Detransitioner Camille Kiefel says that she and other victims of transgender surgeries “have been dismissed” by doctors pushing so-called gender- affirming care. (Photo: The Daily Signal YouTube)
Detransitioner Camille Kiefel says that she and other victims of transgender surgeries “have been dismissed” by doctors pushing so-called gender-affirming care.
“I struggled with childhood trauma,” Kiefel told The Daily Signal’s Mary Margaret Olohan. “My best friend had been raped by her brother when I was in sixth grade.”
A detransitioner is someone who attempts to transition to the opposite gender, then realized that such an attempt is impossible, and “detransitioned.” Many of these individuals, such as Kiefel, say they were betrayed into irreversible hormonal and surgical procedures by doctors and therapists who ignore biological realities in favor of radical ideology.
“For me, it was being afraid of being vulnerable and wanting to protect myself,” she said, adding, I just started to identify with the male characters in anime manga reading … trying to reject my female identity, dressing more masculine, trying to hide my breasts and my hips, so that men wouldn’t see.
Kiefel confirmed that her father’s stories of “how men his age talk sexually about girls my age … was what started me on that.”
“It was when I was 26 that I saw a ‘gender-affirming care’ therapist, and then started to believe I was nonbinary, and then I got surgery when I was 30,” she said.
“The crazy thing is that they transitioned me into a nonbinary sex, one that doesn’t exist in nature,” she said.
“This freeing idea, with being nonbinary for many people is, like … I can just be me, and I’m not sexualized,” Kiefel explained. It was an idea that she learned in women’s studies classes, adding:
The gender ideology really co-opted it. There was this idea that you can be a third sex.
“I didn’t know what I wanted,” she said. “I just really wanted my breasts gone.”
Explaining the approval process for getting a double mastectomy, Kiefel said, “The ideology says that you can be trans and have trauma. They’re not accounting for the people who are transitioning because of trauma … it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
She explained the affirmation she received for the transition, saying, “I actually told the gender therapist what had happened to my friend and yet … but they didn’t push back at all.”
“I dealt with all these physical health issues after the surgery,” Kiefel said, “and the doctors took me seriously at first, but then became dismissive when they thought it was psychosomatic fever.”
In the face of that dismissal by the doctors, Kiefel took matters into her own hands and began working with a naturopath.
“I started adding meat back into my diet and some other holistic treatments,” she said, “and all of a sudden, I was, like, ‘Wow!’ My mental health is getting better!”
“All I needed to do was address my physical health, but nobody was doing that because … you’re depressed. … [T]hey just pegged me as someone dealing with mental illness.”
When Olohan asked Kiefel about her contact with the surgeons after she realized the mistake, the detransitioner said, “I just don’t feel comfortable reaching out to those doctors” after having experienced a doctor who treated her like she was wasting his time.
“I think a lot of detransitioners have those feelings of, like, we’ve been dismissed. I know many detransitioners who have been told that this is part of their gender journey,” Kiefel said.
Many detransitioners are suing the medical establishment, accusing doctors and therapists of manipulating them into undergoing brutal sex-change experiments.
Olohan asked Kiefel, “What would you say to doctors and therapists who are considering being a part of these so-called gender-affirming surgeries and interventions?”
“Make sure that no one who is struggling with severe mental health issues should do any of these surgeries,” Kiefel said. “They need to get their mental health under control.”
“Particularly with women who have histories with sexual trauma,” she added, “there’s a lot of them who are transitioning … . It’s partially escapism and to protect themselves. “
Olohan stated, “It sounds like we need more medical professionals that want to help detransitioners.”
Kiefel agreed: “We do.”
Olohan documents numerous stories of detransitioners in her book “Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult,” due out May 28, an intimate look at the lived experiences of detransitioners, including the manipulative therapy sessions, botched surgeries, and attempts to construct phantom body parts.
It’s often said that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. Of late, too many seemingly good men have done nothing to protect their daughters from transgender-identified athletes competing in girls’ sporting events. Let’s not mince words. These male athletes are harming and hurting their daughters under the guise of “equality” and “fairness.”
Just last week, a Massachusetts high school girls’ basketball team forfeited a game after a male on the opposing team injured three female players. The team decided to forfeit because the injured girl’s female teammates were afraid of getting hurt themselves.
The girls made the right call, to be sure. But why was it necessary in the first place? And why was it up to teenage girls to make that call?
Last year, also in Massachusetts, a male high school field hockey player, identifying as a girl, hit a ball so hard it knocked out a female player’s teeth. Video of the incident shows the female player crumpling to the ground and shrieking as her teammates cover their mouths with their hands and walk around in shock.
Every time I see another story like this — and the number of incidents is surging — I wonder: Where were their fathers?Why have so few fathers, especially after their daughters were injured by a male, stepped forward and said, “Not on my watch”?
Recently, former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines shared a similar sentiment, telling Joe Rogan on his podcast, “I thought someone with political power, someone within the NCAA — quite honestly, I thought someone’s dad — would come down there and yank this man out of our locker rooms.”
Yet it never happened. “I’m standing on the podium, and we’re clapping, and we’re smiling, and we’re cheering, and it hit me, I’m like, what in the world are we clapping for?” she said.
How many injured female athletes will it take for one father to stand up and manfully assert, “Enough is enough. I refuse to let my daughter be physically harmed by a male in her sport.”
How far men should go to protect their daughters is a conversation that needs to be had. But to have that conversation, first, men must do something. Anything.
Even when men competing against women doesn’t cause female athletes bodily harm, it is no less unjust. In New Jersey, transgender-identified swimmer Megan Cortez-Fields competed for three years on the Ramapo College men’s swimming team before switching to the women’s team. He’s since set school records in the women’s 200 Individual Medley.
Over the course of three years in Connecticut, two male athletes broke 17 girls’ track meet records, took more than 85 opportunities to advance to the next level of competition, and won 15 women’s state track championship titles. It’s past time for women to stop paying the price for men taking away their places, their awards, and their health and safety.
Women should not be forced to sacrifice their bodies on the altar of political correctness. It’s time for men to do their duty and confront other men — even if those men identify as women. Call a spade a spade and do not apologize for doing so.
Now consider the most vocal advocates for women’s sports. Think about those activists who are boldly standing up for truth, common sense, and women’s safety. Here’s a few: J.K. Rowling, Riley Gaines, Megyn Kelly, Selina Soule, Alanna Smith, Ashley Nicoletti, and Bethany Hamilton. Notice a pattern? They’re all women. And good for them, because the more women who stand up and speak out, the better. But where are the men?
In his book The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis spoke about men who lack conviction and fortitude. “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise,” Lewis wrote. “It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.”
Such could be said of the state of America’s men today. We’re too comfortable. We’re too apathetic. And we’re too nice. We could use a little more righteous indignation from America’s men.
Perhaps I’m just old-fashioned, but I was raised to respect and care for women. I know that men are supposed to protect and provide for their families. I refuse to stand idly by as the women of America suffer at the hands of men.
If you’re a father who’s still reticent to stand up for your daughter, here’s a suggestion: Don’t go it alone. Join forces with other fathers. The Good Book says, “Though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him — a threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12).
Courage is contagious. So, fathers of America, the ball is in your court. Your daughters are waiting for you to protect and take care of them. This is your job. This is your responsibility. This is your duty.
Zachary Mettler works as a staff writer and communications liaison for the Daily Citizen at Focus on the Family. In his role, he writes about current political issues, U.S. history, political philosophy, and culture. Mettler earned his Bachelor’s degree from William Jessup University and is an alumnus of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation. In addition to the Daily Citizen, his written pieces have appeared in the Daily Wire, the Washington Times, the Washington Examiner, Newsweek, Townhall, the Daily Signal, the Christian Post, Charisma News and other outlets.
Members of the transgender community hold a flag while blocking Avenida de los Insurgentes and Avenida Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City to demand justice for hate crimes and transphobia against transgender women in the Mexican capital. (Photo: Gerardo Vieyra/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Over the past decade, the United States has seen a rise in power of the transgender movement. Once a fringe, left-wing movement premised on the idea that gender is a social construct and that it can be changed at a whim, it has now become mainstream. Today, the question “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?” is now a political question.
The transgender movement can be traced back as far as 1952, when trans woman Virginia Prince launched a publication titled Transvestia: The Journal of the American Society for Equality in Dress.
Following that, the movement experienced rapid expansion, culminating in a riot in Los Angeles within seven years. The unrest originated as a retaliatory response to the Los Angeles Police Department, which was perceived to have engaged in harassment of the LGBTQ community. Then, in 1966, there was another riot. In 1969, another riot. inally, as a result of the 1996 publication Transgender Warriors by American lesbian activist Leslie Feinberg, the term “transgender” gained widespread usage.
Today, 1.6% of Americans, or 4,800,000 adults aged 18 or over, say their gender is different from their sex assigned at birth. However, that number is on the rise, as 5.1%, or nearly 15,000,000 young adults aged 18-29, fall into that category. This can be attributed to a litany of factors, including changing education environments in classrooms, social media, and more.
The “marked incongruence between (a person’s) experienced or expressed gender and the one they were assigned at birth” defines gender dysphoria. As of now, gender dysphoria’s causes remain unknown, and it does not have an established treatment. The term “gender dysphoria,” which is frequently used in the medical field, has itself become a subject of political controversy.
Today, despite the small numbers of transgender people in the United States, the movement has permeated nearly all facets of life.
Educators raise LGBTQ flags in classrooms nationwide and educate students in the elementary school age range that their designated gender at birth may not always reflect their true identity. Such a serious injustice necessitates rectification.
Students in elementary school have limited knowledge regarding sexuality; therefore, being informed that they could be of a different gender can be confusing to them—it can change them even if they never wanted to be changed.
It is worth noting that around 80% of children who experience gender dysphoria as children eventually overcome it and opt not to identify as transgender as adults.
In addition, depression among children who overcome gender dysphoria is extremely uncommon. However, according to The Trevor Project, a national organization dedicated to preventing suicide among LGBTQ youth, around 60% of transgender youth experience symptoms of depression, and 70% experience anxiety.
Depression affects approximately 5%-6% of the general population. In addition, around 0.5% of the general population has attempted suicide, while nearly half of transgender youth have considered suicide, and nearly 20% have attempted it.
But what causes this depression? Could it be bullying? Could it be that transgender rights are persistently violated? Of course not. On the contrary, transgender people are thriving. Their rights are enshrined in state constitutions, they are protected by numerous state laws, they are given more protections by schools than any other class of students; transgender people may have more rights than the average person.
Of course, we can’t forget drag story hour, where numerous elementary schools throughout the country have males dressed in scant attire read books about transgenderism to children.
It is unnecessary to expose children to males in little clothing in order for them to hear stories. The mind of a child is sacred and must not be exposed to these sorts of things. It can corrupt the mind and, as we’ve seen, may lead them down the road of gender dysphoria and ultimately depression.
Tragically, transgenderism has compromised the rights of biological women. Undoubtedly, women continue to advocate equality in the United States. Women continue to face significant disparities in the workforce and in public life. However, before the complete realization of gender equality for women, transgenderism emerged and complicated the situation.
At this time, males beat women in all aspects of life. Do you recall 2015, when Caitlyn Jenner was named “Woman of the Year” by Glamour magazine? The recipient of that award was not a woman who had struggled her entire life to be a woman in a world dominated by men. It was taken from a biological woman by a man.
Likewise, transgenderism has entered the realm of athletics. Transgender males have emerged victorious in athletic competitions against biological women on a multitude of occasions. Men have won significant accolades in swimming, wrestling, golf, snooker, and even weightlifting, the sport that exemplifies strength disparities. Men who underwent the transition from male to female are often found to have been mediocre at best among their male counterparts.
And how about sex changes for minors? It is plausible that the notion that a child could undertake surgical gender transition from their biological to an alternative gender would be utterly absurd and repugnant to the average person. However, 54% of Americans oppose legislation that criminalizes providing medical care for gender transition to minors.
Science and common sense support the notion that by our mid-to-late 20s, the brain has reached complete maturity and development. This is why children often engage in foolish behavior without contemplating the repercussions, why a contract formed by a child is deemed void in legal terms, and why alcohol consumption hinders the development of children’s minds. Yet, when it comes to transgenderism, all that goes out the window.
Men are not women, and women are not men. This is the reality everyone on this Earth must face until their death.
America has been divided along lines of common sense by the transgender movement: those who support it and those who do not. The rise of transgenderism will persist as long as rational individuals remain reluctant to express their opinion on the matter.
NHS England admitted Tuesday that puberty blockers are neither safe nor effective.
Luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone agonists, also called GnRHa drugs, have long been used to chemically castrate sex offenders. In recent years, these sex offender drugs were rebranded as puberty blockers and offered to confused children — despite ample evidence that such treatments create sexless adults, deplete victims’ bone density, hamper cognitive development, and produce a myriad of adverse emotional effects.
While these transmogrifying treatments remain legal in American blue states, across the Atlantic, resistance is growing among some early adopters. That’s certainly the case in the United Kingdom, where England’s top health authority has pumped the brakes on the victimization of children captive to the notion that their sex and gender are somehow misaligned. National Health Service England confirmed Tuesday that minors will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers at so-called gender identity clinics.
NHS England has been working up to this decision for years, having commissioned an independent expert review of gender identity services for minors in September 2020.
The health service figured it was prudent to pursue such a review in light of the massive spike in referrals for minors to the Gender Identity Development Service run by the scandal-plagued and soon-to-be shuttered Tavistock clinic and the Portman NHS Foundation Trust. Whereas there were 250 referrals to the NHS’ gender clinic in between 2011 and 2012, that number skyrocketed to over 5,000 between 2021 and 2022.
NHS England also noted at the outset of the review that “a significant number” of children seeking puberty blockers were mentally compromised and presenting with “other mental health needs and risky behaviors,” prompting careful consideration and additional research.
A policy document dated March 12 states, “Puberty suppressing hormones (PSH) are not available as a routine commissioning treatment option for treatment of children and young people who have gender incongruence / gender dysphoria.”
The document notes that “[g]ender atypical behavior is common among young children and may be part of normal development. … Children who meet the criteria for gender incongruence / gender dysphoria may or may not continue to experience the conflict between their physical gender and the one with which they identify into adolescence and adulthood.”
often just a fleeting fad, the NHS noted that puberty blockers don’t do what LGBT activists claim they do. The NHS-commissioned review found that across nine observational studies, “there was no statistically significant difference in gender dysphoria, mental health, body image and psychosocial functioning in children and adolescents treated with GnRHA.”
In addition to recognizing that the supposed problem puberty blockers are supposed to resolve is
This finding resonates with the explosive Finnish study published last month in the esteemed journal BMJ Mental Health that found sex-change medical interventions “do not have an impact on suicide risk.” Extra to noting that puberty blockers effectively don’t help, the NHS noted that they can actually do considerable harm: “GnRHa may reduce the expected increase in lumbar or femoral bone density during puberty.”
“We have concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of PSH to make the treatment routinely available at this time,” concluded NHS England.
The Independent reported that the NHS will be rolling out two new services, one in London and the other in Liverpool. Rather than sterilize children, these clinics will provide patients with access to mental health and pediatric health experts, “resulting in a holistic approach to care.” The Conservative government applauded the decision.
Health Minister and parliamentarian Maria Caulfield said she welcomed “this groundbreaking change as children’s safety and well-being are paramount.”
Caulfield told the Independent, “Ending the routine prescription of puberty blockers will help ensure that care is based on evidence, expert clinical opinion and is in the best interests of the child.”
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The truth about transgenderism is coming out. On Monday, Michael Shellenberger released a multitude of internal files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) that “prove that the practice of transgender medicine is neither scientific nor medical.” WPATH has been accepted by the political, cultural, and medical establishments as the authority on transgenderism, but what its members say in private is not the narrative they sell to the public.
Instead of the rigorous, careful, evidence-based medicine that champions of “gender-affirming care” claim to practice, the WPATH files show doctors who are making it up as they go along, smashing through guardrails even though they know that the children they are chemically and surgically altering cannot really give informed consent. And people are noticing.
No wonder the transgender ideologues are worried. The public has proven more resistant than they expected, especially regarding radical policies such as putting men in women’s prisons and girls’ locker rooms, let alone sexually mutilating and sterilizing children. And transgender activists and their allies have no response except to repeat their same failed arguments, just louder.
Consider a recent opinion piece in the New England Journal of Medicine by Michael R. Ulrich, a Boston University professor of law and public health who is also affiliated with Ibram X. Kendi’s scandal-plagued Center for Antiracist Research. Ulrich argues that restrictions on transitioning children are part of a broader right-wing culture war restricting and regulating medicine. There is a lot wrong with this assertion, but the fundamental problem is that so-called gender-affirming care is not medicine.
From puberty blockers to hormones to surgeries, transition is never medically necessary. Transitioning does not cure any disease or correct any physical ailment or injury. Rather, the point of medicalized transition is to disrupt and destroy the normal functioning of healthy bodies.
Ulrich tries to assuage concerns over these procedures by comparing them to “Pediatric chemotherapy and radiation,” which also “have lasting effects on growth development and reproductive capabilities.” Well, yes, but cancer kills people, which is why we are willing to accept serious side effects to treat it — and even then, doctors and patients have to balance the risks of the disease against the risks of treatment. In contrast, there is no physical risk from not receiving “gender-affirming care,” whereas, as the WPATH files show, there is significant, potentially lethal, risks from puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transition surgeries.
This is why the argument for transition always comes down to encouraging people, especially children, to take themselves hostage by threatening suicide. The only harm that can come from not transitioning is self-harm. And so, Ulrich deploys the suicide threats early and often, writing that “it is not hyperbole to say that lives are at risk in states pursuing these bans on needed care.” Ulrich offers no real evidence to back this claim up. He simply presumes that the “high rates of suicide, suicide attempts, and suicidal ideation among transgender young people” would be reduced with affirmation and medical transition.
Ulrich cites just one study as “evidence showing the effectiveness of gender-affirming care in reducing depression, anxiety, and suicide attempts.” But, despite hype to the contrary, that study showed no such thing. Rather, as Jesse Singal explained after it was published in 2022, “the kids who took puberty blockers or hormones experienced no statistically significant mental health improvement during the study. The claim that they did improve, which was presented to the public in the study itself, in publicity materials, and on social media (repeatedly) by one of the authors, is false” (emphasis in original).
No Evidence Regarding Suicide
There is no good evidence that transition prevents suicide, especially for children. Those who identify as trans do have an elevated risk of suicide (though this tends to be exaggerated by activists), but this is best explained by trans-identified individuals also having a much higher rate of mental health problems and trauma — and it doesn’t help to add to these underlying issues the lie that they were somehow born in the wrong body.
This extraordinary claim — that some children are born into the wrong bodies, and therefore must be chemically and surgically reshaped into a facsimile of the opposite sex — is medically unsupported. It is ideological and sexual fantasy masquerading as medicine. There is no good evidence to support transitioning children because gender ideology is just that, an ideology masquerading as medicine. The reality of human nature does not change, even though much of the medical establishment, such as the NEJM, was shamefully eager to capitulate to a small number of aggressive activists.
Rein in the Industry
Therefore, it is not only reasonable, but imperative, for legislators to rein in the transgender industry, and especially to stop the “transitioning” of children. Ulrich and other activists can fulminate about right-wing conspiracies, but it is right and just to ban the surgical and chemical mutilation of children. Many states have done so, thereby proving that gender ideology will not inevitably triumph and claim our children for its own.
This does not mean the fight is over. Indeed, we should expect gender ideologues to become more aggressive as their losses pile up. They thought time would be on their side, and that new research would vindicate them. But their time is running out, and the continued lack of evidence for “gender-affirming care” is pushing them to increasingly brazen lies and distortions as they attempt to justify their collapsing position. And they are also becoming more authoritarian in the places and institutions they do control, as they attempt to impose transgender dogma on the rest of us.
Thus, those opposed to gender ideology must not get cocky. Trans activists and their allies will keep fighting to the bitter end, especially those who have staked their reputations, livelihoods, and self-respect on radical gender ideology. Nonetheless, the end can now be envisioned, even if much work remains to achieve it.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Critics of “book bans” tend to speak as though no book chosen by a school librarian is ever inappropriate for kids. That’s preposterous on its face. (Photo: Jose Luis Pelaez Inc./Digital Vision/Getty Images)
Our English teachers taught us to use extreme caution before writing a word such as “always” or “never.”
Such totalizing words are rarely accurate, since most principles have exceptions. But you won’t see this advice applied by critics of “book bans,” who tend to speak as though no book chosen by a school librarian is ever inappropriate for kids.
My colleagues at The Heritage Foundation found that about three-fourths of books on lists of “banned books” are actually still in the libraries where the books were challenged. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Many of the rest are indeed inappropriate for children. They contain “images of people engaged in sex acts or graphic descriptions of those acts.” The material is so graphic, in fact, that it’s censored on broadcasts to avoid Federal Communications Commission fines. Moreover, movies and TV shows have ratings. Anyway, none of the books is “banned.” Kids generally can bring their own copies to school or buy them at a bookstore.
Since 1982, the Supreme Court has made it clear that while books may not be removed from school libraries to suppress ideas, there are legitimate reasons to remove books. Those reasons include when a book is obscene in general or is obscene as to minors, and when a book is inappropriate for the age, grade, or developmental level of students. When a book is inappropriate for the curriculum, it also can be removed from classrooms.
That point should be obvious. After all, the Supreme Court also has permitted censorship of school newspapers. The high court also has permitted punishment of students who held a banner reading “bong hits for Jesus.” In that case, the school argued successfully that it could in fact suppress an idea if that idea were about promoting the use of illegal drugs.
And the court has permitted punishment of a student who used pervasively vulgar language at a school assembly.
Adults really do, it turns out, have a role in determining what expression is acceptable for kids at school. And some of the same schools that resist book challenges have speech codes. They unconstitutionally ban “hate speech” and “misgendering,” but if the same language is in a book, they think nobody ought to challenge it.
Next week, I will be making these points at a private school, where “book banning” is the conference topic. I will note that the school’s libraries use the term “age-appropriate” to describe their book curation. Do librarians never make mistakes?
I also will tell the students that a complete opposition to book challenges is unlikely to express their true position.
Do the kids really think they were ready for the sexual, violent, gory, or scary content of any book when they were in the first grade? Do they think their younger siblings should be able to access all of that at school?
Do the kids really think it would be appropriate for the school librarian to advertise to first graders a book making the case against the existence of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy?
More likely, kids still believe that preserving innocence is one of their values. That argument should hold for most adults, too.
Probably no one is arguing that every challenged book is inappropriate for kids. Just as librarians can err in adding a book to the library, schools can err in removing them. The key is to develop a review process that puts the most knowledgeable people in charge—parents and, secondarily, teachers know the kids best—and makes the fewest mistakes.
For those critics of “book bans” who are unwilling to admit that even one book could ever be bad enough to remove from a school library, it’s time to mature and acknowledge that unlike the printed page, life is not black and white. Then we can have the important discussion of how to properly protect kids.
Chloe Cole speaks as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., looks on during a news conference on Capitol Hill on Sept. 20, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Detransitioners have been trying to warn the public that so-called gender-affirming care—transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers—is both experimental and dangerous, especially for minors. Now, thanks to the efforts of journalist Michael Shellenberger, we know that World Professional Association for Transgender Health doctors and medical experts pushing these practices were well aware of the experimental and lasting nature of the procedures they were recommending. Yet these so-called health professionals pushed forward, despite alarming awareness of tumors developing from hormones, reduced sexual function, lack of proper informed consent for minors, and more, according to Shellenberger’s reporting.
“Let the reckoning begin,” says Luka Hein, a young woman who underwent a double mastectomy when she was only 16 years old, believing that she would be happier if she could become a boy. “Because of organizations like WPATH I’m missing body parts and struggle with pain.”
The WPATH medical professionals acknowledge in the messages that some of the minors who are being given puberty blockers have no idea that they will be sterilized. Other messages reveal WPATH doctors saying they went ahead with performing surgery on patients with severe mental health problems, even though they were worried the patients couldn’t give full informed consent.
“I’m relieved the files are out in the world for everyone to read,” Shellenberger told my colleague Tyler O’Neil, sharing that the files reveal WPATH’s “whole paradigm falling apart over the last three years.”
The news prompted a number of detransitioners to speak up, sharing the mental and physical anguish that they have gone through as a result of this ideology.
“I was a scared kid who thought doctors were going to help me…and look at how these butchers talk about what happened to those like me behind closed doors,” Hein added in another X post.
On a more positive note, since I reposted the scar picture, I want to put it side by side with a more recent picture. I am determined to thrive, in spite of what has happened. #detrans#detransitionpic.twitter.com/ua0Yfi3MaX
A detransitioner is someone who attempted to transition to another gender, then realized that such an attempt is impossible, and “de-transitioned.” Many of these individuals, like Hein, say they were betrayed into irreversible hormonal and surgical procedures by doctors and therapists who ignored biological realities in favor of ideology.
I document numerous stories of these transitioners in my upcoming book, “Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult,” an intimate look at the lived experiences of detransitioners, including the manipulative therapy sessions, botched surgeries, and attempts to construct phantom body parts.
“WPATH gave my therapist the green light to destroy my body,” said Abel Garcia, a young man who attempted to transition to become a girl by taking hormone and undergoing breast augmentation surgery. “The people who hurt me sleep with no problem, while I live in emotional, physical & mental pain.”
“These files prove what detransitioners have always said but now it’s coming from their own mouth,” he added. “Let the truth prevail.”
WPATH gave my therapist the green light to destroy my body. The people who hurt me sleep with no problem, while I live in emotional, physical & mental pain.
These files prove what detransitioners have always said but now it’s coming from their own mouth. Let the truth prevail https://t.co/DTpy5bz9PO
Chloe Cole, a young woman who underwent a double mastectomy as part of her teenaged gender transition, specifically addressed WPATH conversations reported by Shellenberger about developmentally delayed 13 year olds attempting transition.
“There is no ethical approach to taking an already developmentally delayed child and preventing them from going on the only path they have towards growing into an adult,” she said. “We are leaving vulnerable children stunted for life.”
“This is unimaginable levels of cruelty,” added Cole.
Laura Becker, another female detransitioner who has become an outspoken advocate against gender ideology, commented on Shellenberger’s revelation that doctors asked permission of all the “alters,” or alternative identities, of one client who had dissociative identity disorder (DID).
“I can’t believe this,” she wrote. “WPATH doctors got ‘consent’ from all a patient’s ‘alter’ personalities before doing surgery… instead of you know, treating the DID symptoms. Absolutely unethical.”
Some detransitioners called for punishments for the medical professionals who led them down this path.
“Justice for all victims,” wrote Richie, a man who attempted to transition to become a woman. “Jail time for the surgeons that held the scalpel, and the therapists that signed off the surgery. If I took everything from them, we still wouldn’t be even.”
“I didn’t think anyone should be jailed when I first ‘came to’ post-transition,” chimed in Michelle, another detransitioned woman, on X. “Changed my mind now. Probably would’ve still had some mercy in me if we hadn’t been gaslit so badly.”
Prisha Mosley, a young woman who has detransitioned and travels the country testifying in defense of biological sex, emotionally shared on Monday evening that she could not yet bring herself to read “The WPATH Files”: “No one deserves this monstrous form of irreversible medical harm…”
WPATH standardized blackmail and abusive medical experimentation and exploitation.
Detransitioners have been saying it for a while now: Doctors have forgotten their oath to Do No Harm. #WPATHFileshttps://t.co/wRs8evulsH
A transgender rights supporter protests outside the Indiana Statehouse on Feb. 20, 2023, in Indianapolis. (Photo: Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/Light Rocket/Getty Images)
A federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed Indiana’s child sex change ban to take effect.
The order, issued by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, lifts a June 2023 injunction by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana against the law. Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, signed the legislation banning child sex changes in the state last April.
“Our commonsense state law, banning dangerous and irreversible gender-transition procedures for minors, is now enforceable following the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeal’s newest order. We are proud to win this fight against the radicals who continue pushing this horrific practice on our children for ideological and financial reasons,” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, a Republican, said Tuesday in a statement.
The injunction was previously issued under the presumption that the law may violate the First Amendment and 14th Amendment.
Some 23 states in the U.S. have passed bans on child sex changes or other transgender procedures, including Montana, Idaho, Utah, and North Dakota. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, issued an executive order implementing a child sex-change ban in January after vetoing a similar bill, a move that was subsequently overridden by the state legislature.
“This ruling is beyond disappointing and a heartbreaking development for thousands of transgender youth, their doctors, and their families. As we and our clients consider our next steps, we want all the transgender youth of Indiana to know this fight is far from over, and we will continue to challenge this law until it is permanently defeated and Indiana is made a safer place to raise every family,” the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana wrote Tuesday in a news release.
“Hoosiers who are too young to drive shouldn’t be subjected to these permanent and drastic procedures. Proud of our state for leading the way!” U.S. Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., said when the law was passed.
A female prisoner says she was forced to share a cell and a bunk-bed with a man who identifies as a transgender woman. Pictured: Prisoners Katie McGraw (left) and Mark Campbell (right). (Photo courtesy of the Wisconsin Department of Corrections.)
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL: Katelyn McGraw is currently incarcerated in Taycheedah Correctional Institution in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, serving a sentence for possession of narcotic drugs and bail jumping. She’s been at Taycheedah since the end of summer 2023, records show, and her fiancee says that she’ll soon be sent to a minimum security prison.
Recently she began sending distressed messages to her fiancee, Raymond Slater II, describing a transgender prisoner named “Mark Campbell” with whom she shares both a cell and a bunkbed. McGraw expressed extreme anxiety as she described her cellmate’s constant masturbating, sexual comments, and aggressive behavior, and she asked her fiancee to find out what exactly got Campbell locked up.
“I’m just sooooo extra stressed out with this weirdo under me,” she wrote in one message to Slater, shared with The Daily Signal, which Slater believes was sent in mid February. He communicates with her through CorrLinks, a platform for people to message their incarcerated loved ones, but said that prison guards will often hold up the messages from being sent or received in a timely manner.
“What did he/she do?!?” she questioned her fiancee. “Mark Campbell?! Goodnight babyyyyy, ILY [I love you].”
Her concerned fiancee quickly turned to the internet to discover who this prisoner was. To his horror, he stumbled upon The Daily Signal’s reporting from September 2023, a report that revealed Campbell to be a man who now identifies as a woman, who raped his own daughter, and is a registered sex offender convicted of first-degree sexual assault of a child.
Since Campbell identifies as transgender, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections has housed him in a women’s prison, Taycheedah Correctional Institution, since August 2022.
‘Anything Is Better Than a Cell With Him’
McGraw also spoke to The Daily Signal through a CorrLinks message, sharing that she was moved to the correctional facility’s psychiatric services unit, called “Monarch,” sometime earlier this month. DOC has not responded to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment for this story, including a request for an interview with Campbell, and questions about whether Campbell is now housed with other female inmates.
“They moved me to Monarch because they believe Campbell over me,” she said in the message, delivered to The Daily Signal on Feb. 19. “He told them I’m delusional cuz I said he was masturbating all the [time] which he was…and they told me if I refuse Monarch I’ll go to [segregation].”
“Anything is better than a cell with him,” she added. “He [asked] me when he first moved in if I have any friends cuz they’re gonna be curious if I [have] seen his vagina cuz it looks great and the surgeon did an amazing job and how its fresher than ours.”
McGraw expressed herself disgusted and “traumatized” with Campbell’s alleged proposition.
“I don’t wanna see nobody’s privates,” she wrote. “Yuckkkkk. Also he told me he don’t have a clit or can’t cum, I said I don’t care, I don’t wanna knowwwwww.”
The female prisoner is 31 years old, standing at only five feet and two inches tall, and weighing 150 pounds, prison records show. According to her fiancee, she was a victim of childhood sexual abuse by her father, who taught her to use drugs when she was a little girl “so that he could start abusing her.” She has lived a very hard, very rough life, Slater said, and has been in and out of prison since 2017. But this is the first time that she has complained about the treatment she received from both the guards and the other inmates, he insisted.
When he spoke with The Daily Signal, before his fiancee was moved, he said he was terrified that Campbell will sexually assault her and beat her, and that the guards won’t do anything about it.
“It’s all very heartbreaking to me,” he said in emotional text messages to The Daily Signal.
Katie McGraw, prisoner at Taycheedah Correctional Institution. (Photo courtesy of the Wisconsin Department of Corrections.)
Mark Campbell, Child Rapist
Campbell is 52 years old, five foot nine inches, and 225 pounds. His prison photos depict him with long hair and wearing makeup, including eyeliner, eyeshadow and blush.
Court documents allege that Campbell would sexually assault his daughter while her little brother was home and that “her little brother would sometimes come into the room while the sexual assault was occurring.”
“I can’t believe that the people in charge there decided to put her in the same cell as a man that raped his 10-year-old daughter knowing Katie’s background,” Slater said.
Campbell first requested transgender surgery to attempt to become a woman in 2013, according to a Wisconsin outlet, but the DOC denied his request at the time. In 2016 he filed a lawsuit accusing Department of Corrections officials of being indifferent to his medical needs by not allowing him to get so-called sex change surgery, the publication reported.
The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2019 that the DOC officials couldn’t have anticipated that denying such a surgery to Campbell would violate his rights.
However, in December 2020, a federal judge ruled that Wisconsin must offer Campbell taxpayer-funded transition surgery and must move him to a women’s prison while awaiting that surgery.
Mark Campbell, prisoner at Taycheedah Correctional Institution. (Photo courtesy of the Wisconsin Department of Corrections.)
The DOC housed Campbell in men’s prisons until August 2022, according to the inmate locator. In August 2022, authorities moved him to Taycheedah Correctional Institution, which “provides female inmates with a safe and secure environment that is gender-responsive,” according to the prison’s website.
Bunking With a Man
In messages shared with The Daily Signal, McGraw described a stressful and unhappy existence in prison, where other prisoners appeared to avoid her because she smelled and her guards didn’t believe her when she complained about Campbell. According to McGraw’s messages to Slater, Campbell shared a bunk bed with McGraw, and she frequently was forced to listen to him masturbating below her.
McGraw said that when she asked Campbell to stop, saying that his actions were disgusting, Campbell “went crazy” and “snapped.”
“[Campbell] punched the top of my bunk a bunch of times then said, ‘[You] wanna spaz out let’s spaz out,’ threw [his] cast off, put [his] fist up as I’m laying in my bed,” McGraw shared. “Like, wtf, what a sick psychopathic weirdo.”
“Really can’t believe they got me in this cell with a man!!!” she concluded the message.
In another message, McGraw again addresses Campbell’s incessant masturbation: “Barffffff! Some sickos will never change!!! It makes my skin crawl! I wanna puke, gag, can’t think about eating sleeping relaxing. This ain’t right…it’s not normal….it’s so wrong on every level! It’d be different if there was a level of respect! There’s not!”
Some of the female prisoner’s graphic descriptions of Campbell’s masturbation habits indicate that Campbell may have undergone a vaginoplasty, wherein surgeons remove the penis, testicles, and scrotum, rearranging tissue to create a faux vaginal canal and external genitalia.
“To create the vaginal canal, the surgeon uses a combination of the skin surrounding the existing penis along with the scrotal skin,” explains Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Dr. Fan Liang. “Depending on how much skin is available in the genital area, the surgeon may need to use a skin graft from the abdomen or thigh to construct a full vaginal canal.”
The procedure costs around $25,000 to $30,000, and takes six to eight weeks to recover from, according to Johns Hopkins. Liang claims that this faux vagina is sexually functional, but says that patients must avoid any form of sexual activity until 12 weeks after surgery.
McGraw vented to her fiancee that Campbell’s new, faux genitalia “stinks like rotten chicken.” She also said that Campbell, like other men who believe they are women and try to maintain a fake vaginal canal, dilates himself everyday so that the surgeon-crafted wound does not close.
Johns Hopkins Medicine describes this dilation as “part of the healing process after vaginoplasty” that involves “inserting a medical grade dilator into the vagina to keep your vaginal canal open as it heals.”
“A doctor or therapist from your care team will show you how to dilate,” writes Liang. “This can be difficult at first, but professionals will work with you and your comfort level to help you get accustomed to this aspect of your healing process. You will begin dilating with the smallest dilator in the dilator pack. You continue to use this dilator until cleared to advance to the next size by your care team.”
“Some patients may need to dilate their whole lives,” Liang adds.
McGraw described the process as “sickening,” writing to her fiancee that Campbell “literally shoves bananas inside of him or hot dogs, he told me when he moved in, and uses shampoo and f—- himself.”
Guidance from the DOC dated April 2018 states that “inmates may self-identify as transgender or intersex at intake or at any other time during an incarceration” and that “all sites are approved for transgender and intersex inmates” except for six facilities: Prairie du Chien Correctional Institution, Gordon Correctional Center, McNaughton Correctional Center, Chippewa Valley Correctional Treatment Facility, Flambeau Correctional Center, and St. Croix Correctional Center.
“Facility and housing assignments shall be made on a case-by-case basis, considering the inmate’s health and safety as well as potential programming, management and security concerns,” the guidance notes. “An inmate’s own views regarding safety shall be given careful consideration.”
If an inmate has undergone an attempted transgender transition surgery, that inmate will likely be placed in a facility consistent with the “reassignment treatment,” the guidance states. In other words, if a man undergoes attempted sex-change surgery to look like a woman, he will be housed with women — as Campbell’s case demonstrates.
“For the purposes of facility placement, self-inflicted genital mutilation does not constitute sexual reassignment surgery and does not qualify an inmate for placement in a different facility,” the guidance adds.
Transgender Inmates And Sexual Abuse
The Daily Signal previously reported that a little more than half of the men housed in Wisconsin Department of Corrections facilities who identify as transgender women have been convicted of at least one count of sexual assault or sexual abuse.
The revelation comes from records obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project through an April 2022 public records request. The Oversight Project sought information on biologically male inmates seeking transfers to female prisons by saying they identified as transgender females. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Of the 161 biological men who are housed in Wisconsin Department of Corrections facilities who self-reported as transgender, 81 (50.3%) have been convicted of at least one count of sexual assault or sexual abuse as of late July. The prisoners may have been convicted of additional offenses for their current incarceration periods that are not sex offenses, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections noted.
Inmates convicted of sex offenses may have committed crimes including sexual exploitation of a child, sexual exploitation by a therapist, forced viewing of a sexual act, rape, sexual intercourse without consent, incest, sexual intercourse with a child, indecent behavior with a child, enticing a child, and more.
This is far from the first story of its kind. The Daily Caller News Foundation reported in April 2021 that a two-time baby killer had requested to be transferred to a women’s prison where the mother of his child was housed.
Forty-six-year-old Jessica M. Hann, formerly known as Jason Michael Hann, underwent a state-funded gender transition before transferring to the Central California Women’s Facility under the name “Jessica.” He is currently housed there on death row, inmate records show.
This article has been corrected to reflect the location of Taycheedah Correctional Institution.
A psychologist at the Department of Veterans Affairs was placed on administrative leave following the publication of an article she co-authored that warned of the danger posed by gender ideology. Pictured: the VA building in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Alastair Pike/AFP/Getty Images)
A psychologist employed by a federal agency is being penalized for speaking out against gender ideology.
Three psychologists working in the Department of Veterans Affairspenned an op-ed late last month warning of the danger posed by allowing biological men to access women’s bathrooms and medical exam rooms. One of the authors, primary care psychologist Dr. Nina Silander, was placed on administrative leave following the article’s publication, according to documents obtained by The Washington Stand.
According to a letter Silander sent to her senators and representatives in Washington, D.C., she was “put on administrative leave due to patient care/safety concerns, which are entirely unsubstantiated given the reality that I have provided quality veteran services and received no complaints to date.”
“My co-authors … anticipate facing similar repercussions for their authorship of this article,” Silander wrote. “We maintain that we are within our rights as federal employees to comment, in our own time and with appropriate disclaimer, on matters of public concern and information already available to the public.”
In the article Silander co-authored with fellow VA clinical psychologists Catherine Novotny and Edward Waldrep, the trio wrote, “VA leadership, perhaps inspired by President [Joe] Biden’s executive order on ‘Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation,’ recently began … injecting concepts of gender ideology into our clinical work.”
They continued, “From here on, the distinction that will matter in patients is their self-identified gender, not their biological sex. We believe this effectively extinguishes the entire class of women, undermining many physical and legal protections for female veterans.”
“Single-sex spaces within the VA—those ensuring bodily privacy, such as bathrooms, exam rooms and medical exam areas—can now be accessed by males who self-identify as women,” the psychologists noted. “We view this VA policy as a betrayal of our female patients. Women face a disproportionate statistical risk of assault, harassment and voyeurism by men. And male violence patterns are unchanged by subjective feelings about gender.”
All three authors, with a combined 44 years of experience in clinical psychology, have a particular professional focus on sexual trauma recovery, a factor on which they laid particular emphasis in their article.
“Imagine a rape victim being forced to share a bedroom in a residential program with a man,” they wrote. “Even worse, according to VA policy, if the female veteran objects, she is required to relocate, despite being the complainant. What has happened to women’s security? What of bodily privacy?”
“The VA’s current policy is based on premises we believe are contradictory, anti-female and unconstitutional. It appears to be motivated by politics and fickle media narratives rather than by sound clinical practice,” the psychologists wrote. “The VA must restore single-sex spaces in which biology is the only relevant factor.”
According to a complaint filed by Silander with the VA’s Equal Opportunity Office and obtained by The Washington Stand, Silander’s VA manager, Dr. Christine Fultyn, inquired whether Silander “had in fact co-authored this article,” two days after the article’s publication.
One week later, Silander reported, Fultyn came to her office and “asked if I was aware of some of the backlash in response to the op-ed. She presented the detail memorandum for me to read, explaining that higher ups had determined to launch an investigation based on ‘patient safety concerns.’” Silander was then removed from her clinical role “effective immediately.”
That same day, Fultyn, along with “LGBQT+ Coordinators and members of our DEI Committee,” scheduled an event for Feb. 6 “to offer support and resources for anyone with concerns related to the recent op-ed.” The event was canceled on Feb. 5 to ensure that staff had adequate time to devote to “patient care/training/administrative tasks.”
Silander recounted that minutes later Fultyn “informed me that the investigation had ended without need for disciplinary action” and that Silander could return to clinical care the very next day. “I inquired about the investigation,” Silander stated, “but Dr. Fultyn was unable to provide additional information and referred me to submit a [Freedom of Information Act] request.”
According to a report by National Review, Silander’s co-author Waldrep has also been retaliated against for publishing the article. He reported he was subjected to “a barrage of backlash in a VA group chat he belonged to that’s dedicated to LGBT matters” and was eventually “kicked out of the chat.”
Waldrep had previously been targeted for questioning the VA’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, which included segregating therapy groups by race. He was, according to National Review, “stripped … of his ability to supervise students, prohibiting him from doing didactics trainings with rotations and from attending meetings where students were present.”
In the wake of Silander’s and Waldrep’s article and the retaliation against the two, Reps. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., and Eli Crane, R-Ariz., sent a letter to VA Secretary Denis McDonough outlining their concerns over the agency’s LGBTQ and DEI initiatives.
“The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) has started to enforce VHA Directive 1341(3) in a way that puts women veterans in danger,” the congressmen wrote. “Specifically, the VHA is allowing biological men into women-only single-sex spaces, including bathrooms, exam rooms, and medical exam areas irrespective of where the veteran is in their ‘transition’. We are concerned that this would put women veterans in danger … ”
The congressmen added, “The VA must ensure that women veterans are not being put at risk to appease radical transgender activists. … The VA must focus on delivering world-class healthcare and benefits to our nation’s heroes. The VA’s DEI efforts distract from your important mission and must end immediately.”
A Catholic couple in Indiana is asking the Supreme Court to hold the state accountable for keeping their child out of their home after they declined to use his chosen name and pronouns. In M.C. and J.C. v. Indiana Department of Child Services, Mary and Jeremy Cox are appealing to the Supreme Court after they were investigated by Indiana officials for refusing to refer to their son using pronouns and a name inconsistent with his biological sex.
Becket is pursuing the case on behalf of the Coxes, arguing state courts allowed Indiana to keep the child from living in his parents’ home due to their disagreement with the child’s gender identity because of their religious beliefs. Notably, upon completing the investigation, the state determined the allegations of abuse against Mary and Jeremy were unsubstantiated, but still argued that the disagreement over gender identity was distressing to their child.
Lori Windham, vice president and senior counsel at Becket, told Fox News Digital that no parent should ever have to endure what Mary and Jeremy have been forced to go through.
“Keeping a child away from loving parents because of their religious beliefs—even when the state admits there was no abuse or neglect—is wrong and it’s against the law,” she said. “The Court should take this case and make clear that other states can’t take children away because of ideological disagreements.”
In 2019, Mary and Jeremy’s son told them that he identified as a girl, but in line with their Catholic religious beliefs that God created human beings with an immutable sex, male or female, they did not believe in referring to him using pronouns and a name inconsistent with his biology.
In addition, the Coxes believed their son was struggling with underlying mental health conditions, including an eating disorder, so they sought therapeutic care for both.
But, in 2021, Indiana officials began investigating the Coxes after a report found they were not referring to their child by his preferred gender identity, removing the teen from their custody and placing him in a “gender-affirming” home. Despite the unsubstantiated claims of abuse, they claimed the Coxes made the child’s eating disorder worse even though it worsened after he was removed and placed in a transition-affirming home.
The Indiana Department of Child Services declined a Fox News Digital request for comment, saying, “DCS does not comment on ongoing litigation.”
Protesters of Kentucky Senate Bill SB150, known as the Transgender Health Bill, cheer on speakers during a rally on the lawn of the Kentucky Capitol in Frankfort, Ky., March 29, 2023. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley)
“This is what every parent is afraid of,” Mary and Jeremy Cox said in a press release. “We love our son and wanted to care for him, but the state of Indiana robbed us of that opportunity by taking him from our home and banning us from speaking to him about gender.”
“We are hopeful that the Justices will take our case and protect other parents from having to endure the nightmare we did,” they added.
When the case was first heard in trial court, Indiana officials argued the child “should be in a home where she is [ac]cepted for who she is” and restricted the Coxes’ visitation time to a few hours once a week, which barred them from speaking to him about their religious views on human sexuality and gender identity. Even though the court determined the Coxes were fit parents, it upheld the removal of their child which was later upheld by the appeals court.
“If this can happen in Indiana, it can happen anywhere,” Windhamn said. “Tearing a child away from loving parents because of their religious beliefs, which are shared by millions of Americans, is an outrage to the law, parental rights, and basic human decency. If the Supreme Court doesn’t take this case, how many times will this happen to other families?”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken—seen here on the final day of foreign affairs ministers’ meetings at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Nov. 29—reportedly sent a memo urging staff to avoid using terms like “brave men and women” and “manpower.” (Photo: Omar Havana/Getty Images)
Someone needs to tell the Biden administration that George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” isn’t an instruction manual.
The administration, and the Left more broadly, has adopted a form of totalitarian “newspeak” that aims to make criticism of transgender orthodoxy unthinkable by eliminating gendered words from the English language. This echoes the totalitarian government of “Nineteen-Eighty-Four,” which systematically seeks to destroy words in order to render criticism of the government unthinkable.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly sent a memo directing staff at the State Department—the government agency that represents America around the world—to avoid using “problematic” terms that suggest human beings are male and female.
National Review’s Ryan Mills first reported Blinken’s Feb. 5 memo, “Modeling DEIA: Gender Identity Best Practices.” Blinken reportedly claims he sent the memo to “support an inclusive work environment.” The State Department told National Review that it does not comment on leaked documents, which appears to confirm the memo’s legitimacy. DEIA stands for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.
Blinken instructs staff to use “gender-neutral language whenever possible,” warning that making assumptions about a person’s gender “can be problematic” and send a “harmful, exclusionary message.”
He recommends staff avoid terms such as “manpower,” “you guys,” “ladies and gentlemen,” and gender-specific words such as “mother/father,” “son/daughter,” and “husband/wife.” He suggests they use “labor force,” “everyone,” “folks,” “you all,” and terms such as “parent,” “child,” and “spouse” or “partner.”
In a hilarious twist of fate, Blinken’s memo urges staff to “avoid using phrases like ‘brave men and women on the front lines,’” in favor of “more specific language such as ‘brave first responders,’ ‘brave soldiers,’ or ‘brave DS agents.’” DS stands for diplomatic security.
Blinken appears not to have gotten the memo. On Nov. 11, just three months before sending the memo, he celebrated Veterans Day, posting on X, “we stand united in honoring the brave men and women who served our country.” How “problematic.”
This Veterans Day, we stand united in honoring the brave men and women who served our country. For your dedication, service, and the ultimate sacrifice for the nation, thank you. pic.twitter.com/skMxItShUn
Blinken’s slip-up illustrates the absurdity of attempting to root out biological truth from the English language. Human beings are male and female, and human reproduction requires male and female gametes. A small minority of people have disorders of sexual development, but these people do not represent a “third sex.” Most languages have three “genders”—male, female, and neuter, generally using the latter for inanimate objects. As the word itself implies, “neuter” represents the absence or removal of sex or gender, not a novel gender or sex.
Advocates of gender ideology aim to erase these biological facts from existence, acting as though banning the use of gendered terms will somehow magically change the way the world works. Ironically, they often do so in the name of “inclusivity,” even though telling people that they can’t tell the truth excludes all but the most ideologically pure acolytes.
The fact that Blinken himself used the forbidden term “brave men and women” underscores the ultimate futility of this brazen act of censorship. Blinken may instruct staff to use pronouns like “they/them” and “ze/zir,” but he knows that a boy is a boy and a girl is a girl. If he truly believes the nonsense he spouted in this memo, he’ll have to watch his own language 24/7 to make sure he doesn’t slip up and mistakenly refer to his child-assigned-female-at-birth as his “daughter.”
The language police in Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” demonstrate the potential abuses of unchecked government power, but they also show the ultimate futility of attempting to silence all dissent from government propaganda. The government succeeds in silencing the main character, the dissenter Winston Smith, yet the cost of doing so—an invasive surveillance apparatus and a Ministry of Truth dedicated to erasing all evidence contrary to the government’s version of the past—illustrates how difficult it is to silence the truth.
The transgender movement’s attempts to silence dissent by rendering basic biology unthinkable are dangerous but ultimately doomed to failure—not because they are “too inclusive,” but because they exclude the one thing that ultimately matters: the truth.
A male high school athlete who identifies as a female took first place in a girls’ high jump competition on Sunday, defeating all female athletes in the girls’ Division II high jump at the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association indoor track and field championship.
Maelle Jacques completed a 5-foot-2-inch jump to secure the top spot at the meet held at Plymouth State University, according to meet results. By comparison, 5-foot-8-inches was the lowest completed jump in the boys’ Division II championship meet. The winning jumper on the male side performed a 6-foot jump.
Jacques is a trans-identified Kearsarge Regional High School sophomore who competes as a girl. According to New Hampshire’s Track and Field Results Reporting System, the athlete is tied as the top-ranked high jumper in the division.
Women’s sports advocate Riley Gaines reacted to the news of Jacques winning the state title in a Wednesday post on X, which included a photo of the male athlete adorned with medals.
Maelle Jacques (male) won a state title in girls high jump this past weekend in New Hampshire
He won the women's category with a 5'2" jump. This is 10 inches lower than the best boys high jump at 6'0"
“Another less than mediocre man atop a women’s podium,” Gaines wrote. “He must be so proud.”
In a follow-up post, Gaines shared a video of Jacques performing the high jump that won him the state title.
Video of his high jump that won a girls state title. Watch as he celebrates when his female competitor doesn't clear the jump: pic.twitter.com/c4PUPP5wQH
The NHIAA, which oversees high school sports in the Granite State, did not immediately respond to The Christian Post’s request for comment.
NHIAA policies state that the association is “committed to providing transgender student-athletes with equal opportunities to participate in NHIAA athletic programs consistent with their gender identity.”
“Therefore, for purposes of sports participation, the NHIAA shall defer to the determination of the student and his or her local school regarding gender identification,” the NHIAA policy document reads. “In this regard, the school district shall determine a student’s eligibility to participate in a NHIAA gender specific sports team based on the gender identification of that student in current school records and daily life activities in the school and community at the time that sports eligibility is determined for a particular season.”
A school district is required to verify that a student is not merely pretending to identify as trans for the purpose of gaining an “unfair advantage” in competitive athletics. The athlete competed in four regular-season indoor track meets and won first place in the high jump each time, according to the results.
During a congressional hearing last year regarding the Biden administration’s proposed Title IX rule changes, Gaines stressed that inclusion cannot take priority over “safety and fairness” for women and girls. Under the proposed rule changes, policies that prevent males who identify as females from competing on female sports teams would be considered a violation of the law.
The women’s sports advocate also highlighted studies that have found trans-identifying male athletes typically maintain a biological advantage, on average, over women even after taking feminizing hormones. She also cited examples of female athletes suffering serious injuries after competing with men.
“There’s a place for everyone to play sports in this country,” the former University of Kentucky swimmer said. “But unsafe, unfair and discriminatory practices towards women must stop. Inclusion cannot be prioritized over safety and fairness.”
Gaines competed against and tied trans-identifying athlete Lia (Will) Thomas during the National College Athletics Association championships in 2022. Thomas competed on the men’s team at the University of Pennsylvania for three years before he began competing on the women’s team.
Despite tying with the male athlete in the 200-yard freestyle race for fifth place, she said she was denied the trophy during post-meet photos. According to Gaines, an NCAA official told her that it was necessary for Thomas to hold the trophy for photo purposes.
“It was clear to me, my teammates, and my competitors that they had reduced everything we had worked for our entire life to a photo-op to validate the feelings and the identity of a male,” Gaines said.
The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project uncovers documents showing how President Joe Biden is implementing and enforcing transgender policies across government agencies, despite what individual employees believe. Pictured: Biden greets the crowd at a Jan. 5 campaign event at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Woodrow Wilson, the father of the American administrative state, once wrote: “Government does now whatever experience permits or the times demand.”
Well, the times now “demand” the construction of a massive transgender architecture across the labyrinth of the federal government.
Perhaps if Wilson were able to gaze a century into the future and see the absurd result, the 28th American president would have hesitated before unleashing this unconstitutional form of government. We weren’t so lucky, and now here we are.
The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project has been busy investigating the federal government’s sophisticated bureaucratization of transgender policy. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)
The Oversight Project’s investigation has obtained and publicized several explosive documents over the past year that expose this fundamental shift. It’s time to identify the trend line.
Each government document, standing alone, is an experience in the absurd. Each reads as the Frankensteinian combination of a mechanical bureaucrat and a Drag Queen Story Hour.
We live in a time when a Supreme Court nominee can’t define the difference between a man and a woman, and yet an army of government human resource officers (whose names history will not remember) can fill reams of paper with exactly how workplace policies should govern, celebrate, and enforce every last detail of how to approach the matter of gender identity.
These policies stem from action from the very top.
Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports. Adults should be able to earn a living and pursue a vocation knowing that they will not be fired, demoted, or mistreated because of whom they go home to or because how they dress does not conform to sex-based stereotypes.
Biden’s executive order directed government agencies to review all policies, conform to the newly established principles of the Biden administration, take necessary actions, and produce plans demonstrating such.
With the stroke of a pen, and without any vote on the issue, the entire federal government workforce was forced to take the deeply unpopular side of a contentious social issue.
Biden’s order has been followed by a series of related orders, pronouncements, and initiatives.
Office of Personnel Management
In its “Guidance Regarding Gender Identity and Inclusion in the Federal Workplace,” dated March 2023, the Office of Personnel Management states that any federal employees who don’t comply with the use of fake pronouns may be disciplined for contributing to “an unlawful hostile work environment.”
OPM directs agencies to support “transitioning” employees by instating transgender points of contact and offering support for “workplace transitions” such as name and pronoun changes in employee profiles. The agency goes so far as to say that men should be allowed in ladies’ rooms and vice versa.
“Agencies should not restrict any employee to a single user facility instead of common facilities,” OPM directs.
🚽 Potty Politics from Biden Admin – Men in the Ladies Room 🧵
We unearthed the radical @USOPM policies that control all federal agencies.
Here, OPM mandates that men are allowed in the ladies room, even absent any indication they are actually "transgender" pic.twitter.com/OngVzQXf95
In the Biden administration, the Department of Agriculture is guided by a memo from its Sub-Working Group for the Memorandum on Advancing the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Persons Around the World.
We uncovered the infamous document showing that Biden administration officials directed Border Patrol agents to use the “preferred pronouns” of illegal aliens who are invading the United States.
The document from U.S. Customs and Border Protection [KM3] decrees: “DO NOT use ‘he, him, she, her’ pronouns until you have more information about, or provided by, the individual.”
🚨Biden Directs Border Patrol to use Illegal Aliens' Preferred Pronouns
We just obtained @CBP documents directing personnel to only use woke language when encountering individuals invading the United States pic.twitter.com/HwhiYJmqmm
A clinical guidance document obtained from the Federal Bureau of Prisons shows that the Biden administration is providing taxpayer-funded transgender operations for inmates. These surgeries include various procedures to remove, create, enlarge, and reshape sex organs request. Federal prisoners also may request feminizing or masculinizing hormone therapy from a prison warden.
The process is reviewed by a Transgender Utilization Review Advisory Group, which assesses whether a requested procedure is “medically needed” and makes recommendations to a medical director for final approval.
🚨 Biden is Transgendering Prisoners!
We obtained internal @OfficialFBOP guidance on exactly how. Doc at bottom of 🧵
Biden’s Treasury Department created an internal policy mandating use of the letter “X” as a gender marker, instead of the traditional “M” and “F.”
Treasury’s gender policy is overseen by a special “bureau designee” whose job is “to ensure adherence to this policy in all official communications and written materials.”
The Interior Department’s lengthy personnel bulletin on the matter attempts a definition of “gender identity” that hinges on “an individual’s internal sense of being male, female, another gender, no gender, of multiple genders, or fluid in gender.”
Even with this “fluid” definition, department employees who use the wrong name or pronoun are considered to be practicing unlawful discrimination.
🚨 Franky the Park Ranger is now Franny
We obtained the new Department of the @Interior bulletin on "Supporting Gender Transition in the Federal Workplace"
According to a “Manager’s Diversity Tip Sheet” for the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, managers should play an active role in mandating “gender identity inclusion.”
Managers should screen interviewers’ reports for new hires and crack down on noncompliance with gender policies.
Managers are encouraged to “carefully probe remarks suggesting the interviewee was uncomfortable” and “consider whether unconscious bias may have played a role.”
Managers also should proactively correct employees of the Antitrust Division who “misgender” coworkers and facilitate introductions by sharing their own preferred pronouns.
According to its Strategies for Gender Identity Inclusion in the Workplace, the division has plans in the works to further increase such diversity and inclusion.
🚨 We obtained Merrick Garland's @TheJusticeDept@JusticeATR woke managers guide to "Supporting Diversity in the Antitrust Division"
We highlight some of more outrageous policies, intended to screen out traditional Americans, that the weaponized DOJ is using in this 🧵 pic.twitter.com/HhRzLgOU6X
These and other documents reveal a massive muscle movement by the federal government under the Biden administration, in which minute details are given intricate thought and put into enforceable rules governing employee behavior. This movement includes creation of a class of transgender commissars throughout the alphabet soup of government agencies, complete with boards and multilayered organizational charts. The end result of these efforts, and what I expect to be the actual sinister motive, is an act of ideological segregation by the federal government. The end is not to protect other people’s feelings, but to strictly enforce ideological compliance and ensure a bureaucratic workforce aligned with radical political aims.
Incidentally, the same theory holds for the federal government’s vaccine mandate during the COVID-19 pandemic, which had the net effect of purging ideological dissenters.
Leftists are acutely aware of the federal government’s power to set standards. Workplace rules and dictates are likely to bleed down to state and local governments and corporations, as well as the wide community of federal contractors. This isn’t about just remaking the administrative state, it is about transgendering America. But at least we now know exactly what we need to rip out when sanity is returned to the White House.
Ohio has banned “gender-affirming care” for minors and restricted transgender women and girls from participating in sports teams. The state’s Republican-dominated Senate voted to override Republican Governor Mike DeWine’s veto of the bill.
Ohio has banned gender-affirming care for people under the age of 18. (ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)
The new law bans sex reassignment surgeries and hormone therapies and restricts mental health care for transgender individuals under 18. The measure also bans transgender girls and women from girls and women’s sports teams at both the K-12 and collegiate level, according to the Associated Press.
The law is expected to take effect in roughly 90 days.
The Associated Press contributed to this story. This is a developing story – check back for more details.
The real “science deniers” aren’t those skeptical of risks posed by climate change, but rather those who insist that men can get pregnant and give birth. (Photo: Andriano_cz/iStock/Getty Images)
If you say, “men give birth,” we all know your position on Hamas.
Now, why is that? Why, if a person says “men give birth” or says that men who say they are women should be allowed to compete in women’s sports, can we be virtually certain that the person sides with Hamas in its war to eradicate Israel?
Theoretically, the two claims—that men as well as women give birth and Israel is the villain in its war against Hamas—have absolutely no connection.
But they do—for two reasons.
Reason No. 1: When people have a distorted moral value system, that distortion applies to just about every issue. Just as a broken compass will almost always point in the wrong direction, a broken moral compass will do the same.
However, to be more precise, people who say, “men give birth” and who side with Hamas, i.e., progressives and leftists—liberals don’t believe men give birth or side with Hamas—do not merely have a broken moral compass. They have a moral compass that works in the way progressives and leftists have configured it: North always points south and east always points west.
Some examples of how the progressive compass works:
Women who object to men who say they are women competing in women’s sports—even in weightlifting—are haters and bigots (“transphobes”). The men who compete against them are heroes.
Adults who object to schools’ sponsoring drag queen performances for 6-year-olds are haters and bigots (“transphobes”). The teachers who take children to drag queen events are progressive, compassionate, and open-minded.
If a 9-year-old girl says she is a boy, the only therapists she is allowed to see are those who engage in “gender affirmation,” which is, of course, a left-wing Orwellian term. The one thing these therapists do not do is affirm the actual gender of the child.
All-black dorms on college campuses are anti-racist. Objecting to racially segregated dorms is racist.
Those who want to build walls or fences to prevent millions of people from illegally entering the country are xenophobic. Those who oppose building such barriers and declare their cities “sanctuary cities” are humanitarians.
Demanding that citizens show a voter ID before being allowed to vote—the norm in virtually every democracy in the world—constitutes “voter suppression.”
If we have fewer police officers, we will have safer cities.
Marriage is a product of patriarchal misogyny. It wasn’t created to protect and honor women, but to exploit them. Anyway, a woman needs a man as much as a fish needs a bicycle.
Scientists who express skepticism about catastrophic man-made global warming are “science deniers.”
These are some of the morally and factually perverse positions of the Left. Just about every individual who holds these positions also holds the morally perverse position that Israel is the villain and Hamas and its Palestinian supporters are the moral party.
The converse is also true: With the exception of Muslims, those who are anti-Israel also tend to believe that men give birth and the other examples of left-wing moral chaos. Few Muslims—certainly no religious ones—believe that men give birth or that children should be taken to drag queen shows. They just want Israel destroyed.
Reason No. 2: People who say that men give birth also say that Israel is the villain because these positions emanate from the same aim; namely, the destruction of Western civilization, beginning with the destruction of the West’s moral and social norms.
When people say that men give birth and that men can compete in women’s sports, they are seeking to undo the bases of Western civilization—truth, science and the belief that we live in an ordered universe. That is why the Left is so adamant about denying that sex (“gender”) is binary. The fact that there are only two sexes represents order—natural and, worse, divine.
Those on the Left unwittingly acknowledge the connection between their anti-Western positions and their Israel-hatred. They routinely attack Israel for being an “outpost of Western civilization.” That is precisely what Israel is, which tells you a great deal about both of Israel’s enemies—the Left and much of the Muslim world.
The Democrats who run California love “transitioning” kids, including chemically and surgically sterilizing them. But a courageous group of residents is betting California voters are less radical than their politicians and that the tide can turn against gender ideology even on the West Coast.
A proposed ballot initiative by Protect Kids California would put the Golden State’s radical “trans kids” agenda — which has previously been checked only by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s presidential ambition — before the people.
The initiative would enact three policies:
First, it would end the practice of government schools socially transitioning children without telling parents. Schools would be required to inform parents about mental health issues, including gender-identity issues, and to have parental permission before pretending a boy is a girl, or vice versa.
Second, the law would require that sex-specific spaces and sports be based on sex, rather than self-declared “gender identity.” Boys would no longer be allowed to participate in girls’ sports or share the girls’ locker room, showers, and other private spaces.
Finally, the law would prohibit medically transitioning children with chemicals, hormones, and surgeries in an impossible quest to change a child’s sex. Chemically castrating boys and amputating the healthy breasts of troubled adolescent girls would be illegal.
These worthy goals might seem impossible. Even as many other states have enacted such policies, California’s leaders have doubled down on radical gender ideology and transitioning children. But the organizers of the initiative point to polling to argue that California’s voters are on their side on this issue, even if Californians tend to vote for Democrats who are in the grip of gender ideology and the transgender lobby. Erin Friday, one of the leaders of the effort, is a lifelong Democrat, and she is convinced there are many more like her who find the transgender industry’s targeting of children abhorrent.
She may be right. The campaign’s website highlights polling showing that the public is with them, and in an email to me, Friday shared additional polling commissioned by the feminist Women’s Liberation Front showing overwhelming support for the child-protection policies this ballot initiative would enact.
This ballot initiative would protect children from outside California as well. As Friday has explained, California is a sanctuary state for sexual experiments on children. In the name of gender ideology, California now refuses to return runaways to their out-of-state parents, pays for minors to be chemically and surgically castrated, and shields doctors who flee to California after breaking the laws of other states. Winning in California is a victory for everyone.
Thus, California’s Democrat establishment will do everything it can to stop this. The state attorney general has already written a biased and inaccurate summary of the measure (the title line is literally “RESTRICTS RIGHTS OF TRANSGENDER YOUTH”) that by law is included on the petition pages. And additional resistance is sure to follow — for example, petition signatures will be rigorously scrutinized by people who otherwise denounce election-integrity measures as racist.
The debate over the measure will be ugly. Its opponents will undoubtedly resort to suicide threats early and often, declaring that this law will push kids to kill themselves. It won’t, but telling kids to take themselves hostage is the transgender movement’s main weapon. After all, the only harm that can come from not transitioning is self-harm. Furthermore, there is no good evidence that castrating or mutilating kids reduces suicides. And in other contexts, we recognize that constantly threatening suicide is manipulative and abusive.
The ugliness won’t end just because the election does. If this measure gets on the ballot and passes, there will be lawsuits. There will be protests that turn into riots. There will be promises of noncompliance from government officials and employees. But it will all be worth it.
If gender ideology goes down in California, it will fall everywhere. Even the most committed Democrats (and the most craven Republicans — looking at you, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine) will have to acknowledge that it is a political liability. And the collapse could be swift. Many people went along with radical gender ideology not out of conviction, but because they were afraid of being caught on the wrong side of the latest front in the cultural revolution. They will happily abandon it if their fear is taken away, and defeating transgender radicalism in California will do that.
There is work to do before that happy future is realized. The initiative has yet to qualify for the ballot, let alone pass. California residents can print out the petition, sign it, and mail it in. They can also volunteer. And everyone can donate to help fund the effort. Collecting more than a half-million valid signatures isn’t free, to say nothing of countering the mass of lies the media will tell about it.
But it is worth the attempt. 2023 brought a lot of victories in protecting children in Republican states from transgender insanity, but victory requires going on offense, even — especially — in California.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
The Ohio House of Representatives voted Wednesday to override Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto of a bill that protects children from irreversible transgender sex change procedures and medical interventions, such as puberty blockers and hormones. Pictured: DeWine speaks to reporters in Columbus, Ohio, on June 24. (Photo: Jason Mowry/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images)
The Ohio House of Representatives voted Wednesday to override Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto of a bill that would protect children from irreversible transgender sex-change procedures and medical interventions, such as puberty blockers and hormones.
The state’s House of Representatives met Wednesday afternoon to vote 65-28 to override the governor’s veto.It now heads to the senate.
Activists and organizations that backed the bill were quick to celebrate the news on Wednesday.
“Ohio and the entire nation have spoken,” said Center for Christian Virtue Policy Director David Mahan in a statement. “It’s not okay to chemically sterilize and mutilate children, and no clinic can transform little girls into little boys with pills and scalpels. Additionally, HB68 will protect women’s and girls’ privacy rights and guarantee them a fair playing field and the opportunity to win athletic scholarships.”
“I want to thank Representatives Click and Powell for courageously championing this legislation, and Speaker Stephens for acting swiftly to protect our kids from the dangerous consequences of Governor DeWine’s veto of HB68,” he added. “I now urge the Senate to do the same.”
🚨 The Ohio House voted (65-28) to override Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto of HB 68!
But organizations opposing the legislation, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, condemned the override.
“This state-sponsored vendetta against some of Ohio’s most vulnerable young people is beyond cruel,”said the ACLU of Ohio in an “X” post. “We stand in solidarity with all trans youth.”
“This bill bans gender-affirming care for trans youth & restricts participation in sports matching their identity,” added the Human Rights Campaign in another “X” post. “Even after Ohioans told politicians to leave medical decisions alone, they put themselves in control.”
NEW: The Ohio House has overridden Gov. DeWine’s veto of HB68. This bill bans gender-affirming care for trans youth & restricts participation in sports matching their identity.
Even after Ohioans told politicians to leave medical decisions alone, they put themselves in control. pic.twitter.com/CoopOSpIFC
On Friday, DeWine issued an “emergency” executive order to ban sex-reassignment surgeries for minors (but not hormones and puberty blockers) just one week after he vetoed House Bill 68, the Enact Ohio Saving Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act.
The SAFE Act would ban cross-sex hormones and so-called puberty blockers for children, measures DeWine’s executive order apparently omits. The bill would also have addressed fairness in women’s sports, an issue DeWine’s executive order also does not address.
“Although I vetoed … House Bill 68, I stated clearly in my veto message that I agreed with the General Assembly that no gender-transition surgeries should be performed on anyone under the age of 18, and I directed agencies under my purview to draft rules to ban this practice in Ohio,” DeWine said in his Jan. 5 executive order.
He also declared that “an emergency exists requiring the immediate adoption of rules 3701-59-06 and 3701-83-60 of the Ohio Administrative Code.”
According to the executive order, the regulations “would prohibit gender-transition surgeries on anyone under the age of 18 in Ohio’s hospitals and health care facilities, including ambulatory surgical facilities.”
National organizations like Catholic Vote and the Alliance Defending Freedom commended Ohio legislators for standing up for the state’s parents.
“DeWine has turned his back on the values of Ohio families, but we are grateful to have safeguards such as this to protect the future of Ohio’s children,” Logan Church, the political director of CatholicVote, said in a statement. “CatholicVote engaged our grassroot supporters throughout the state to urge their representatives to vote the right way, and we will continue that initiative with the Senate. We hope the Senate promptly follows in the House’s footsteps to preserve the principles Ohioans hold dear.”
Matt Sharp, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, emphasized: “Now and always, young people deserve the loving embrace of family members who guide them toward this truth rather than be subjected to risky, often irreversible, and life-altering experimentation and drugs. These approaches are dangerous, as they block healthy puberty, alter hormonal balance, and remove healthy organs and body parts.”
“No one has the right to harm children, and, thankfully, states have the power—and duty—to protect them,” he added. “Now, we urge the Ohio Senate to act and join over 20 other states and several European countries in fighting for truth and curtailing the deployment of harmful surgeries and drugs that are devastating countless lives.”
Only five days have passed since a 17-year-old shot up his school in Perry, Iowa, killing one and injuring five. Yet anyone looking for updates about the tragedy would be hard-pressed to find it on the front pages of any corporate outlet, unusual given the media’s typical amplification of such tragedies. The press is known for lengthy coverage glamorizing killers, inspiring copycat acts, and using shootings to push gun control. When covering tragedies that contradict leftist claims, however, Democrats and their cronies in the corrupt media quickly go radio silent.
Those media that did bother to keep coverage of the issue going, like NBC, sought to shift blame from the shooter to sexual sanity advocates such as Libs of TikTok Founder Chaya Raichik. She dares to report on the growing trend of violent transgender shooters, including details linking the Iowa school shooter to gender-fluid identity politics.
“Each time there is a mass shooting where the shooter’s identity is possibly LGBT, you and other conservative influencers appear to fixate on this and suggest to your millions of followers that people with LGBT identities are prone to violence,” NBC’s LGBT issues writer Matt Lavietes wrote in a comment request Raichik posted. “What would you say to your critics who say you’re stoking fear, hatred, and potential violence against a marginalized group of people?”
Democrats and the press followed a similar playbook in 2023 when a woman masquerading as a man shot and killed three children and three staff at a small Christian school in Nashville. They framed Christians as the perpetrators of the shooting rather than the victims and blamed Tennessee gun laws, gun lovers, and laws protecting children from drag shows and irreversible sexual disfigurement. Some outlets even complained that authorities “misgendered” the shooter.
When a man shot and killed five at Old National Bank in Lousiville, Kentucky in the name of furthering the left’s gun-control agenda, gun grabbers also used the shooter’s logic to fuel Democrats’ push for unconstitutional red-flag laws.
The corporate media’s double standards on shootings should not surprise Americans, 39 percent of whom say they do not trust media at all. These double standards should, however, enrage them.
For noticing patterns in violence among gender-indoctrinated kids and warning that taking away Second Amendment rights won’t solve the mental health crisis or the weakening family and community ties that exacerbate these tragedies, the media believes conservatives deserve more criticism. The press is perfectly content smearing their political enemies with the acts of those so evil they’d murder children, while refusing ever to look in the mirror.
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, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, on Friday issued an executive order prohibiting gender-transition surgeries on minors in his state and issued draft administrative rules on so-called gender-affirming care for minors and adults. DeWine’s directives came a week after his Dec. 29 veto of House Bill 68, the Saving Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act, which would restrict any gender-affirming care for minors in Ohio and bar biological males who “identify” as females from participating in girls’ and women’s interscholastic athletics.
Heritage Foundation legal scholar Sarah Parshall Perry herewith takes issue with DeWine’s decision. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine just vetoed a bill that would have protected women and children in the Buckeye State.
HB 68 is a commonsense bill with broad support designed to do two things: Protect minor children from irreversible damage by banning experimental surgeries and cross-sex hormones for those under 18 and prevent males from competing in female scholastic athletics.
70% of Americans agree that both minor children shouldn’t be rammed through gender-transition procedures and that boys don’t belong in women’s sports, which makes sense considering that those aren’t controversial positions. But Gov. DeWine would rather capitulate to a vocal minority screaming “settled science” or “trans women are women.”
"Women's sports is not a space nor a retirement plan for failed male athletes".
Without evidence, he also claims that his own executive action on the issue would have a better chance of surviving judicial review. He’s wrong, and the lawmakers of Ohio should show him by exercising a veto override before women and children have to pay the price for his political correctness.
Two of the Republicans vying for the GOP presidential nomination are refusing to weigh in on a key culture-war moment—the governor of Ohio vetoing a bill protecting children from gender ideology. Pictured: former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former South Carolina Gov. and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley speak during a break in the fourth Republican presidential primary debate at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on Dec. 6, 2023. (Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
Two of the Republicans vying for the GOP presidential nomination are refusing to weigh in on a key culture-war moment—the governor of Ohio vetoing a bill protecting children from gender ideology. That bill, called the Enact Ohio Saving Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act, would bar physicians from performing transgender-reassignment surgeries on children as well as from prescribing cross-sex hormones or drugs to block children’s puberty. It also would allow students to sue if they are deprived of a fair playing field in sports due to transgender activism (such as a biological boy playing on a girls’ volleyball team) and protect parental rights to raise their children according to their biological sex.
Since many high-profile lawmakers and conservatives have focused their efforts on fighting transgender activism in recent years, Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto of the SAFE Act drew the outrage of former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who slammed the Republican for failing to protect children.
Presidential candidates Nikki Haley and Chris Christie have not yet weighed in on the topic. Pressed by The Daily Signal to share their thoughts on the governor’s veto, both Haley and Christie remained silent. Their reticence demonstrates a rift in the GOP field on the topic: While Trump, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy have indicated that lawmakers should act to protect children from destructive gender ideology, Haley and Christie have suggested that the law should stay out of the matter and parents should decide.
Haley has recently drawn heavy fire on the topic. In a June CBS interview clip that resurfaced shortly before the December presidential debate, though she criticized the idea of children undergoing permanent transgender sex changes before they turn 18, Haley suggested that “the law” should stay out of the matter.
“What care should be on the table when a 12-year-old child in this country assigned female at birth says, ‘Actually, I feel more comfortable living as a boy’?” asked her interviewer.
“Well, I think the law should stay out of it,” Haley said. “This is a job for the parents to handle.”
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former South Carolina Gov. and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy participate in the fourth Republican presidential primary debate at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on Dec. 6, 2023. (Photo: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
During the most recent presidential debates, moderator Megyn Kelly questioned Christie about his stances on this so-called gender-affirming care for children—transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers.
“How is it that you think a parent should be able to ‘OK’ these surgeries, never mind the sterilization of a child, and aren’t you way too out of step on this issue to be the Republican nominee?” she asked him.
“No, I’m not,” Christie responded, “because Republicans believe in less government, not more.” The presidential candidate went on to emphasize the importance of defending parental rights, though he indicated that he believes transgender interventions for children are dangerous.
.@megynkelly goes after Chris Christie for his stances on trans surgeries for kids: "How is it that you think a parent should be able to ok these surgeries, never mind the sterilization of a child, and aren't you WAY to out of step on this issue to be the Republican nominee?" pic.twitter.com/jZiLs4xPyS
Trump, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy clearly condemned DeWine’s veto.
“DeWine has fallen to the Radical Left,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Saturday, vowing that he would no longer promote the Republican governor. “No wonder he gets loudly booed in Ohio every time I introduce him at rallies, but I won’t be introducing him any more.”
“I’m finished with this ‘stiff.’ What was he thinking?” Trump asked. “The bill would have stopped child mutilation, and prevented men from playing in women’s sports.”
“Legislature will hopefully overturn,” he added. “Do it FAST!!!”
DeSantis similarly slammed DeWine, saying in a social media post: “The Ohio legislature should override the veto done by Trump-endorsed Gov. DeWine. I’ve signed both of these bills—and I was right to do so. Girls should be able to compete with fairness and integrity in sports. And these procedures are irreversible and should not be allowed, period.”
“There are two genders,” the presidential candidate said in a social media post. “Boys shouldn’t compete with girls in girls’ sports. Kids shouldn’t be subjected to genital mutilation & chemical castration when they suffer mental health lapses. Shame on Ohio Governor Mike DeWine for this failure.”
DeWine framed his Friday veto as an effort to bring consensus on a divisive issue and to avoid having the government decide what medical decisions are best for children. He also echoed the claims of pro-transgender activists that children will commit suicide if they don’t undergo so-called gender-affirming care, such as testosterone or estrogen injections or double mastectomies.
“Were House Bill 68 to become law, Ohio would be saying that the state, that the government, knows better what is best for a child than the two people who love that child the most, the parents,” DeWine said.
The governor has not responded to requests for comment from The Daily Signal. Ohio lawmakers have vowed that they will overturn the governor’s veto, and have scheduled a special legislative session to do so, according to The Washington Stand.
Michael Shellenberger reveals the parallels between the Lefts gender dysphoria affirmation and mental illness. “Abrosexual” is a relatively new sexual preference term that could require an editorial explanation according to the United Kingdom media outlet Metro.
Emma Flint, a freelance journalist, wrote an op-ed for Metro’s “Platform” section, a portion of the website dedicated to “opinions, real life stories and analysis from experts in their field.” In the piece, she explained how she came out as “abrosexual” in 2020 only to be confronted by a close friend claiming that “this doesn’t sound real.”
“For those of you who don’t know what abrosexuality is, in layperson’s terms, it simply means when someone’s sexual identity fluctuates and changes,” Flint wrote.
She noted that she did not know about the term until two years ago when she was 30 years old. Flint lamented abrosexuality was still not more well-known.
Emma Flint explains the term “abrosexual.” (Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images/Fairfax Media via Getty Images)
“When I was growing up, I’d never heard the term abrosexual – you were either straight, gay, or lesbian as far as nineties society was concerned. Anything else was made up,” she wrote. “Of course, we know that’s far from the truth – but societal blind spots mean we learn terms much slower than if they’re readily accessible.”
Flint added, “When I tell people that I’m abrosexual, I’m often greeted by a blank expression, followed by a question of what the term means. And questions are fine, as long as they’re respectful. I’m not expecting everyone to know what it means – hell, I didn’t until two years ago – but you should always listen with respect.”
U.K. schools have reportedly been allowing students to experiment with “neo genders.” (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)
Dictionary.com reports that early versions of the term “abrosexual” came from 2013 with an abrosexual flag making social media rounds in 2016. The term, however, has still not found mainstream approval.
“Eventually, I hope that abrosexuality will be seen as normal, just another identity that someone might have, and not regarded as a way to be ‘on trend’, as some of the hurtful comments I’ve received suggest,” Flint wrote. “Acceptance can only come from education, and stepping outside your comfort zone to familiarize yourselves with terminology you might not know.”
“There’s a whole wealth of LGBTQ+ knowledge online that people would benefit from learning, so that ignorance isn’t the main language so many of us speak.”
A California district has suggested that there are at least 10 different sexual orientations. (iStock)
In June, there were also reports of United Kingdom schools allowing students to experiment with “neo genders” and identifying as non-human animals.
“Students in schools across Britain have been allowed to identify as dinosaurs, horses and moons, amid warnings that teachers should address such incidents as a safeguarding issue,” The Telegraph reported.
Lindsay Kornick is an associate editor for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to lindsay.kornick@fox.com and on Twitter: @lmkornick.
With legislative battles heating up, detransitioners fighting back, and families openly sharing their heartbreaking plights, the transgender battle is entering some startling — and perhaps encouraging — new phases. As these changes unfold, “Generation Indoctrination” host Brandon Showalter is back with a new season of his eye-opening documentary podcast series, providing a unique lens into this diabolical issue.
WARNING: Adult themes and discussions are present in this series. This is not appropriate for children.
This past year was unlike any before it in terms of visible opposition to trans policies, particularly the experimental medicalization of gender confusion via puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and the performing of irreversible surgeries on gender-confused minors.
Across the U.S. South and Midwest, 17 state legislatures implemented bans on gender medicalization on youth and, as of this episode’s publication, a bill that would do so is sitting on the desk of the governor of Ohio, which will become the 18th state this year if the legislation if enacted into law. The state-level legislative push is perhaps the greatest indicator that public awareness has reached a point where the issue cannot be ignored nationally and it is likely to be discussed in the context of the 2024 presidential election (hear more about this on the premier episode).
In this inaugural episode of the third season of “Generation Indoctrination,” The Christian Post engages lawmakers who have been instrumental at the state level to protect children from irreversible medical harm in addition to public policy experts and leaders working to address these and related issues on the national scene, including a left-wing radical feminist activist and author who has been resisting gender identity ideology and policies for nearly a decade.
The mob’s stranglehold of speech on college campuses may be beginning to loosen thanks to legal challenges aimed at strengthening the free-speech rights of college professors and students. Just look at Western Michigan University. In 2021, WMU fired adjunct music professor Daniel Mattson solely for writing about his religious views off-campus on his own time. After a remarkably short seven months of litigation, Mattson was vindicated this year on Oct. 31.
Mattson, a professional symphony trombonist, had worked for WMU’s School of Music since 1999. He performed in the university’s Western Brass Quintet, comprised of School of Music faculty members. As part of his duties, Mattson also performed with the Western Winds, a student-faculty ensemble.
In 2009, Mattson returned to Catholicism and left behind his prior homosexual lifestyle. For several years, he wrote articles and spoke at public events explaining how the church should engage with people who experience same-sex attraction. All the while, Mattson strictly compartmentalized his religious activity from his work at WMU. He never initiated a discussion about his religious beliefs or views concerning sexuality with students.
Punished for Christian Ideas
In 2017, Mattson’s writing culminated in Why I Don’t Call Myself Gay: How I Reclaimed My Sexual Reality and Found Peace — an autobiographical account of his experience with same-sex attraction. He advocated that the church should sympathetically engage people who experience same-sex attraction while offering Catholicism as a better way.
In October 2021, Mattson agreed to perform as a guest artist at the School of Music. A recently appointed faculty member and LGBT activist discovered Mattson’s writings on his experiences with homosexuality and his recommitment to the Catholic faith. She launched a campaign to cancel Mattson’s planned events. As she posted to Twitter: “I won’t be going to any recitals by ex-gay activists, thanks.” She engaged students, faculty members, and DEI administrators in this effort. In the weeks leading up to the recital, there was extensive discussion over email and on social media among faculty and students, many of whom expressed support for the idea that Mattson’s presence on campus was “harmful” to students who identify as LGBT.
The administration’s response to the outcry over Mattson’s religious speech was swift and harsh. Matson was first stripped of his core duties, hindered in important school activities, and finally, WMU refused to renew his teaching contract.
Mattson refused to allow activists to cancel him without a fight. He challenged WMU’s forcing him to choose between earning a livelihood as a world-class artist and mentor for aspiring musicians on campus and his life as a religious believer and witness for conflicted Catholics off-campus.
Violations of Free Speech and Religion
In March 2023, Mattson, represented by the Center for Individual Rights, a nonprofit public interest law firm, filed a federal lawsuit on Mattson’s behalf challenging his firing as a violation of his rights to free exercise of religion and freedom of speech under the First and 14th Amendments.
WMU’s efforts to cancel Mattson ran afoul of both recent and longstanding Supreme Court precedent guaranteeing the right to religious free speech. Just last year, in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Supreme Court reaffirmed a longstanding rule that government action that burdens a sincere religious practice in a manner that is not “neutral” must be justified by a compelling government interest and must be narrowly tailored to that interest.
In the 2018 decision Masterpiece Cake Shop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the court found that a plaintiff may also prove a free exercise violation by showing evidence of government hostility to religion. Here, the school administration had made its views clear in an email sent to the entire school community. “Mr. Mattson is also a high-visibility advocate for the position that homosexuality is a chosen lifestyle that is to be avoided. He has stated his position strongly and widely. While he is free to express his beliefs, we cannot ignore the fact that they are harmful to members of our LGBTQ community, particularly our students.”
Another body of law going back to the 1960s prohibits retaliation by a public employer against an employee on the basis of protected speech by the employee, where that speech was directed to an issue of public concern and was not made as part of the employee’s official duties.
Confronted with the controlling legal authority in Mattson’s suit and his refusal to let WMU cancel him so cavalierly, WMU was again swift to respond. Rather than attempting to defend its sectarian or viewpoint-based punishment in a court of law, less than seven months after Mattson filed suit, WMU settled the case and agreed to pay Mattson substantial damages and attorney’s fees.
These are the workings of the leftist cancel mob. Instead of a wholly government-controlled censorship regime, militant activist mobs have informally coordinated with DEI bureaucrats. Together, they have cowed administrators to censor, punish, expel, and fire students and professors who contradicted leftist orthodoxies about skin color and sex. These radicals have met the slightest deviations from DEI orthodoxy with draconian punishments, and sincere religious believers have suddenly been at risk of losing their livelihoods.
Even more rewarding than the financial compensation for Mattson is the vindication in standing up for the rights of all individuals to religious expression regardless of what others think. As more victories like this pile up, we may hope that we’re reaching a turning point in the battle against cancel culture.
J. Robert Renner is the Deputy General Counsel of the Center for Individual Rights and counsel of record for Mr. Mattson.
The U.S. Department of the Interior sent an internal bulletin to employees in September on “Supporting Gender Transition in the Federal Workplace.”
According to documents published on X by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, the department sent out guidelines establishing “gender identity” as a protected class under its federal policy. “Gender identity,”according to the Interior Department, is defined as “an individual’s internal sense of being male, female, another gender, no gender, of multiple genders, or fluid in gender.”
“The document states ‘it is not DOI’s intent to be overly protective,’” the Oversight Project reported, “but then goes on to establish policies governing confidentiality and privacy, dress and appearance, names and pronouns, inclusive language, restrooms and related facilities, workplace assignments and duties, recordkeeping, sick and medical leave, and hiring process.”
“An employee’s transition should be treated with as much sensitivity and confidentiality as any other private or highly personal life experiences,” the department memo reads. “Transitioning employees often want as little publicity about their transition as possible.”
The bulletin also outlines codes for “dress and appearance,” encouraging employees to “evaluate, and consider eliminating, where appropriate, gender-specific dress and appearance rules.”
“Once an employee has informed management that they are transitioning, consistent with the employee’s wishes, DOI dress codes should be applied to employees transitioning to a different gender in the same way that they are applied to other employees of that gender, as appropriate,” the policy reads.
Employees with the National Park Service (NPS) apparently violated the agency dress code during an LGBT “pride” celebration this summer when staff held a parade at Yosemite National Park featuring celebrity environmentalist drag queen Pattie Gonia. While the NPS uniform code expressly prohibits employee participation in demonstrations or public events “wherein the wearing of the uniform could be construed as agency support for a particular issue, position, or political party,” staff draped their uniforms in activist apparel anyway.
In October, the drag queen was featured by the department again with a bizarre clip promoting the false narrative that “queer rights are more under attack than ever” alongside Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.
The transgender policy deployed by Interior leadership in September urges employees to “use gender-neutral language in broad communications to avoid assumptions about gender identity.” Examples of “pronouns,” according to the policy, are “they, them, theirs, ze/hir/hirs, ze/zir/zirs, xe/xem/xyrs.” Bathroom use is up to personal discretion, it says, and those who refuse to abide by departmental policies are warned of retribution for “unlawful discrimination.”
“Repeated, intentional refusal to use the employee’s affirming name/gender/pronouns, and/or repeated reference to the employee’s dead name/gender/pronouns by supervisors/managers, or coworkers is contrary to the goal of treating all employees with dignity and respect,” the policy states. “Such intentional conduct could constitute unlawful discrimination.”
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.
Parents Joe and Serena Wailes were horrified to discover that their 11-year-old daughter had been assigned to not only room with, but also to share a bed with, a boy on her school trip. (Photo: Screenshot/YouTube)
DENVER—Parents Joe and Serena Wailes were shocked and horrified to discover that their 11-year-old daughter had been assigned to not only room with, but also share a bed with, a boy on her school trip. That boy identified as a transgender girl, the Wailes say, and his parents had allegedly told the school district that he was operating under “stealth mode”—meaning that his gender identity was to be kept secret.
In an interview with The Daily Signal earlier this month, the Wailes shared their experience in detail—how their daughter felt, how the school trip chaperones handled the matter, and what they want from the school district moving forward.
Represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, the Waileses are calling on the Colorado-based Jefferson County Board of Education and Jefferson County Public Schools to clarify “whether JCPS will continue this practice of intentionally withholding information about rooming accommodations from parents like the Waileses, who object to their children rooming with a student of the opposite sex, regardless of the other student’s gender identity.”
UCLA’s Jessie Smith looks on in a women’s beach volleyball match against Cal Poly on the campus of California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California, on April 16, 2022. Now, another Californian, this one a teen boy who identifies as a girl might win a girls’ volleyball scholarship at the University of Washington, depriving a deserving girl of the award. (Photo: Erick Rasco/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images)
A California transgender volleyball player may become the first biological male recipient of a collegiate Division 1 athletic scholarship designated for women. Tate Drageset, 17, verbally committed to the University of Washington, where Drageset is poised to claim one of 12 Division 1 volleyball scholarships designated for female players, Reduxx first reported on Dec. 13.
A class of 2025 volleyball commitments Twitter page announced Drageset’s intention to play as an outside hitter at the University of Washington.
— Class of 2025 Volleyball Commits (@classof2025vb) June 27, 2023
In high school, Drageset earned MVP honors at the Girls Junior National Championships and was named the California Interscholastic Federation’s Division 5 Player of the Year for 2022-23.
The NCAA needs to prevent players like Drageset from taking scholarships from females, former Division 1 volleyball player and now Independent Women’s Forum spokeswoman Adriana McLamb told The Daily Signal.
“As a former Division 1 NCAA volleyball athlete and current recruiting coordinator, I know and see the uphill battle athletes are facing and will face by competing against a male for roster spots and scholarships designated for women,” McLamb said. “The sad truth is that schools will inevitably recruit the stronger, faster male athlete because the NCAA allows it.”
“The root of this issue is the NCAA, because they have outright refused to set parameters that safeguard their female athletes,” said McLamb, who now coaches aspiring collegiate female volleyball players.
In September 2022, another biological male identifying as a girl spiked the ball in the face of female high school volleyball player Payton McNabb in North Carolina, leaving her with severe head and neck injuries resulting in long-term concussion symptoms.
University of Washington Assistant Director of Athletic Communications Michael Bruscas declined to comment on Drageset.
“NCAA rules prohibit universities from commenting on any student-athlete who has not signed a letter of intent, regardless of whether they are being actively recruited or not, even in instances where media reports are claiming that a verbal commitment has been made,” he told The Daily Signal.
Drageset currently plays on the highest-level team at a Santa Monica, California, volleyball club. According to Drageset’s Hudl account, an online platform for coaches to review player performance, the athlete is 6 feet tall.
An anonymous source identified by Reduxx as the parent of a minor player in the Southern California Volleyball Association community revealed concerns about “the steady escalation of Drageset’s participation in women’s volleyball,” Reduxx reported.
The source said every parent in the volleyball association was aware of Drageset’s participation, but they were afraid to discuss it.
“Everyone is scared of how their child will be treated if they speak up,” the parent told Reduxx. “The stealing of positions and opportunities has been infuriating, and so sad, when you see how it affects the girls. There is no concern for their mental health or safety after being replaced.”
“Stealing the already few opportunities for women at the collegiate level,” Gaines wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “How can he be proud?”
Male takes women's volleyball scholarship at @UW … a soon-to-be Big 10 school
Stealing the already few opportunities for women at the collegiate level. How can he be proud?@UWVolleyball should rescind the scholarship if they really care about women. He can play with the men. pic.twitter.com/Dj7VcDWlW4
A recently elected Pennsylvania school board president made his priorities clear this month when she was sworn in using controversial books, including sexually explicit material.
On Dec. 4, Karen Smith, a Democrat who was elected to lead the state’s third-largest school district in November, was sworn in with a stack of books, including sexually explicit material.
“Thank you for your trust in me, I do not take this hand lightly,” Smith said when she became president of the Central Bucks County School Board. “To my supporters, I am so very thankful. To those of you who have challenged me, I will do all I can to hear your voices and concerns.”
However, based on the books upon which she swore an oath, Smith’s pledge to keep an open mind to parental concerns was hardly austere. According to Fox News, one of the books used in the swearing ceremony included Flamer, by Mike Curato, published in 2020.
“[Flamer] tells the story of a character who is bullied at a Boy Scouts summer camp for ‘acting in a manner considered stereotypical of gay men,’” Fox News reported. “The graphic novel includes characters discussing pornography, erections, masturbation, penis size, and an illustration that depicts naked teenage boys.”
Other books included in the stack upon which she was sworn in were Night, by Elie Wiesel; The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison; and All Boys Aren’t Blue, by George M. Johnson. At least three of the books Smith was sworn in on were listed in the top 5 of the American Library Association’s (ALA) “most challenged books” of 2022. The national library group’s activism promoting these books in local curriculums has led conservative policymakers in at least nine states to begin severing ties with the ALA. Last week, Texas, which ended its tax-subsidized affiliation with the ALA in August, passed new rules to keep “sexually explicit” books out of school libraries.
Smith’s decision to use material endorsed by far-left activists to infiltrate classrooms illustrates how identity politics has become embraced as a cynical, secular religion. Had Smith been genuine with a pledge to hear district parents’ concerns, she might have chosen different material to be sworn in on.
Silvi Haldipur, a mom of two boys in Bucks County schools, said she was previously “horrified” by LGBT and antisemitic remarks in the boardroom of the east Pennsylvania district. However, parents in this district could have more difficulty being involved in their children’s education moving forward. The school board’s new Democrat majority immediately voted to “freeze two policies related to library books that passed last year along with other policies.” This includes halting a previous update to the Library Materials policy that allowed parents to challenge certain books in the classroom.
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.
U.S. Capitol Police are continuing to investigate the filming of a sex tape inside a prominent hearing room at the Hart Senate Office Building, a source told Fox News on Monday. Fox has learned that the Senate sex tape was recorded last week. But time of day is unclear. A Congressional security source is promising a “thorough investigation” with interviews upcoming. While there are currently no pending charges in the case, a security source did not rule out the possibility.
The investigation comes after a staffer filmed an amateur pornography video inside a Senate hearing room. The identities of the men in the video have not been confirmed. The Daily Caller, which broke news of the video, reported that the footage was leaked in a chat and was “shared in a private group for gay men in politics.”
U.S. Capitol Police are continuing to investigate the filming of a sex tape inside a prominent hearing room at the Hart Senate Office Building, a source told Fox News on Monday. (Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Room 216 in the Hart Senate Office Building is a storied hearing room. The dais where the graphic video was filmed is a place from which U.S. senators have grilled high-profile presidential nominees, including those who would go on to become justices of the Supreme Court.
Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley, an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law, discussed possible charges that could be brought last week. Turley said, “the question is whether this unofficial use would constitute trespass.”
“It also uses an official area for personal purposes, though it is not clear if there were any commercial benefits garnered from the video found on various sites,” Turley wrote.
Sen. Ben Cardin’s office says the staffer involved in the filming of a sex tape is no longer with the office. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Turley said one possible charge could fall under D.C. code section 22-1312, which discusses lewd, indecent or obscene acts.
“It is unlawful for a person, in public, to make an obscene or indecent exposure of his or her genitalia or anus, to engage in masturbation, or to engage in a sexual act as defined in § 22-3001(8). It is unlawful for a person to make an obscene or indecent sexual proposal to a minor. A person who violates any provision of this section shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and, upon conviction, shall be fined not more than the amount set forth in § 22-3571.01, imprisoned for not more than 90 days, or both,” the criminal code states.
A hearing room in the Hart Senate Office Building. (Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Turley says the question regarding charges falling under this section would be whether a locked Senate committee room is considered “in public.”
Whether or not any video filmed in the hearing room was used to make money could also “have bearing on potential charges,” Turley argued.
Fox News’ Adam Sabes and Chris Pandolfo contributed to this report
Anders Hagstrom is a reporter with Fox News Digital covering national politics and major breaking news events. Send tips to Anders.Hagstrom@Fox.com, or on Twitter: @Hagstrom_Anders.
The Virginia Supreme Court unanimously voted Thursday to revive a lawsuit filed by a teacher who was terminated for declining to use male pronouns to refer to a female student.
In 2018, Peter Vlaming was fired from his job of seven years as a French teacher at West Point High School because he would not address a student by biologically inaccurate pronouns. Vlaming “told his superiors his Christian faith prevented him from using male pronouns” for the student. The student complained, leading to a four-hour hearing with the school board, which ultimately voted 5-0 to fire Vlaming for “discrimination.”
“That discrimination then leads to creating a hostile learning environment,” claimed West Point Schools Superintendent Laura Abel. “And the student had expressed that. The parent had expressed that. They felt disrespected.”
Vlaming sued the school board in 2019. After a circuit court judge dismissed the suit in 2021, the seven justices on the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that Vlaming’s case alleging that his rights to free religious exercise and free speech were violated deserves to move forward.
“Peter wasn’t fired for something he said; he was fired for something he couldn’t say,” said Chris Schandevel, a senior defense counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), who represents Vlaming. “The Virginia Supreme Court rightly agreed that Peter’s case against the school board for violating his rights under the Virginia Constitution and state law should proceed.”
In December last year, another teacher represented by ADF filed a lawsuit challenging her termination for refusing to refer to a student by inaccurate pronouns. Ohio middle school teacher Vivian Geraghty was fired over her religious objections to addressing two students by names and pronouns contradictory to their biology.
“Schools can’t force teachers to set their religious beliefs aside just to keep a job and they also can’t force teachers to say things that are untrue and harmful to students,” ADF legal counsel Logan Spena told the Daily Caller.
In California, a Christian teacher was let go for her refusal to conceal students’ attempts to dress and act as the opposite sex from parents. Jessica Tapia was a physical education teacher who would not permit male students to use women’s locker rooms and objected to district policy mandating that teachers hide students’ gender confusion from parents.
“[The district] called me back to work but presented me with various directives, to which I responded I would not be able to comply with some of them based on my beliefs, such as having to call students by their preferred gender/pronoun and withhold that information from their parents,” Tapia told the Daily Caller. “I believe God is love and the most loving thing we can do is affirm one another in who God made us to be.”
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.
Two biologically male athletes who identify as females took the top spots in an Illinois cycling competition last weekend after taking the top two places in an October race. Results from the Montrose Beach Cyclocross event in Montrose Beach, Chicago, Sunday show that Tessa Johnson and Evelyn Williamson won first and second place, respectively, in the Cyclocross Women Single Speed race.
Johnson finished the race in 33 minutes and 33 seconds, while Williamson completed it in 35 minutes and 28 seconds. The third-place finisher, Kristen Chalmers, finished the race in 36 minutes and 48 seconds.
In a social media post Sunday, Riley Gaines, a former collegiate swimmer who has emerged as one of the most forceful critics of policies allowing trans-identified athletes to compete on sports teams that align with their stated gender identity, said that “two men take 1st & 2nd at the Illinois State Cyclocross Championships yesterday.” She lamented, “@usacycling has 2 categories for men and none for women.”
An X account with the handle @i_heart_bikes provided a picture of the top three finishers, asserting that “men took the top two podium spots in the women’s singlespeed category at the Illinois State Cyclocross Championships.” The post noted that “Tessa (Michael) Johnson took [first place] and ‘Evelyn’ Williamson took [second place].”
“Thanks to @usacycling, men are racing in women’s categories all over the US,” the post added.
Today male racers Tessa (Michael) Johnson and Evelyn Williamson once again proved they are GREAT at women's cyclocross at Jackson Park in Chicago.
Johnson took 🥇in both the women's 1/2 AND the singlespeed.
A spreadsheet documenting the results of the 2023 Chicago CycloCross Cup, of which the Montrose Beach race was the eighth and final event, shows that Johnson won first place overall in both the Women Single Speed category and the Women’s Category 1/2. This makes Johnson a 2023 Illinois State Cyclocross champion in two separate categories.
Johnson and Williamson took the top two spots at the Chicago CycloCross Cup in October, and Johnson previously competed in men’s categories at Clemson University, OutKick reports.
The participation of trans-identified males in women’s sports has become a hot-button issue in American politics. Arguments against allowing trans-identified athletes to compete on sports teams that correspond with their gender identity as opposed to their biological sex focus on the concerns that the physical differences between men and women give male athletes, on average, an unfair advantage over their female counterparts.
USA Powerlifting, a national sporting organization that enacted bans on biological men competing in women’s sports, identifies the differences between men and women as “increased body and muscle mass, bone density, bone structure, and connective tissue.” A 2020 study from the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that trans-identified male athletes maintain an advantage over biologically female athletes even after two years of taking feminizing hormones.
Two dozen states have banned trans-identified males from competing in women’s sports at the K-12 level and/or the collegiate level: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.
A poll of 1,011 United States adults conducted by Gallup in May found that 69% of respondents believed that trans-identified athletes “should only be allowed to play on teams that match their birth gender,” while 26% thought that “transgender athletes should be able to play on sports teams that match their current gender identity.”
Even as social media addiction accelerated under Covid lockdowns, Meta jettisoned internal alarms about mental health dangers. Following Frances Haugen’s 2021 whistleblower testimony, attorneys general from 42 states filed consumer protection lawsuits against Meta.
The “Facebook Files,” a Wall Street Journal investigation based on Meta’s internal documents, showed that the social media company “ignored their own studies revealing Instagram’s photo-sharing and editing app harms girls.” Capitalizing on the need to connect during lockdown, Meta helped propel young women into gender facilities.
When you set up a social media profile, you begin a process of virtualized identity that makes you a target for ad campaigns. Bots track people exploring “gender issues.” As Michelle Santiago Cortés’ observed, “Our algorithmically orchestrated encounters with people … on social media start to feel preordained, as if the fact that the algorithm put something on our path Means Something™.” Meta hid the many adverse effects — including anxiety and body-image dysmorphia — tied to compulsive online behavior such as infinite scrolling.
The “Facebook Files” disclosed built-in Instagram features that made it more harmful than similar youth-targeting apps. In particular, according to internal documents, “Social comparison is worse on Instagram.” Social comparisons on visual platforms, such as Instagram, resemble past research on body image. That research showed that young girls’ body image worsened when they compared themselves to images of cover girls.
The Self as an Object to Edit
What’s worse now is that, according to JAMA Plastic Facial Surgery, selfies and photo editing detach users from their own bodies, “making us lose touch with reality.” A dangerous object orientation toward the body occurs.
Creativity and intelligence cannot withstand making comparisons and spiraling into envy. Even a sophisticated awareness of the objectifying effect of social media will not protect young people from it. A study of youth reactions to their own untouched versus filtered photos showed that their resulting critical awareness is insufficient to avoid social comparisons: “Although the majority of the teens said they actually preferred their original, unretouched photos, every single one chose to digitally alter their image for social media.”
Cell phone users occasionally walk into traffic. Why wouldn’t preoccupation with an unfolding digital presentation lend to disembodied living in your head and ensuing self-estrangement?
The face app visually re-aligns the facial contour, such as the jawline, to achieve a more masculine appearance. While the initial experience is euphoric, the emotional high is not lasting. One Reddit thread makes this clear: “So I just got face app to see what the hype was all about. And let me just say its [sic] pretty awesome, but as soon as I finished one picture I was washed over with so much dysphoria and just felt sad that that wasn’t me.”
Depersonalization Through Photo Editing
Meta relies on AI to filter content. This includes machine learning and rule-based character pattern-matching algorithms, including liking and contextual cues to identify and capitalize on curiosity about gender issues. The best AI in the world cannot filter out image comparisons that undermine an individual’s mood and self-esteem. This is especially true with face apps, which invite the user to dwell in a detached way on her own physical appearance. Moreover, these apps allow users to swap in a dramatically altered appearance of themselves as the opposite sex.
It’s easy to recognize the excessive focus on body image in those who begin to experience appearance incongruence — the feeling that one’s actual appearance does not match one’s true appearance. If it overshadows real life, the “trans alter,” as Eliza Mondegreen calls the virtual performance of self, becomes discordant with embodied existence. In this context, photo editing can take on outsized significance. Psychologists note that “photo-editing may exacerbate disordered body image in vulnerable individuals.” According to its own science, Meta knew its Instagram photo-sharing app “was addictive and worsened body image issues for some teen girls.”
The use of social media, especially Instagram, is as addictive as drug use. Instagram incorporates short, exciting videos to trigger infinite scrolling. “Meta did not disclose that its algorithms were designed to capitalize on young users’ dopamine responses and create an addictive cycle of engagement,” according to a report. The more preoccupied a person becomes, the more likely she is to experience mental health issues such as dissociation.
Transgenderism, the New Aspiration
Even a brief amount of time spent filtering photos leads to an increase in girls’ anxiety, according to researchers. This is because Instagram and other platforms introduce an emotional feedback loop, in which waves of dysphoria are punctuated by spikes of euphoria. In the online world, where bots are ubiquitous, every female who doesn’t accept her sex has access to a virtual trans surgeon. Social media feeds a dynamic of nonstop clicking for more hits of dopamine.
Although they are aware of digital distortion online, teens looking at face apps see plastic surgery results and aspire to physically embody their own retouched images. Dr. Helen Egger, a child psychiatrist, notes that “it’s a dopamine hit, it’s like ‘woah I’m popular, I like this feeling, I want to do it again,’ it can feed on itself.” Social affirmation of face swaps, within a cycle of addictive feedback loops, validates the urgent demand for medical intervention.
The trouble for social media users involves its capacity not only to reflect reality but to project a desired or imagined reality. Sociologist Charles Cooley coined a theory of the looking-glass self to explain how we develop our self-concept through interaction, especially when noticing how we’re perceived by others. In this way, social media is particularly addictive in promising to show us to ourselves in more complete ways than even a mirror can.
At the same time, social media is not a mirror held up to reality at all. It’s an unreal screen for public consumption that spreads acceptance of transgender surgeries. Social media in this sense is not the playful leisure activity it appears to be. Staring into the mirror-like cell phone screen can deepen an out-of-body experience and a preoccupation with one’s sex.
A Trans ‘Rite of Passage’
For girls who deny their sex, Instagram’s face-swapping filters have been attributed to “finally ‘cracking their egg’ — a rite of passage” when a trans identity is apparently firmly established in the mind as a visually concrete identity: “The Snapchat girl filter was the final straw in dropping a decade’s worth of repression,” said Josie, an early-30s man from Cincinnati who claims to be a woman. “[I] saw something that looked more ‘me’ than anything in a mirror, and I couldn’t go back.”
In the past, the young were tricked into altering their aspirational goals by mimicking airbrushed models. Today, teens fixate on their own filtered image and dream about cosmetic surgery.
In May, an advisory from the U.S. surgeon general warned of social media’s negative effect on anxiety and body-image disorders. In this Meta face-changing ecology, every confused girl on Instagram can instantly see a tougher image of herself, able to withstand the worries that assail her. Something, she feels, has suddenly jelled.
Dr. Faith Kuzma is a retired Assistant Professor of English. Kuzma has written for Salvo, The Canadian Patriot, American Spectator, Psych Reg, and Mercator Net, among others.
As Americans celebrate the holidays with their families, the Biden administration is laying the groundwork to destroy families by taking children away from their parents in order to sterilize and sexually mutilate them.
The Biden administration has proposed new rules for foster care, which would treat any parent rejecting LGBT ideology as a child abuser. The public comment deadline is today, the Monday after Thanksgiving, a bureaucratic middle finger to the public it is supposed to serve. The proposed regulations state that “to be considered a safe and appropriate placement, a provider is expected to utilize the child’s identified pronouns, chosen name, and allow the child to dress in an age-appropriate manner that the child believes reflects their self-identified gender identity and expression.” In short, those who don’t believe the superstition that a child can somehow be born into the wrong body are, per the Biden administration, unfit to be foster parents.
This won’t stop with foster parents.
Cutting Christians and other dissenters from the sexual revolution out of the foster care system is only the start. Given the government control of the foster care system, this is a convenient place for the left to establish the precedent that rejecting gender ideology and the rest of the LGBT movement’s dogmas is abusive and harmful to children and that those who do so are unfit parents. Once they have set this point, they’ll expand it to everyone else — after all, if it’s abuse for foster parents, it’s abuse for biological parents as well.
This should not be a surprise. Democrats have been suggesting taking children away from “non-affirming” parents for years now, but they have thus far been too scared to go through with it. But the folks in Biden’s administration — led by Babylon Bee “Man of the Year” Rachel Levine — are going to see if they can get the ball rolling this time.
The justification for these new rules is based on the usual junkscience, created and pushed by activist organizations and those whose reputations and livelihoods depend upon validating transitioning children. For example, the Biden administration repeatedly cites a survey by the activists at The Trevor Project. This survey consisted of a self-selected online sample. The Biden administration wants to keep kids away from loving homes because the science told them to — the science of a self-selected online survey created by an activist group.
These sorts of garbage studies are necessary for the LGBT movement to justify itself, especially as it has shifted to an obsession with “LGBT youth.” They long ago dropped the pretense that this is about consenting adults, or that they seek some sort of live-and-let-live settlement. Rather, they are determined to claim other people’s children for themselves and their movement.
Trying to take children away from “non-affirming” parents is the predictable result of the lies that children are born LGBT, and that sexual and gender identities are the essential core of our being. The belief that nothing is more authentic or important than sexual desire and “gender identity” is what lies behind the LGBT movement’s fanatical drive to groom other people’s children. It is why educators are eager to push sexually explicit material onto even very young children. It is why schools fill kids’ minds with gender ideology, and then encourage them to transition without telling their parents. And it is why the left has wholeheartedly embraced medically “transitioning” children, sometimes starting before they are even teenagers.
This wrongly termed “gender-affirming care” is incredibly abnormal medicine. It attempts to treat psychological distress by radically remaking the patient’s body in a way that is completely medically unnecessary, indeed, medically harmful. As the proposed Biden administration rules make clear, there is no objective physical or psychological diagnosis for being transgender; rather, it is a purely subjective, self-diagnosed identity — a “self-identified gender identity and expression.” And there is never any medical need to transition.
When someone who identifies as transgender does not chemically and surgically transition, his or her body continues its natural, healthy development and functioning. The only harm that can come from not transitioning is self-harm, which is why the transgender movement has become totally reliant on threats of suicide. This suicide narrative is used to rush children into transition, with almost all the power centers of our nation pushing them on. But studies show that children overwhelmingly desist from transgender identification if given time and counseling. The Biden administration nonetheless relies on threats of self-harm in making its case for the proposed rules for foster care. It is pure hostage-taking, done to enable the sterilization and sexual mutilation of children on the superstition that they are being born into the wrong bodies.
In short, the Biden administration plans to treat parents who object to this grotesque medical malpractice as child abuse. They are coming for your children, and they aren’t bothering to hide it anymore.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Individuals who have undergone “any form of male puberty” will not qualify to compete in international women’s cricket, the International Cricket Council has announced.
“The new policy is based on the following principles (in order of priority), protection of the integrity of the women’s game, safety, fairness and inclusion, and this means any Male to Female participants who have been through any form of male puberty will not be eligible to participate in the international women’s game regardless of any surgery or gender reassignment treatment they may have undertaken,” the ICC noted.
The ICC noted that “gender eligibility at domestic level is a matter for each individual Member Board, which may be impacted by local legislation.” It also noted, “The regulations will be reviewed within two years.”
The issue of whether men who identify as women should be permitted to compete in women’s athletics remains an ongoing point of significant debate between those who advocate radical leftist gender ideology and those who oppose it. Cricket player Danielle McGahey, who apparently identifies as a transgender woman, responded to the news.
“Following the ICC’s decision this morning, it is with a very heavy heart that I must say that my international cricketing career is over. As quickly as it begun, it must now end,” McGahey wrote on social media.
“While I hold my opinions on the ICC’s decision, they are irrelevant. What matters is the message being sent to millions of trans women today, a messaging say that we don’t belong. I promise I will not stop fighting for equality for us in our sport, we deserve the right to play cricket at the highest level, we are not a threat to the integrity or safety of the sport,” McGahey wrote. “Never stop fighting!”
Non-“affirming” adults would be barred from becoming foster parents under the Biden administration’s proposed rule. Pictured: Thousands of New Yorkers take to the streets of Manhattan on June 25 for the Reclaim Pride Coalition’s fifth annual Queer Liberation March. (Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images)
Transgender orthodoxy may soon become a litmus test for parenthood, according to the logic of a new policy working its way through the Department of Health and Human Services under President Joe Biden.
A new rule in HHS’ Administration for Children and Families would apply the idea that any lack of “affirmation” constitutes a form of child abuse to foster care placements. Once that idea takes root in foster care, child protective services agencies might start applying it more broadly.
The rule would reinterpret the Social Security Act, which requires agencies to ensure that each child in foster care receives “safe and proper” care. The rule would lay out steps agencies must take to meet that requirement for “LGBTQI+ children,” defined as kids who “identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, as well as children who are non-binary, or have non-conforming gender identity or expression.”
Why is our government so interested in grooming America’s children to become homosexual? Are these efforts Gestapo in function? Why? Is it Eugenics? Are the disciples of Margarett Sanger that powerful in America’s Deep State?
Before agencies place a child with a foster parent, known as a “provider,” that person must “establish an environment free of hostility, mistreatment, or abuse based on the child’s LGBTQI+ status;” receive training “to be prepared with the appropriate knowledge and skills to provide for the needs of the child related to the child’s self-identified sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression;” and must be able to “facilitate the child’s access to age-appropriate resources, services, and activities that support their health and well-being.”
As the Federalist Society’s Rachel Morrison pointed out, the rule does not define “hostility,” “mistreatment,” or “abuse.” However, it does clarify that “a provider who attempted to undermine, suppress, or change the sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression of a child, including through the use of so-called ‘conversion therapy,’ would not be a safe and appropriate placement.”
The proposed rule cites medical associations such as the American Psychological Association to claim that efforts to “undermine, suppress, or change” sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression “are not supported by evidence and have been rejected as harmful.”
The rule does not acknowledge that gender ideology has infiltrated these medical associations and that many doctors—including those who once embraced gender ideology—have warned against confusing children on their gender and putting them on a path to mutilating their own bodies.
Dr. Stephen B. Levine, a psychiatrist and early proponent of transgender medical interventions, joined and briefly helped lead the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, which later became the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the central medical group that organizations such as the American Psychiatric Association rely upon.
A member from 1974 to 2001, Levine served as chairman of the eight-member International Standards of Care Committee that issued the fifth version of the standards. He ultimately resigned his membership in 2002 upon concluding that the organization “had become dominated by politics and ideology, rather than by scientific progress.”
In a document opposing the use of Medicaid funding for experimental transgender medical interventions for children, Levine explains that “there is no consensus or agreed ‘standard of care’ concerning therapeutic approaches to child or adolescent gender dysphoria.” He notes that gender identity “is not biologically based” and “empirically not fixed for many individuals.” Levine also warns that social transition “is a powerful psychotherapeutic intervention that radically changes outcomes” and makes it far less likely that young children will “desist” from a transgender identity.
Contrary to the transgender activists’ claims, many doctors have raised serious concerns about the long-term effects of “gender-affirming care.” Cross-sex hormones can weaken children’s bones and make them more prone to heart disease. So-called puberty blockers, often billed as fully reversible, involve introducing a disease into a child’s body and make puberty harder to start again, should the child change his or her mind.
European countries, long considered more “progressive” than the U.S., have found a lack of evidence for medical interventions on children and are recommending a “watchful waiting” approach for minors.
Ultimately, gender ideology rests on the claim that a nebulous gender identity is more important than an individual’s biological sex. If a biological male claims to identify as female, society must consider him a woman and allow him to enter women’s restrooms, prisons, and sports teams, even though some men pose a threat to women in intimate situations and enjoy biological advantages in many sports. Similarly, this ideology encourages bodily alterations to make a male appear female and vice versa, despite the lack of evidence that such interventions actually improve well-being over the long haul.
This idea is particularly harmful for children who are just learning what it means to be male or female. If a boy likes to play with Barbie dolls, that does not mean he is really a girl. If a girl likes to play with G.I. Joes, that does not mean she is really a boy. Yet the ideology behind transgender identity urges parents to abandon all sanity and declare that such kids are transgender.
Before you object, think about how nebulous “gender identity” actually is. It doesn’t rely on a specific set of standards that may be verified objectively. Instead, it relies on an individual’s claim that he or she experiences painful and persistent dissonance between an “identity” and his or her biology. Any attempt to resolve this dissonance through mainstream talk therapy is ipso facto a form of “conversion therapy” to be condemned as “harmful.”
Yet Levine argues that “affirming” a transgender identity is a “powerful psychotherapeutic intervention” that will set kids on the path to mutilation and sterilization—long before they have any concept about what their own fertility means.
Under Biden’s proposed new rule, any potential foster parent who aims to protect a child from this confusion and damage may soon face expulsion from the program. That means the process will be designed to weed out guardians who actually would take good care of the kids and enable guardians who would assist in harming them.
In this topsy-turvy world, biology takes a back seat to a child’s insistence that he or she is really the opposite sex, even if the child might just as well identify as Queen Elsa of Arendelle or a Tyrannosaurus rex.
The rule justifies this by claiming that kids in the foster care system are more likely to identify as LGBTQI+, i.e. to face gender confusion. This means they are more vulnerable to the damage of gender ideology, not less. They need someone to protect them from “gender-affirming care,” and Biden seems dead set on preventing that.
Sadly, the HHS rule is not the first time Americans have faced this type of policy. In my home state of Virginia, state Del. Elizabeth Guzman, a Democrat, supports a bill to expand the definition of “child abuse” to include disagreement with gender ideology.
California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, signed a bill turning California into a “sanctuary state” for “gender-affirming care,” which the law defines as an absolute right. The law gives California courts the ability to award custody over a child if someone removes the child from his or her parents in another state in order to obtain such “care” for that child despite the parents’ disagreement.
Ultimately, Americans cannot have it both ways. Either it is child abuse to deny a child’s transgender identity, or it is child abuse to encourage experimental medical alterations that will leave that child stunted, scarred, and infertile.
Those on the Left seem hell-bent on forcing gender ideology in the name of safety, and Americans need to stand up and say, “No.”
Thankfully, HHS’ Administration for Children and Families must read every single written comment that concerned Americans send in on the rule. Americans may make their voices heard by submitting comments at this link.
Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority leadership has revoked the membership of two prominent alumnae this week, after more than 50 years of sisterhood and service. Their crime? Standing up for women — specifically the young women in KKG’s University of Wyoming chapter who are suing to keep biological males out of their sorority.
Patsy Levang and Cheryl Tuck-Smith got kicked out of KKG for advocating that the sorority hold to its own bylaws, which limit membership to “women.” Sadly, KKG is suffering from the broader cultural confusion around sex and gender — confusion that will harm women and rob the next generation of the benefits of single-sex organizations and environments.
Personally, I never planned to become a “sorority girl,” and didn’t initially see the value of Greek Life. But in my case, I started to open my mind when, after my freshman year, I still felt lost in a proverbial “big pond” after growing up in a small town.
I suspected that joining a sorority — and particularly living in a sorority house — would help me find a close-knit community. My university offered precious few single-sex housing options, meaning that when I lived on campus I was surrounded by both women and men.
A Facebook picture of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority at the University of Wyoming includes a biological male, which is why some in the sorority sued. (Fox News)
The guys in my dorm buildings were respectful enough, but I could tell that 18-year-old men and women living in close quarters was a recipe for disaster. Although this went unspoken, the students in coed housing felt pressure to act a certain way to impress members of the opposite sex. We kept our doors closed a lot of the time, for privacy, which didn’t foster a friendly vibe.
Incredibly, I lucked into the re-launch of a new chapter of Phi Mu sorority on my campus. Our charter chapter attracted a lot of girls like me: Greek-skeptical but desiring to “make campus smaller.”
As I got to know more sorority women from my chapter and across campus, I learned that many of them shared my motivation for membership: community with other women. I also learned that sorority membership was more diverse than stereotypes depict.
Sororities include women of various races, sizes and socioeconomic backgrounds. The only things that all sorority members had in common were that we were all students at the same university, and we were all women.
I moved into the Phi Mu house as quickly as I could, and spent two years living there. We had our own dining room and meal plan, and various common spaces in the house both downstairs (where visitors were always welcome) and upstairs (sisters only).
We could only bring a male guest upstairs on moving day. Even then we had to shout “Man on the floor!” — which was kind of comical for us, but also practical… it was a warning to cover up if you happened to be “indecent.”
Of course, the prohibition on men upstairs was not followed 100% of the time, but it was truly taboo for a man to be upstairs in the bedroom/bathroom areas.
This female-only environment was very freeing. I could be myself at our sorority house, without any pretense. My sisters and I bonded during chapter meetings, study hours, social events and charitable fundraising events.
As I got to know more sorority women from my chapter and across campus, I learned that many of them shared my motivation for membership: community with other women. I also learned that sorority membership was more diverse than stereotypes depict.
Four of my bridesmaids were Phi Mu sisters. To this day, they are some of my best friends.
I can’t imagine what my sorority experience would have been like if my chapter had been open to men, even those who identify as women. There’s no question about it: Including men inevitably and fundamentally changes the mission and experience of sorority life.
Sororities were founded during a time — the 1800s — when women were excluded from many opportunities. Our founders understood that our shared biological sex and experiences as women serve as a starting point for sorority sisterhood. Although much has changed for women in our society, the reality of biological sex differences has not.
Sorority women, and all women, deserve the basic right to safety and privacy, and the presence of males can threaten that right. But female-only environments are about more. They’re about the communities and bonds that women form when it’s “just us girls.” Similarly, men and boys should be free to join all-male organizations if they choose, and can reap similar benefits.
The Kappa plaintiffs deserve the same opportunities I had — the opportunities they were promised — to participate in a women-only community. Patsy Levang and Cheryl Tuck-Smith rightly stood up for them. In ousting these alumnae, KKG leadership has broken faith with more than the word “woman,” but with sisterhood itself.
Hadley Heath Manning is the vice president for policy at Independent Women’s Forum.
These days, when she gets ready for school, the hair will be done. Perhaps it will be a braid of some sort, perhaps it will be curled. Earrings will be selected. A light and subtle application of age-appropriate makeup usually follows. The only constant is that she will always put on a skirt.
It didn’t used to be this way. When younger, she was quite the tomboy. There were the fights over getting her hair cut short, fights she lost not because we’re that controlling, but because short hair has to be cut more frequently and we didn’t want to add monthly visits to the stylist to the calendar. The uniform was shorts or pants and a polo for school, nicer pants and tops for dressier occasions, and athletic gear for casual moments. Jewelry was a no-go, even the pearls and things that grandmothers like to give to be worn at church.
She never suffered from dysphoria. She always knew she was a girl. It bothered her how often she was mistaken for a boy, not connecting the dots between her preferred functional form of attire and how it was virtually indistinguishable from the clothing sported by little boys. She was horrified when a classmate exhorted her to “just get the surgery.” That was reading too much into the truth, which was that she just wanted to play, to roughhouse, and to get outside. Dresses and skirts didn’t lend themselves to such things.
Once puberty arrived, the interests largely remained, but the video tutorials on how to do different braids and requests for new earrings joined them. It’s also when she looked at me earnestly in the car one evening and said, “I’m glad you and Mom aren’t liberals. You would’ve tried to turn me into a boy.”
While there are people across the political spectrum who recognize the realities of biology, statistically speaking, she wasn’t necessarily wrong in her proclamation. If she’d been born to this mom, this mom, or this mom, things could have turned out much differently. Thankfully, she was born to us, and we don’t hold retrograde opinions about the imaginary relationship between preferred clothing, toys, activities, and sex.
Not everyone is so enlightened, though, instead preferring to categorize children based on rigid stereotypes about how superficial things define us as boys and girls, men and women. Countless stories, like those linked above, of parents realizing their daughter was “transgender,” start with “I knew my son [sic] was trans when…” and revolve around such stereotypical markers. She didn’t like the color pink (once hated in our house, now one of her favorites), dresses, or games associated with little girls. Ergo, she must be a boy!
All one has to do to make such a logical leap is ignore the fact that prepubescent kids are, by definition, not sexual creatures and, as such, not much thinking in terms of true masculinity and femininity. They are just thinking about what interests them, not how those interests align with or diverge from their sex. It’s misguided parents who swoop in and make those assumptions.
This viewpoint is especially incomprehensible when one realizes that tomboys have long been with us. They were once staples of literature and other entertainment, from Laura Ingalls to Jo in Little Women to Pippi Longstocking. That they enjoyed clothing or activities more typical of boys wasn’t reason to attempt to muck around with their biology, and it still isn’t reason now.
If you have a daughter, you have a daughter. Her preferred clothing and activities do not define her, particularly when she’s young. Maybe she just finds pants more comfortable or likes playing in the dirt more than playing with a Barbie. If you let her grow up as a girl, those preferences may stick or they may, as in our case, shift in more traditionally feminine ways. In either case, it is not our job as parents to guide them toward self-destruction, but toward self-fulfillment and flourishing.
Let your tomboy be a tomboy. As a father, enjoy that you can get out and do more rough-and-tumble things with her. As a mother, enjoy that she isn’t raiding your closet or makeup tray. To do otherwise, to make the destructive assumption that because she doesn’t fit a stereotype she must have been “born in the wrong body,” is to abdicate your responsibility as a parent, to punish her with pseudoscience, and to saddle her with a lifetime of legitimate suffering, not the imaginary kind that arises from preferring blue to pink.
This author is a regular Federalist contributor.
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.
Last week in Denver, several hundred people gathered in person for the Genspect conference, “The Bigger Picture,” while many more from all over the world joined online. Genspect’s founder, Stella O’Malley, has the intentional strategy of hosting their annual conference at the same time and in the same location as the annual World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) meeting.
Last year they gathered in Killarney, Ireland, when WPATH met there, and next year they will host their gathering in Lisbon, Portugal, piggybacking off of the WPATH dates and location. It’s an interesting strategy offering WPATH attendees to come to Genspect’s sessions for free whereby they can engage with a different perspective, as well as putting WPATH on notice that there is a growing movement of those who want to offer a “healthy approach to sex and gender.”
I was unable to attend their gathering last year in Ireland, but when O’Malley invited me to speak at the Denver conference, I was happy to accept. The speaker’s list was a who’s who of those fighting gender ideology, some for many years.
On the Front Lines of the Gender Wars
Michael Shellenberger opened the conference with a bold claim that time is up for WPATH and that soon he would release his “WPATH files” on his Substack, where he will show the receipts he has on the pseudoscientific standards of care and practices of WPATH. Amid robust applauses, attendees were encouraged to post on X using #TimesUpWPATH. A lifelong member of the Democrat Party, he lamented how far the left has fallen from the principles that drew him to that party.
Highlights for me were hearing from the brilliant Leor Sapir on “Institutional Capture (How gender ideology has been embedded within America).” Sapir chronicled Obama’s 2010 anti-bullying initiative, which was at first sex-based directed, and then expanded in 2011 to include gender language in the antibullying initiative.
Following this was the 2015 letter from James Ferg Cadima in the Office of Civil Rights, stating, “The Department’s Title IX regulations permit schools to provide sex-segregated restrooms, locker rooms, shower facilities, housing, athletic teams, and single-sex classes under certain circumstances. When a school elects to separate or treat students differently on the basis of sex in those situations, a school generally must treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity.”
Wonder how America got to this place? Perhaps a well-intentioned initiative to combat bullying quickly led us down the path where boys can have access to spaces that were once protected for girls.
Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright and scientist Heather Heying did an excellent job, patiently and thoroughly stating the obvious, that there remain only two sexes no matter what others assert. They marveled at the fact that even once-trusted scientific journals are now claiming that “The idea of two sexes is overly simplistic.”
Two mothers, January Littlejohn and Erin Friday, gave impassioned speeches about their daughters who believed the lie that they were born in the wrong body. Littlejohn spoke about her daughter’s middle school working behind their back to encourage this idea and talked about her decision to bring forth a lawsuit, restoring rights and protections to parents over their own children.
Friday, an attorney by training who works with Our Duty, had many in tears using Hans Christian Anderson’s story of “The Snow Queen” to parallel her own efforts to save her daughter from the evils of gender ideology. She is a force in the state of California, fighting laws passed by Gov. Gavin Newsom while trying to raise funds to get initiatives on the ballot to put before voters which will protect children and parental rights. She appealed to the audience that if the transing of children can be stopped in California this will have an enormous positive effect across the whole country.
Stories of Destransitioning and Whistleblowers
Any conference like the one hosted by Genspect naturally needs to include the voices of those most harmed by “gender affirmation therapy,” those who transitioned and have now detransitioned once they realized their decision to transition didn’t fix any of their mental health issues, and as is often the case, made things worse. Chloe Cole and Prisha Mosley both spoke about their deeply personal experiences. Many other detransitioners attended the conference as well. It was wonderful to see how their tragic stories have brought them together in the spirit of camaraderie.
And who doesn’t love a good whistleblower story like Jamie Reed? Reed blew up the internet back in February with her expose, “I thought I was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle.”
Since 2018, Reed served as a case manager at Washington University, in their Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, until she came to the realization that she could no longer condone the treatment children were receiving. Her remarks at Genspect were a rallying cry for the political left to wake up and stop harming children. As a lifelong leftist, she implored the audience not to give up on the left, but to help them return to principles.
The title of my own talk — “Transgender Assisted Reproduction: where is this going?” — was a convergence on my years of work in assisted reproductive technology and how this technology will most likely be needed by trans-identifying people, especially children who are fast-tracked to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries.
When I first found out that children were being offered fertility preservation procedures, knowing
that “gender affirmation care” harms natural and normal fertility, I began speaking up and producing documentary films about the lack of medical ethics and evidence-based medicine supporting these practices. Pre-puberty, children are offered to cryopreserve their ovarian or testicular tissue because their gametes, (ova and sperm) are not yet mature. Post-puberty, the child will have mature ova and sperm, so they are offered to freeze and bank their gametes.
The data is clear. Most assisted reproductive technology cycles fail. Data is coming out about the harms and risks to children being created by these technologies. The maxim, “First, Do No Harm” is being ignored in offering hope of future children, when in fact this is considered an experimental procedure with no data on this population. From the audience’s reactions and comments, it was clear that this is a whole new level of doubling down on harming children to advance an ideology that ignores biological reality, evidence-based medicine, and medical ethics.
Times up, WPATH.
Jennifer Lahl, MA, BSN, RN, is a filmmaker and founder of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. She is on X @JenniferLahl
A teammate of the Massachusetts high school field hockey player who was hospitalized last week after a male opponent fired a high-powered shot into her face said it’s time for changes to rules that allow males to play on female teams, WFTX-TV reported.
Dighton-Rehoboth team captain Kelsey Bain wrote in a letter to the state’s lnterscholastic Athletic Association that “boys do not belong in girls’ sports,” the station said.
During Thursday’s playoff game against Swampscott High School, the male Swampscott player fired a shot toward the goal, but the ball instead hit a Dighton-Rehoboth player hard in her face. The ball ricocheted far from the point of impact, and the injured player fell to her knees and cried out — as did her teammates. A number of them turned their faces away after coming to her aid, and play was halted while the injured female player was treated.
It's reported that male player (#2 for Swampscott) knocked the teeth out of female player. Males are allowed to play on female teams in MA because of the "equal play act"
“The shrieks and screams of fear and pain that projected from her after being hit filled the stadium,” Bain added in her letter, according to WFTX. “The looks of horror and shock on the faces of the girls surrounding her were also chilling.”
Massachusetts scholastic rules allow males to play sports with females if there’s no male team for that sport available — and vice versa.
But Bain said enough is enough.
“We all witnessed the substantial damage that a male has the ability to cause against a female during a game,” she added in her letter, according to the station. “How much longer does the MIAA plan on using girls as statistical data points before they realize that boys do not belong in girls’ sports?”
The MIAA told WFTX it stands by the Equal Rights Amendment: “We respect and understand the complexity and concerns that exist regarding student safety. However, student safety has not been a successful defense to excluding students of one gender from participating on teams of the opposite gender.”
When play resumed following the injury to the Dighton-Rehoboth player, the male Swampscott player quickly scored a goal. In fact, he scored both goals for Swampscott, giving his team a 2-0 victory and eliminating Dighton-Rehoboth from the tournament.
It won’t come as a shock that the male Swampscott player is reportedly a Northeastern Conference All-Star. He’s also a four-year varsity player and team co-captain, WCVB-TV reported, citing Swampscott Public Schools Athletic Director Kelly Wolff.
Dighton-Rehoboth Superintendent Bill Runey said the injured female player was released from the hospital Friday but suffered “significant facial and dental injuries,” the Sun Chronicle reported.
A female Massachusetts high school field hockey player was sent to the hospital Thursday for “significant facial and dental injuries” during a state tournament game after a male on the opposing team hit her in the face with a field hockey ball. In the video circulating social media, viewers can see the male player (No. 2) hit the ball, which launches up and hits his unnamed female opponent in the mouth. After the hit, the girl is heard screaming while her teammates look on with their hands laced over their mouths in shock.
The game was between the number No. 12 Swampscott Big Blue and the No. 21 Dighton-Rehoboth Falcons.
It's reported that male player (#2 for Swampscott) knocked the teeth out of female player. Males are allowed to play on female teams in MA because of the "equal play act"
According to the Media Research Center, the male player in question is Sawyer Groothuis, who plays for Swampscott and is a “Northeastern Conference All-Star in the women’s league.” The Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association handbook effectively allows for men to compete in women’s sports and vice versa.
While speaking with the media, Dighton-Rehoboth Superintendent Bill Runey called for the MIAA to take a “renewed approach” to protecting student athletes, but stopped short of saying men should be prohibited from competing in women’s sports.
Rather than highlight the unnamed female players’ injury, at least one local news outlet completely ignored the egregious nature of a man dominating Thursday’s game. In its brief “roundup” of local sporting events, for example, ItemLive ran with the headline, “Big Blue, big-time performance from Groothuis,” and didn’t even mention Groothuis sending the opposing female player to the hospital.
“Swampscott led at the break thanks to a goal from Northeastern Conference All-Star Sawyer Groothuis,” the article reads. “The Big Blue had a corner and the ball was loose in front of the goal. Groothuis was quickest to react, and poked it home for the early cushion. In the second half, it was Groothuis again finding the back of the net and sealing the game.”
You’d like to believe that a girl screaming out in agony and being sent to the hospital after getting a ball to the face would warrant at least brief mention, if not a paragraph. Especially when considering that the ItemLive write-up of the game is about Groothuis and his performance.
But at the end of the day, many local media outlets are just as bad at their jobs as their national counterparts. It doesn’t matter that the aforementioned female athlete got knocked out of a state tournament game because a male decided he wanted to impose his will on women’s athletics. All that matters is advancing the leftist agenda — no matter what.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Conservative media personality Steven Crowder allegedly obtained three pages of Nashville school shooter Audrey Hale’s manifesto, revealing that the transgender-identifying killer targeted Christian school children because they are white.
“[G]oing to fancy private schools with those fancy khakis + sports backpacks w/ their daddies mustangs + convertibles,” Hale wrote in her “DEATH DAY” plan shared by Crowder. “I wish to shoot you weak-ss d-cks w/ your mop yellow hair wanna kill all you little crackers!!! Bunch of little f-ggots w/ your white privileges,” she added.
The Federalist reached out to the Nashville Police Department and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI), but neither would confirm or deny the validity of the manifesto. The Federalist also reached out to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) but did not hear back.
If verified, the three pages published by Crowder are the first glimpse the public has had of Hale’s manifesto since she gunned down three children and three staff members at the Christian Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, last March. For 7 months, the FBI, TBI, and Nashville Police Department have hid the manifesto from public view.
Hale’s alleged manifesto reveals that Hale’s attack was premeditated. The leaked documents include minute-by-minute details of her planned attack, such as the time Hale intended to arrive at the Covenant school and how long it would take her to park her car. Hale even predicted that she would die the day of the shooting, writing at the bottom of her “DEATH DAY” schedule, “Time 2 die.”
The manifesto includes many disturbing quotes like her enthusiastic desire to “Kill those kids!!!” and to obtain a “high death count.” She also wrote, “Can’t believe I’m doing this, but I’m ready…I hope my victims aren’t.”
Journalist Ian Miles Cheong pointed out that Hale’s stated hatred of white people and white privilege is an outgrowth of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” ideology. “[Hale] is a product of DEI,” Cheong wrote on X. “This is why the media industrial complex, the government, and the institutions refused to publish it. They are all complicit. Hale’s actions and her motive go against the narrative that ‘white supremacy’ is the greatest threat to democracy. The greatest threat to freedom and democracy is DEI. It is the woke mind virus.”
Google and Facebook have reportedly censored news of the manifesto’s leak. This censorship is reminiscent of X’s actions back in March, when the social media company mass-suppressed reports on the “Trans Day Of Vengeance,” which was originally scheduled to take place the same week as Hale’s attack. Federalist CEO Sean Davis was among the censored, and his X account was locked for simply sharing a poster about the scheduled event.
If the leaked manifesto is real, it confirms that despite the Biden Justice Department (DOJ) knowing Hale’s attack was racially motivated, the DOJ did not investigate the shooting as a hate crime.
This adds to the dismissiveness and disrespect the Biden administration has shown to the Nashville shooting victims and their families. Thus far, the Biden administration has done nothing to seriously investigate the perverse, bigoted incentives behind the murders of the six slain Christians, nor has it, at the very least, done anything to memorialize the victims.
Recall, also, that in the wake of the shooting, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre came out with statements in support of the “trans community,” and Vice President Kamala Harris met with rogue, insurrection-instigating Tennessee state representatives instead of the victims’ families.
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., seen here being sworn in on Oct. 25 after winning the House speakership, said of gender transitioning: “When you’re an adolescent or a young child, obviously, you’re in no position to be making life-altering decisions. And that’s why parental consent on everything is so critically important. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL: New House Speaker Mike Johnson sharply criticized experimental surgeries on children as he discussed the “destructive” effects that such experimentation, dubbed “gender-affirming care” by gender ideologists, has upon young people.
“We had some hearings on the subject when I was in [the Judiciary Committee],” the Louisiana Republican said in a Tuesday interview with The Daily Signal, referring to a high-profile hearing that he led in July. “Some of the evidence that the expert witnesses brought forward was just alarming, in terms of some of these experimental surgeries that they’re performing on young children.”
His great concern is whether some of this has been done without parental consent, Johnson said.
“All of it just seems terribly destructive,” he said.
Johnson went on to discuss detransitioners, such as activist Chloe Cole, who attempted to change their gender and then realized that that was impossible. Cole testified emotionally at the July hearing about how attempting to transition has irrevocably changed her life.
“We had also witnesses who had gone through a gender transition and were transitioning back, and they gave very compelling testimony about how damaging this was to their physiology, their physical body, as well as their mental and spiritual health,” he recalled.
Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill on Oct. 24, the day before he was elected as House speaker by his colleagues. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
“I think it’s a very, very serious issue that demands the attention of lawmakers at the state and federal level,” Johnson continued. “I don’t know that there is a consensus yet on exactly what Congress should do about that, but we wanted to put the advocates of that on notice that we’re deeply concerned about it.”
Why children can’t consent to puberty blockers in under 30 seconds!
Kids that choose 2 Oreos over $10,000 and still believe in the tooth fairy are being told they are able to make the lifelong decision to take chemical castration drugs.
Though lawmakers are still discussing what role Congress might play in protecting children, Johnson emphasized that they are “watching [the matter] closely.”
“Mostly, it is being handled at the state level, and we’ll have to continue to have dialogue here about what role Congress should play,” he said.
He called the plight of detransitioners “tragic, vastly tragic,” condemning gender ideology advocates for overlooking vital components—such as parental consent—“because they’re pursuing an agenda.”
“It just breaks your heart what these young people have been through,” he said. “When you’re an adolescent or a young child, obviously, you’re in no position to be making life-altering decisions. And that’s why parental consent on everything is so critically important.”
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Tenth-graders at a Missouri high school last week had to watch a slideshow on “oppression and privilege” that may violate state law by using information from a Planned Parenthood affiliate that lists abortion clinics on its website.
The class of sophomores at Webster Groves High School near St. Louis watched a slideshow titled “Being an Ally,” which lists so-called oppression categories as “racial,” “class,” “gender,” “sexual orientation,” “religion,” and “immigration status.”
“It’s wrong to teach that different categories of human beings are either inherently oppressive or oppressed,” said the mother of one student, who provided a video of the presentation to The Daily Signal.
“This rhetoric is divisive in nature and creates undeserved mentalities of guilt or victimhood,” said the mother, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her child’s privacy.
In an apparent violation of Missouri state law by the Webster Groves School District, the end of the Oct. 18 slideshow included a barcode and link to the website for Teen Health Source, a subsidiary of Planned Parenthood Toronto.
Teen Health Source calls itself a “sexual health information service run for and by youth.” Categories listed on its website include “Birth Control,” “Gender Identity & Sexual Orientation,” “Pleasure,” “Pregnancy,” “Puberty & The Body,” “Sex,” and “STIs” [sexually transmitted infections].
The presentation to 10th-graders isn’t out of the ordinary for Webster Groves School District, which enrolls almost 4,500 students in the suburbs of St. Louis. Last September, a parent read the transgender-promoting children’s book “I Am Jazz” to a second-grade class without the school’s first informing other parents. Starting in kindergarten, students in the school district learn to “examine issues of social justice and equity within an anti-bias framework.”
Two school employees, counselor Carrie Aschinger and social worker Anne Gibbs, presented the “privilege and oppression” slideshow to the 10th-graders, a video of which later was uploaded to an online learning platform.
“Being an ally means using your privilege to help support people who are facing oppression that you might not experience yourself,” Aschinger told the 16- and 17-year-old students, according to the video.
The presentation included tips on listening to those who are oppressed by navigating factors such as “gender pronouns.” Gibbs told the students that “allies” need to go through “unlearning,” which “involves questioning and rejecting oppressive beliefs you might have held for a long time.”
“As you learn about your privilege as a non-oppressed person, try to be honest with yourself about how that privilege has affected your life and who you are,” Gibbs told students, according to the video posted below.
This is a direct attack on Christian homes. Jesus said (John 3:19-21) that human beings love the darkness, instead of the light, because they know their believe system, philosophy, theology, sociology, et., al., is wrong. Their real aim is to take young Christian students away from God and their parents upbringing.
Aschinger and Gibbs didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment for this report. The Webster Groves School District also didn’t respond.
The mother who leaked the video of the slideshow to The Daily Signal said a public school shouldn’t ask children to evaluate their privilege.
“The district knows that many parents disapprove and continues to push these lessons anyway,” she said.
The “About” page for Teen Health Source, linked in the presentation to the 10th-graders, says it is “non-judgmental, sex-positive, pro-choice, and inclusive.”
Missouri law requires school districts to notify parents of the “basic content of the district’s or school’s human sexuality instruction to be provided to the student.” It also specifies a “parent’s right to remove the student from any part of the district’s or school’s human sexuality instruction.” However, the school mom who saw and leaked the video of the slideshow said she wasn’t informed in advance.
In a letter to the state association of school boards, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey promoted a model resolution with which school districts could pledge to “uphold Missouri law on human sexuality instruction in public schools.”
Bailey’s draft resolution for the Missouri School Board Association notes that “issues of sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression are inextricably intertwined with human sexuality.”
To enforce the laws as written and protect children across the state, I directed a letter to the Missouri School Board Association, urging them to call on their members to adopt a model resolution pledging to uphold Missouri law on human sexuality instruction in public schools. pic.twitter.com/kg5pzfotOO
— Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey) January 31, 2023
On its website, Teen Health Source defines abortion on its website as “a safe medical procedure that ends a pregnancy.” The website also says medical abortions “use medication to stop the growth of a pregnancy and then expel the pregnancy tissue from the uterus” and a surgical abortion “remove[s] the pregnancy tissue from the uterus.”
“Pregnancy tissue” apparently is a euphemism for “unborn baby” or “fetus,” words that don’t appear there in regard to abortion.
The Teen Health Source website has descriptions and links to abortion clinics in the Toronto area. It doesn’t list any pro-life pregnancy resource centers.
Teen Health Source also suggests “trangender care” clinics that offer minors sterilizing hormone therapy and referrals for transgender surgery. Other services listed include support for teenagers who want help “coming out” or are “questioning gender identity and/or sexual orientation.”
Some clinics recommended to Teen Health Source’s audience, which encompasses ages 13 through 19, provide HIV testing, birth control prescriptions, and abortion pills.
A section of the website, called “Navigating sex and gender dysphoria,” defines gender dysphoria as “a term for stress, conflict, or negative feelings people can feel in relation to their bodies, gender or how others perceive their gender.” It defines gender euphoria” as “a term for the joy, comfort or connection people can feel in relation to their bodies, gender or how others perceive their gender.”
A page on gender dysphoria advises teens who are questioning their gender on how to have “affirming sex” and remind themselves that their “body and gender is awesome and is the gender and sex that you say it is” [sic].
A post on “porn literacy” tells teenagers: “Porn can be good for inspiration.”
“Lots of people use and enjoy porn,” Teen Health Source’s post reads. “Some people are concerned about how they use it. They may worry that they’re using porn too much or that they’re addicted to it, but there’s no one ‘normal’ or ‘right’ amount to use porn.”
“Linking students to any website that publishes articles about gender identity, sexual pleasure, ‘porn literacy,’ and abortion should not occur without notifying parents,” the anonymous mother of a sophomore told The Daily Signal in an email. “They are sneaking in sexual education when some families may have opted out.”
A post on “Sex, Gender, and Sexuality” says: “Some people are transgender, which means their gender identity doesn’t align with their biological sex.”
“Your gender identity may be fluid and can change throughout your life,” the post reads.
Teen Health Source’s webpage titled “Hookups” describes what it calls “casual sex encounters.”
“Sex is not something that happens only when people are in committed relationships,” the post reads. “There are many different kinds of sexual relationships and sometimes it can be confusing to sort them all out.”
The slideshow presentation that refers to Teen Health Source makes her want to remove her child from the school district, the concerned mother told The Daily Signal.
“The decision-making by district administration and the Board of Education have become increasingly predictable and politically-driven,” she said in an email. “How can parents feel comfortable sending their children to school where they are fed a constant stream of one-sided political propaganda?”
The mother said she believes the Missouri school district violated state law by encouraging students to visit a website associated with Planned Parenthood that contains materials on sex education.
“I would really like to see Webster Groves School District drop the politics from their decision making and curriculum,” she said. “But unfortunately, I don’t see that happening, as they’ve been accelerating in the opposite direction.”
A Missouri law, passed in March, will allow students to transfer from their school district to eligible schools starting with the 2024-2025 school year.
“School choice is just around the corner in Missouri, and I think people will be shocked at the number of families who pull their children from the district, given that opportunity,” the mother said.
FIRST ON FOX: Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, R-Ark., is setting the record straight on femininity in Arkansas, introducing an executive order to mandate the use of gender-specific terms when describing women and “prohibit the use of woke, anti-women words for official state government business.”
“The science is clear and real; There are things only women can do, like perform the miracle of birth,” Sanders wrote in the executive order shared first with Fox News Digital. “Government should reject language that ignores, undermines, and erases women; Government should celebrate gender distinctions between men and women — not erase them.”
Sanders’ order comes as states, workplaces and schools around the country are pushing the use of what they refer to as “culturally conscious” or “inclusive” language — initiatives that commonly attempt to remove femininity from terms used to describe women.
In the spring, the Arkansas Department of Health issued a memo on drinking water that described how small per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) can have negative effects on “pregnant people.” Sanders’ new order will require the state to use the terms “pregnant women” or “pregnant mom” when describing someone who is expecting a child.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders. (Thomas Metthe/Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)
The governor wrote that rather than refer to females as a “menstruating person” or “menstruating people,” to use the terms “woman” or “women.” Rather than “birthing person,” use “birth mom,” and rather than “chestfeeding,” use “breastfeeding.” And rather than “laboring person,” use “birth mom,” and “woman” instead of “birth-giver.”
Sanders has firmly stood on the side of opposition to removing femininity from terms referring to women. As the first woman to serve as Arkansas governor, Sanders has slammed President Biden as “the first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can’t tell you what a woman is.”
I’m the first woman to lead my state. Biden is the first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can’t tell you what a woman is.
Everyday we are told that we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship their false idols. It’s crazy, and it’s wrong.
Amid a nationwide trend to replace gender-specific terms, the city of Portland, Oregon, recently urged city staff members to adopt a more “culturally conscious” vocabulary that included not using words such as “women,” “Caucasian” or “citizen.”
An elementary school in Vermont was criticized for telling parents it would be removing “male” and “female” language from its fifth-grade science lessons covering the human body and reproduction, while a Missouri school district decided to use “they/them” pronouns in math class to help kids’ “mathematical identities.”
In several other cases, the “inclusive” push stretches beyond gender to removing religious terms from vocabulary and allowing biological men to compete in women’s sports.
Riley Gaines is a former championship swimmer who was forced to compete against a biological male. (Riley Gaines)
Michigan State University released an “inclusive” language guide for its students that suggested “in winter and spring, avoid references to majority religious imagery and language, such as the word ‘merry’ or ‘Christmas trees,’ ‘wreaths,’ ‘holly,’ ‘bells,’ ‘gifts,’ ‘reindeer,’ ‘bunnies,’ ‘eggs’ and ‘chicks,’” the style guide suggested. “Use terms like ‘wishing you a wonderful winter/spring break’ or ‘best wishes for the new year.’”
Sanders will introduce the executive order Thursday “banning a number of all sorts of ridiculous words from state government documents.”
“We are all here to say enough. Enough trying to erase women and girls. Enough denying our biological differences from men. Enough of the craziness taking over our country,” the governor is expected to say at the signing on Thursday afternoon.
“They’re using nonsense words to erase women and girls — and more importantly, to erase our voices and experiences. Today, we’re taking a stand against woke nonsense… It’s the Left that decided that ‘woman’ is a dirty word. It’s the Left that decided that we needed to toss out basic biology — and basic grammar along with it.”
Fox News’ Alexander Hall contributed to this report.
Aubrie Spady is a Freelance Production Assistant for Fox News Digital.
President Joe Biden delivers falsehood-filled remarks at the pro-LGBTQ Human Rights Campaign’s annual national dinner at the Washington Convention Center on Saturday night. (Photo: Kent Nishimura/ Getty Images)
President Joe Biden spoke Saturday at the Human Rights Campaign’s annual national dinner. Biden said it was his fourth appearance at the annual event, which is billed as “a national gathering for champions of LGBTQ equality.”
Although the 80-year-old president rarely makes public appearances before 10 a.m. or after 4 p.m., he made an exception for his close allies, and he delivered a reasonably coherent address to boot. As to the truthfulness of Biden’s remarks, the most charitable description is that the spin began before he started speaking and ran through his concluding paragraph.
From downright false testimony to invented stories, from ideological falsehoods to absurd non-sequiturs, the president’s speech had it all. Perhaps it would even have been comedic if the stakes weren’t so deadly serious.
Biden was introduced by his wife, Jill, and the false testimony began with her. But the president added his own false claims.
Lies About State Laws
First, the president lied about state legislatures acting to protect women and children from the harmful effects of transgender ideology. He denounced “over 600 hateful laws [actually, bills] introduced,” of which he said “more than 70” became law, “denying the existence of transgender people, silencing teachers, banning books, threatening parents with prison for getting their children health care.”
In June, the Human Rights Campaign had declared a national state of emergency for “LGBTQ+ people” in the U.S. over this wave of state legislation, and they deliberately mischaracterized the laws in ways quite similar to the president. The HRC’s move was a one-time political stunt that meant absolutely nothing, but Biden at least knew how to play to the crowd.
The bills to which Biden referred do things quite different from the things he claimed they do. A law “denying the existence of transgender people” in Biden’s estimation is any law that defines “sex” in verifiable ways—that is, in biological terms—instead of the nebulous vagueness of self-perceived feelings.
By “silencing teachers,” Biden referenced laws that regulate school classrooms to ensure that material being taught to children in kindergarten through 3rd grade is age-appropriate.
The policies Biden claimed were “banning books” merely removed sexually inappropriate materials from school libraries, but it did not prohibit private individuals from purchasing said books, which is the traditional understanding of a “book ban.”
Lastly, Biden mentioned laws “threating parents with prison for getting their children health care.” This is a reference to SAFE Act-style bills, which protect minors from the harmful effects of gender transition drugs and surgeries. For starters, these procedures are not health care.
Additionally, only five out of 22 (four out of 19 enacted in 2023) state laws carry any criminal penalties. Of those five laws, none targets parents: Laws in Florida, North Dakota, and Oklahoma specify the felony penalties are for health care professionals, while Alabama’s and Idaho’s laws carry felony penalties for activities only medical professionals can do.
Biden followed up on these wild accusations by claiming that families with LGBT-identifying children “now face excruciating decision to move to a different state,” making them feel like “refugees inside our nation.” His remark cheapened the plight of millions of actual refugees—even from his beloved Ukraine, not to mention Israel—who have had to flee from their homes because they lived in literal war zones.
Yet, even if we granted, for the sake of argument, the president’s contention that interstate migration provoked by bad governance implied a moral failure on the governing parties, what does that say about California and New York? Their strict COVID-19 lockdowns, soft-on-crime policies, and high taxation have provoked an exodus to the very states Biden condemned—and certainly a much larger migration than however many families decided to relocate to obtain harmful gender transition procedures for their children.
Lies About Congressional Action
Having borne false witness against state legislatures, the president proceeded to do the same against Congress. “In the United States Congress, extreme MAGA Republicans are trying to undo virtually every bit of progress we’ve made,” he argued. “They’re trying to wipe out federal funding to end the HIV epidemic, strip funding from community centers for seniors, reinstate the ban on transgender troops, ban the Department of Justice from enforcing civil rights laws, ban Pride flags from flying on public lands. … And they threaten the legal recognition of same-sex marriages.”
Let’s set the record straight.
“Federal funding to end the HIV epidemic” refers to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), America’s largest overseas aid program, devoted to preventing and treating HIV/AIDS in undeveloped countries. It’s five-year authorization expired Sept. 30.
Pro-lifers in Congress agreed that PEPFAR was “critical legislation” and were concerned that the Biden administration had reimagined PEPFAR’s strategic direction, turning it into a vehicle to advance abortion and the LGBT agenda overseas—mostly because that’s what the Biden administration said they were going to do.
After including some legislative protections to prevent the administration from pulling a fast one, House Republicans reauthorized PEPFAR for another year in the State and Foreign Operations appropriations bill, which now sits unpassed in the U.S. Senate. To Biden, passing a bill to fund the program amounts to “trying to wipe out federal funding.”
Next, Biden accused Republicans in Congress of wanting to “strip funding from community centers for seniors.” The factual basis for this claim is that in July the House Appropriations Committee struck $3.62 million for three LGBTQ community centers from the Transportation and Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill. Only LGBT publications such as The Advocate say the LGBT centers are for seniors. Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont., said appropriators removed the funds because the community centers had programming supporting communism, drag shows, and the administration of gender transition hormones to minors. Some senior centers!
The president also said that congressional Republicans wanted to “reinstate the ban on transgender troops.” If not presented among so many other obvious untruths, this could be forgiven as careless wording more than an outright lie. But, in context, it’s clear that Biden’s word choices were deliberate, and this one too misrepresents the facts.
The Trump-era regulation which Biden called a “ban” would merely prevent the military from becoming a glorified clinic for people rendered undeployable by deep mental health issues, and who were seeking expensive surgeries. It did not automatically kick someone out of the military simply because they claimed to be transgender.
Biden further claimed that Republicans wanted to “ban the Department of Justice from enforcing civil rights laws.” Again, that’s not at all what Republicans want. Republicans have taken issue with the DOJ rewriting civil rights laws to extend them to matters Congress never intended the law to cover. Specifically, the DOJ is attempting to redefine “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as protected categories, extending the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision even to laws Bostock didn’t address.
In addition, Biden accused congressional Republicans of seeking to “ban Pride flags from flying on public lands.” Like the “book ban” Biden previously mentioned, this attempts to conflate regulations on something’s appropriate use with making that thing unlawful. Congressional Republicans are actually seeking to prevent government agents and agencies from flying the Pride flag with taxpayer dollars, or in a way that gives the controversial symbol the government’s endorsement.
But if, say, someone wants to hang a Pride flag from their camper in a national park, or if someone wants to turn it into a bumper sticker and drive down an interstate highway, congressional Republicans are not seeking to ban that.
Finally, Biden claimed that congressional Republicans “threaten the legal recognition of same-sex marriages.” Oh, if only that were true! Yet, just last year, 47 Republican representatives and 12 Republican senators voted to affirm same-sex marriage. There is currently no pro-marriage majority to undo that vote.
Lies About ‘Violence Against LGBTQ Americans’
Biden referenced “violence against LGBTQ Americans” to argue that “we have to do more to keep people and their communities safe.” He offered five examples, but he bungled nearly every single one.
First on Biden’s list was the murder of Matthew Shepard. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent to 303 Creative v. Elenis, Shepard was “targeted by two men, tortured, tied to a buck fence, and left to die for who he was.” Much like George Floyd for BLM, Shepard’s death became a rallying cry for an entire movement against anti-LGBTQ violence.
The only problem is, he wasn’t killed “for who he was.” Wrote National Review fellow Haley Strack, “Shepard, who was involved in the Wyoming meth drug culture, was murdered by a bisexual who confirmed that the murder had nothing to do with Shepard’s being gay.”
Next, Biden mentioned O’Shae Sibley, who he said was “killed while dancing and expressing joy.” The Associated Press reported that another teen began arguing with Sibley and his friends while they danced shirtless while filling up at a gas station, but that the argument broke up. Later, said The AP, in a video, “Sibley could be seen following the teen and then lunging at him. The stabbing happened out of a clear view of the cameras.”
Biden then mentioned Laura Ann Carleton, who “hung a Pride flag outside her home,”and Colin Smith, who was “stabbed while defending a friend being harassed.” From cursory research, these seem to be the most accurate descriptors, but they still miss key information. Carleton hung a flag outside her business, not her home. Smith was stabbed on a bar patio in lawless Portland, Oregon. Curiously, neither Carleton nor Smith personally identified as part of any LGBTQ group.
Lastly, Biden mentioned “the horrific shooting at Club Q [an LGBT nightclub] in Colorado Springs,” which killed five people and wounded nearly two dozen. The shooter—who identifies as “nonbinary” and uses “they/them” pronouns to refer to himself—has been sentenced to serve five consecutive life sentences plus another 2,208 years in prison. But Biden said the episode highlights the need for stricter gun laws.
In summary, Biden’s list of examples of “violence against LGBTQ Americans” included three examples where the perpetrator or instigator identified as LGBTQ and two examples where the victim was someone who did not identify as LGBTQ. It also ignored the trend of violence committed by people who identify as LGBT, such as the Covenant School shooter.
Lies About Personal Experiences
Not satisfied with unjustly slandering state and national legislators, Biden proceeded to fabricate stories about his own life. “I’ve told this story before, but I’ll tell it again,” began the 80-year-old president.
“I wanted to work in the projects as a lifeguard on the east side of Wilmington [in Delaware]. And [my dad] was dropping me off on his way to work at the City Hall to go get an application to be a lifeguard there. And as I got out of the car at the four corners at the center of town, two men—it turns out, one going to the Brandywine; one worked for the Dupont Company; the other worked for Hercules Company; this was back when I was a kid—and they leaned up and kissed one another. And I’d never seen that before. I turned and looked at my dad. And he just looked at me and said, ‘Joey, it’s simple. It’s simple, Joey. They love one another. It’s a simple proposition.’”
In a previous telling of this story—which Biden repeats often—he said the incident occurred in 1961, when he was 17 or 18. This was years before the sexual revolution launched and a full decade before the first known same-sex couple applied for a marriage license. It was one year before any state repealed its sodomy law, and 11 years before Delaware repealed its sodomy law. It was 12 years before the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses.
Most problematic of all, neither building Biden referenced had been built when he said the story took place. The Brandywine Building was built in 1969, while Biden was practicing law in Wilmington. The Hercules Building opened in 1983, while Biden was serving his second term in the U.S. Senate.
Descent Into Confusing Nonsense
In fairness to Biden, not everything he said on Saturday was an outright lie. He correctly characterized Hamas as the villain in its contest with Israel:
“A week ago, we saw hate manifest in another way in the worst massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust. More than 1,300 innocent lives lost in Israel, including at least 27 Americans. Children and grandparents alike kidnapped and held hostage by Hamas. A humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Innocent Palestinian families—and the vast majority of them have nothing to do with Hamas. They’re being used as human shields.”
But Biden followed that up with a statement that won’t hold up in many other contexts. “Folks, we have to reject hate in every form. Because history has taught us again and again anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia—they’re all connected,” he said. “Hate toward one group, left unanswered, opens the door for more hate toward more groups, more often, readily. But here’s what, which history shows: The antidote to hate is love. The answer to twisted, dehumanizing ideologies is solidarity and standing up for everyone’s humanity.”
Biden’s philosophy is clear: Everyone has a binary choice between love or hate. The LGBT movement paints the slogan “love is love” on its banners. Or, as a columnist wrote last week in Philadelphia Gay News regarding Hamas’s intolerance of LGBT lifestyles, “hate is hate.”
But there are many things to love or hate, and sometimes loving one thing means hating something else, or at least deprioritizing it. Hamas is the dictionary definition of antisemitism, and Biden would likely regard them as homophobic, too. But could Hamas ever succumb to Islamophobia?
Taking an example closer to home, many of the most antisemitic members of Congress are among the most rabid proponents of the LGBT agenda. One member has a Palestinian flag outside her office and refused to condemn Hamas’ terror attack. Next to it flies a Progress Pride flag.
In another illogical moment, Biden announced “an ambitious plan to end HIV,” boasting that his administration “finally did away with the outdated policy banning gay and bisexuals from donating blood.” In other words, allowing the group at highest risk of contracting HIV/AIDS to donate blood, which might be contaminated with the disease, is part of his plan to end the disease by 2030.
“We’re leading with science, not stigma,” said Biden. Such awkward dissonance of ideas—“The Office” would be proud.
But out of all of Biden’s confusing moments, this one takes the cake: Biden delivered a message to LGBTQ-identifying youth across America, “We see who you are, made in the image of God, deserving dignity, respect, and support. That’s why my administration is combating the dangerous, cruel practice of conversion therapy.”
Here Biden does a bait-and-switch. The “dangerous, cruel practice” refers to quack treatments such as electric shock therapy aimed at removing a person’s LGBT feelings; such practices are everywhere discontinued and nowhere proposed. Yet LGBT activists continue to push sweeping bans on so-called “conversion therapy,” a ban so broad that it encompasses any effort—including simple talk therapy, which is a widespread practice—to help a person move out of an LGBT lifestyle.
Such therapy would simply involve affirming someone in their biological sex. Given the fluidity of sexual orientation, there would be quite a demand for such counseling, without any force involved.
Thus, a Christian counselor might tell a troubled young person seeking help to leave behind an LGBT lifestyle, “God made you in His image as male or female. The person God made you deserves dignity, respect, and support, and you don’t need to change to feel whole.”
Biden wants to prohibit such counseling. But the reason he gives for wanting to ban such advice is quite similar to the advice he wants to ban.
Bad Theology, Too
Biden concluded his address with some very popular—but very bad—theology. “I see a great nation because we’re basically a good people,” he said. But Jesus disagreed, “No one is good except God alone” (Mark 10:18).
“Folks, we’re the United States of America. And there is nothing beyond our capacity when we do it together,” said Biden. Here the biblical parallel is to the tower of Babel. “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them,” said God (Genesis 11:6).
So, God confused their language to divide them and stop their work. Confused language and division over language are widespread in America today.
At a Palestine rally at @UNC, radical left students threaten a man who they perceive to be an Israel supporter. Campus police lead the man away, apparently for his own safety. The leftist rally was promoted with a flyer featuring a Hamas terrorist. pic.twitter.com/8r2iB9Pq3Z
We will not allow terrorists to prevent Floridians from going about their daily lives or exercising their freedom to worship.
FHP and FDLE will continue providing increased security, and I expect universities to fully enforce all antisemitism laws on campus. https://t.co/ezfPmkM9Ml
AOC is a sickening Marxist antisemite who hates America and Israel, and I am fed up with her BS, the media promoting her, and ashamed that this two-faced hater is anywhere near the floor of the House of Representatives. You think my words are tough? Well, go back and look at…
It's noteworthy that not a single Arab country has offered to accept Gaza Palestinians. Not one. And they are silent about Egypt keeping closed the main passageway for the Gaza Palestinians to leave Gaza, because Egypt doesn't want Gaza Palestinians coming into their country.…
Ep. 30 What's happening at the southern border isn’t just an invasion, but a crime. The politicians and NGOs responsible for it are criminals, who should be punished accordingly. pic.twitter.com/cbkTSUyogC
NEW: Harvard students are freaking out after a truck is driving around the school, displaying names of students who allegedly signed a letter blaming Israel for Hamas’ terror attacks.
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 Trump.
NEW: Denver Colorado, which is a proud 'Sanctuary City,' is now begging Texas to not send migrants to their city by urging border towns to hand out flyers to migrants, encouraging them to stay away.
This is the most disturbing video you will see all day. Director of education for HiTops, an LGBTQ+ nonprofit focused on bringing queer theory and gender ideology into schools, says that the most critical time to get in the classroom are grades 5-8, to “catch kids when they’re… pic.twitter.com/TUxFPrzhn7
This is a man wearing high heels and a diaper in the food court at the U of A.
A freshman girl on campus reached out and told me that this man had been walking into several girl’s dorm rooms unannounced the first two weeks of school.
Jesus Jara, school superintendent for Clark County, Nevada, signed a Defense of Democracy pledge supporting “educators” over parents when it comes to class and library materials. Defense of Democracy has demonized the parental rights group Moms for Liberty. Pictured: Jara speaks at a fundraiser for St. Jude’s Ranch for Children in Boulder City, Nevada. (Photo: Clark County School District)
As Moms for Liberty galvanized concerned parents across the country, a left-leaning group called Defense of Democracy sprouted up to oppose the growing parental rights movement. Now, a Nevada superintendent has become the first top school district leader to sign this new organization’s pledge to put “education professionals” ahead of parents when it comes to class materials.
“We serve all families and all kids from all walks of life,” Jara, who leads the fifth-largest school district in the country with more than 300,000 enrolled students, said upon signing the pledge.
The pledge doesn’t explicitly oppose parental rights groups, but Defense of Democracy, the organization behind it, has compared Moms for Liberty to the Ku Klux Klan. A member of the Clark County school board also has condemned Moms for Liberty as a “cancer.”
Jara didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s multiple requests for comment on the pledge, Defense of Democracy, and Moms for Liberty.
The pledge opens with a declaration of diversity and states: “I recognize that our LGBTQ+, Black, Indigenous, and families of color [sic] face significant threats from extremist groups. I pledge to represent and protect the civil rights of all members of my constituency” [emphasis original].
The pledge emphasizes that an “excellent public education system” is the “cornerstone of a fully functioning society” and declares support for “teachers, librarians, and other educators.”
It notes that “parents should be involved in and have input regarding their own child’s education,” but insists that parental input “does not extend to other children within the school system” [emphasis original].
“By signing this pledge I acknowledge that our education professionals are best qualified to make decisions regarding materials included in their classrooms and libraries,” the pledge concludes.
Parents across the country have raised the alarm about sexually explicit books in school libraries. Although Defense of Democracy doesn’t take a position on a specific book, its prioritizing of “education professionals” over parents when it comes to educational materials suggests a stance aligned with groups such as PEN America and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Those left-leaning organizations claim books have been “banned” in schools over their racial or LGBTQ+ content, even though a Heritage Foundation report found that the books in question remain widely available in schools. (The Daily Signal is The Heritage Foundation’s news outlet.)
Karen Svoboda, president and CEO of Defense of Democracy, told The Daily Signal that her organization “does not endorse candidates.”
“Our Pledge to Protect our Public Schools is a promise that any candidate or elected official should be comfortable making, as it is simply a promise to give a voice to every constituent in their district, regardless of race, gender, religion, or political party,” Svoboda said. “We are grateful to everyone who has made this promise.”
Defense of Democracy’s “Statement of Beliefs” stipulates that although the group “does not take stands regarding specific books,” it does stand with “educators who are trained to decide which books are appropriate for their classrooms.” The group also states that “information about the human experience—including gender identity, differing spiritual beliefs, and accurate historical facts—should be part of all levels of education.”
According to the “About” page on its website, Defense of Democracy launched as a response to Moms for Liberty, which the organization brands a “hate group.”
Last month, the organization shared a meme comparing Moms for Liberty to the Ku Klux Klan.
Karen Svoboda, president and CEO of Defense of Democracy, cited the Southern Poverty Law Center’s decision to brand Moms for Liberty an “anti-government extremist” group.
“In June 2023, Moms for Liberty was declared an ‘anti-government extremist organization’ by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Defense of Democracy agrees with this assessment,” Svoboda said, linking to the SPLC’s website.
As I explain in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC took the program it has used to bankrupt organizations associated with the Ku Klux Klan and weaponized it against conservative groups, partially to scare its donors into ponying up cash and partially to silence ideological opponents.
In 2019, amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal that led the SPLC to fire its co-founder, a former employee came forward to call the organization’s “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”
Seven years earlier, in 2012, a terrorist with a gun used the “hate map” to target a Christian nonprofit in Washington, D.C. Although the SPLC condemned the attack, it kept the organization targeted by the gunman on its “hate map.”
The SPLC put parental rights groups such as Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education on its “hate map” in June, condemning them as part of an “anti-student inclusion movement.” This attack built on a previous article in which an SPLC analyst compared the parental rights movement to the “uptown Klans” of white southerners who supported segregation after the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation of schools is unconstitutional.
FOR THE RECORD. The Ku Klux Klan was formed by slave owning democrats in the South in rebellion over Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
Not only did Jara sign Defense of Democracy’s pledge, but Clark County school board member Linda Cavazos also demonized Moms for Liberty. Cavazos shared an article about Moms for Liberty online, commenting: “Founded in Florida—what a surprise. They will not win here.”
“Their hateful comments about our gender diverse students and our educators will not be tolerated here,” the school board member added. “They are a cancer that we absolutely will not allow to spread in our community.”
Founded in Florida-what a surprise. They will not win here. Their hateful comments about our gender diverse students and our educators will not be tolerated here. They are a cancer that we absolutely will not allow to spread in our community. pic.twitter.com/rVaxfJCSDP
Neither Cavazos nor the other six members of the school board responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time.
Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice defended her organization from these attacks and questioned the motives of Defense of Democracy.
“In the fight for the protection of parental rights there will always be those who choose to call names and point fingers,” Justice told The Daily Signal. “We will continue to stand up for the rights of parents and the protection of our children.”
She drew attention to Moms for Liberty’s own pledge advancing parental rights:
I pledge to honor the fundamental rights of parents including, but not limited to the right to direct the education, medical care, and moral upbringing of their children. I pledge to advance policies that strengthen parental involvement and decision-making, increase transparency, defend against government overreach, and secure parental rights at all levels of government.
“Our parental pledge is focused on supporting and protecting children and parents, and we will continue to encourage our elected officials to sign our pledge,” Justice added. “We will not stand down in this fight. We do not coparent with the government.”
“Why are the teachers unions and Defense of Democracy opposing parental rights?” she asked.
The Defense of Democracy pledge in full (emphasis original):
I acknowledge that my constituency is made up of individuals from all religions, cultural backgrounds, gender identities, sexual orientations, and walks of life. I recognize that our LGBTQ+, Black, Indigenous, and families of color face significant threats from extremist groups. I pledge to represent and protect the civil rights of all members of my constituency.
I acknowledge that an excellent public education system—including access to information—is the cornerstone of a fully functioning society. I pledge to support and, when necessary, advocate for teachers, librarians, and other educators within my public school system.
Parents should be involved in and have input regarding their own child’s education. However, this right does not extend to other children within the school system. By signing this pledge I acknowledge that our education professionals are best qualified to make decisions regarding materials included in their classrooms and libraries.
The complete Moms for Liberty pledge:
I pledge to honor the fundamental rights of parents including, but not limited to, the right to direct the education, medical care, and moral upbringing of their children. I pledge to advance policies that strengthen parental involvement and decision-making, increase transparency, defend against government overreach, and secure parental rights at all levels of government.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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