingly headlined “Sex Changes are Not Effective, Say Researchers.” The article summarized the findings: “There is no conclusive evidence that sex change operations improve the lives of transsexuals, with many people remaining severely distressed and even suicidal after the operation.”
A 2011 long-term follow-up study in Sweden concurs. People who underwent GAT were 19 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population.
Undeterred by the lack of evidence of benefits, enthusiastic “gender experts” in Europe and the United States expanded the dangerous practice to children and adolescents. Pediatric gender clinics sprang up, ignoring evidence that showed most children, if not affirmed as the opposite sex, reconciled their sex with biological reality by the time they reached adulthood. Instead, clinics promoted and offered only GAT.
Finally, in 2022, pediatric gender clinics in Sweden, Finland, and the UK objectively reviewed the evidence. They found the risks outweighed the potential benefits and officially ended the practice of GAT for minors, replacing it with good psychosocial care. Recently, Norway did the same.
Why the U.S. Continues as Others Stop
But in the United States, it’s a different story. The legacy medical establishment pushes radical, risky medicalization, sterilization, and removal of healthy body parts as the only effective treatment for youth — no counseling, no diagnosis and treatment of co-existing disorders, little discussion of the risks and harms, no waiting, no alternatives.
Hospitals apparently salivate over the money to be made by gender clinics, as seen in the video from Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Pediatric Transgender Clinic in Nashville, Tennessee, in which a doctor describes the surgeries as a “huge money maker” for the hospital.
Recently, a selfless whistleblower from Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital blew the cover off the lack of established protocols and frequency of harm, saying, “what is happening to them [children] is morally and medically appalling.”
Children and their parents need protection from this medical quackery, and they need it now. That’s why lawmakers in several states are pursuing legislation to protect children from harmful medicalization. Arkansas, Arizona, Alabama, Florida, and Texas enacted protections, and several other states are in process: Missouri, Utah, Montana, South Carolina, South Dakota, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Oklahoma.
The state of Florida commissioned a comprehensive evaluation of the benefits and harms of GAT for minors in 2022. The scientifically stringent review exposed a lack of quality evidence showing any benefit, and ample proof of harm. The analysis prompted the Florida medical boards to act and limit the widespread use of hormonal and surgical interventions for youth.
Encouraging Me to Cross-Dress Was Child Abuse
As a child, I was encouraged and affirmed by my grandmother to cross-dress in women’s clothing. She made me a purple chiffon evening dress when I was four years old. It was our secret, she said. Her repeated affirming and loving response to me in the dress proved devastating. It implanted the damaging idea that something must be wrong with me as a boy.
Think of the parallels to today. The public-school environment fosters the same perverse practice on children by teaching students (beginning in kindergarten) a disturbing curriculum that confuses children about their innate identity. Public schools have become indoctrination centers for “gender change” and de facto satellite gender clinics that practice medicine without training, a license, or, in many cases, parental permission.
“The public-school environment fosters the same perverse practice on children by teaching students (beginning in kindergarten) a disturbing curriculum that confuses children about their innate identity. Public schools have become indoctrination centers for “gender change” and de facto satellite gender clinics that practice medicine without training, a license, or, in many cases, parental permission.”
Teachers groom children as early as kindergarten or first grade to think that “there are many genders” and they can choose one. When children seem upset or perplexed about whether they are a girl or a boy, school counselors and teachers stand ready to inappropriately diagnose them as trans and encourage them to take the next step: “Choose a new name and wardrobe for use at school. We’ll keep it a secret from your parents.” Unbeknownst to parents, many school districts prohibit staff from informing parents.
Protect your children from being corrupted and “transitioned.” Take them out of the public school system.
Trans Kids and Parents
As I discovered in my own life, and in the lives of parents and the detransitioners I have had the pleasure to work with, gender distress is a symptom, not a diagnosis. There are many factors driving youth to identify as trans, such as indoctrination and enabling in public schools, local peer group influence and social contagion, and autism or mental disorders.
Other factors are social media apps such as TikTok, sexually charged transgender gaming, and anime. Lastly, there are adverse childhood experiences, such as sexual abuse, emotional abuse, divorce of parents, exposure to pornography, bullying, and other perceived trauma.
Kids don’t need a “gender” therapist or hormones or to cut off healthy body parts. They need parents to shelter them from school indoctrination and peer group and social media influences. They may need a trauma therapist who can help them unearth and address underlying adverse childhood experiences or mental disorders.
My Adverse Childhood Experiences
I can only speculate as to why I wanted to cross-dress and pretend I was a girl. Certainly, my grandma’s obvious delight in me as a girl in the purple dress, not as the scruffy boy in blue jeans, damaged my male identity. Another leading contender was my relationship with my mother.
I never felt my mom, a young 20-year-old at my birth, ever wanted me, loved me, or accepted me. The feeling was confirmed years later, after I detransitioned, when she shared an alarming story with a friend of mine.
Without any shame or remorse, she revealed how she would grab my wrists and yank me up off the floor with one arm and hit my dangling body with a frying pan with the other. I have no memory of this. I must have been very young to be suspended with one hand.
I never hated my mom. I was always trying to win her approval and get her to love me. The sad truth is, at no time in my mom’s lifetime did she ever talk about how much she loved me. Shortly before she died, she revealed to me and my wife that when I was a toddler, she almost killed me by shaking me very hard.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to guess that a four-year-old boy would prefer being loved and appreciated at grandma’s wearing the purple dress than being yanked up by one arm and hit with a frying pan by an angry mom. My grandma’s affirming me as a girl started my overwhelming desire to change into a female, a longing reinforced by subsequent physical and sexual mistreatment.
The psychological and emotional abuse perpetrated on me as a child was so devaluing and so dehumanizing, I was convinced as an adult by doctors that the only way to heal was to load up on female hormones and let surgeons slice up my body and declare I was now a female. That was 40 years ago. Today, “gender-affirming care” for children is lucrative medical abuse that devalues, destroys, and dehumanizes boys and girls.
Sweden and other countries examined the evidence and ended it. Florida reviewed the high-quality evidence and as a result, Florida medical associations stopped it. The U.K. court reviewed evidence provided by the Tavistock clinic and called it experimental and not suitable for children.
Children need love, real care, and good psychosocial counseling, not a change of identity.
Walt Heyer is an accomplished author and public speaker with a passion for mentoring individuals whose lives have been torn apart by unnecessary gender-change surgery.
Regular viewers know that I am sicken by what is happening to America’s children. I have been asking for a long time, “Why is the political Left so hyper about transgenderism, and mutilating children?” I think I might have some (certainly not all) answers.
Could it be motivated by the “Over-Population” cabal?
The Democrat Party, and the rest of the whacky Left, have always embraced Margaret Sanger and her beliefs that the world is overpopulated. She fought for euthanizing certain people groups, especially black people. She wrote how she was a student of how Hitler killed the Jews.
The Left certainly knows that children that have these cross-sex hormones, surgeries, et., al., CANNOT REPRODUCE. (They also know the alarming amount of people, especially young people, are dying from Fentanyl poisoning, yet won’t close the southern border).
History is full of their manipulative means to control Americans. Could this be one more manipulation?
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.
Like Blaze News? Get the news that matters most delivered directly to your inbox. SIGN UP
Transgender activists and their supporters were triggered after Jordan Peterson launched an online invective against vaginoplasty surgery for children.
Peterson was responding to videos posted to social media showing a doctor from Boston Children’s Hospital explaining the “penile inversion vaginoplasty” procedure for biologically male people.
“In this procedure the surgical team is creating the outer and the inner vagina,”explained Dr. Oren Ganor. “The reason it’s called penile inversion vaginoplasty because we use the penile skin and the scrotal skin in order to reconstruct the vagina. But in doing so, we break it down to all of its components and we use some of the tissue to reconstruct things the way they were supposed to be for that patient.”
Peterson responded to the video with a one-word tweet, saying simply, “Prison.”
And it's not a vagina. It's a hole for another man to f**k. And that's that. https://t.co/E03wxm8fCF
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) March 12, 2023
“And it’s not a vagina. It’s a hole for another man to f**k. And that’s that,” he added in another tweet.
Supporters and allies of the transgender agenda were angered by Peterson’s description of the operation.
“At this point Jordan is pure hatred and bigotry walking around in a trench coat, pretending to be an intellectual,” read one response.
“Oh this sad little pathetic man who needs to denigrate women to boost his fragile ego,”responded a woman identifying as a professor and a feminist.
“He’s claiming to be talking about and in defense of the bodies of children. The post is not age restricted, and would be disgusting even if kids couldn’t see it. You won’t find a single anti-trans crusader who doesn’t sexually harass children like this,”said another person identifying as a transexual communist.
“I’m tired of transphobes seeing parts of trans people’s identity (in this case, a trans woman wanting a vagina) and sexualizing it,”read another response.
Others inexplicably accused him of being homosexual over the comment.
Here’s more from Jordan Peterson:
Jordan Peterson Knows Why We’re Obsessed with Aliens | The Glenn Beck Podcast | Ep 107 www.youtube.com
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Like Blaze News? Get the news that matters most delivered directly to your inbox. SIGN UP
Dr. Robert Redfield testified before Congress Wednesday, noting three suspicious events at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that strengthened his long-held conviction that COVID-19 came from a Chinese lab — a belief, he says, that got him boxed out of transformative conversations.
Whereas there is now growing recognition that COVID-19 “most likely” originated in the Chinese Communist Party-controlled Wuhan Institute of Virology, where dangerous gain-of-function experiments were routinely performed on coronaviruses, saying so in recent years prompted derision and censorship.
Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reportedly received death threats from his fellow scientists for noting that human error and meddling may have resulted in the spread of a virus that claimed tens of millions of lives worldwide.
“I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” he told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”
When addressing the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on March 8, he did not hold back.
Redfield noted there were three things in particular that took place early in the pandemic that bolstered his suspicion that COVID-19 came from a lab.
First, “they deleted the sequences. Highly irregular. Researchers don’t like to do that.”
The New York Times reported that early in the pandemic, over 200 data entries from the genetic sequencing of early cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan were erased from an online scientific database. The early suspicion was that these sequences were deleted because they revealed that the virus that ravaged the world may have predated the alleged outbreak at the wet marked in December 2019.
Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, was able to track down 13 of the sequences online and determined that it “seems likely that the sequences were deleted to obscure their existence.”
Chinese researchers had requested that the National Institutes of Health delete the sequences, and the NIH complied, reported the Washington Examiner.
Redfield appeared to suggest that the deletion of sequences took place as early as September 2019.
Second, Redfield said, “they changed the command and control at the lab from civilian control to military control. Highly unusual.”
In 2021, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) noted during a meeting of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, “New testimony now received by my committee reveals the Chinese military potentially took over this lab, not in January 2020 as was reported, but earlier in 2019. … The Chinese military were actually in the facility at the time of 2017. That signals the CCP was worried about something at the lab before the world even knew what COVID-19 was. Why else would they put the Chinese military in charge?”
The State Department noted in early 2021 that “the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
Major General Chen Wei, China’s top biowarfare expert, formally took over the BSL-4 lab from a local communist party committee president on Jan. 31, 2020, sparking concerns that the virus not only originated in the lab but was linked to a biowarfare program.
Third, “which is very telling, they let a contractor redo the ventilation system in that laboratory. So I think, clearly, there was strong evidence that a significant event that happened in that laboratory in September.”
Redfield ruffled feathers in March 2021 when he went on CNN and said, “I’m of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory — escaped. … Other people don’t believe that. That’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out.”
Dr. Robert Redfield, the former CDC Director, talks about three suspicious events that took place at the Wuhan lab in September 2019:
— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 8, 2023
Fauci’s skew
Redfield told the subcommittee that retired National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci and former National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins both sought to push a “single narrative” about the virus’ origins.
Redfield noted that he “made it very clear in January [2020] to all of them why we had to aggressively pursue this and I let them know, as a virologist, that I didn’t see that this was anything like SARS or MERS because they never learned how to transmit human to human.”
“I felt that this virus was too infectious for humans,” said Redfield. “There was a lot of evidence that lab actually published in 2014 that they put the ACE2 receptor into humanized mice so it could infect human tissue. I think, you know, we had to really seriously go after the fact it came from the lab and they knew that that was how I was thinking, although I thought we had to go after both hypotheses.”
Even though Redfield helmed the CDC at the time, Redfield intimated that Fauci elected not to involve him in the controversial Feb. 1, 2020, conference call with top virologists on account of his insistence on a possible lab origin.
TheBlaze previously reported that Fauci appeared keen to push the zoonotic origins theory, both on the conference call and in the correspondence that followed.
According to congressional investigators, just days after the call, Fauci commissioned an influential 2020 study suggesting COVID-19 was not the result of a Chinese lab leak. The former NIAID director also reportedly edited and provided final approval for the document, which he later cited on the national stage without noting his involvement.
Redfield revealed he was not made aware of his exclusion from the conference call or the call itself until the correspondences was released following a FOIA request.
When asked why Fauci and others excluded him, Redfield answered, “Because I had a different point of view and I was told they made a decision that they would keep this confidential until they came up with a single narrative, which I will argue is antithetical to science.”
“This was an a priori decision that there’s one point of view that we’re going to put out there, and anyone who doesn’t agree with it is going to be sidelined,” Redfield told Congress. “And as I say, I was only the CDC director, and I was sidelined.”
Former CDC Director: Coming Up With a Single Narrative Is Antithetical to Science
Dr. Redfield, who was the CDC director at the time, was excluded from a February 2020 call with doctors Fauci, Collins, and others discussing the origins of COVID.
Actor-turned-podcast host Russell Brand pummeled MSNBC, big pharma, and the military-industrial complex during his appearance on the latest episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
Brand tussled with fellow guest and liberal MSNBC analyst John Heilemann during a debate about media bias. Brand contended that all of the corporate cable news networks have an inherent bias because of pressure from their controllers. Heilemann claimed that Fox News was far worse in regards to disinformation than MSNBC – the network that signs his checks.
Brand declared, “But I have to say that it’s, it’s disingenuous to claim that the biases exhibited on Fox News are any different from the biases exhibited on MSNBC.”
“It’s difficult to suggest that’s because these corporations operate as anything other than mouthpieces for their affiliate owners in Blackrock and Vanguard,” Brand continued. “We’ve have to take responsibility for our own perspective.”
Brand said, “I’ve been on that MSNBC. Man, it was a propagandist nut-crackery over there.”
Brand spoke about previously appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show, “It was absurd the way they carried on.”
“No one could concentrate, they didn’t understand the basic tenets of journalism,” the comedian stated.
“No one was willing to stick up for genuine American heroes like Edward Snowden,” Brand proclaimed. “No one was willing to talk about Julian Assange and what he’s suffered – trying to bring real journalism to the American people.”
“I think to sit within the castle of MSNBC throwing rocks at Fox News is ludicrous. Make MSNBC better. Make MSNBC great again,” Brand said.
A perturbed Heilemann lashed out, “You don’t actually know anything about any of these organizations you’re talking about. You’ve been on MSNBC once – big f***ing deal! You don’t have a single actual fact.”
Heilemann challenged Brand to provide one example of an MSNBC correspondent or anchor saying something they knew was false on TV.
Brand gladly accepted the challenge.
“The ludicrous, outrageous criticisms of Joe Rogan around ivermectin,” Brand retorted. “Deliberately referring to this as a horse medicine when they know this an effective medicine.”
Brand raised another example, “What about Rachel Maddow turning up on the TV saying, ‘If you take this vaccine you’re not gonna get it.”
Heilemann simply dismissed Brand’s examples without explaining why.
The “Stay Free” podcast host then questioned the MSNBC analyst, “Do you think you can improve America by avowedly condemning Fox News without acknowledging that you’re participating in the same game?”
Brand called for systemic changes, and taking money out of politics.
“We need new political systems that genuinely represent ordinary Americans so that we can overcome cultural differences,” Brand told Bill Maher. “And bickering about which propagandist network is the worst is not going to save a single American life, not improve the life of a single American child, not going to improve America’s standing in the world, and the world needs a strong America. I’ll tell you that.”
Brand told Heilemann, “So you have an obligation, a duty, not to condemn these people.”
(WARNING: Explicit language)
Russell Brand Calls Out MSNBC's Hypocrisy on COVID
"Do you want an example? The ludicrous, outrageous criticisms of Joe Rogan around Ivermectin deliberately referring to it as a horse medicine when they know it's an effective medicine!"@rustyrockets@billmaher@joeroganpic.twitter.com/5J0e0hkpSh
Maher said the pandemic dissenters are “looking better these days.”
Brand delivered a comedic take on the origin of COVID-19. He suggested that COVID came from a Wuhan lab leak and not the wet market that was touted as the origin of the deadly outbreak.
Maher sarcastically joked, “How could it not be a possibility? It’s a lab in Wuhan where the virus started that studied the virus and was doing gain of function research on the virus. How could it not be?”
Heilemann blamed the politicization of the COVID-19 origin debate on former President Donald Trump.
“If you go back to that time, why do people seize on the notion that they’ll reject the lab-leak theory? Because like everything else in COVID, Donald Trump politicized it from day one,” Heilemann theorized.
Brand pushed back by saying, “It seems that it’s not solely the responsibility of Donald Trump that this issue has become politicized. When we take the issue of natural immunity, the efficacy of masks, it’s difficult not to posit that perhaps increasingly a centralized authority becomes subject to inquiry that it has never before faced because of the advancement of technology, because of our media ability to communicate, they are doubling down on authoritarianism.”
Bill Maher & Russell Brand on the Suppression of the COVID Lab Leak Theory
Brand also delivered a warning about big pharma and the military-industrial complex.
“If you have an economic system in which pharmaceutical companies benefit hugely from medical emergencies, where a military-industrial complex benefits from war, where energy companies benefit from energy crisis, you are going to get states of perpetual crisis where the interests of ordinary people, separate from the interests of the elite,” Brand asserted.
Russell Brand Calls Out MSNBC's Hypocrisy on COVID
"Do you want an example? The ludicrous, outrageous criticisms of Joe Rogan around Ivermectin deliberately referring to it as a horse medicine when they know it's an effective medicine!"@rustyrockets@billmaher@joeroganpic.twitter.com/5J0e0hkpSh
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.
The more money our government has pumped into cancer research, the more cancer has proliferated, culminating over the past year or so in an explosion of sudden cancers. We’ve spent $90 billion on cancer research just through the National Cancer Institute from 1971 until last decade. Yes, surgical techniques and early detection have gotten better in making certain cancers more survivable, but why have cancers exploded, and what about the progress and prudence of the standard oncological treatments? Are they really backed by data, science, and the good of the patient or by pharma greed and incentives created by government-funded monopolies, just as we saw with COVID?
This appears to be some of what is vexing the first lady of Florida in pursuit of her new approach to cancer funding, following her personal bout with breast cancer in 2021. “The Cancer Connect Collaborative will analyze and rethink the way Florida approaches cancer research, diagnosis, and treatments — through incentivizing proven and promising approaches to cancer care while reducing the role of bureaucratic red tape and special interests,” said Casey DeSantis during a public roundtable with Florida’s Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo and other local doctors. “This collaborative will chart a course of action that will lead the nation and ultimately save lives.”
Typically, federal and state politicians outbid each other in funneling money toward cancer research and treatment that just perpetuates the same failed status quo and likely empowers the same monopoly stifling innovative thinking and approaches. After all, who will oppose a proposal for more cancer research? But this $170 million initiative called the Cancer Connect Collaborative, a large sum of money for a state government, seeks to break down barriers to introducing new ideas.
It all begins with honesty. “We know a lot about cancer – what causes it, and in many cases, what preventative steps can minimize the risk of a diagnosis,” reads the one-page printout from the Collaborative. “It’s time to open the tap on cancer information, and the Collaborative will be tasked with identifying the ways to ensure this is done.”
The Florida first lady passionately asserted, “It’s not good enough any more to hear ‘we don’t know what causes cancer.’ We do know a lot of what causes cancer. And frankly, I would like that information laid out in a straightforward manner free from tainted influences. I’d rather not rely on content and random articles brought to you by special interests that may, unfortunately, be part of the problem.”
Many Americans have long surmised that Big Pharma has kept the “tap of information” on cancer closed to purposely perpetuate a model that maximizes revenue while achieving very uneven and questionable outcomes, often at the cost of the quality of life of the patient. It’s almost like the medical establishment is enjoying this too much. With cancers exploding across the country, we need state governments to start rethinking our approach to cancer and imposing more transparency and direction on the funding rather than a blank check. We must ask why cancers are exploding, what some of the potential causes are, and whether the current regimented way of treating it is really the best approach for humanity.
I’ve witnessed the difficulty and sorrow of many friends and family members going through various forms of cancer treatment in recent years. What is striking about this experience is that the oncologists almost appear to have a computer-based algorithm on how they treat patients. The cost-benefit analyses are already baked into predetermined formulas, and they don’t appear to update them with clear data and clinical outcomes or changing facts on the ground. They are obdurately conditioned to strict, robotic protocols.
What many of us have learned from COVID is that the government-pharma complex is willing to push dangerous and ineffective treatments on patients while actively stifling much safer and more promising alternatives. As such, does anyone really think there is no better approach to cancer than the current circulation of endless forms of chemo that are fueled by the data provided by the manufacturers themselves, not necessarily real-life outcomes? Remember the 95% efficacy of Pfizer’s shot? Do you really think that was the company’s first rodeo manipulating its trial data? At some point, outcomes need to matter.
To that end, DeSantis and Ladapo are promising to gather state data about the proliferation and treatment of cancer to make it “both timely available and easily accessible.” The key is to actually have trustworthy and timely data on the cancer rates and reoccurrence rates. Without that we cannot assess the efficacy of this pharma empire, which often accounts for the bulk of revenue for some companies and many medical specialties.
“Currently, there is about a two-year lag between the time the data is collected, submitted, and analyzed. We need real-time data to asses current trends … for example, why are so many types of cancer skewing younger and becoming more prevalent? Case in point [referring to her own experience]. Why are there increasing concerns recently from some physicians about higher rates of reoccurrence?” said Casey DeSantis.
Indeed, one of the lessons we should learn from the broken health care system in the wake of COVID is that you can’t properly treat something you fail to diagnose and asses in terms of its cause.
This was the problem from day one with COVID. At least 95% of doctors were flummoxed by COVID, but there were certain doctors, such as Drs. Brian Tyson and George Fareed in El Centro, California, who were clearly treating thousands of people in their urgent care with success. Why didn’t the medical establishment observe what they did and break the barriers for their successes to become a part of the standard of care elsewhere? We now know why this was the case with COVID, but who’s to say this isn’t happening to some degree with cancer treatment too?
Funding for cancer is always a double-edged sword. As we saw with COVID, the funding for treatment fueled terrible products and was used to actively ensure that no effective product would ever emerge or be promoted. Despite our medical system spending $600 billion a year on cancer treatment, double the per-person rate of the average of other wealthy countries, there is no evidence of meaningfully better outcomes, according to a recent study published in JAMA.
The fact that this cancer funding is being inaugurated under the watch of Dr. Ladapo, a man who recognizes the lessons of the COVID disaster, should give us more confidence that he will take the approach to cancer in a different direction, just as he stands alone on the COVID shots.
Ladapo, during his remarks, spoke about the need to “step out” of the typical threshold standards of the NIH for preliminary research needed to fund a clinical trial. As we’ve all witnessed, that standard is often used as a gatekeeper to keep out promising treatments while green-lighting problematic ones. Ladapo spoke of his own experience as a researcher in how he plans to use some of this funding to offer entrepreneur scientists who might not be connected wit the heavy-hitter pharma companies to prove the promise of their innovative research and ideas.
Also, in what sounded like a clear understanding of the lessons of COVID, Casey DeSantis called for the group to study all the “best practices” across the nation and state to see what works and why it’s not being done everywhere. “Why, if a physician has been utilizing a proven technique within their hospital system for years, and that successful procedure is not available to other patients across the state – if not, why not? What reasons or barriers to entry are prohibiting successful practices from being made available to Floridians? Is it bureaucracy? Is it the lack of a billing code that allows for reimbursement? …How does one treatment get the reimbursement green light, while others may not?”
Put another way, is the remdesivir vs. ivermectin dynamic also playing out in cancer research and protocols? Overall, DeSantis was motivated by her personal experience to ensure that others have clarity and the best options headed forward. “I have to admit this is not a subject that is very easy, as you can imagine, for me to talk about. But I’m of the mind [that] when much is given, much is expected. And if I have the opportunity … to put a lot of really smart people into a room to rethink the way we approach cancer care, I’m going to do it, even if I have to use the C-word now and again.”
The COVID-19 pandemic likely originated from a Chinese lab leak, the U.S. Department of Energy has reportedly concluded. According to a classified intelligence report recently supplied to the White House and key members of Congress, a leak from a Chinese laboratory is the likely origin of the COVID pandemic.
The Wall Street Journal reported, “The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory.”
The WSJ stated, “The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.”
The report – which is reportedly less than five pages – noted that the Department of Energy made the determination with “low confidence.” In 2021, the FBI reportedly concluded that COVID escaped to the public through a lab leak. The FBI made its judgment with “moderate confidence.” The U.S. agencies allegedly clarified that COVID-19 escaped from a lab, and was not part of a Chinese biological weapons program.
Meanwhile, four other U.S. government agencies suspect that the coronavirus pandemic was most likely the result of natural transmission. Two other agencies – including the CIA – have yet to establish where the deadly pandemic originated.
David Relman – a Stanford University microbiologist – told the WSJ, “Kudos to those who are willing to set aside their preconceptions and objectively re-examine what we know and don’t know about COVID origins. My plea is that we not accept an incomplete answer or give up because of political expediency.”
A spokesperson for the Energy Department spokesman did not confirm or deny the report, but said the agency “continues to support the thorough, careful, and objective work of our intelligence professionals in investigating the origins of COVID-19, as the President directed.”
The initial explanation for the COVID-19 pandemic was that the virus originated from a wet market in Wuhan, China. Many believe that the virus mutated and was able to jump from animals to humans. However, the animal source was never actually identified. Since the pandemic began, there have been many who suspect that COVID-19 may have possibly escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China – a Chinese laboratory that studies coronaviruses and has the highest biosafety risk level.
The WSJ highlighted, “Wuhan is home to an array of laboratories, many of which were built or expanded as a result of China’s traumatic experience with the initial severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, epidemic beginning in 2002. They include campuses of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, which produces vaccines.”
The lab leak theory has been dismissed by top health officials, major media outlets, and influential politicians. The idea that COVID came from a lab has been disregarded as a conspiracy theory. Some even claimed that just proposing the lab leak theory is racist.
In early 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci – the government’s top infectious diseases expert – along with other top health officials pushed messaging that a “laboratory-based scenario” is not plausible, and anyone suggesting otherwise is likely a conspiracy theorist.
If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what’s out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated … Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species.
In May 2021, Fauci admitted that he wasn’t “convinced” that COVID was caused by natural transmission.
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.”
A former case manager for a pediatric gender clinic in Missouri recently blew the whistle on the American medical system for “permanently harming” gender-questioning vulnerable children, the New York Post reported.
Jamie Reed, a 42-year-old woman from St. Louis who describes herself as a “queer woman” and “politically to the left of Bernie Sanders,” published an article in the Free Press on Thursday explaining why she walked away from her job at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.
Reed, who is married to a transgender man, stated that she “could no longer participate in what was happening” and claimed the medical professionals at the clinic were “permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.”
Reed noted that when she started her position, there were approximately 10 calls a month from gender-questioning children, and when she left, there were 50. According to Reed, 70% of new patients were female adolescents who sometimes arrived at the center in groups.
“This concerned me, but didn’t feel I was in the position to sound some kind of alarm back then,” Reed said. “There was a team of about eight of us, and only one other person brought up the kinds of questions I had. Anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe.”
Most girls arriving at the gender clinic had “many comorbidities,” including depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, or obesity.
“Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had,” Reed explained. “We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t).”
According to Reed, doctors at the St. Louis clinic believed that the children’s incorrect self-diagnoses resulted from social contagion. However, doctors rejected the idea that the children’s questioning of their gender identity might also be a manifestation of social contagion. Instead, they claimed it was “something innate.”
Adolescents who wished to medically transition commonly only needed to see a therapist once or twice, Reed explained. Therapists were even provided a template for writing a letter supporting the child’s transition.
Side effects from the gender transition medications are many, including sterility.
After years of working in patient intake, Reed concluded that “teenagers are simply not capable of fully grasping what it means to make the decision to become infertile while still a minor.”
“Being put on powerful doses of testosterone or estrogen—enough to try to trick your body into mimicking the opposite sex—-affects the rest of the body,” Reed wrote. “I doubt that any parent who’s ever consented to give their kid testosterone (a lifelong treatment) knows that they’re also possibly signing their kid up for blood pressure medication, cholesterol medication, and perhaps sleep apnea and diabetes.”
Reed said she recently brought her concerns to Missouri’s Republican attorney general.
“He is a Republican. I am a progressive. But the safety of children should not be a matter for our culture wars,” she stated.
Reed called for “a moratorium on the hormonal and surgical treatment of young people with gender dysphoria” because of the “secrecy and lack of rigorous standards.” She added that referring to transgender treatment as a “national experiment” is incorrect.
“Experiments are supposed to be carefully designed. Hypotheses are supposed to be tested ethically. The doctors I worked alongside at the Transgender Center said frequently about the treatment of our patients: ‘We are building the plane while we are flying it.’No one should be a passenger on that kind of aircraft,” Reed concluded.
A spokesperson for St. Louis Children’s Hospital told KMOV, “We are alarmed by the allegations reported in the article published by The Free Press describing practices and behaviors the author says she witnessed while employed at the university’s Transgender Center. We are taking this matter very seriously and have already begun the process of looking into the situation to ascertain the facts. As always, our highest priority is the health and well-being of our patients. We are committed to providing compassionate, family-centered care to all of our patients and we hold our medical practitioners to the highest professional and ethical standards.”
After being swarmed by health providers who enabled her to medically transition as a minor, Prisha Mosley now says she’s been abandoned by the medical community as she attempts to navigate a complicated and painful detransition.
“I was under the impression that my doctors, who were transitioning me, loved me. They said they didn’t want me to die, they were saving my life, they were worried about me, and they wanted me to be healthy and happy,” Prisha told me. “Clearly, they don’t love me. As soon as it’s not profitable, they don’t want to help.”
Prisha has a slew of medical complications dating back to the more than five years she spent on testosterone and a double mastectomy that a plastic surgeon performed shortly after she turned 18. Many of those complications surround her endocrine system, which encompasses the hormones that regulate nearly every process in the body, from metabolism to growth and development, emotions, mood, sexual function, and sleep.
“I was hoping that if I could get my endocrine system working, I could be on less psychiatric medicine because low testosterone and estrogen will cause depression and anxiety, both of which I’m medicated for and don’t really like being medicated for,” she said.
Prisha also hopes that with estrogen supplements, she’ll experience some muscle and fat redistribution. After years of testosterone broadened her neck and shoulders, she now carries more weight in her upper body, which causes her chronic pain. Her throat is sore, she can no longer sing or raise her voice, and she suffers hair loss, as well as hair growth on her body, which she has to treat with costly laser hair removal sessions.
Another side-effect Prisha is seeking medical attention for is severe sexual dysfunction, which is so bad, she says she can no longer use tampons.
“I used to be able to, and now I can’t,” she said. “And that sucks. There’s pain, there’s irregular periods, and atrophy.”
No Medical Professionals Will Help
Hormonal care to fix her endocrine system, she hopes, could help her become more feminine — and perhaps fertile again. But she said every primary care physician, endocrinologist, obstetrician, and gynecologist she’s approached on her insurance list has turned her away or said they can’t help.
“I could call and be rejected every single day,” according to Prisha.
Professional organizations that represent many of these providers claim to offer open, inclusive, supportive care for “transgender” and “gender diverse” individuals. That offering, it appears, doesn’t apply to individuals seeking to detransition.
Prisha isn’t the only detransitioner who feels abandoned by the medical institutions that pushed her into wrong-sex hormones and surgery. Over the past year, Independent Women’s Forum has documented multiple stories of detransitioners who also report being abandoned by medical and mental health professionals after deciding to detransition.
“I reached out to every physician, every therapist who is involved with this, and I haven’t really gotten any help at all,” said Chloe Cole, an 18-year-old who was fast-tracked down a medical transition as a child by a team of eager doctors. Left to navigate the detransition process on her own, Chloe stopped taking testosterone “cold turkey,” and is still struggling with urinary and other complications that doctors have yet to help fix.
Cat Cattinson, a woman who medically transitioned to a wrong-sex identity in her 20s before realizing it was a major mistake, said access to medical care from providers who are knowledgeable is one of the major barriers detransitioners face:
Because of the experimental nature of gender medicine, doctors know very little about the long-term effects of medical transition and even less about the health-care needs of those who detransition. Surgeries, obviously, are irreversible, but hormonal interventions can also have lasting effects requiring treatment to mitigate. Testosterone caused irreversible changes to my vocal cords, resulting in daily discomfort and pain, but most ENTs [ear, nose, and throat doctors] and other voice ‘professionals’ are not informed about how testosterone affects a female voice or how to help someone in my situation.
Prisha doesn’t know why she’s been turned away from so many doctors and medical providers — whether it’s about money, politics, or a lack of knowledge to help. If it’s the latter, one might ask why medical professionals are allowed to put individuals, including minors, on drugs and “treatments” that they’re unable to later undo or address, should that patient change his or her mind.
Whatever the reason, the inability to access medical attention is having a profound effect on Prisha, beyond her physical health.
Prisha’s Mental Health Struggles
Prisha, who attends school in Big Rapids, Michigan, has a long and complicated history with borderline personality disorder, anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses. Now 24, Prisha says she used transitioning as a cover for her deeper-rooted mental health issues.
Since detransitioning, Prisha’s been in dialectical behavior therapy to manage her borderline personality disorder — therapy she credits with saving her life.
“When I treated that, all of the symptoms started getting better,” she said. “Nothing that I did to transition treated those things that were causing me mental suffering.”
But now as a detransitioner, even her therapy treatment is in disarray. A few months back, Prisha lost her health insurance because she couldn’t afford it. Under her new insurance, instead of being charged $10 per therapy appointment, she is being charged $96, an increase she wasn’t aware of for five months. Prisha now owes nearly $3,000 to her therapist, a service she depends on.
Upon going public with her story, Prisha started a campaign to raise money for breast reconstructive surgery, something she wishes to pursue to resolve the “phantom breast syndrome” she often experiences, and to appear more feminine.
But because the surgery is not deemed “a medical necessity,” Prisha would have to pay for it fully out-of-pocket. She would also need at least two surgeries to stretch her skin and reconstruct her breasts, estimated at more than $11,000 each. During this process, Prisha says she was told she would risk losing her nipples, which her plastic surgeon removed and reattached in more masculine positions.
The dream of breast reconstructive surgery and the $4,000 she’s raised for it thus far were put on hold, as Prisha is left using every penny she has to pay for her therapy and basic health insurance coverage.
“I feel like it’s like a bottomless pit — the medical needs, and I need the therapy because I can barely do this,” she said. “And I’m absolutely not going to, once again, medicalize my body without taking care of my mind.”
Now in debt and being rejected by one doctor after another, Prisha is at a loss for what to do. In an act of desperation, she turned to Plume, a company that has raised millions of dollars to connect patients with physicians who can prescribe them “gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy” online, including a “one-time medical letter of support for surgery with a one week turnaround time” for a fee of $150. But this time, instead of affirming her identity as the opposite sex, Prisha sought the help of Plume to get blood tests and hormone treatments to affirm her true sex: a woman.
Screenshot of Plume website.
After paying $99 and scheduling an appointment with a provider, Prisha said she was “ghosted” 40 minutes before the appointment. Plume hasn’t responded to Prisha’s requests for an explanation or even a refund. She suspects the provider canceled last minute because Prisha disclosed that she was “detrans” in initial paperwork she completed just minutes before the canceled appointment. After she submitted her intake forms, “All contact dropped off,” Prisha said. She then took to YouTube to share her devastation.
“I don’t know what to do, I don’t know who to go to because no one will help,” Prisha said through tears. “I was really hoping that they would care about me and help me. I just want to feel better. I just want to be better. I don’t want my body to be like this anymore. I’m in pain. … I can’t take it anymore.”
Independent Women’s Forum reached out to Plume to ask whether the company offers its services to detransitioners. Plume did not respond to our request.
The situation led Prisha to consider self-medicating. But due to her family history with mental illness and addiction, she’s doing everything in her power to resist that path.
“I’m feeling pushed to go that route because no doctor will help me,” she said. “It is deeply triggering my [borderline personality disorder] abandonment and rejection issues. It’s really easy to slip into the mindset that everyone hates me, I’m a medical monster, I’m bad and evil, and I deserve this.”
“It’s just being abandoned,” Prisha added. “I feel abandoned.”
Kelsey Bolar is a contributor to The Federalist and a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Forum. She is also the Thursday editor of BRIGHT, a weekly newsletter for women, and the 2017 Tony Blankley Chair at The Steamboat Institute. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, daughter, and Australian Shepherd, Utah.
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.
Like Blaze News? Get the news that matters most delivered directly to your inbox. SIGN UP
Project Veritas released an undercover video purportedly involving Pfizer employee Jordon Trishton Walker – who claimed in the footage that the pharmaceutical company is exploring the possibility of mutating COVID through “directed evolution” to develop future mRNA vaccines.
According to a deleted LinkedIn profile, “Jordon Walker” allegedly started working for Pfizer in June 2021. The profile shows the individual as a “Director, Worldwide R&D Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning” at Pfizer in New York, New York. Before Pfizer, Walker was employed as a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group. In May 2020, Walker co-wrote a BCG article titled: “The Near-Term Outlook for COVID-19 Therapeutic Treatments.”
There is a “Jordon Walker” listed on the New York state physician listing website as well as a doctor acknowledged by U.S. News and World Report. Walker allegedly graduated from UT Southwestern Medical Center and Yale University.
Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe said his organization had “obtained internal Pfizer docs verifying Jordan Walker as Pfizer Director, Research & Development Strategic Operations.”
We’ve obtained internal Pfizer docs verifying Jordan Walker as Pfizer Director, Research & Development Strategic Operations
Graduated Yale 2013
Doctor Med at U of Texas Southwestern medical school.
According to Project Veritas, Jordon Trishton Walker revealed in great depth the possibility of Pfizer mutating the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is responsible for COVID-19, as a way to develop mRNA vaccines against future variants.
“One of the things we’re exploring is like, why don’t we just mutate it [COVID] ourselves so we could create – preemptively develop new vaccines, right? So, we have to do that,” Walker allegedly said on video. “If we’re gonna do that, though, there’s a risk of like, as you could imagine – no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating f***ing viruses.”
Walker made the undercover journalist “promise” not to tell anyone.
“The way it [the experiment] would work is that we put the virus in monkeys, and we successively cause them to keep infecting each other, and we collect … samples from them,” Walker reportedly said.
Walker dismissed the idea that the origin of the COVID-19 outbreak was from nature; instead he believed that the virus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Walker allegedly cautioned, “You have to be very controlled to make sure that this virus [COVID] that you mutate doesn’t create something that just goes everywhere. Which, I suspect, is the way that the virus started in Wuhan, to be honest. It makes no sense that this virus popped out of nowhere. It’s bulls**t.”
“From what I’ve heard is they [Pfizer scientists] are optimizing it [COVID mutation process], but they’re going slow because everyone is very cautious – obviously they don’t want to accelerate it too much,” he continued. “I think they are also just trying to do it as an exploratory thing because you obviously don’t want to advertise that you are figuring out future mutations.”
“Part of what they [Pfizer scientists] want to do is, to some extent, to try to figure out, you know, how there are all these new strains and variants that just pop up,” Walker allegedly said. “So, it’s like trying to catch them before they pop up and we can develop a vaccine prophylactically, like, for new variants. So, that’s why they like, do it controlled in a lab, where they say this is a new epitope, and so if it comes out later on in the public, we already have a vaccine working.”
Walker reportedly said that developing vaccines for future variants before they become pandemics would be a “cash cow” for Pfizer. He boasted, “COVID is going to be a cash cow for us for a while going forward.”
The undercover journalist points out that the purported experiments sound like gain-of-function experimentation. Walker is seen on video saying that the experiments are not really gain-of-function experiments, but rather “directed evolution.”
The Department of Health and Human Services defines directed evolution as: “The laboratory process by which biological entities with desired traits are created through iterative rounds of genetic diversification and library screening or selection.”
Walker also allegedly revealed that there is a “revolving door” of government officials who later become Pfizer employees.
“So, in the pharma industry, all the people who review our drugs – eventually most of them will come work for pharma companies,” Walker purportedly said. “And in the military, defense government officials eventually work for defense companies afterwards.”
Walker allegedly admitted that the revolving door is “good” for the pharmaceutical industry, but conceded that it is “bad for everybody else in America.”
When pressed as to why it was bad, Walker responded, “Because when the regulators reviewing our drugs know that once they stop regulating, they are going to work for the company, they are not going to be as hard towards the company that’s going to give them a job.”
TheBlaze asked for a comment from Pfizer and to verify Walker’s employment at the biotechnology company. At the time of publication, Pfizer had not responded to the request.
(CAUTION: Explicit language)
BREAKING: @Pfizer Exploring "Mutating" COVID-19 Virus For New Vaccines
"Don't tell anyone this…There is a risk…have to be very controlled to make sure this virus you mutate doesn't create something…the way that the virus started in Wuhan, to be honest."#DirectedEvolutionpic.twitter.com/xaRvlD5qTo
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) did not give proper oversight to EcoHealth Alliance even after it awarded the organization millions of dollars to study bat coronaviruses, a new 72-page report from the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General found.
More than a year and a half after the OIG announced an investigation into the NIH’s funding of the Wuhan lab suspected of playing a role in the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak, the inspector general officially announced that NIH and EcoHealth Alliance failed to comply with federal research and reporting standards. That included failing to adequately monitor what U.S. money was being used for and whether that research was safe and legal.
The report did not directly address whether EcoHealth Alliance engaged in illegal and dangerous gain-of-function research, as legislators and documents have alleged, but noted that NIH repeatedly neglected to refer questionable enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPPs) research to the Department of Health and Human Services.
After EcoHealth Alliance failed to submit a mandatory report on its research progress the fall before the global Covid-19 outbreak, the NIH did not mention the report’s tardiness until nearly two years later in July 2021. That was a direct violation of HHS requirements, which state the NIH must follow up with grant recipients “no later than 30 days after the established due date.”
“This oversight failure is particularly concerning because NIH had previously raised concerns with EcoHealth about the nature of the research being performed,” the inspector general’s report states.
For more than a decade, EcoHealth Alliance received taxpayer dollars to conduct dangerous high-level research on various pathogens including coronaviruses. EcoHealth Alliance often used part of its grant money, at least $1.1 million from October 2009 to May 2019, to employ the help of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
The NIH attempted in April of 2020 to cut off the money pipeline from EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) over fears that the lab “may have been involved with the release of the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19.” By July 2020, the NIH reinstated the grant it had previously severed under the condition that the EcoHealth Alliance ensured the WIV fixed its “facilities in China that posed serious biosafety concerns and, as a result, created health and welfare threats to the public in China and other countries.”
Because the WIV received American tax dollars as a sub-recipient for years, it was subject to certain reporting standards just like EcoHealth Alliance was. Yet, when the NIH requested an update about the WIV in November of 2021, EcoHealth Alliance said the WIV failed to turn over key documents.
“EcoHealth officials confirmed to us that WIV had not been responsive to its request to provide the scientific documentation and indicated it was unlikely to receive the requested information,” the inspector general stated in the report.
That observation confirms previous reporting, which suggested that EcoHealth Alliance stonewalled the release of lab records to the NIH after China barred investigators from inspecting WIV databases.
Mismanagement by the NIH also allowed EcoHealth to waste $89,171 of the $8 million U.S. taxpayer dollars granted to it from fiscal years 2014-2021 on “unallowable costs,” including salaries, bonuses, travel, tuition, benefits, and sub-awards to Chinese Communist Party-controlled entities such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who challenged the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ then-Director Anthony Fauci over the NIH’s funding of gain-of-function research, tweeted that the OIG’s report “confirms what we already knew.”
“NIH failed to conduct adequate oversight of EcoHealth Alliance’s grant awards. The continued funding of EcoHealth Alliance despite its repeated noncompliance with federal regulations and policies further demonstrates the need to reform oversight of risky research paid for by the American taxpayers,” Paul said.
The White Coat Waste Project, which first documented the connection between EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology and discovered that the NIH helped EcoHealth Alliance circumvent a federal ban on gain-of-function research, also said the report confirms that “EcoHealth Alliance shipped tax dollars to Wuhan for dangerous animal experiments that probably caused the pandemic, violated federal laws and policies and wasted tax dollars.”
“Yet, the Wuhan lab remains eligible for even more taxpayer money for animal tests and just since the pandemic began, EcoHealth has raked in at least $46 million in new federal funds from the DOD, USAID, NIH, and NSF,” Justin Goodman, the senior vice president of advocacy and public policy at White Coat Waste, said in a statement.
Despite its history of noncompliance, EcoHealth Alliance secured another $653,392 in October of 2022 to sustain more bat-based coronavirus research, but that’s just the first installment. The five-year plan involves giving EcoHealth $3.3 million by 2027.
Goodman said Congress should “defund these rogue organizations once and for all” because, “Taxpayers should not be forced to bankroll reckless white coats who waste money, break the law and place public health in peril.”
Rep. Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania and Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, both Republicans, joined together on Thursday to do just that with the reintroduction of a bill dubbed the Defund EcoHealth Alliance Act.
If passed, the legislation would not only bar American taxpayer dollars from going to EcoHealth, but it would require the U.S. Government Accountability Office to conduct a report on how much money given to EcoHealth ended up in the hands of communist China-controlled entities in the last 10 years.
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.
Like Blaze News? Get the news that matters most delivered directly to your inbox. SIGN UP
Dr. Jordan Peterson announced in May 2021 that he would be getting the COVID-19 vaccine, citing insufficient antibody levels. The esteemed psychologist indicated Thursday he had been fooled and has since made clear that, notwithstanding demands by both the Biden administration and Canada’s Trudeau government, he will not be fooled again.
Peterson was met with significant backlash in 2021, after he tweeted, “Off to be vaccinated today. Despite having Covid last May, my antibody levels appeared insufficient to prevent re-infection. Hope Ontario opens up soon.”
Off to be vaccinated today. Despite having Covid last May, my antibody levels appeared insufficient to prevent re-infection. Hope Ontario opens up soon.
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) May 13, 2021
Despite having had contracted COVID-19 in 2020, the psychologist’s immune system had likely been dealt a blow by his recent recovery from a severe case of pneumonia and the “incredibly grueling” drug detox treatment for benzodiazepine reliance he received abroad.
Indy100 noted at the time of this admission that some of his fans and followers online expressed concern over his decision to get the COVID-19 vaccine and potential long-term health risks.
Peterson suggested Thursday that he “got vaccinated because I naively believed the woke force-mongers would leave me the hell alone thereafter. Fool me once….”
The psychologist was responding to a tweet from Israeli artificial intelligence researcher Eli David that said, “I got Covid shots in 2021, because I believed the claimed clinical trial results, and trusted the FDA. But looking at mountains of evidence since, I no longer think I made the right decision. These shots are much more dangerous and much less effective than claimed.”
I got vaccinated because I naively believed the woke force-mongers would leave me the hell alone thereafter. Fool me once…. https://t.co/whVCF3hR6m
Peterson told BlazeTV host Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” in November 2021: “I got vaccinated. And people took me to task for that. And I thought, ‘All right, I’ll get the damn vaccine.’ Here’s the deal, guys: I’ll get the vaccine, you f***ing leave me alone!” He underscored that the vaccine didn’t work to that end. The Trudeau government still required that he be tested for COVID-19 when exercising his mobility rights to leave and return to his home nation.
In a tweet Saturday — responding to a notice from Canadian state media that the country’s chief public health officer Theresa Tam was once again pushing booster shots — Peterson wrote, “How about ‘over my dead body.'” Tam and the Trudeau government have been pushing the bivalent booster shot on Canadians, many of whom have yet to get it since it was made available last fall.
Tam said Friday, “It’s still too early to stop taking the personal protective measures that have helped us weather the COVID storm.”
The Biden administration is similarly pushing boosters on the general public.
The Associated Press reported that the Food and Drug Administration has recently proposed rolling out COVID-19 boosters once a year, every year, for adults and children. While 80% of Americans have received at least one dose, only 16% cared to get the latest boosters.
Allysia Finley, writing in the Wall Street Journal, noted over the weekend that “the public-health establishment’s praise for the bivalent shots shouldn’t come as a surprise. Federal agencies took the unprecedented step of ordering vaccine makers to produce them and recommending them without data supporting their safety or efficacy.”
Finley appeared to justify the increasing reluctance of people like Peterson, stating, “Three scientific problems have arisen. First, the virus is evolving much faster than the vaccines can be updated. Second, vaccines have hard-wired our immune systems to respond to the original Wuhan strain, so we churn out fewer antibodies that neutralize variants targeted by updated vaccines.”
“Third, antibodies rapidly wane after a few months,” she added.
Peterson’s late rejection of the booster regime comes after he admitted on Dec. 19, “It’s worse than I thought. I trusted the vaccine process more than I should have. I thought the lockdowns and masks were a terrible idea but I still thought we could rely on public health and science.”
Notwithstanding this trust, now evidently depleted, Peterson had expressed skepticism in 2021, stating that “Covid is not going away. it will mutate, indefinitely, sped along in some senses by the vaccines themselves. And when is it a sufficiently ‘new variant’ to panic? How about when pharmaceutical company shares drop?”
I'm in Nashville. No masks. No mandates. Freedom. Music. Joy. Covid is not going away. it will mutate, indefinitely, sped along in some senses by the vaccines themselves. And when is it a sufficiently "new variant" to panic? How about when pharmaceutical company shares drop? https://t.co/i5WfrxmGRB
The Daily Mail reported that Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla personally earned $50 million in compensation across 2021 and 2022 and that Pfizer’s has revenue tripled to over $100 billion since the start of the pandemic. Newsweek indicated that Moderna earned $12.2 billion in profit in 2021, mostly from its vaccine production. The company had not been able to turn a profit before 2021. According to the company’s earnings report released in February 2022, its “total revenue was $18.5 billion for the full year 2021, compared to $803 million in 2020.” As for Johnson & Johnson: U.S. News reported that sinking COVID-19 vaccine sales have recently hurt its revenue.
“During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill, and careful judgment required of him, that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.” ~Nuremberg Code #10
We’ve reached a critical mass of data points and safety signals on the COVID shots from a full two years of it circulating in 5.5 billion people. One must be worse than a conspiracy theorist to ignore them. One now has to be a “coincidence theorist” to chalk up this degree of human suffering that is in immediate need of redress to mere coincidence.
It’s time for Republicans in state legislatures and on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to pay attention to the daily barrage of shocking data points and safety signals. Here is just a sampling of 12 points from the past few weeks, out of many more. Each one alone should have been enough to suspend the shots, terminate the technology in the pipeline, and investigate the actors behind it. Time is of the essence:
1) 17% of children experienced some cardiac symptom after the Pfizer shot: Just how large is the universe of those roped into some risk of cardiac damage? A new peer-reviewed study from Taiwan published in the European Journal of Pediatrics found that 17% of high school children, mainly boys, experienced at least heart palpitations or chest pain from the second dose of Pfizer. These numbers work perfectly with many other surveys showing a significant number of people experiencing arrythmias, tightness in the chest, or shortness of breath. They are also particularly concerning given that a Swiss study and a Thai study showed the proportion of people afflicted with subclinical myocarditis (a ticking time bomb) was much larger than those diagnosed with myocarditis.
2) 20% spike in excess deaths in England and Wales:According to the latest figures from the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics, deaths for the final two weeks of 2022 in England and Wales were 20% above the five-year average. That is greater than the pandemic itself. It makes no sense why there would be more deaths, long after the vaccines supposedly quelled COVID, than in 2020 and early 2021, at the peak of the pandemic. The U.K. Timesreports that “50,000 more people died last year than normal.” That is the equivalent of 250,000 excess deaths in the U.S. This cannot be COVID; it must be something else. (The data for those weeks: Data from week ending Dec 23, 2022; data from week ending Dec 30, 2022).
3) 0 of 1,1779 COVID hospitalizations in New South Wales were unvaccinated:According to NSW Health, which breaks down COVID hospitalizations and deaths by cohorts of various levels of vaccination, for the two weeks ending Dec. 31, 2022, not a single COVID hospitalization (or ICU admission) was among the fully unvaccinated.
The overwhelming majority were among the boosted. Although 84% of people in Australia have gotten at least one dose of the shot, it’s not 100%, so there is clearly a degree of negative efficacy, which is in itself a safety signal. And although 6% of the deaths were among the unvaccinated (still below their share of the population), it is suspicious how they all seemed to die at home, which makes you wonder if they are placing some of the “unknown” category into the unvaxxed pile by automatically assuming they didn’t get the shots. Dr. Syed has presented evidence in the past that makes it likely NSW Health has been doing that all along.
4) FDA admits massive elevated risk for heart attacks, blood clots, and pulmonary emboli: FDA researchers published the results of a massive observational study of 30.7 million Medicare patients in 2021 and found that people who took the shot found that the shots increase risk of pulmonary embolism by 54%, acute myocardial infarction by 42%, blood clotting by 91%, and platelet disorder by 44%. The claim this is only an early warning signal and downplay the results, but they harmonize with many other surveys, studies, reporting, and an understanding of the shot’s mechanism of action.
5) COVID vax was associated with 22%-74% greater all-cause mortality vs. being unvaccinated in U.K.: Prior to May 2022, the U.K. Health Security Agency published COVID case and death rates, age-stratified, by vaccination status. They terminated these weekly reports after we began using them against the system. El Gato Malo revisited the numbers and calculated somewhere between a 22% and 74% elevated risk of all-cause mortality associated with the vaccinated from September 2021 through April 2022.
As you can see, this portends either negative efficacy or risk outweighing reward even for seniors over 80 who are constantly bombarded with endless boosters. This should not come as a surprise given that Pfizer’s own all-cause mortality analysis in its six-month follow-up of its trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed 21 deaths in the trial group and 17 in the placebo group. The company failed to follow through the rest of 2021 and 2022, but it’s reasonable to presume based on what we know now that the negative efficacy became worse with other variants. It’s also likely that the long-term injuries of the vaccine, which were never followed because of the unblinding of trial participants, came home to roost increasingly over time.
6) New bivalent booster even worse: Remember the boosters that were approved with nothing but antibody tests and 8 blind mice? Well, now there are results of clinical trials for the bivalent booster approved last September, and members of the FDA advisory committee are expressing anger at not seeing this data. It turns out that 1.9% of the study participants who received the original booster became infected, while 3.2% of those with the new bivalent shot got COVID. This in itself demonstrates that not only does the detection of more antibodies not necessarily mean better clinical outcomes, but more antibodies of the wrong type can facilitate infection.
7) Two studies show mRNA shots create wrong antibody class: In yet another possible indication that the shots actually make you more vulnerable to coronavirus, a second study has been published showing the shots create a class switch from IgG1-3 neutralizing antibodies to IgG4 “tolerating” antibodies, which can make someone keep getting the virus and not fight it off. Last month, German researchers, in a groundbreaking study published in Science Immunology, found that some people reinfected with the virus after having had boosters had over 40% of their antibodies composed of IgG4. Now a second peer-reviewed German paper, this time published in Frontiers in Immunology, found this phenomenon even after the original two doses. The shocking thing is that a Pfizer scientist served as the study’s editor and one of Fauci’s staffers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases served as a peer reviewer
8) New bivalent shot caused reactions in large minority of children: Not only do the boosters not work, but according to the CDC’s own V-SAFE adverse reporting app, 49% of the 5- to 11-year-old children who took the bivalent booster shot experienced systemic reactions. These symptoms include fatigue, chills, nausea, abdominal pain, vomiting, joint pain, and diarrhea. In 22% of the children, they could not go to school or perform their daily functions after getting the shot. In other words, these children experienced upfront the upper bounds of what the virus would have done to them. And keep in mind that V-SAFE did not monitor lurking serious long-term side effects – all for a shot that doesn’t work.
9) 51% of Democrats believe vaccines behind sudden deaths: Whether the government and media are willing to acknowledge the extent of injuries, the dam is clearly breaking with the general public. Numerous surveys have been showing for months that most people know friends or family killed by the shots. But earlier this month, Rasmussen published a survey broken down by party affiliation. It found that 51% of Democrats nationally believe it is likely the vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths, and 33% believe someone they know personally died from the shot. That is more than the 26% of Republicans and Independents who said the same thing. The reason this is significant is because more Democrats than Republicans received the shot, so these results likely reflect reality.
Furthermore, 31% of Democrats attest to experiencing side effects, and 6% believe they experienced major side effects. This tracks closely with the 7.7% according to the CDC’s V-SAFE who had to seek medical attention (and 33% experienced at least minor side effects). And this is among Democrats who are naturally inclined to defend the shots, which means this is not some right-wing conspiracy but a reflection of widespread reality.
10) VAERS analysis shows 500 injuries with greater safety signals than myocarditis: By now, anyone not under a rock knows that the vaccines could cause myocarditis. But according to a FOIA document obtained by the Epoch Times, in turns out that the CDC conducted its own analysis of VAERS from December 2020 through July 2022 and found that there were over 500 categories of injuries with louder safety signals than even myocarditis. Specifically, as Hebrew University Professor Josh Guetzkow explains, there are 503 AEs with proportional reporting ratios larger than myocarditis and 552 with PRRs larger than pericarditis. Overall, in just a year and a half of Moderna’s and Pfizer’s COVID jabs, the safety signals were 5.5 times larger than all serious reports for vaccines given to adults in the US since 2009.
11) The CDC anticipated over 1,000 VAERS reports per day: The agency didn’t make a mistake. Bureaucrats knew from August 2020 that they expected major problems with the vaccine. Prof. Guetzkow, the prolific FOIA sleuth, posted details of documents showing that the CDC contracted with General Dynamics in August 2020 to run the VAERS database. The $9.45 million contract stated that officials expected 1,000 adverse event reports a day, with 40% of them being serious. Again in March 2021, they amended the contract to expand the capacity by another 25,000 a day and to clear a backlog of 115,000 reports just for the first ten or so weeks of the vaccination drive.
12) Disability numbers skyrocket in U.S. and U.K. coinciding perfectly with vaccine take-up: The U.K.’s Institute for Fiscal Studies published a report last month showing that the number of people on disability claims doubled in the U.K. from the summer of 2021 to July 2022.
While this alone doesn’t prove causation, in conjunction with the millions of reported debilitating injuries, the timing of this rise makes the shots the number-one suspect relative to any other possible factor. It is possible that lockdowns are a part of the problem, because the disabilities were heavily weighted toward mental health problems among younger people. However, the doubling of claims across all age groups, with physical ailments being the key cause among the middle-aged, makes it hard to pin this trend exclusively on lockdowns. They also note that this trend of doubling of disability payments “is consistent with the rise being driven by a general worsening of health across the population,” which in itself coincides perfectly with the “significant rise in the number of (non-COVID) working-age deaths from late 2021 through 2022, compared to pre-pandemic years.”
It should be noted that a similar trend is evident in the United States. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, those in the labor force identifying as having a disability skyrocketed by more than 30% right after the vaccines were introduced to the public. This is unprecedented and did not begin in 2020 with COVID and the lockdowns.
The goal of the CDC and FDA at this point is to create a limited hangout in which they let the pressure mounting against the shots out of the balloon and channel it into a limited concession. For example, the CDC conceded some sort of safety signal for myocarditis, then briefly conceded a safety signal for strokes in seniors on the Friday afternoon headed into the MLK holiday weekend before concluding in a comprehensive study that took all of a few hours that it’s really not a problem.
In reality, there are over 14,000 categories of injuries reported to VAERS affecting every organ system and every inch of the body. If you just take the 1,400+ SERIOUS adverse events noted by Pfizer in its confidential document just 90 days into the vaccination campaign, it would take 10 minutes (reading at the rapid rate of 200 words per minute) to disclose them in a TV commercial. Yet Pfizer is exempt from such disclosures.
Consider the fact that in 1999, Dr. Fauci explained to Congress that you can have a vaccine that is totally fine at first, but then as late as 12 years later, “all hell breaks loose.”
The year is 1999. A virus (HIV) is killing people. Anthony Fauci warns:
"If you give people a vaccine & a year goes by…everybody's fine. Then you give it to thousands of people, & 12 yrs later all Hell Breaks Loose. Then what have you done?"
It doesn’t require a degree in rocket science to realize our country is polarized. Not just politically speaking, but socially, emotionally, religiously, spiritually, and in every way possible.
So much so, that many of us have lost our perspectives along the way. This is indeed an inflection point, because due to our much-splintered societal focus- everything we thought we knew has changed.
In recognition concerning events of late, I’m reminded of these words adapted from 15th century writer John Heywood: “you can’t see the forest for the trees.” Simply put, you can’t see the problem- because you’re concentrating too hard on it.
Sometimes the answer isn’t what you want to believe. Considering the recent Damar Hamlin incident in which the 24-year-old Buffalo Bills’ safety suffered a cardiac arrest on the field as they began their skirmish- it provides the perfect preface.
By all accounts, Hamlin’s condition prior to the game was sound with no health challenges or issues. In high school, Hamlin led his team to a 15-1 record. According to npr.org, he also helped his school garner a ”WPIAL Class AAAA championship and PIAA state title during his final year in high school. In his career thus far with the Bills, he has played in all 15 games so far, tallying 91 tackles (tied for second-most on the Bills), six tackles for loss, two pass breakups and 1.5 sacks this season.”
So why isn’t this the question: “Why would a perfectly healthy football star suddenly have a massive heart attack?”
Before you go into the sports media-buzz rhetoric about the violence of the game being a factor or an accessory culprit, think about these examples:
In August of 2022, a 20-year-old Canadian hockey player died after collapsing during a tournament. According to an article on people.com, Eli Palfreyman, the captain of the Ayr Centennials collapsed in the locker room during a pre-season game. Chest compressions were administered by his trainer but were unsuccessful. He died shortly after being taken to the hospital. The article continued: “Per Shantz, his father told the athletes, “The happiest day in Eli’s life was when he was named captain, and he said you cannot take a shift off the rest of the year because Eli’s spirit will be pushing you to do your best every shift, and I want to see it.”
Shantz added of the emotional meeting, “Then the mother spoke and, you know, the tears were just flowing everywhere when a grieving mother speaks about her son. And instead of going inward, she just talked about us and everything that we did. She was there, she saw it and she just praised us. She said, ‘I know how hard you worked to save Eli.’”
Despite the understandable shock, sadness and disbelief, the question still isn’t being taken under consideration, so I ask again, “how could he possibly be dead at 20?”
Next up is the rising MMA star Victoria Lee.
At only 5 ft 5, and 115 lbs., Victoria Sun-hei Lee was nicknamed, “The Prodigy.” The ONE Championship star was the third in her family to compete, following older sibling’s fighters Angela and Christian Lee. After only her third year in MMA, her short-but-amazing career spawned 3 fights, culminating in 3 wins and zero losses. She had recently paused her meteoric rise to focus on graduating, having not quite finished high school.
Getting her start at age 11, her future looked bright, promising and historic. Fellow Hawaiian UFC fighter Dan Ige was disappointed by the reaction of some concerning the 18-year-old’s sudden death, when he spoke in the MMA Junkie section at CNN.com:
“Was it the vaccine? Was it mental health? Was it this? Was it that? Like, give them freaking respect, because that’s their tragedy, that’s their loss. … Give them some respect.” Pleaded Ige. “An 18-year-old girl passes, and they’re going to mourn that for the rest of their lives. We’re going to wake up Monday and f*cking read the newspaper, ‘What’s next?’ They have to mourn that. It’s an absolute tragedy. They were definitely weighing on my heart, and the only thing you can do is pray for them, because she’s gone, and there’s no bringing her back.”
Tragically, the only answers that we received concerning the mysterious death of one so young is, “no cause of death is shared.” While the tragedies these families suffer is no doubt unimaginable, we find ourselves with more questions than answers. And despite not knowing the causes of death, many are quick to dismiss the vaccine.
Question Everything!
According to the VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) it was revealed that there was more than 5,000 deaths and adverse reactions from the experimental vaccines. Although this article records several untimely deaths of youth in the prime of their lives, we are discovering more tragic fatal cardiac episodes striking our young people almost daily.
For many, we chose to dismiss the governmental push to take an unapproved, unproven, untested chemical and inject it into our bodies. For others, they chose to ignore the science and follow the rhetoric, despite the limited testing and lack of results (positive or negative) thus far. As it stands by example, vaccine deaths occur even more in those vaccinated than in those that are not. For instance, vaccination matters, even as it comes to light that more people who were vaccinated against COVID-19 died in August than those who weren’t vaccinated, according to an analysis by Cynthia Cox, vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF).
Cox undertook the analysis for The Health 202, which is published by The Washington Post. Kff.org reads: “The share of COVID-19 deaths among those who are vaccinated has risen. In fall 2021, about 3 in 10 adults dying of COVID-19 were vaccinated or boosted. But by January 2022, as we showed in an analysis posted on the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, about 4 in 10 deaths were vaccinated or boosted. By April 2022, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data show that about 6 in 10 adults dying of COVID-19 were vaccinated or boosted, and that’s remained true through at least August 2022 (the most recent month of data).”
To date, millions have taken the vaccines, as well as the boosters. Some out of fear; others out of caution, no doubt impatient concerning what the virus could do. Based on the real science, based on what we’ve learned since then, many are now realizing they should have waited longer.
Like Blaze News? Get the news that matters most delivered directly to your inbox. SIGN UP
A Las Vegas family is mourning the loss of a teenager who died “suddenly and unexpectedly” after suffering from cardiac arrest. Jordan Brister, 17, was at school on Jan. 3 when he experienced sudden cardiac arrest. He was found inside one of the school’s bathrooms after gym class, his family told KSNV-TV. School officials provided lifesaving support, and Brister was transported to a nearby hospital. But he died on Sunday, five days after his medical emergency.
“The Brister family has suffered a tremendous loss, a loss none of them were prepared for,” the GoFundMe explains. “Jordan Tyler Brister suddenly and unexpectedly suffered cardiac arrest while at school with no explanation as to why.”
Brister’s mother, Savanna, said in a statement that her son planned to join the military.
Jordan was a selfless, respectful, Southern gentleman who was kind to everyone. He was witty and charming. He wanted to join the military to become a para rescue jumper to save others. In the end, he saved others through donation of organs, so his dream was somewhat fulfilled. He was a wise, older brother who cared deeply for his brother and sister. Jordan was truly everything you could ask for and more. He had a heart of gold.
The Clark County Coroner’s Office is investigating Brister’s death. An official cause of death has not yet been announced.
High school student found unresponsive remembered with honor walk at Las Vegas hospital www.youtube.com
Brister’s sudden medical emergency happened just two days before another Las Vegas teenager, 16-year-old Ashari Hughes, suddenly died after she suffered a “medical emergency” while playing a game of flag football.
The corner said Hughes “died from anomalous origin of the right coronary artery from left coronary sinus of valsalva,” KVVU-TV reported. The death was reportedly declared “natural.”
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Nearly three years after bureaucrats shuttered businesses, forced people to stay home, and threatened fines for those who didn’t comply, all in the name of preventing the spread of a respiratory virus, the Covid regime is quietly reviving the “forever pandemic.”
Ahead of the midterms, the Biden administration, Democrats, and corporate media championed the end of years of pandemic panic.
“The pandemic is over,” President Joe Biden declared during a “60 Minutes” interview in September.
The Covid regime’s grip on the country may have loosened during the heat of the 2022 election cycle, which gave Americans the false hope that everything was finally returning to normal. Shortly after the election, however, when Democrats realized the Republican Party isn’t as big of a threat as expected, fearmongering about a “surge” in the nearly three-year-old pandemic thanks to a new variant resumed.
“Should Everyone Be Masking Again?” one Atlantic writer inquired in December. His article is littered with comments from “experts” who eagerly and unanimously answered “yes.”
“You really should mask up again, says infectious disease expert: The tripledemic is hitting ‘too fast and too furious,’” one CNBC headline blared a few days before Christmas.
“The ‘Tripledemic’ Holiday: How to Fly More Safely (Hint: Wear a Mask),” The New York Times wrote.
When corporate media mouthpieces aren’t virtue signaling about staying home on New Year’s Eve, alleging that emergency rooms are “packed and doctors are rationing care,” they are offering favorable coverage of communist China’s forced lockdowns and wondering aloud why certain counties aren’t heeding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations to mask communities with “high” levels of virus transmission.
Despite the legitimate scrutiny the CDC has received for its bureaucratic malfeasance, its Director Rochelle Walensky all but confirmed the agency’s commitment to reintroducing protocols that, according to the science, don’t stop infection from spreading.
“We wanted you to put your masks away, not to throw your masks out,” Walensky said in an interview with NPR in early December.
Public schools all around the nation, similarly, are backsliding. Evidence indicates that forced masking takes a toll on children’s ability to learn and speak. That hasn’t stopped some of the largest school districts in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Boston from reintroducing forced masking for the beginning of the spring semester.
“We don’t think that learning will stop or that students will be inherently prohibited from learning,” Philadelphia School District Superintendent Tony Watlington Sr. told NBC.
Some cities such as Oakland have decided to reinstate mask mandates for government buildings. Others are contemplating a return to masks at the behest of so-called “infectious disease experts.”
Bureaucrats justify these useless and harmful mandates under the claim that the rise of RSV, the flu, and Covid cases could, combined, overwhelm local hospitals. Sound familiar? That’s the same excuse bureaucrats used to extend “two weeks to flatten the curve” to keep the U.S. locked down for most of 2020.
Mask mandates aren’t the only indicator that the Covid regime is trying to claw its way back into the driver’s seat. Biden, who smeared former President Donald Trump as xenophobic for introducing a similar policy in 2020, quietly enacted testing restrictions on travelers from Covid-plagued China last week.
Furthermore, Anthony Fauci, the now-retired former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who was mostly absent from TV screens for months leading up to the midterms, was back on corporate media shows shortly after Election Day telling Americans what to do with their lives.
Republicans have threatened to hold Fauci and other “forever pandemic” spokesmen accountable for the havoc they wreaked on the economy and Americans’ health and education. But while the GOP, which only holds a razor-thin majority in the House, is distracted by infighting, the Covid regime is emboldened to further encroach on Americans’ lives once more.
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.
Tolerance is a good thing in most aspects of life. But when it comes to the immune system, artificially juicing up the body to create antibodies with long-term tolerance to a pathogen is a recipe for disaster. Amid thousands of papers on COVID and the vaccines, a new German paper published in Science Immunology should be the headline story this week. Although the subject matter is very dense, the implication of it is that the Pfizer shots (and possibly other mRNA spike protein shots) caused the immune system to misfire, thereby creating an endless feedback loop of viral immune escape, perpetuating the pandemic in the macro, and creating immune suppression for the individuals who received them.
The vexing question of 2022 is why the virus is even still with us to this day. Why is it that so many countries in the Pacific Rim that did so well in 2020 and 2021 now have a bigger problem in 2022 with less virulent strains of COVID? Why does it appear the pandemic will never end and so many people continue to get the virus multiple times? None of this is normal.
Wherever you turn, the most vaccinated countries are not only experiencing rampant side effects from the shots, but worse outcomes from COVID itself following their endless booster campaigns.
During the last six months, 98% of all reported covid deaths have occurred in nations where more than 1 vaccine dose has been administered per person.
Portugal is the most vaccinated nation in all of Europe (95% vax'd, 70% boosted) and yet just as many people are dying now as in 2021 and significantly more people than in 2020 (when no one was vax'd and no one had immunity and covid was more virulent).
But even more telling than an epidemiological comparison of one nation to another is a comparison of outcomes within nations themselves between pre- and post-vaccination/booster campaign. Prior to the mass vaccination, two parts of the world largely escaped excess deaths from the virus: continental Africa and the Pacific Rim nations. Yet whereas Africa flatlined in terms of COVID deaths throughout 2021-2022, countries like Japan only experienced meaningful numbers of deaths after the mass vaccination program.
Here is a chart of the daily COVID deaths per million in Japan, a country that is super vaccinated (and mask-obsessed).
Notice how Japan is experiencing progressively worse death curves, which only began after everyone (particularly seniors) was boosted, even though Omicron is less pathogenic than the earlier strains. Japan is also the current world leader in cases per million.
Australia is a similar story:
Now contrast these two countries to Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa.
One could assert that there are some unknown factors as to why Africans appear not to die from COVID, compared to the high death rates in North America, South America, and Europe. However, the Pacific Rim countries like Japan and Australia seemed to enjoy almost as low a death rate prior to the booster campaign. After that point, Nigeria (and the rest of Africa) seemed to flatline and be done with the virus, as we would typically expect by now, while the other countries incurred skyrocketing cases and a relatively massive spike in deaths. Obviously, Nigeria’s vaccination rate is much lower than these other countries, but its booster rate is almost nonexistent.
Even within Europe, Scandinavian countries like Norway largely escaped a massive death curve during the first two years of the pandemic. That all changed in 2022. Norway now has the highest COVID death rate per million in the world.
Adding these three Omicron waves together, we see that Norway is beginning to rival the U.S. in terms of death curves. However, America is a much unhealthier country, and America experienced the death curves with the more pathogenic Wuhan and Delta strains.
If you track the number of boosters given per 100 people in some of the aforementioned countries, you will see that the current death curves track almost perfectly in a positive correlation.
Indeed, Chile now has the most deaths per capita in South America, even though the country already suffered a substantial number of deaths and should be done with the pandemic. Nigeria and the rest of Africa indeed are done with the pandemic, and the U.S., which has an average booster rate, is somewhere in the middle in terms of current COVID rates.
So, this is about a lot more than “oh, the vaccines don’t stop transmission.” They appear to proliferate it and also to worsen clinical outcomes. But why?
A group of German researchers tested for which specific antibody levels spike at what time. Specifically, they tested the Pfizer shot against the AstraZeneca shot and discovered something very concerning. Increasingly over time, and particularly with three doses of Pfizer, the immune response switched from the more neutralizing IgG1 and IgG3 antibodies to the non-neutralizing “tolerating” IgG4 antibodies:
High levels of neutralizing SARS-CoV-2-antibodies are an important component of vaccine-induced immunity. Shortly after the initial two mRNA vaccine doses, the IgG response mainly consists of the pro-inflammatory subclasses IgG1 and IgG3. Here, we report that several months after the second vaccination, SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies were increasingly composed of non-inflammatory IgG4, which were further boosted by a third mRNA vaccination and/or SARS-CoV-2 variant breakthrough infections. IgG4 antibodies among all spike-specific IgG antibodies rose on average from 0.04% shortly after the second vaccination to 19.27% late after the third vaccination. This induction of IgG4 antibodies was not observed after homologous or heterologous SARS-CoV-2 vaccination with adenoviral vectors [emphasis added].
Why is this so important?
Importantly, this class switch was associated with a reduced capacity of the spike-specific antibodies to mediate antibody-dependent cellular phagocytosis and complement deposition. Since Fc-mediated effector functions are critical for antiviral immunity, these findings may have consequences for the choice and timing of vaccination regimens using mRNA vaccines, including future booster immunizations against SARS-CoV-2 [emphasis added].
So not only do these shots fail to produce the first line of defense antibodies known as IgA in the mucosal, something we knew from day one, but even the blood-based antibodies are increasingly the wrong type. This problem seems to get worse over time and with more doses of the shot, which correlates perfectly with numerous studies showing negative efficacy increasing over time, with more doses, and how the vaccinated take longer to clear the virus.
This topic is both very dense and fascinating. You can find clear explanations of this study about IgG4 antibodies in layman’s terms here, here, and here. But the important outcome for us from a policy standpoint is understanding the deadly subterfuge that has been foisted upon 5.5 billion people of the world and how it will be used with many more novel vaccines coming down the pipeline. The medical establishment successfully convinced the world that a vaccine is nothing more than simply stimulating an antibody response and is something that can be done within days of discovering a virus. This is why they now seek to get vaccines approved not based on accurate clinical trials and clinical outcomes but on “immunobridging” – the measuring of antibody levels. Indeed, this is how they got the bivalent booster shots and the JYNNEOS monkeypox vaccine approved and how they plan to get future shots approved.
However, merely measuring antibody levels in the abstract is meaningless and potentially masks harms to the body. God designed our bodies to create the right sort of antibodies, in the right amount, at the right time, in the right place. Any fault in any of those factors can create auto-antibodies, Trojan horse antibodies (antibody dependent disease enhancement) or a misfiring of the immune system, which is some form of original antigenic sin or pathogenic priming that teaches the body to tolerate a specific strain of the virus or respond for a wrong strain. This is why vaccines take years to develop. And this is before we even discuss the fact that these shots are not even vaccines, but are gene therapies that code your body to produce a pathogenic spike that was the result of gain-of-function research and seems to potentially damage every organ system, particularly the cardiovascular system.
In the case of the COVID shots, what the German study discovered is that over time and with increased doses it actually trains your body to tolerate rather than fight the virus it was designed to destroy. The other class of blood-based antibodies are designed to neutralize pathogens; however, the IgG4 class was specifically designed to tolerate innocuous cells (that don’t reproduce) that it repeatedly contacts, such as pollen or peanut particles. They serve an important role and help ensure that people don’t respond with excessive inflammation to everyday encounters with pollen, but to see 20% of the antibody response to SARS-CoV-2 (it was as high as 42% in those experiencing infection after boosters) be something that tolerates it is astounding … and dangerous! In other words, whereas your IgG1 or IgG3 antibodies are like the SWAT team, your IgG4 antibodies are like social workers. You don’t want social workers responding to replicating pathogens like the SARS-CoV-2 spike.
The long-term implications of this study are still unclear, but like every earth-shattering finding, this one will not be studied by governments. If this shot is really upregulating an IgG4 response for most of the population, it could easily explain why herd immunity is out the window with SARS-CoV-2. It’s literally teaching the body to not only respond to the wrong pathogen but to tolerate its existence and not remember to fight it. Also, what does this mean long-term for people who don’t create pro-inflammatory antibodies to defend against pathogens? What sort of damage is being done by not having the virus sufficiently neutralized before it invades the system so deeply?As Kilian Schober, one of the authors of the study, notes (after calling our interpretation of the study too “simplistic”),”Our findings do, however, raise some questions about how to proceed.” But in the past, we used to answer those questions before experimenting on humans, not begin to raise them (and then never answer them) after 5.5 billion people were already injected with the product.
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.
When it comes to vaccine injury, silence is certainly golden, because it’s the only currency valuable enough to cover up the atrocity of what was done to the entire global population over the past two years. The medical establishment has relied on doctors to turn a blind eye to vaccine injury, allowing those injured to languish without a proper diagnosis and treatment, and continue doubling down on even more doses of this dangerous therapeutic. Thankfully, a few of the former top enforcers of this dogma in the key Western countries of Australia and Israel are making amends for their past misdeeds.
As a lesbian who is married to a woman, a lifelong leader in sex education, former left-wing member of parliament, and former head of the Australian Medical Association, Dr. Kerryn Phelps is not exactly your candidate for right-wing conspiracy theorist. But in a wide-ranging interview with the Chronicle, the Sydney-based doctor publicly acknowledged her own injury as well as that of her partner and divulged how she faced censorship, a lack of treatment options, and a painful journey countless others are facing, a number she says is a lot higher than governments are willing to admit.
“This is an issue that I have witnessed firsthand with my wife, who suffered a severe neurological reaction to her first Pfizer vaccine within minutes, including burning face and gums, paraesethesiae, and numb hands and feet, while under observation by myself, another doctor, and a registered nurse at the time of immunization,” the 65-year-old former AMA president said to the Chronicle.
“I continue to observe the devastating effects a year and a half later, with the addition of fatigue and additional neurological symptoms including nerve pains, altered sense of smell, visual disturbance, and musculoskeletal inflammation. The diagnosis and causation has been confirmed by several specialists who have told me that they have seen ‘a lot’ of patients in a similar situation.”
Phelps noted that the Therapeutic Goods Administration failed to follow up with her reported injury, and many
doctors have told her that not only are they seeing the injuries in droves, but many practitioners themselves were injured but refuse to speak out.
“Regulators of the medical profession have censored public discussion about adverse events following immunization, with threats to doctors not to make any public statements about anything that ‘might undermine the government’s vaccine rollout’ or risk suspension or loss of their registration,” she said.
In other words, there are thousands of doctors who know what is going on, many experiencing it themselves, but who refuse to speak out. Some remain silent; others downright continue promoting the shots. What is quite telling is how even Dr. Phelps herself was still promoting the shots on social media a month after she claims to have been injured by the shots.
For “ineligible for a vaccine”, substitute “inadequate supply of vaccine available for his age group”. #covid19 Profound sympathy for this 15 yo boy’s family as his death has just been confirmed 💔 https://t.co/batoAnRBtD
It demonstrates how entrenched the vaccine cult is and how long it took for even someone injured this badly (along with her partner) to speak out.
The bombshell from Dr. Phelps is significant enough given her biography, but an even more explosive convert to the cause of truth is Professor Shmuel Shapira, who headed the Israel Institute for Biological Research from 2013 to 2021 and literally led the development of Israel’s coronavirus vaccination scheme, in the country that Pfizer referred to as the laboratory for its experimentation. Shapira has been speaking out against the shots for months, but not after he was personally injured by his third dose. Last week, he wrote a series of tweets describing his conversion:
I was wrong 3 times: * In the first shot * In the second shot * and in the third shot Who said that those who are injected do not admit that they were wrong?
The pigs from the animal farm, got time off for the final and were sent to trash. I touched them at a painful point. Yes then I will repeat it, I was wrong 3 times when I was injected the first, second and third time. Unlike the dwarfs, I'm proud of everything I've being doing.
Why aren’t others speaking out? Well, when even the man who was almost the Fauci of Israel gets this much blowback, it’s no wonder few have the courage to fight.
You have no idea what a campaign of slander and anonymous threats I go through. Some of it is quoted to me by journalists and others. The traces clearly lead to what used to be the Ministry of Health ,but not only to him. They aren't even smart enough to clean a fingerprint.
What this means is that there are likely a great many others who know this is going on – perhaps from personal experience – and yet, like a death cult, they will not admit they were wrong. They are trained to find only medical ailments they are primed to look for. If it’s not in their memorized and regimented protocols, then it doesn’t exist. The medical system has become so monotonized and streamlined that almost no doctor is willing to even cognitively question the hierarchy, much less articulate opposition.
This code of silence would be bad enough if the vaccination campaign were over and it was just an issue of treating those already injured. Yet the pressure and even mandates still exist in some settings, and almost all doctors still promote the vaccines. Furthermore, they are pushing mRNA technology for flu and RSV shots as early as next fall.
Silently accepting this degree of short-term and unknown long-term risk would be bad enough if the shots actually worked against COVID. But as we’ve known for well over a year and a half, the more you inject, the more you infect. The latest evidence is from a Cleveland Clinic preprint study of over 50,000 of CC’s in-house health care workers. The retrospective cohort study shows a strong positive correlation between an increase in vaccine doses and a stronger likelihood to test positive for the virus. The unvaccinated performed the best, and the boosted were three times more likely to get infected.
This is just over 90 days. We’ve seen in the past from other studies that the negative efficacy intensifies over the months, which might explain why for the first time in history this virus shows no signs of going away, except in Africa, where few people were vaccinated. Last year, long before the negative efficacy of the shots associated with Omicron that we are seeing today, Sweden conducted the most comprehensive long-term study of vaccine effectiveness in the world and found that after six to seven months, “no effectiveness could be detected” from the Pfizer shot. In fact, the study found negative efficacy after 210 days for those over 50, which harmonizes with what we are seeing before our very eyes throughout the world. For some older adults, the shots are as much as -77% effective, and the numbers seem to drop every month.
Shockingly, this cycle of failure allows the same duplicitous doctors to fearmonger even more people into getting even more doses, perpetuating and exacerbating an endless cycle of viral immune escape, mutations, and pathogenic priming that leads to negative efficacy reflective of suboptimal antibodies and a leaky vaccine.
For months, Walgreens has been posting the results of its weekly COVID testing by vaccination status. They have consistently shown the unvaccinated to have the lowest number of cases relative to the number of tests (the unvaccinated are subjected to more testing mandates in the workforce).
As you can see, the unvaccinated have the lowest positivity rate. It’s also self-evident that the negative efficacy intensifies over time since the duration of the last dose. And even the Omicron boosters, which were tested on eight blind mice, are now addressing a variant that is nearly extinct. According to the CDC, BA.4 is extinct and BA.5 represents only 10% of cases and is rapidly declining.
Yet the FDA just approved these extinct, dangerous, negative-efficacy shots for babies! It’s no longer a tenable position for Republicans to merely oppose mandates. Mind you, so many red states still have mandates on health care and in public colleges. They must completely stop promoting the shots, oppose any future mRNA shots under the current design, sponsor treatment for those injured, create state-based vaccine reporting, and encourage rather than punish doctors to speak out and dissent. “See something, say something” needs to be the catchphrase in the medical profession. Too many lives are on the line to remain silent.
‘Sunday Night in America’ panelists discuss the looming threat that China poses and how America should respond.
FIRST ON FOX: Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee are alleging in a newly released report that there are “indications” that COVID-19 could be tied to China’s biological weapons research program and “spilled over” to the general human population during an incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The information was released in a minority staff report by members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Wednesday night.
“Contrary to the implication of the [Intelligence Community’s] declassified report, based on our investigation involving a variety of public and non-public information, we conclude that there are indications that SARS-CoV-2 may have been tied to China’s biological weapons research program and spilled over to the human population during a lab-related incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” a summary of the report states. “The IC failed to adequately address this information in its classified Updated Assessment. When we attempted to raise the issues with the IC, it failed to respond.”
In a declassified assessment on the origins of COVID-19 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in October 2021, the report states that SARS-CoV-2 was “probably not a biological weapon,” adding, “We remain skeptical of allegations that SARS-CoV-2 was a biological weapon because they are supported by scientifically invalid claims.”
Members of the World Health Organization team tasked with investigating the origins of the coronavirus disease are seen. (Reuters/Thomas Peter)
Wednesday’s report released by House Republicans also alleges that its investigation “revealed serious shortcomings with both the classified and declassified versions of the Intelligence Community’s,” and states that the omissions “likely skewed the public’s understanding of key issues and deepened mistrust.”
“The Committee believes the IC downplayed important information relating to the possible links between COVID-19 and China’s bioweapons research based in part on input from outside experts,” the report states, adding that the intelligence community “refuses to be transparent with the Committee regarding which experts it relied on.”
Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, speaks during a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, April 15, 2021. (Al Drago/Pool via AP) (AP)
Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, told Fox News Digital that Americans deserve answers regarding the origins of COVID-19
“The American people are owed answers about the origins of COVID-19. Our report states that COVID-19 may have been tied to China’s bioweapons research program and that the Intelligence Community (IC) withheld key information from the American public’s authorized elected officials, deepening public mistrust,” Wenstrup said. “Our findings also show that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) bears more responsibility for the COVID-19 pandemic than what has been publicly known or transparently communicated to the American people.”
“As a physician and Army veteran, I believe it is vitally important that we understand the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and strive to do everything within our power to pursue policies that will help prevent our country from being vulnerable like this in the future.”
A security person moves journalists away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)
While alleging that COVID’s origins were likely tied to China’s biological weapons research program, the report states, “We have not seen any credible indication that the virus was intentionally, rather than accidentally, released.”
Security personnel gather near the entrance of the Wuhan Institute of Virology during a visit by the World Health Organization team in Wuhan in China’s Hubei province on Feb. 3, 2021. (AP)
“Nor do we claim the information we have found is a smoking gun that definitively resolves the question of the origins of COVID-19 beyond all doubt. However, the information is important to furthering the public’s understanding, and we will seek to declassify the classified version of our report in the next Congress to further the conversation,” the report states.
Adam Sabes is a writer for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to Adam.Sabes@fox.com and on Twitter @asabes10.
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.”
Like Blaze News? Get the news that matters most delivered directly to your inbox. SIGN UP
President Joe Biden last December warned of a “winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated.” But new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlighted a trend that would suggest that the greater share of COVID-19 deaths this winter will be among the vaccinated and boosted.
The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), a nonprofit that focuses on health care issues affecting the nation, issued a report Wednesday analyzing recent CDC data — data that excludes the partially vaccinated. According to the KFF report, the “share of COVID-19 deaths among those who are vaccinated has risen.”
“In fall 2021, about 3 in 10 adults dying of COVID-19 were vaccinated or boosted. But by January 2022, as we showed in an analysis posted on the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, about 4 in 10 deaths were vaccinated or boosted. By April 2022, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data show that about 6 in 10 adults dying of COVID-19 were vaccinated or boosted,” said the report.
This decrease in the share of deaths from the unvaccinated crowd and the increase in the share of deaths from the vaccinated continued into the summer. In August, the CDC found that the unvaccinated accounted for 42% of COVID-19 deaths. Alternatively, individuals who had received the primary series of vaccines accounted for 22% of deaths, and those who received the primary series plus one or more booster accounted for 36% of deaths. Taken together, the vaccinated and boosted represented a 58% share of COVID-19 virus deaths in August.
On Nov. 23, Cynthia Cox, vice president at the KFF, told the Washington Post that this trend has been driven in particular by three factors: high-risk individuals being more likely to have received the shots; vaccines losing their potency over time; and more Americans having received the vaccines.
The KFF reported that another factor at play is “changes in immunity among the unvaccinated.”
The U.K. Health Security Agency noted in a March vaccine surveillance report that “people who have never been vaccinated are more likely to have caught COVID-19” previously. “This gives them some natural immunity to the virus which may have contributed to a lower case rate in the past few weeks.” In addition, the report also suggested that new variants coupled with a drop in masking might lead to more deaths among vaccinated people.
Notwithstanding the reasons behind the trend, Cox concluded, “We can no longer say this a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
Fox News Digital underscored how outgoing White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and other medical experts had previously admitted that COVID-19 vaccines do not protect “overly well” against infection. Fauci, who is vaccinated and boosted but nevertheless caught COVID-19, stated in July that vaccines “don’t protect overly well, as it were, against infection” but “protect quite well against severe disease leading to hospitalization and death.”
On Nov. 22, Fauci once again implored people in what might have been his last address from the White House podium to “get your updated COVID 19 shot as soon as you’re eligible to protect yourself, your family, and your community.”
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.
The transgender movement has a science problem. Trans activists and their allies are trying to silence their critics by accusing them of “science denialism,” but they are inadvertently illustrating the anti-science nature of transgender dogmas. For example, a recent opinion piece in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) — titled “Protecting Transgender Health and Challenging Science Denialism in Policy” actually demonstrates that rejecting transgender ideology is the best way to protect health and defend scientific integrity.
Of course, the authors, a couple of Yale professors plus a student, set out to prove the opposite. They open by asserting:
A virulent brand of science denialism is emerging in the U.S. legal system, as states enact bans on gender-affirming health care. Misused clinical research and disinformation have provided legal cover for bans on essential treatments for transgender and gender-expansive (TGE) people. Many of these bans restrict Medicaid reimbursement of gender-affirming care for people of all ages or prohibit gender-affirming care for minors. The recent end of federal protection for abortion and the lifting of Covid-19 protections such as mask mandates may signal an expansion of this dangerous force in health policy.
Yes, the complaints about the Dobbs decision and the ending of mask mandates are real and not a parody of upscale liberal white women. The rest is just loudly repeating transgender orthodoxies, with imprecations for doubters. And despite its apologists’ accusations of misused research and disinformation on the part of critics, transgenderism is indeed a dogmatic form of mysticism. Science has nothing to do with it.
Transgenderism denigrates the reality of bodily sex in order to exalt a non-corporeal sense of gender identity. It does not make a scientific claim, but a spiritual or metaphysical claim — that we have something like a gendered soul in a sexed body and that mismatches are possible and are best resolved by modifying the body into a facsimile of the other sex.
This extraordinary claim cannot be proven and must be taken on faith. Consequently, transgender advocates and allies, such as those writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, do not even attempt to provide a scientific explanation for transgenderism. Rather, because there is no physical need for medical transition, transgenderism has to be self-authenticating, proving itself by whatever mental health benefits can be attributed to it. This is why trans advocates are constantly (and falsely) telling parents that the alternative to transition is suicide — it’s the only argument they have; the only physical harm that can result from not transitioning is self-harm.
TRANSGENDERISM
As this demonstrates, so-called gender-affirming care is abnormal medicine. It hugely disrupts healthy bodily functions for dubious mental benefits. It is like using intense chemotherapy to treat anxiety. Thus, the case for transition, especially for children, needs to meet an extremely high standard of evidence.
Predictably, the authors of the NEJM article fail to do this. They argue that the case for transition is robust and accuse their opponents of disinformation and cherry-picking data but tracing their citations back through their own previouswork provides more assertion than evidence. The studies they cite cannot escape the usual weaknessesplaguing this area of study: poor response rates, bad sampling methods, small sample sizes, short time-frames, and a reliance on patient self-evaluation.
Even less convincing are their attempts to dismiss the side effects of medical transition, which undermine the claims of any benefits. For example, the NEJM writers suggest that the use of puberty blockers in cases of precocious puberty means they are also safe to use in transition — but the former use simply delays a natural, healthy puberty until the appropriate age, while the latter prevents it from ever happening. Even the New York Times has noticed that using puberty blockers for gender-confused children may have major downsides.
TRANSGNDERING ISSUES.
Of course, the elephant in the room is that studies on transition, and especially transitioning children, are overwhelmingly conducted by those whose careers depend upon proving the benefits of transition. The doctors who are chemically castrating teenage boys, or amputating the healthy breasts of adolescent girls, are all-in. To admit that these procedures are a mistake would be a confession of horrific, possibly even criminal, medical malpractice that would end their careers.
Likewise, many of the formerly respectable gatekeepers of medicine and scientific research have been deeply compromised by transgender ideology. From medical associations to hospitals, there is a multitude of people who are in too deep to admit error, even as transgender ideology collapses.
The fact-free nature of transgender ideology is apparent in the latest standards of care issued by WPATH (World Professional Association of Transgender Health), a pro-trans group that is treated as the leading authority on transgender medicine. The organization eliminated many of its recommended age restrictions for medical transition in order to protect from malpractice claims physicians who were transitioning children younger than the previous standards — after all, doctors can’t violate a standard of care that doesn’t exist. And bizarrely, WPATH declared “eunuch” to be a valid gender identity, a decision reached, in part, by relying on online forums filled with violent fantasies of child sexual abuse.
These cranks and creeps have captured the establishment, from medicine to academia to the Democratic Party. And they intend to use their power to intimidate and silence critics. They do not care that their attempts are dishonest and incoherent. For instance, the NEJM writers admit that the scientific “consensus is ever evolving,” yet they posit this as a reason to shut down debate and deregulate transitioning children.
They are not perturbed by the inconsistency, for they are engaged in the exercise of power, not reason. They do not care about winning the argument but about intimidating people into compliance. And so, they rely on credentialism and cries of “science denialism” and “misinformation” — following the same approach used to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, the lab-leak theory of Covid-19’s origins, and skepticism about extended school closures and masking toddlers — to protect their faith in gender identity and the pediatric transitions it demands.
But try though they might, they cannot alter biological reality. They may live by the lie of gender ideology, but they cannot make it true.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
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.
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.
Detransitioner Chloe Cole, 17, speaks about her experience undergoing trans medicalization as a young teenager in a meeting with Florida Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo in July 2022. | Screengrab: Twitter/Joseph A. Ladapo
A detransitioner is suing doctors who performed body mutilating sex-change surgeries on her as a minor, seeking to hold accountable the “mutilators” who “butchered” her.
Chloe Cole, an 18-year-old detransitioner residing in California, has filed a notice of intent to sue the medical facilities that performed procedures that have left her disfigured. The notice of intent to sue in California Superior Court lists three doctors practicing in the Los Angeles area and two medical companies based in California as defendants in the pending lawsuit. The lawsuit will move forward 90 days after the publication of the notice of intent to sue, on Feb. 9, 2023, “unless this matter can be resolved prior to that time.”
A detransitioner is a person who formerly self-identified as the opposite sex but has now become comfortable with their biological sex.
In a statement announcing the letter of intent to sue, Cole described her teenage years as “a culmination of excruciating pain, regret, and most importantly injustice.” Cole recalled that she was “emotionally and physically damaged and stunted by so-called medical professionals in my most important developmental period.”
My teenage life has been the culmination of excruciating pain, regret, and most importantly injustice. It is impossible for me to recoup what I have lost, but I will insure no child will be harmed at the hands of these liars and mutilators. I am suing these monsters. @pnjabanpic.twitter.com/i80VHvGXJn
“I was butchered by an institution that we trust more than anything else in our lives,” she added. “What is worse is that I am not alone in my pain. I will ensure that the blood and tears of detransitioners like me will not be in vain. It is impossible for me to recoup what I have lost, but I will fight to ensure that no other children will be harmed at the hands of these liars and mutilators.”
Harmeet Dhillon, CEO of the Center for American Liberty, is representing Cole in her litigation. Dhillon vowed to “hold the ‘professionals’ involved accountable for their deliberate choices to mutilate children and financially benefit from it without regard to the human tragedies they’ve created,” adding, “We will break the cycle of them breaking America’s children before it’s too late.”
The notice of intent to sue elaborates on Cole’s circumstances: “Chloe is a biological female who suffered from a perceived psychological issue ‘gender dysphoria,’” the document states. “Under Defendants’ advice and supervision, between 13-17 years old Chloe underwent harmful transgender treatment, specifically, puberty blockers, off-label cross-sex hormone treatment, and a double mastectomy.”
The notice classified Cole’s experience as a form of “medical experimentation,” adding, “She now has deep emotional wounds, severe regrets, and distrust for the medical system.” Specifically, the letter adds that because of acts carried out by the defendants, Cole “suffered mutilation to her body and lost social development with her peers at milestones that can never be reversed or regained.”
“Defendants coerced Chloe and her parents to undergo what amounted to a medical experiment by propagating two lies. First, Defendants falsely informed Chloe and her parents that Chloe’s gender dysphoria would not resolve unless Chloe socially and [medically] transitioned to appear more like a male. Chloe has been informed by her parents that Defendants even gave them the ultimatum: ‘Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?’”
The notice of intent to sue notes that “the vast majority of childhood gender dysphoria cases resolve by the time the child reaches adulthood, with the patient’s self-perception reverting back to align with their biological sex.”
According to the letter, “Despite an undeniable body of relevant medical literature, Defendants never once informed Chloe of the possibility, indeed the high likelihood, that her gender dysphoria would resolve, without cross-sex treatment, by the time she reached adulthood.”
“Defendants fraudulently concealed that information from Chloe that the only way to resolve her psychological condition was to undergo physical, chemical, and social transition to a male role,” the document added.
Citing a longterm study finding that “gender dysphoric individuals who undergo sex reassignment continue to have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity as compared with the general population,” the letter lamented that “Defendants intentionally obscured these facts and defrauded Chloe and her parents in order to perform what amounted to a lucrative transgender medical experiment on Chloe.”
Although Cole was “advised that the distress she experienced because of her gender dysphoria would resolve as she transitioned,” her “distress always came back worse” following the “initial relief” that occurred after “each phase of transition.”Cole’s double mastectomy, which was performed on her at 15, caused her to experience suicidal thoughts and a deteriorating state of mental health.
Cole told Fox News opinion host Tucker Carlson last week that the doctors named as defendants in the letter committed medical malpractice. The notice of intent to sue outlined some of the claims of medical malpractice, including the absence of “specific information regarding the actual risks of the testosterone and puberty blockers” she was first prescribed at age 13.
Side effects of puberty blockers include: “Permanent fertility loss, painful intercourse, impairment of orgasm, reduced bone development and inability to obtain peak or maximum bone density, stopped or stunted widening and growth of the pelvic bones for reproductive purposes, increased risk of osteoporosis and debilitating spine and hip fractures as an adult, increased morbidity and death in older age due to increased risk of hip fracture, negative and unknown effects on brain development, emotional liability such as crying, irritability, impatience, anger, and aggression, and reports of suicidal ideation and attempt.”
While much of the notice of intent to sue contains redacted information about the medical consequences of the experimental procedures performed on Cole’s body, the document concludes with an assessment of damages caused by the drugs and operations performed on her body over the course of several years. Cole will seek $350,000 from each of the three doctors named as defendants in the lawsuit and both healthcare organizations where the procedures were performed, making it possible that she could be awarded up to $1,750,000 in damages altogether.
The notice of intent to sue comes shortly after Cole has emerged as one of the most prominent detransitioners in the U.S. Cole founded the support group Detrans United, established to provide detransitioners who regret their attempts at gender transitions with a platform to voice their “dissent against ‘gender-affirming care,’ [and] influence policy.”
Cole has voiced her dissent against sex-change surgeries for minors by calling into a school board meeting last month at Conejo Valley Unified School District in Ventura County, California. Cole expressed concern about the school district’s distribution of a book to 8-year-old students teaching that children could be born in the wrong body. Cole warned that exposing children to such material could lead them to make ill-fated decisions like the ones she made when she was experiencing gender dysphoria.
“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 at the meeting. “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.”
In light of the concerns about the longterm impacts of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and body-mutilating surgeries on minors, the states of Alabama, Arizona and Arkansas have banned such procedures for children younger than 18, while the Florida Boards of Medicine and Osteopathic Medicine voted to do the same earlier this month. The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services classified such procedures as a form of child abuse, as has the state’s Republican attorney general.
Like Blaze News? Get the news that matters most delivered directly to your inbox. SIGN UP
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an emergency use authorization (EUA) for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine on Dec. 11, 2020. A week later, the FDA issued an EUA for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine. Now, nearly two years later, Pfizer and Moderna will launch clinical trials to track adverse health issues stemming from the COVID-19 vaccines, such as myocarditis – inflammation of the heart muscle.
Pfizer is in the infancy of beginning clinical trials to determine if there are any health risks associated with their own vaccine. In a partnership with the Pediatric Heart Network, the trial will focus on vaccine recipients who have suffered heart issues following being jabbed with the COVID-19 vaccine. The clinical trials will monitor patients for five years.
Enrollment for the study in the U.S. and Canada has not started yet. However, the research team has already identified more than 250 patients with myocarditis, according to Dr. Dongngan Truong – a pediatrician at the University of Utah Health and a co-lead on the Pfizer study.
NBC News reported on Friday, “The team will also compare the patients to a subset of patients with multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, also known as MIS-C, which is associated with a COVID infection.”
The first findings are not expected to be released until sometime next year.
Moderna will be conducting their own studies about possible side effects of the COVID vaccines in five countries with the assistance of the European Medicines Agency. The data from those studies are not expected to be released to the public until next summer. Dr. Paul Burton – Moderna’s chief medical officer – admitted that scientists are not certain as to what causes the possible heart issues from the COVID-19 vaccine.
“We don’t understand yet and there’s no good mechanism to explain it,” Burton conceded to NBC News.
Burton theorized that the spike protein in the vaccine may stimulate a negative reaction in the body that could cause inflammation in the heart.
NBC News highlighted the alarming struggles of one Michigan man who suffered major health issues after receiving a COVID vaccine.
In October 2021, Detroit native Da’Vion Miller was found unconscious in the bathroom of his home one week after receiving his first dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. Miller, who was only 22 years old at the time, experienced chest pain two days after getting vaccinated. He also suffered from fatigue, dizziness, and shortness of breath. Miller was rushed to the Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital, where he was diagnosed with myocarditis and pericarditis – inflammation of the outer lining of the heart. Miller’s doctor advised him not to receive his second dose of the COVID vaccine.
In the year since being diagnosed with myocarditis, Miller is still experiencing chest pain and has been in and out of the hospital.
In July 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report that stated: “An elevated risk for myocarditis among mRNA COVID-19 vaccinees has been observed, particularly in males aged 12–29 years.”
The report found, “Myocarditis reporting rates were 40.6 cases per million second doses of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines administered to males aged 12−29 years.”
The CDC added, “Myocarditis and pericarditis have rarely been reported. When reported, the cases have especially been in adolescents and young adult males within several days after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination (Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna).”
In April, an Israeli large-population study of 196,992 unvaccinated adults who were post-COVID-19 infection were “not associated with either myocarditis or pericarditis.”
“We did not observe an increased incidence of neither pericarditis nor myocarditis in adult patients recovering from COVID-19 infection,” the authors wrote.
Like Blaze News? Get the news that matters most delivered directly to your inbox. SIGN UP
In an astonishing turn of events, the National Health Services of England announced that most children who believe that they are transgender are just going through a “phase,” the Telegraph reported on Sunday. The publicly funded health care provider stated that it would take a more cautious approach when treating minors with gender dysphoria.
Doctors should not encourage children to socially transition, because transitioning is not a “neutral act” and it could have “significant effects” in terms of “psychological functioning,” according to the new NHS report.
The NHS also announced that it would ban prescribing minors puberty blockers “outside of strict clinical trials,” the Telegraph reported. Treatment for those under 18 years old will be heavily restricted.
In July, the NHS stated that it would be closing down the controversial Tavistock Centre, a gender identity clinic for children led by therapists and hormone specialists. Following an independent review, the gender dysphoria clinic received criticism for failing to collect data on puberty blockers and for taking an “unquestioning affirmative approach” to treating children with gender dysphoria.
Instead, the NHS will open two regional clinics based in specialist children’s hospitals led by medical doctors who are experts “in pediatric medicine, autism, Neurodisability and mental health.” The new clinics will follow guidelines that “reflect evidence that in most cases gender incongruence does not persist into adolescence.” Therefore, the NHS recommended that medical professionals should consider that a child expressing gender dysphoria might only be going through a “transient phase.” Doctors will be encouraged to take “a watchful approach” to monitor how a child’s gender dysphoria develops.
Going forward, the NHS will no longer recommend that medical professionals urge children to change their names or pronouns. Instead, socially transitioning will be recommended only in cases in which the child “is able to fully comprehend the implications of affirming a social transition” and in which a social transition may likely prevent “clinically significant distress.”
“The clinical approach has to be mindful of the risks of an inappropriate gender transition and the difficulties that the child may experience in returning to the original gender role upon entering puberty if the gender incongruence does not persist,” the NHS report stated.
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.”
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.
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
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Opinion
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
You Version
Bible Translations, Devotional Tools and Plans, BLOG, free mobile application; notes and more
Political
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
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Spiritual
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
Bible Gateway
The Bible Gateway is a tool for reading and researching scripture online — all in the language or translation of your choice! It provides advanced searching capabilities, which allow readers to find and compare particular passages in scripture based on
