New data shows U.S. hospitals performed at least 5,747 gender-disfiguring surgeries on minors between 2019 and 2023, according to a database released by Do No Harm, an advocacy group of medical professionals. The data also show 13,994 American children received other transgender treatments, such as puberty-blocking and opposite-sex hormones, in those four years.
Most of the children receiving such procedures were girls between the ages of 12 and 17, the database indicates. Medical practitioners made more than $119 million from the procedures, the data says.
This week, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) kicked out of its vendor hall four young Americans who returned to affirming their given sex after experiencing transgender medicine. A similar group of “desisters” met a warm welcome last month in Orlando, Florida, at the Catholic Medical Association’s Annual Educational Conference. That medical conference hosted 750 medical practitioners from around the nation and featured a panel of detransitioned young adults.
At the CMA event, seven young adults who were permanently injured by sex-transition procedures publicly explained the harm these treatments cause. These young adults were given a voice at a U.S. annual medical conference for the first time, to inform and educate health practitioners about the irreparable harm caused by “gender medicine.”
“CMA’s decision to invite detransitioners to speak at this year’s conference signals a deepening in the divisions in the medical community about how to best address gender distress in young people,” a CMA press release notes. “It also shows the commitment by CMA leaders to recognize and provide care to those harmed by these common practices.”
Particularly in American “gender medicine,” negative and harmful effects have been ignored, and at times suppressed, by some major medical organizations, said Tim Millea, MD, the chairman of CMA’s Conscience Rights Protection Task Force. He said this contradicts the long-held scientific tradition of allowing “ideas to be discussed and debated in an open, honest and transparent manner.”
‘Medicine’s Ability to Harm Is Nearly Limitless’
Pediatrician Patrick Hunter, a Florida Board of Medicine member, organized the panel. He said he was aiming to “bring to light to the harm that is being done, and to improve the overall care for trans-identified youth.”
“No one should want what is happening to these youth and young adults,” Hunter said. “The fact that harm and regret is happening should not be tolerated by our profession. The lack of concern and the unwillingness to acknowledge it should concern everyone in the medical profession.”
One detransitioner, Prisha Mosley, told CMA attendees she was manipulated by activists and therapists into accepting testosterone injections and a double mastectomy as a minor.
“It is important for doctors to learn how to stop the damage and to try and heal what’s been done. It is wrong for the very profession who hurt detransitioners to also routinely turn us away,” she said in the CMA’s press release about the event. “I’m grateful for any medical professional who is willing to listen.”
Hunter said he has heard from nearly 100 youth who regret their transitions and found the panelists’ stories “very painful.”“Medicine’s ability to harm is nearly limitless, while the ability to cure does have limitations,” Hunter said.
“This is why the principle of ‘First, do not harm’ is sound and universally accepted,” he said. “It acknowledges our need for humility, our need to know where our limits lie, and when we should and should not act.”
Refusing to Acknowledge Detransitioners
Hunter said he proposed the panel to multiple medical organizations, encouraging more groups to hear detransitioners speak. Both the AAP and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) rejected the proposal, he said, matching the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) stance of ignoring detransitioners. WPATH’s leadership has said that recognizing these patients is “considered off limits for many in our community.”
“Patients are being harmed by sex transition. That cannot be disputed,” Hunter said. “Medical evidence fails to show that patients will reliably benefit. If the medical profession will not recognize and learn from those that are being harmed, we are failing as professionals, but more importantly we are failing the patients that are being harmed. The medical profession has lost its way.”
The Stop the Harm Database highlights a “dirty dozen” of the U.S. hospitals that perform the most sex-disfigurement surgeries on minors. They are:
The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Connecticut Children’s Medical Center
Children’s Minnesota
Seattle Children’s
Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
Boston Children’s Hospital
Rady Children’s Hospital
Children’s National Medical Center
UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland
Children’s Hospital Colorado
UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center
The database also lists the employers of the U.S. doctors who billed the most for performing child mutilation surgeries from 2019 to 2023. The top-billing doctor for child sex surgeries in that timeframe worked at Boston Children’s hospital and charged more than $5 million for the procedures.
“California, one of the first states to declare itself a ‘sanctuary state’ for transgender procedures, also had the most irreversible surgeries, with 1,359 minors undergoing surgical procedures, followed by Oregon with 357, Washington with 330, Pennsylvania with 316 and Massachusetts with 300,” Fox News reported on the Do No Harm data.
Warring Medical Organizations
Many European countries have curtailed or halted gender medicine interventions in approximately the last year, based on experience and research demonstrating its serious damage to children. Yet most American medical organizations have remained staunch advocates, dismissing well-documented risks and complications associated with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transgender surgeries.
The United Kingdom’s release of the Cass Review in April and leaked WPATH files indicating that organization pushes medicine without informed consent sent clear messages about transgender medicine that American medical organizations such as the AMA and the AAP have largely dismissed or ignored. They are ignoring “objective and evidence-based data,” Millea said.
Still, some U.S. medical organizations do oppose gender mutilation, including the American College of Pediatricians, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, American College of Family Medicine, and the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. The “Doctors Protecting Children Declaration,” published by ACPEDS, represents thousands of health care workers who want such practices ended.
“A number of cases have been and will continue to be filed in courts around the country, challenging the federal and state mandates for transgender interventions and the freedom of medical professionals to challenge these methods and refuse to participate in them,” Millea said.
The CMA will support court cases to halt this harm in medicine, joining other organizations’ challenges in the form of amicus briefs, and if necessary, serving as plaintiffs, Millea said.
Last month, state attorneys general sent a letter to the AAP president demanding the AAP defend its support of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions for minors with gender dysphoria. The attorney generals requested a thorough explanation of this non-evidence-based policy by October 8.
“I heard from many attendees that the panel discussion was the most important thing they heard all week, and maybe at any conference,” Hunter said. “The medical profession cannot remain silent any longer. We must take action and speak out. We must seek regulation of the profession so that evidence-based, ethical, and effective care is provided for trans-identified youth. We must return medicine to its roots where we care for the individual, and not use the patient to make money, or forward social or political agendas.”
Ashley Bateman is a policy writer for The Heartland Institute and blogger for Ascension Press. Her work has been featured in The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, The New York Post, The American Thinker and numerous other publications. She previously worked as an adjunct scholar for The Lexington Institute and as editor, writer and photographer for The Warner Weekly, a publication for the American military community in Bamberg, Germany. Ashley is a board member at a Catholic homeschool cooperative in Virginia. She homeschools her four incredible children along with her brilliant engineer/scientist husband.
Effective July 2025, teacher licensing rules passed last year in Minnesota under Democrat Gov. Tim Walz will ban practicing Christians, Jews, and Muslims from teaching in public schools. Walz is now the presidential running mate of current U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. His resume includes a stint as a high school social studies teacher who sponsored a student queer sex club in 1999.
Starting next July, Minnesota agencies controlled by Walz appointees will require teacher license applicants to affirm transgenderism and race Marxism. Without a teaching license, individuals cannot work in Minnesota public schools, nor in the private schools that require such licenses. The latest version of the regulations requires teachers to “affirm” students’ “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” to receive a Minnesota teaching license:
The teacher fosters an environment that ensures student identities such as race/ethnicity, national origin, language, sex and gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical/developmental/emotional ability, socioeconomic class, and religious beliefs are historically and socially contextualized, affirmed, and incorporated into a learning environment where students are empowered to learn and contribute as their whole selves (emphasis added).
Last spring, administrative law judges finally approved these pending changes The Federalist reported one month before they were finalized. Universities are also affected: starting in 2025, they must either train their teaching students to fulfill these anti-Christian requirements or be banned from offering state licensing — and thus the ticket to the vast majority of teaching jobs — to their students.
Since 2020 in Minnesota, teachers renewing their licenses, which is usually required every five to seven years, must demonstrate “cultural competency” similar to the requirements imposed in 2025 on new teaching licensees. Teachers renewing their licensing must “Show[] evidence of self-reflection and discussion of” topics that include “Gender Identity, Including Transgender Students” and “Sexual Orientation.” They must also show they understand “bias” in themselves, and their students related to race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other cultural Marxist categories.
Queer Totalitarianism Forces Religion into the Closet
Some Christian universities in the state will obey these regulations, said Doug Seaton, founder and president of the nonprofit Upper Midwest Law Center, located in Minneapolis. Some Christian universities will not, but so far, those UMLC has reached out to that plan to disobey these state commands to violate their faith will do so quietly and only sue when the state finds and punishes them, Seaton said.
“Some are not willing to do it [file a lawsuit] until they actually have their college programs tagged for noncompliance, or their graduates actually not licensed as a consequence of not adhering to these standards,” he said in a phone interview. This comes even though UMLC, as a public interest law firm, would undertake the litigation and pay the vast majority of its expenses thanks to their donors. Three Minnesota Christian Universities The Federalist reached out to did not return inquiries on whether they would enforce the new licensing rules.
Faithful members of the world’s largest and oldest religions cannot in good conscience “affirm” non-heterosexual sexual orientations and gender identities. Christians who do so publicly deny their faith, something Jesus Christ said endangers a person’s soul and eternal bliss after death: “Therefore whoever confesses Me before men, him I will also confess before My Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies Me before men, him I will also deny before My Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 10:32, 33).
Minnesota’s teacher requirements therefore force Christians, Muslims, Jews, and adherents to other religions to violate their faith and endanger their hopes of eternal life in order to work in government-run schools.
Forcing people to testify to beliefs they don’t hold, often called compelled speech, is clearly unconstitutional, he said: “They’re essentially requiring people to affirm these ideas that they don’t really believe, in many cases, as a condition of being a public-school teacher or being part of a program to be a licensed public-school teacher. You can’t force that kind of speech; you can’t require adherence to ideas that aren’t believed.”
The 13-member board that made these changes is appointed by the governor, whom for the last six years has been Walz. So, Walz is poised to make similar bigoted, totalitarian, and unconstitutional policies across the United States should he be elected vice president.
Marinating Kids in Anti-American Propaganda
As I reported last year, Minnesota’s new teacher requirements also “require teachers to agree that the taxpayers supplying their salaries and the people who created the school system that will employ them are racists and affirm other cultural Marxist beliefs.”
“For example, Standard 6C requires that ‘The teacher understands the historical foundations of education in Minnesota … that have and continue to create inequitable opportunities, experiences, and outcomes for learners … especially for … students historically denied access, underserved, or underrepresented on the basis of race … gender, sexual orientation.’” That “standard” remains in the latest version of the regulations, under the same number.
Recently in The Wall Street Journal, Katherine Kersten examined curricular changes Minnesota is making under Walz’s administration in “ethnic studies” that mirror these changes to teacher licensing requirements.
Mr. Walz signed the law establishing this initiative in 2023. The department’s standards and benchmarks, approved in January, require first-graders to‘identify examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation and systems of power’ and ‘use those examples to construct meanings for those terms.’
Fourth graders must ‘identify the processes and impacts of colonization and examine how discrimination and the oppression of various racial and ethnic groups have produced resistance movements.’ High-school students are told to ‘develop an analysis of racial capitalism’ and ‘anti-Blackness’ and are taught to view themselves as members of ‘racialized hierarchies’ based on ‘dominant European beauty standards.”
The new teacher requirements are also rife with demands to agree with race Marxism, as Child Protection League analyses detail. Below are just a few examples.
Walz’s first executive order as governor was to install a “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI, council. Former Minnesota state legislator Allen Quist notes that “The radical Walz administration Department of Human Rights has also forced school districts to report student discipline by race and require equal outcomes (equity) in discipline. The results have been horrific chaos and violence.”
During Walz’s governorship, student achievement in Minnesota has gone from among the best in the nation to declining more sharply than anywhere else in the nation, according to the Minneapolis-based Center for the American Experiment. The most recent scores show Minnesota fourth graders dipping below the national average in reading for the first time ever recorded on the well-respected Nation’s Report Card.
Research has found for decades that there is no link between teacher certification and student achievement. People who enter teaching with a degree other than in education tend to have significantly higher personal and student academic performance.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her new book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
In 2023, the legislature amended the Minnesota Human Rights Act (MHRA) to add anti-discrimination protections for “gender identity” but failed to revise the corresponding religious exemption, effectively attempting to remove it.
This year, “gender identity” was added to a list of already protected categories of protections in the MHRA. “Sexual orientation” was already protected by the MHRA, but the term “gender identity” was added explicitly. A religious exemption that had already been in place since 1993 “prohibited the state from forcing religious organizations to comply with the anti-discrimination law provisions with respect to protected categories like sexual orientation when those provisions are inconsistent with a religious organization’s sincerely held beliefs,” said Renee Carlson, general counsel for True North Legal. However, the religious exemption was not updated to include the term “gender identity.”
“While we had hoped it was an oversight, the House Judiciary Chair stated on the record that the omission of those words was intentional,” Carlson said. “A discussion ensued during the committee where Democratic legislators not only refused to accept an amendment to protect religious organizations, but also called the amendment to protect religious organizations ‘disturbing’ and ‘disgusting’ after hearing a testimony from a diverse group of testifiers.”
By openly failing to include “gender identity” in the previously established religious exemption, the Minnesota legislation openly attacked religious freedom, but the attack does not stop there. Churches and religious institutions would be directly impacted by this exemption, but so would many unprotected groups served by religious organizations.
“A threat to religious organizations extends well beyond the churches and ministries that the statute protects. Religious organizations often serve marginalized and underserved communities, such as victims of sex trafficking, homeless families, and youth through programs that help kids graduate high school and even go to college. These religious entities in Minnesota meet individual needs and fill gaps that the government could never achieve on its own. To be sure, this was an unprecedented attack on religion and people of faith, but also on the communities that they serve,” said Carlson.
The MHRA could even threaten the existence of some religious organizations whose mission and religious beliefs are inseparable, Carlson added. “For religious organizations and its members, every decision is inextricably bound up in the tenets of its faith tradition. Removing statutory protections for religious organizations from the Minnesota Human Rights Act threatened the existence of all religious entities whose missions are inseparable from their employment practices, catechisms, and governance.”
According to Jason Adkins, general counsel at Minnesota Catholic Conference, the religious exemption was put in place in 1993 and had functioned without any problems until the bill introducing “gender identity” protections. The religious exemption was never meant to compromise anti-discrimination law but was intended to protect the freedom of religious institutions.
“The clear religious exemption provides predictability to religious organizations, potential litigants, and others about the scope of the MHRA and the pluralism of values that it protects, including the autonomy of religious institutions on matters of sexual identity. Anti-discrimination provisions related to sexual orientation and gender identity made it into law in 1993 in part because religious groups did not oppose them due to the inclusion of the exemption. This clarification of law restores the gender identity exemption and ensures that the MHRA is not used as a sword against faith communities,” said Adkins.
After public backlash, both the Minnesota House and Senate voted unanimously to restore religious protections.
While the restoration of the exemption somewhat protects religious organizations, there are many members of religions working in fields not controlled by religious institutions. Christian workers, including teachers, lawyers, and doctors, fear the need to compromise their religious beliefs in order to do their jobs in a way that respects the MHRA. “Our big concern is that doctors may be punished for declining to provide treatments they believe are unethical or harmful. This is not a tenet of a specific religion, but of natural law and universal human rights,” said a medical doctor from the Association of American Physicians.
Despite the religious exemption being restored, legal battles to defend religious freedom are constantly raging in Minnesota. Still in effect are the new standards requiring state-licensed teachers to affirm students’ gender identities. After the MHRA tried to effectively remove the religious exemption, new amendments to the Minnesota constitution intending to attack religious institutions have been proposed.
Doug Seaton, a lawyer at Upper Midwest Law, emphasized the constant need for vigilance in an environment where religious liberty is always under attack. “We have to be constantly fighting these assaults in the dark and bringing them to the light. This attempt ended in success, but it is a lesson in how eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed on Monday that it is pursuing a four-count indictment against a Texas doctor who blew the whistle on a kids’ transing scheme at the largest children’s hospital in the United States.
Dallas-based Dr. Eithan Haim first discovered Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston — which originally claimed it no longer offered body-butchering services to pediatric patients — employed physicians who continued to castrate children during his residency rotations. The 34-year-old leakedevidence of this deceptive activity along with proof that the hospital administration promoted procedures to cut off the breasts and genitals of physically healthy people to City Journal’s Christopher Rufo in May 2023. Both Haim and Rufo maintain that the information Haim passed along contained redactions that kept minor patients’ information secret.
The four-count indictment, unsealed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Texas on Monday, however, alleges Haim obtained “protected individual health information for patients that were not under his care and without authorization” by requesting to “re-activate his login access at TCH to access pediatric patients not under his care” shortly before the article debuted.
Prosecutors led by U.S. Attorney Tina Ansari, who has already been accused of a long list of misconduct in the investigation, claim Haim acted “under false pretenses and with intent to cause malicious harm to TCH.”
The HIPPA Privacy Rule prosecutors will invoke in their case against Haim states that “covered entities” are allowed to disclose seemingly protected health information as long as “they believe [it] is necessary to prevent or lessen a serious and imminent threat to a person or the public, when such disclosure is made to someone they believe can prevent or lessen the threat (including the target of the threat).”
According to Haim, the threat posed by medical professionals who swore to “do no harm” but continued to subject children to dangerous gender experiments was serious and imminent enough to risk his livelihood for it. He also believes the Biden administration’s sudden show of interest in an exposé from last year at the same time it continues to weaponize itself against its ideological enemies is no coincidence.
“I believe the reason they are doing this is clear. They want to send a message to any potential whistleblower — the punishment for telling the truth, for challenging the dominant political ideology, will be the heavy hand of the most powerful federal leviathan in human history,” Haim wrote on his Give Send Go page earlier this month.
If convicted, the expectant father could face up to 10 years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and 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 X @jordanboydtx.
The Biden administration’s Department of Education unveiled a sweeping set of rules on Friday that effectively erase protections for sex-based spaces by expanding the Title IX prohibition against sex discrimination to include “gender identity” — a term that’s never mentioned in the original law.
A majority of Americans agree that males who claim to identify otherwise should not be allowed to infiltrate girls’ and women’s sports teams. As of now, some 25 states have laws or regulations aimed at keeping boys and men out of female-only spaces, on and off the field. Yet, come Aug. 1, the Democrat regime’s radial redefinition of “sex-based discrimination” poses a threat to sex-based protections and welcomes males into female spaces including athletic competitions, locker rooms, and sex-specific clubs such as sororities, despite state laws.
“The final regulations will help to ensure that all students receive appropriate support when they experience sex discrimination and that recipients’ procedures for investigating and resolving complaints of sex discrimination are fair to all involved,” the rules claim.
The regulations do even more damage, however, such as by undoing Trump-era due process safeguards for those accused of sexual misconduct, which could include merely using accurate pronouns. They also encroach on parents’ rights and threaten academic free speech by incentivizing schools to censor students and teachers with traditional views on sex and marriage, so they don’t lose federal funding.
In the regulations, the Biden administration openly admits it relied on the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision to inform its rulemaking. In that case, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch joined their Democrat-nominated colleagues to expand the prohibition against employment discrimination based on “sex” to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”
A draft of the rules released in June 2022 received a “record number” of comments from Americans warning that enacting such extensive provisions and redefining terms like “sexual harassment” would bully schools into mandating the spread of radical gender ideology.
In response to Biden’s Department of Education ignoring some 240,000 comments, “a coalition of organizations” including the Independent Women’s Forum andIndependent Women’s Law Center are suing the administration, according to an IWF press release. In 2022 and 2023, those groups sentlegal and policyobjections to the new rule.
“Title IX was designed to give women equal opportunities in academic settings. It forbids discrimination on the basis of ‘sex,’ which it affirms throughout the statute is binary and biological. The unlawful Omnibus Regulation re-imagines Title IX to permit the invasion of women’s spaces and the reduction of women’s rights in the name of elevating protections for ‘gender identity,’ which is contrary to the text and purpose of Title IX,” Director of Independent Women’s Law Center May Mailman said, noting the rules are illegal.
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.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) developed its 2021 framework on sex and “gender” around the concepts of fairness, inclusion, and non-discrimination. This framework leaves it to each sport’s governing body“to determine how an athlete may be at a disproportionate advantage against their peers.” However, they admonish sports organizations against “targeted testing … aimed at determining [athletes’] sex, gender identity and/or sex variations.” Instead, it’s up to each sport to “[provide] confidence that no athlete within a category has an unfair and disproportionate competitive advantage.”
The IOC’s sophistic gymnastics to deny sex-based categories in sport prompted 26 researchers from around the world to rebut the IOC’s framework. Their paper, published last week in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, is the latest peer-reviewed study providing evidence of the obvious about sex in sports. The researchers reviewed studies from “evolutionary and developmental biology, zoology, physiology, endocrinology, medicine, sport and exercise science, [and] athletic performance results within male and female sport” to refute the IOC’s position that male athletes warrant “no presumption of advantage” over female athletes based on “biological or physiological characteristics.”
That statement “is ridiculous on its face,” says Kim Jones, co-founder of the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS). “This is the basic knowledge we all understand and see play out in front of our eyes every day. [This new] paper is brilliant at laying out how clear the differences are between men and women. There are thousands of differences between male and female development in humans across the entire maturity path that result in these huge performance gaps.”
John Armstrong, a mathematician at King’s College London who was not affiliated with this research, highlights this “central flaw” of the IOC’s framework. “To say we should not presume male advantage in a sport unless we have specific data for that sport is like saying that just because most of the apples in a tree have fallen to the ground, one shouldn’t presume the remaining apples are also subject to gravity,” he said.
“There is overwhelming evidence of male advantage from across different sports and there is little to be gained from demonstrating this again and again, sport by sport,” Armstrong noted.
The Illusion of Testosterone Suppression
But even sports that have copious research into sex differences in performance have permitted males to compete in the female category at all levels of competition and age. One path has been through misguided policies based on testosterone levels.
Over the last decade, various sports governing bodies — including the IOC and USA Boxing — have attempted to define females through testosterone levels. Those organizations relied heavily on a publication by Joanna Harper, a trans-identifying male medical physicist. The paper consisted of eight self-reports by trans-identifying male recreational runners who had suppressed their testosterone pharmacologically and recalled that they ran slower after doing so. Harper excluded the one respondent who said he ran faster and then concluded that males who were suppressing their testosterone could compete fairly in the female category.
Last week’s paper builds on research by lead authors Tommy Lundberg, Emma Hilton, and others who demonstrate the persistence of male advantage after testosterone suppression.
While testosterone suppression decreases various measures of anatomy, physiology, and physical performance, those changes are a small fraction of the differences between men and women on these metrics. A testosterone-suppressed male will have less muscle mass than his former self, but as a category, testosterone-suppressed men remain larger and stronger than women. Further, testosterone suppression does not change attributes like height, bone length, or hip and shoulder width.
Even before puberty, though, males outperform females in athletic competitions. Greg Brown is an exercise physiologist at the University of Nebraska at Kearney and was a co-author on the Lundberg paper. Brown recently published research based on national youth track and field championships. He found that by age 8, the boys ran faster in their final rounds than the girls did in theirs, at race distances from 100 meters to 1,500 meters.
When ‘Obvious’ Sex Differences Are Not Enough
Brown’s article came out a few months after John Armstrong (mentioned above), sociologist Alice Sullivan of University College London, and I published a paper on the role of sex versus gender expression in distance running. Having been on the receiving end of many tweets and articles saying, “Duh, obvious, did we need research to prove this?” I asked Brown if we really needed quantitative research to prove that boys run faster than girls.
“Some court cases regarding transgender athletes competing in girls’ sports said there’s no evidence of prepubescent sex-based differences. This kind of work does matter to inform policy. Moreover, it can be useful to evaluate the obvious because some of the things we take for granted as truth, maybe they’re not,” Brown said.
The obvious question in response to this accumulation of “obvious” data is: What will it take to restore and enforce sex-based categories in sports at all levels? Even if the International Olympic Committee aligned its policies with the Lundberg paper, the IOC is not binding on youth sports, grassroots sports, or even the NCAA.
Brown is optimistic about “the grassroots level, where girls and women’s sports will start being limited to female athletes. Some school districts and other local organizations are making female-only sports policies when state or higher-level organizations won’t.”
Brown noted the lawsuit against the NCAA by female athletes will “make those in charge of sports have second thoughts about their transgender inclusion policies. Before there was a fear of lawsuits from transgender activists, but now the shoe is on the other foot.”
He also called on “scholarly journals, sports science organizations, and sports scientists to speak out and keep the reality of sex-based differences in sports performance in the news to counteract the 20-year head start the transgender activists have.”
ICONS is funding the lawsuit that Brown mentioned. “We need people to realize there can be no fear and no shame in standing up for women. It’s a basic message that we all have the responsibility to communicate clearly,” said ICONS co-founder Kim Jones. “The stories of women and girls being robbed of fair sport, or even facing injury, are the path of change. It shouldn’t take women and girls being hurt, but everyone has the clear evidence.”
Jon Pike, a sports philosopher and a co-author of the Lundberg paper, advises sports organizations to look to the evidence and not to the IOC.
“They are training and developing athletes who aspire to international competition. They owe female athletes the same level playing field that they will get at the international level. Female athletes at all levels are entitled to fair sport,” he said.
Objective empirical data that accord with everyday experience and observation are the most powerful counters to the emotion, rhetoric, and threats that often accompany attempts to deny the validity of female-only spaces and categories.
The value of studies like those of Lundberg, Brown, Armstrong, and their respective colleagues will play out in board rooms and courtrooms, not to mention the living rooms where so many grassroots sports decisions are made. The more decision-makers can rely on research rather than earnest but shallow plaints of “But it’s obvious!” the more women and girls will flourish in fair and competitive sports.
George M. Perry is a sports performance coach, sports businessman, and writer. Before going into the sports industry, he was a submarine warfare officer in the United States Navy and briefly attended law school.
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.
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.
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.
Today a Helsinki appeals court acquitted two Christians of “hate crimes” charges with potential prison sentences for tweeting Bible verses and publishing a Christian booklet about sexual ethics. This unprecedented application of Finnish law has kept Member of Parliament Paivi Rasanen and Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola in court for nearly five years.
Despite today’s unanimous ruling affirming a unanimous lower-court acquittal, those five years are likely to increase. The state prosecutor told media she will appeal to Finland’s Supreme Court, and the court is likely to take the case, said Rasanen and Pohjola’s lawyer, Matti Sankamo, in a press conference from Finland this morning. An adverse ruling could effectively outlaw Christianity in Finland and damage the fundamental human rights to free speech and religious exercise across the world.
“This is a significant win … for everyone concerned with the protection of fundamental freedoms,” Rasanen said in the press conference. “While I celebrate this victory wholeheartedly, I am also saddened at the thought of the enormous state resources expended over the last four years to prosecute us for nothing more than the peaceful expression of our Christian faith. The basic human right to free speech remains under serious threat in Finland and around the world.”
Rasenen and Pohjola said they immediately texted friends and family the news of the court decision this morning, with Pohjola reading Psalm 103’s words of praise to his family, he said. He also immediately shared the news with fellow pastors, and “I got an immediate reaction that ‘We are so happy our bishop is not labeled as a criminal,’” he said.
“This is not only a cultural or legal battle but also a spiritual battle,” Pohjola said, noting their prosecution raises the “question of [whether] pastor and church can teach publicly what we understand to be the word of God and the created order and the natural law. There have been difficult moments, but I understand this is my calling as a Christian and a pastor to guard the faith and teach it publicly and carry the cross.”
That cross, he said, is not a physical cross like the one he wears around his neck, “It’s to pay the price in this age to be a witness for Christ.”
The case began in 2019, when Rasanen argued on X (then Twitter) that Finland’s state church, in which her husband is a pastor, should not sponsor an LGBT parade. She tweeted a picture of Bible verses that say non-heterosexual acts are unnatural.
Finland’s top prosecutor investigated complaints filed over Rasanen’s tweet. This led to three days of police interrogating Rasanen and an investigation into Rasanen’s 25 years as a member of Parliament and former interior minister for the nation recently admitted into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
That investigation unearthed a 2004 booklet Rasanen, a medical doctor, wrote and Pohjola published as part of a church catechism series. The booklet, titled “Male and Female He Created Them,” explains basic Christian doctrines about God’s design for marriage to comprise one man and one woman for life.
Helsinki prosecutor Anu Mantila argued Finnish courts should ban from the internet the booklet, Rasanen’s tweet, and an audio recording of Rasanen defending Christian views. Mantila also seeks punitive fines. “Male and Female He Created Them” was published in 2004, several years before Finland adopted the antiterrorism laws now being used to prosecute the two Christians for “hate speech.”
“With the right police and prosecutor, we could expect to see similar cases crop up across Europe and in fact around the world,” noted Alliance Defending Freedom International lawyer Paul Coleman, who is assisting the Christians’ legal defense. Hate crimes laws like Finland’s are on the books in many European nations and American states and cities.
Rasanen said the most difficult part of her prosecution has been the prosecutor’s false accusations against her, including that Rasanen considers homosexuals inferior. She said that is “against my conviction” as a Christian. Christianity teaches that every human is made in God’s image and so beloved by God that He sacrificed His own Son to wash away every sin ever committed.
“We represent the common traditional classical understanding of family and sexual ethics, and now this has been labeled widely in our society and also in the established Lutheran church as something which is … not only offending and extremist but it’s also criminal,” Pohjola said.
Pohjola is the bishop of a small non-state church body that adheres to the Bible’s teachings, which Finland’s state church has in large part abandoned. The Federalist interviewed Pohjola in person in 2021, and Rasanen in person in 2022.
In the press conference, Pohjola and Rasanen expressed gratitude for all the prayers and messages of support they’ve received from around the world, as well as their own families’ steadfast support during their trials. They both called it a “privilege” to defend Christianity and the basic human rights of free speech and freedom of religion in court and in numerous media appearances since their prosection began.
Rasanen, whose 11 grandchildren include a newborn, highlighted a message she’d received from a 16-year-old Finnish girl who said the prosecution has encouraged her to be more public about her faith at school.
“In a free society, faith is not meant to be hidden behind closed doors,” Rasanen said today. “This is what happens in dictatorships, not democracies.”
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her ebooks include “The Read-Aloud Advent Calendar,” “The Advent Prepbook,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her traditionally published books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
The mother of a Virginia teensex-trafficked twice after her school concealed her newly asserted gender identity has filed a groundbreaking lawsuit against school staff and a Maryland public defender who alleged parental “misgendering” and abuse. The complaint was filed Aug. 22 in the Western District of Virginia court on behalf of Michele Blair by the Child and Parental Rights Campaign (CPRC) with support from the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR).
It alleges that the defendants’ actions—first in withholding vital information about the girl’s gender identification and related assault in the boys’ bathroom, then later by falsely alleging abuse to deprive her mother of custody—resulted in the child’s ordeal at the hands of sexual predators not once, but twice. Blair v. Appomattoxet al. will set critical precedents in two areas of roiling national debate: parental notification of gender transition in schools and parental custody relating to gender identity.
Public Schools Hide Kids’ Dysphoria
More than 10 million children this fall returned to public schools that conceal kids’ transgender identities from parents. A California case recently settled for $100,000 is one of several lawsuits filed by parents whose children were secretly transitioned in school.
The Blair suit, however, is groundbreaking for displaying the liability schools risk when secret-keeping results in tragedy. Safely back in her loving home for more than a year now, Sage still suffers persistent nightmares and panic attacks. She is receiving intensive therapy for complexPTSD, her mother reports, a diagnosis related to prolonged helplessness amid extreme trauma.
The reason for the secrecy that prefaced her ordeal no longer exists: Sage has embraced her sex, reflecting in hindsight that she had “just wanted to make friends” at her new school by claiming to be a boy.
How gender identity relates to “abuse” is fiercely debated nationwide. In some states including California, pending legislation categorizes parental non-affirmation of gender dysphoria as abuse. The political cost of angering parents of all backgrounds has begun to affect 2024 campaigns, as demonstrated by California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s unexpected veto of one of these bills.
In 2023, Virginia lawmakers debated “Sage’s Law,” requiring parental notification in schools and clarifying that raising a child according to his or her sex may not be considered abuse. Virginia Senate Democrats killed Sage’s Law, and it has become a campaignissue. In fact, the transgender delegate who vehemently opposed House Bill 2432 is now facing a veteran anti-traffickingleader championing the bill.
“Sage’s story is an absolute tragedy that no child should ever have to endure. But what is even worse is that it was entirely preventable,” said attorney Vernadette Broyles in announcing the lawsuit. “School administrators and public officials alike decided that their authority superseded that of her parents…This is about who has the best interests of the child at heart, who knows that child better than anyone else, and ultimately who must make important personal decisions for a child.”
An ‘Entirely Preventable’ Nightmare
Sage’s heartbreaking story was documented in The Federalist last winter, when Delegate Dave LaRock introduced Sage’s Law in the Virginia General Assembly. She was a 14-year-old freshman at Appomattox County High School in 2021 when her school allegedly reinforced her claim to be male and concealed it from her parents. She was severely bullied, then assaulted in the male bathroom school employees told her to use, according to the complaint.
Sage ran away, leaving a note expressing fear of further violence. She was caught by a predator who drugged and raped her, then drove her into Washington, DC, where other men sex-trafficked her into Maryland.
When the FBI rescued Sage in Baltimore eight days later, a public defender alleged “misgendering” and abuse at home, so a judge withheld custody from Sage’s loving parents for more than two months. Instead, the judge ordered Sage to a Maryland state home in male quarters, where she was assaulted again, the lawsuit says. Sage fled and was once again caught by a predator and raped, drugged, starved, and tortured, this time for months before law enforcement found her in Texas.
Seeking Justice for Sage
The 55-page complaint lays out nine causes of action, seeking “compensatory and punitive damages” plus court costs for “tortious interference with the parent-child relationship, conspiracy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, professional malpractice, and other rights” resulting in extreme harm to Sage and her mother. The first four causes of action target Appomattox County High School counselors Dena Olsen and Avery Via, Superintendent Annette Bennett, and the school board.
The remaining causes contain shocking charges against Maryland public defender Aneesa Khan and the school counselors of malpractice, perjury, and conspiracy “aimed at depriving Mrs. Blair of custody of her daughter and keeping [Sage] in Maryland to be affirmed in a male identity.”The complaint alleges the trio knowingly presented false testimony of abuse to Judge Robert Kershaw, and that their success in convincing him to keep Sage from her parents resulted in her subsequent abuse in a state home and in her second, months-long victimization.
Lawsuit: Hiding Info Led to Sex Trafficking
The Appomattox defendants, contends the lawsuit, concealed both the school’s unauthorized “mental health intervention” affirming Sage as male and the resultant student “bullying, verbal, physical and sexual assault.” It alleges they failed to take corrective action or to initiate a Title IX sexual harassment investigation, instead directing the girl into the male bathroom, where she was assaulted.
Among the most damning allegations is the counselors’ egregious disregard for Sage’s history of trauma and mental health concerns. Michele had provided these to the school expecting they would work closely with her like Sage’s previous school had, she described in testimony to Virginia’s legislature.
Sage lost her father as a baby and had been through six foster homes by age two when Michele, her biological grandmother, adopted her. Michele recalls Sage’s unusual silence as a child: she had learned not to cry because adults didn’t respond.
With years of love, she developed into a happy child. Then a wave of mental health issues emerged with puberty, compounded by Covid isolation. As a trained Virginia Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA), Michele sought professional help for Sage, including hospitalization the summer before she entered high school.
Despite this known vulnerability, contends the lawsuit, Appomattox kept Sage’s parents in the dark even once reports surfaced of assault in the boys’ bathroom. School personnel met repeatedly with Sage alone, culminating in an emotional session on August 25, 2021 where they threatened she could be sued if she made false allegations against the boys, the lawsuit says. Sage suffered a “psychotic break,” alleges the lawsuit, and ran away that night into the nightmare that followed.
Counselors, Public Defender ‘Conspired’
The night Sage was rescued in Baltimore, she spent hours alone at the hospital undergoing a difficult rape exam into the wee hours of the morning. As she was being driven to a detention center afterward, the complaint alleges, Sage asked that her mother be called to take her home. This request was denied and she was locked in solitary detention. Later that day, Khan was claiming in court that the Blairs were abusive and Sage did not want to go home.
Among the disturbing facts alleged are sudden, mysterious phone calls originating from self-described “mandated reporters” to the Appomattox County child abuse hotline hours after Sage was found on September 3, “before her rescue and location were known to anyone but law enforcement, Mrs. Blair and Ms. Khan.”
Other reports followed, claiming Michele had subjected Sage to “‘conversion therapy’ aimed at changing [Sage’s] gender identity.” This was “factually impossible,” as Michele allegedly only became aware of the gender identity shift the night Sage ran away. In fact, asserts the complaint, Khan conspired with Olsen and Via to “facilitat[e] the initiation of child protective services investigations in Virginia and Maryland.”
There are further allegations of grievous cruelty to a traumatized young rape victim: Sage was never informed her parents were waiting for her right outside the jail; Khan convinced Sage to lie to the court that her parents had abused her; Khan told the child her mother no longer wanted her, and withheld all the gifts and loving letters Michele sent to Sage at the Maryland children’s home.
These “extreme and outrageous actions intentionally aimed at harming…Mrs. Blair’s parental relationship with [Sage]” were allegedly “all because Ms. Khan believed that [Sage] must be affirmed as male,” the lawsuit says. According to a text from Sage to a friend, Khan had the stated ambition of taking her case to the Supreme Court.
Ideology Trumps Care for Trauma
Broylesstated to The Federalist Radio Hour that “ideology overwhelmed everything we know about trauma, about sex abuse victims, about children needing their parents and how they should be restored [to them] immediately…unless there’s actual proof of…abuse.” Instead, a 100-pound, deeply wounded girl with no criminal record was jailed for several days, then housed with troubled teenage boys, “where she was exposed to drugs, further sexual harassment and assault.”
Broyles reasoned Sage was treated “as if she’s a juvenile delinquent…in order to maintain control.” The legal maneuvering in Maryland lasted more than two months, with Judge Kershaw holding multiple hearings that delayed Sage’s return to Virginia required under the Interstate Compact for Juveniles (ICJ).
Khan’s alleged narrative of abandonment fell on receptive ground: Sage told Michele months later how much she’d missed her, but tried not to, because she “knew” Michele didn’t want her. The shame and unworthiness felt by victims of sexual exploitation is well-documented. “Trauma-related shame is an irrational and biological response…connected to the specific reactions of denial, hiding, and running away,” explains one study.
A Critical Precedent on School Secrecy
The school secrecy that allegedly facilitated Sage’s ordeal is an intense national debate. In Virginia, leftist school boards like FairfaxCounty’s are defying Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s new model policies requiring parental notification and use of privacy facilities by sex, not gender identity. California and New Jersey are suing their own constituents, at constituent expense, for the right to deceive them about their own children.
Significantly, records indicate Appomattox staff followed the same principle of instant, uncritical, and secret affirmation dictated by LGBT activist–craftedmodel policies that have infiltrated thousands of schools. The “Schools in Transition” model policy insists “affirming a child’s gender identity is in a child’s best interest,” and that school personnel have “unique insight into the student’s needs without the biases parents can or are perceived to have.”
An Essential Precedent on Children’s Rights
This raises the critical question: does refusal to affirm a child as the opposite sex constitute “abuse” and grounds for removal from parental custody, as Khan advocated in court? Activists are training legalofficials and law students that it does.
A bill California’s legislature passed would transfer children to state custody where, as Sage experienced, the risk of actual abuse skyrockets. Simultaneously, by dictating that foster parents “affirm” kids’ sexual identities, California is reducing the homes available to needy foster kids.
In some states, family custody is alreadydecided on this basis. While all 50 states are bound by the ICJ governing the return of runaway minors, some have passed “refuge” laws preventing the return of children who have run or been taken across state lines for “gender-affirming care.”
The fundamental question in Blair v. Appomattox et al. is whether fit parents or the state rightfully decide a child’s best interests. Sage’s story as described in the complaint shows the devastating potential harm to children when ideologically captured institutions wrest control of a child’s life from parents. While the case will set critical precedents in schools and courts, it also highlights the pressing need for laws reinforcing the right of parents to protect their children from state overreach.
Michele says she’s filing this lawsuit in the “hope…that no parent ever has to go through what [she] did to protect their child.”
Laura Bryant Hanford is a mother of five and is actively involved in school policy and religious freedom issues in Virginia, where she lives with her family. She served from 2015 to 2018 on Fairfax County Public Schools’ Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee. She was the lead congressional staff drafter of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. She also served at the U.S. Embassy in Romania as the officer in charge of human rights, focusing on ethnic minorities, women, and refugees. She is a graduate of Princeton University.
Mark Campbell is a registered sex offender convicted of first-degree sexual assault for raping his 10-year-old daughter, but thanks to the state of Wisconsin, he is now housed in a women’s prison in Fond du Lac. Despite his biology and the heightened threat he poses to women based on the nature of his crime, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections allowed him to be categorized as “FEMALE,” and subsequently to be incarcerated with female inmates at Taycheedah Correctional Institution since August of 2022.
Campbell began serving his 34-year sentence in 2007 and has since been receiving wrong-sex hormones and claiming to be a woman named Nicole. In 2013, he requested a surgical operation to mutilate his male sexual organs to appear more female and was initially declined for not meeting prerequisites.
In 2016, Campbell sued the Department of Corrections for not allowing him to undergo the procedure, claiming it was an Eighth Amendment violation. In 2019, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that “clearly established law did not require Wisconsin prison officials to provide Campbell with gender-dysphoria treatment beyond hormone therapy.”
But as of December 2020, “a federal judge ruled that Wisconsin must offer Campbell taxpayer-funded transition surgery and move him to a women’s prison while awaiting that surgery,” according to reporting from The Daily Signal.
In his ruling, U.S. District Judge James Peterson referred to Campbell by inaccurate female pronouns and argued the disfiguring genital surgery was necessary because Campbell was still “in anguish” thanks to his “gender dysphoria,” even after receiving experimental female hormones on Wisconsin taxpayers’ dime. While he awaits the procedure, the convicted rapist continues to be housed with female inmates.
Campbell’s status as a sex offender isn’t unusual for male inmates with whom female prisoners are forced to live. According to The Daily Signal’s reporting on Wisconsin data, 81 of the 161 male inmates who claim to be transgender have been convicted of “sexual assault or sexual abuse.”
Nor is the trend of leftist localities housing dangerous men with female inmates to appease the pro-transgender agenda of the Democrat Party limited to Wisconsin. A California law passed in 2019 “requires men who say they are women to be housed in women’s prisons.” In both the 116th and 117th Congress, House Democrats overwhelmingly voted for H.R. 5, which sought to bar so-called “discrimination” based on “gender identity” in federal institutions — effectively demanding that men like Campbell be treated as women under the guise of “equality.”
There’s a bill sitting on Gavin Newsom’s desk right now that would not only render the First Amendment null and void but also strip parents of their most fundamental rights and responsibilities toward their children. It’s not a matter of if the far-left California governor will sign it, but when.
The bill, the Transgender, Gender-Diverse, and Intersex Youth Empowerment Act (AB 957) — which last week passed the Senate and then, on a party-line vote, the Assembly — dictates that courts must consider “gender affirmation” in child custody battles. The soon-to-be-law states that in seeking to determine the “health, safety, and welfare of the child,” courts must consider “a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity or gender expression.”
While some Democrat apologists in the media pretend it’s absurd to think this means conservative parents would ever lose custody of their children by nature of holding conservative values — It doesn’t say judges *have* to side with the loving, accepting parents, you hateful rubes! — we know how this will go. It’s California, for crying out loud.
But we don’t have to extrapolate much. Other media have dropped the facade and told us exactly where this bill will lead. Here’s CNBC:
Under the proposed law, parents, who fail to acknowledge and support their child’s gender transition, could face potential consequences, including the loss of custody rights to another parent or even the state itself. The bill’s supporters argue that it is in the best interest of children, aiming to create a more inclusive and affirming environment for gender-diverse youth.
There’s the quiet part out loud: A mom or dad who opts not to indulge their child in mental illness, who uses the child’s given name, prohibits the use of puberty blockers, or discourages sterilizing hormones or surgery could lose the child not only to the other parent, which is egregious enough — but to the state.
As Sarah Parshall Perry, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has pointed out, this law would stomp on the Constitution’s guarantee to free speech and the free exercise of religion. It would “muzzle” parents and prevent them from rearing their children in accordance with their deeply held beliefs — beliefs, by the way, that have been regarded by both Christians and non-Christians as basic laws of nature and fundamentals of civil society until about five minutes ago. This is more than a legal dilemma for Constitutional scholars and gender-studies midwits to bat around in mahogany rooms and shoddy amici, however. If it feels more nefarious and personal — that’s because it is. We’ve seen it before.
It’s classic Democrat emotional blackmail. It’s the left waging psychological warfare on its ideological opponents with barely veiled threats. Oh, you want to see your own child? Well, that’s interesting because xir needs some hormones xe says you won’t provide. You don’t seem too concerned with xir’s health and safety.
This brand of emotional blackmail has already been tested and perfected with the suicide card. That is, the aforementioned gender-studies “experts,” medical professionals, journalists, and other Very Smart People™ have decided, based on little to no evidence, that transgender medical interventions are the only acceptable course of action for confused kids. In fact, anything short of full “affirmation” is deadly, they say.
With this conclusion in mind — and at the expense of mountingevidenceshowingpro-trans policiescausethe most harm — they’ve devised “research” that Democrats then present as unassailable. The methodology of these biased studies is wildly problematic. Pro-trans ideologues habitually equate correlation with causation, fail to treat gender dysphoria as a mental illness and ignore underlying mental health issues such as depression, discount the potential role of wrong-sex hormones in unhealthy ideations, ignore hard facts about the ways puberty eventually resolves almost all dysphoria in minors, discounts rampant social factors, and turns a blind eye to the growing chorus of detransitioners who fell for leftist lies and are now filled with despair.
But never let bad science get in the way of an agenda. Would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter?, they manipulate. A lack of acceptance has driven trans suicide rates and self-harm through the roof.
A law this unconstitutional is bound to wind up in the courts. And I suppose we should be thankful there’s one remaining recourse. But if all conservatives have on their side is a waiting game until the courts eventually slap California lawmakers on the wrist, they have nothing. In fact, getting GOP-opposed laws tied up in the slow gears of the court system is exactly what Democrats are expecting. They’re counting on it. The more they can keep conservatives and jurists busy, the more radical laws and policies they can keep shoving out the door. We can’t stop them all. How many poor parents and children will be casualties in the meantime?
But don’t lose the human element in the legislative games. Rabid ideologues and iconoclasts who want to remake America and its children in their own image aren’t afraid to use the most vulnerable among us as pawns. Self-censorship will only be the start. It’s emotional blackmail, plain and simple. Do what we say, or else.
Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
As they worked tirelessly to oust Donald Trump from the White House in 2020, a chorus of corporate media, Never Trumpers, establishment Democrats, and Joe Biden himself promised Americans a Biden presidency would usher in a “return to normalcy.”
Two and a half years later, normalcy has yet to appear. Biden’s tenure has cemented a new “normal” of men pretending to be women, a march toward global conflict, and synthetic drugs in the White House. Decency and decorum? Not exactly. As the 2024 election season heats up, now is as good a time as ever to take stock of our cultural and political status quo and remind ourselves that the self-proclaimed unifier-in-chief and his administration’s lackeys have done everything in their power to upend our norms, not return to them. Here are 10 examples.
1. Obscene LGBT Activism
In exchange for Trump’s mean tweets, Biden’s normal includes men showing off their prosthetic breasts on the White House lawn. As LGBT extremists enforced pride month on the rest of the country, the Biden family saw fit to host a pride party at the symbolic residence. Three of their guests proudly stripped off their tops to flaunt their mutilated “true” selves.
After immediate backlash, the Biden administration noted the behavior was “inappropriate” and disinvited the three people involved — but there was nothing “normal” about nude White House party guests.
Speaking of indecent exposure, LGBT activism under the Biden administration has taken an obscene turn and not just during “pride month.” The White House’s gay and trans agenda has no limiting principle, with the president going out of his way to promote irreversible medical interventions for confused youths. This radicalism trickles down into defending pornographic books for children, explicit “education,” public nudity, and graphic sexual depictions in family-friendly public environments.
2. Corruption
When Biden talked about normalcy, did he mean multimillion-dollar bribery schemes? Thanks to astute lawmakers like Sen. Chuck Grassley and brave whistleblowers within the Internal Revenue Service and FBI, Americans are finally seeing past the Biden-protection racket to the corrupt family business.
Biden and his DOJ will pretend the sins are littler misdemeanor tax crimes limited to his poor addict son Hunter, but whistleblower testimony about a damning FBI document suggests “the big guy’s” hands are dirty — and the Justice Department has been covering it up.
3. Cocaine at the White House
The same administration that tracked down grandmas who happened to be in D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, claims it won’t be able to figure out who brought cocaine into the high-security White House, complete with Secret Service agents, cameras, and records of every guest’s name, date of birth, and social security number, among other things.
Whether the synthetic drug belongs to Hunter Biden, an obvious suspect who is believed to be living in the White House right now, or someone else, Colombian bam-bam turning up at the president’s house isn’t normal.
4. Federal Weaponization and Censorship
To suppress its ideological and political opponents, the Biden administration found convenient ways to silence social media users. As recent House reports have shown, Biden’s agencies regularly engaged in collusion with the largest Big Tech companies to suppress free speech. Not only did they push for the censorship of speech that was factually wrong — speech that is still protected by the First Amendment — but they labeled information critical of the Democrat regime as “disinformation” and “misinformation” to justify stripping it from the public square. Worse, the Biden administration devised a category of speech that’s true but inconvenient, called “malinformation” — and worked to silence that too.
5. Bidenomics
Despite recovering some of the jobs the government forced workers out of during Covid lockdowns, Biden’s economy overall has been disastrous for the American people. Inflation in particular has been a steady theme, with prices for essentials from groceries to gasoline soaring throughout the early years of Biden’s term. Prices are still high and many Americans are still suffering in 2023, but in January the president had the audacity to claim a high inflation rate was a good thing because it had “cooled” from the 40-year record Biden broke the previous year.
6. The Edge of World War
Aggressive support for Ukraine in its war with Russia has been a constant theme of the Biden administration. Unfortunately, this support edges us closer to a global war. With escalation as the apparent goal of this conflict, depleted stockpiles put the U.S. at increased risk of war with insufficient supplies to fight it. NATO’s recent shortening of Ukraine’s membership application process could threaten to drag NATO member countries, and America in particular, into a great power conflict once again.
Of course, this is in addition to rising threats from China and at America’s southern border, with foreign threats growing under the noses of a distracted national security apparatus.
7. Science-Denying HHS Assistant Secretary
How’s this for normal? Biden appointed a science-denying man as the first “female” four-star
admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. The president selected Dr. Rachel Levine, a transgender-identifying person and motivated LGBT ideologue, as the assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Levine previously promoted the most extreme policies of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during Covid and was responsible for thousands of excess deaths in Pennsylvania during his tenure as the head of the Pennsylvania Health Department. In his position as Assistant Secretary, Levine has consistently fought to deny biological realities and promote the sterilization and mutilation of gender-confused children.
8. Pop Star as a Medical Expert
In keeping with Biden’s elevation of the unqualified, his administration turned to celebrities such as Olivia Rodrigo to persuade Americans to fawn over a flailing Anthony Fauci. In 2021, Rodrigo partnered with Fauci and Biden to produce videos encouraging youth vaccination. Her fans, along with the rest of the world, realized her expertise in healing hearts through music did not extend to medicine; her vaccination video remains one of her least-liked social media posts.
9. Senility and Lying
Probably the easiest return to normal would have been the election of a younger, coherent president who maintained some semblance of accountability to Americans. Instead, Biden offers regular doses of verbal incoherence, sleepiness, gaffes, uncomfortable whispers and shouts, and tumbles. These are all bad looks, but not as bad as the lies that spill out of the president on the daily, which The Federalist has tracked since his first day in office. Lying may be normal for Biden, but it shouldn’t be normal for the presidency, and neither should perceived physical and cognitive weakness on the world stage.
10. War on SCOTUS
It’s no surprise attacks on the Supreme Court have ramped up under the Biden administration. After all, this president evidently believes he’s above the law, and the court has disagreed, smacking down his administration on everything from student loans to Covid jab mandates. Not to mention other blows to the left during Biden’s tenure, such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the 303 Creative decision, and a university affirmative action takedown.
With the help of the media, the Biden administration has gotten bold about its plans to undercut and circumvent the court wherever it can. And the president is not alone; private universities will also be doing their best to dodge the law to keep supporting racial discrimination.
Samuel Boehlke is a rising senior in Mass Communication/Law and Policy at Concordia University Wisconsin and a current intern at The Federalist. He is Web Editor for CUW’s The Beacon and External Affairs Editor for Quaestus Journal. Reach him at sboehlkefdrlst@gmail.com or by DMs @vaguelymayo.
Columbus City Schools (CCS) shelled out more than $24,000 taxpayer dollars to a consulting firm that taught staff how to sneak radical gender ideology into classrooms without parents’ permission, a public records request made by Parents Defending Education revealed.
The two-day training in September 2022 was conducted by Q-inclusion, now known as “Hey Wes,” an organization led by a woman disguised as a man that boasts of partnering “with schools, healthcare clinics, businesses, and communities in order to support queer & trans belonging.”
Before the symposium, CCS had policies allowing students “affirming name and pronouns” to be “on all other documents, so long as this does not out them or put them in danger.” Some gender-bending students were also granted access to opposite-sex bathrooms and lockers.
During the sessions, CCS staff such as speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, school psychologists, and school counselors were schooled on methods and tools such as “gender support plan” sheets they could use to further their campaign to quietly force the LGBT agenda on children without parents’ knowledge.
CCS hires were specifically instructed what to do “when a student is out to you but not to their family” and how to handle “caregiver concerns and pushback” with conversation tactics while still hosting sexual conversations with children.
“Transgender and nonbinary students have a FERPA-protected right to privacy; this extends to students’ gender identity, birth name, sex assigned at birth and medical history. This includes privacy rights from parents/caregivers,” a Q-inclusion handout used for the training states.
Another set of slides boldly asserts that “children are not too young to talk about or know their gender” and that “gender expansiveness” should be discussed with toddlers.
Other slides used during the training included infamous imagery such as the genderbread person iteration, “the gender unicorn,” and the “wheel of power and privilege,” which argues that a mentally and financially stable, white, heterosexual, educated male in good health is the epitome of societal “privilege.”
The session hosts cited phony statistics from the Trevor Project, which not only promotes the mutation and castration of children but was recently caught hosting online, anonymous conversations about sex between adults and children.
Any religious staff who believe marriage is between a man and a woman and may have taken issue with some of the training’s content were educated on “What to do when your personal/religious beliefs don’t align with LGBTQ+ inclusion.” Q-inclusion’s suggestion for staff looking for ways to promote “LBGT inclusion” starts with displaying pride flags, wearing pronoun pins, and calling boys and girls “Friends, scholars, learners, children, mascot/community name.”
The consultants also encouraged CCS staff to fill their offices and classrooms with sexually explicit books.
“Families assume that when their children’s teachers attend professional development sessions, educators learn how to be more effective. But as these documents show, taxpayer dollars were instead spent encouraging school officials to treat pupils differently on the basis of superficial characteristics, hide information from parents, and discuss adult content with young students,” President of Parents Defending Education Nicole Neily told The Federalist. “It’s appalling that Columbus City Schools would choose to spend its finite resources on a consultant pushing such toxic content on teachers — particularly because less than half of all students in the district are proficient in reading and math.”
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.
The U.S. military issued a series of social media posts commemorating LGBT-themed “diversity” on the same weekend millions of Americans came together to celebrate the nation’s founding.
The first of such incidents occurred on Sunday when the Defense Department’s official Twitter account posted a June 22 article detailing the “coming out journey” of U.S. Army Maj. Rachel Jones, a man who identifies as a “transgender female.” In a tweet accompanying the first post, the agency claimed that Jones “faced deep-rooted challenges on her path to self-acceptance” and that his “resilience shines as a hope for others facing similar struggles.”
Jones faced deep-rooted challenges on her path to self-acceptance. In a world where LGBTQ+ voices were often marginalized, she battled depression and contemplated suicide. Today, her resilience shines as a hope for others facing similar struggles.
— Department of Defense 🇺🇸 (@DeptofDefense) July 2, 2023
You do not become a Major overnight. This confused individual has been in Army leadership for some time. Think that through. How many more of these “confused” people do we haev in our military?
You know our enemies are laughing themselves silly with this knowledge that America has sexually confused, obsessed, leaders in its forces. Does that sound prepared for war to you?
In the attached article — which was published on the Army’s official website — Jones described his process of “accept[ing] and lov[ing]” himself and further claimed it “was very risky to [his] career to be seen in public as a transwoman” during the Trump administration when transgender-identifying individuals were not permitted to openly serve in the military. Upon taking office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order reversing the policy, which allowed Jones to “come out publicly as transgender” to his colleagues.
“People here have been amazing. I know how lucky I am to work in an organization with such acceptance and everyone here has been really supportive,” Jones said. “I was initially a bit fearful of coming out as my true self and how I would be perceived, but I had nothing to worry about.”
To commemorate “pride month,” Jones also recorded a video claiming that for him, “pride” is about “celebrating that diversity is our strength, as a nation and as an Army.”
US Army Major “Rachel” Jones on diversity in the military 🤡 🌎
— Jordan Schachtel @ dossier.today (@JordanSchachtel) July 1, 2023
A similar incident exemplifying the military’s increased focus on so-called “diversity” occurred on Friday and Sunday, when the U.S. Navy posted two separate Instagram clips highlighting the importance of removing alleged “barriers” for LGBT service members’ “total inclusion” in the fleet.
“It’s a necessary effort to make sure that the chief of naval operation and our operational commanders are getting the very best from the 6 to 8 to 10 percent of our force that identifies as LGBTQ+,” said Rear Admiral Mike Brown in the Friday clip.
I am a Combat Marine Veteran. There is no possible way for me to trust anyone like this into combat. As adults they are confused about the way they “feel”, makes every other aspect of their lives questionable.
When asked in the second video what it means to have a “diverse force,” Brown further claimed it’s important for the Navy to be “inclusive of all parts of the American population.”
“Inclusion means recognizing that we have a diverse force and getting the most of every part of our force, every individual sailor,” Brown said. ”We will not be able to compete and win if we don’t continue to pull from the amazing talent that resides in every corner of the United States, harness that talent, respect it, and use it.”
It’s worth mentioning that both the Army and Navy are expected to miss their recruiting goals for the 2023 fiscal year.
Since Biden’s inauguration, the Defense Department has seemingly ramped up its push for military leadership to adopt discriminatory “DEI” ideology. DEI — which stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion — is a divisive and poisonous ideology that dismisses merit to discriminate based on characteristics such as skin color and sexual preferences. Individuals who qualify for a certain position due to their merits but don’t meet the discriminating entity’s goal of being more “diverse” are passed over in favor of those who meet the preferred identitarian standards.
Last month, for instance, the Air Force went all out to celebrate “pride month” by authorizing the use of U.S. taxpayer dollars to cover the travel costs for service members seeking to attend the branch’s June “pride” events. Several Air Force bases also held LGBT-related events on their respective grounds last month.
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
As naked men parade in front of kids and pride marchers chant “we’re coming for your children,” a few LGBT activists are beginning to worry that things have gone too far. For example, Andrew Sullivan, an early and ardent advocate for same-sex marriage, is unhappy about reaping what he has sown. And he should be — from sterilizing and mutilating children via “gender-affirming care” to flashing children at pride festivities, the LGBT movement is proving social conservatives right.
Sullivan is repulsed and worried about a backlash, but he still denies any responsibility for the fruits of his labor. He argues his ideas needn’t lead to the illiberalism and radicalism his side is indulging. He is adamant that we could have, however uneasily, agreed to live and let live if the LGBT movement had taken his advice and closed up shop after its legal victories. He insists, “There is no slope in the case I made. There is a clear line: formal legal equality alongside cultural and social freedom on all sides.”
He is wrong. Same-sex marriage was always a radical project with implications for all of society, which is why there is a direct line from Sullivan’s case for it to the extremism he now deplores. Same-sex marriage reduces the differences between men and women to a matter of personal sexual preference, rather than a fundamental ontological one upon which civilization is based. If the sex binary doesn’t matter in marriage, it doesn’t matter anywhere.
Instead of a lifelong covenant that unites the two halves of the human race in a relationship that provides for the future of the human race, marriage was redefined as the mere legal recognition of an indefinite and androgynous pairing. The collapse of the older understanding of marriage began before the LGBT movement, but the triumph of same-sex marriage sealed it.
As Pastor Hans Fiene has put it, expecting that same-sex marriage would have no significant social effects is like blowing up the Hoover Dam and expecting Lake Mead to move only a few inches. And so, less than a decade after the Supreme Court invented a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, men think they can be women, women think they can be men, doctors are amputating the healthy breasts from increasing numbers of troubled adolescent girls — and our leaders from President Joe Biden on down are cheering them on.
The Lie of Being ‘Born This Way’
Evils such as this were baked into the arguments used to establish same-sex marriage. In particular, the claim that people are “born this way” — that LGBT identities are intrinsic and immutable — ensured that dissenters would be persecuted and children would be groomed into rainbow identities. However, though the mantra of “born this way” was a public relations triumph, it was false. The search for a “gay gene” quietly ended in failure a few years ago. The experiences of same-sex attraction and gender dysphoria are often fluid and felt with varying intensity. The causes are diverse and complex; that these feelings and desires may be unchosen does not mean they are determined at birth, or that environmental and psychological factors play no role.
Nonetheless, the lie of “born this way” enabled the hijacking of civil rights law to serve the LGBT agenda, which ensured that opponents of the LGBT movement were not only defamed as the equivalent of racists but that the enormous state power used to break segregation would be deployed against them. And so every wedding cake artist and photographer must bow before the state-enforced metaphysical doctrine that sex is irrelevant to the meaning of marriage. And the dogmas of gender identity demand that women and even little girls must get comfortable with males ogling and flashing them in what used to be female-only spaces.
Worse still, the false doctrine of “born this way” demands the grooming of other people’s children into rainbow identities. After all, if we are born with our sexual orientation and gender identity already fixed for life, then some children are necessarily born into the rainbow elect. Affirming these identities is seen as essential to their flourishing, for the sexual self is seen as the authentic self. Therefore, in order for the children born into the LGBT elect to live as their true selves, they must learn who they really are. And because we do not know which children are born with a rainbow identity until they tell us, then all children must be taught about sexual orientation and gender identity as young as possible, and encouraged to explore any hints of rainbow identity.
Of course, because “born this way” is a lie, the result has been a surge in children and young adults claiming to be LGBT. Consequently, we are now debating whether public schools should encourage children to transition and then hide it from their parents, and whether the government should take children away from parents who don’t affirm a child’s transgender identity. Somehow, “love wins” has become a mandate to seize children from their parents and mutilate them.
Social Conservatives Vindicated
These evils show that though social conservatives have been defeated, we have been vindicated. And there is more than the logic of social and legal revolution at work here. What religious conservatives understood — and what almost everyone else overlooked — is that sin stays hungry. Indulging and endorsing falsehoods about the nature of marriage, sex, and what it means to be embodied as a man or a woman only leads to more lies and more injuries.
If the cause of same-sex marriage had been righteous, we might have seen a result like that Sullivan imagines. That matters have instead gone so wrong, so quickly, should prompt us to look for where we went astray.
This reevaluation will often be uncomfortable, for the premises of the LGBT movement are derived from the sexual revolution as a whole, and that implicates almost all of us. Same-sex marriage was not the top of the slippery slope, it was just a point where it got steeper. The slide began with the effort to separate sex and its pleasures from obligation and commitment — the lie that we could and should separate sex from marriage, and marriage from the natural family of mother, father, and children. This is, of course, a perennial temptation, but the wealth and technological prowess of our age made it seem less harmful than it did in less prosperous times that lacked the pill and penicillin. But money and technology are poor substitutes for virtue and justice, so we have kept sliding down the slope.
Same-sex marriage accelerated this, building on past lies and adding new ones. And it also prevents recovery, insofar as it institutionalizes lies about sex, marriage, and family. Truth must be the foundation of any effort to rebuild a healthy sexual and family culture. And that will require rejecting government dogmas declaring that men and women are sexually and relationally interchangeable, subject only to the sovereign whim of adult preference.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
ROCKVILLE, Md.—Here at the crossroads of Mannakee Street and College Drive in the suburbs of the nation’s capital, woke intersectionalism came to die.
Outside the headquarters of Montgomery County Public Schools, a cleric at a local Ethiopian Orthodox church stood in a white turban, gold-colored robe, and church insignia. Like Seyouman Getahun was in an interfaith crowd of about 1,000 parents, students, and community members. The crowd of largely “brown and black” people, as equity warriors so often colorize minorities, rallied for the right of parents to opt children out of age-inappropriate sex education in local public schools.
Meet Like Seyouman Getahun, a cleric at a local Ethiopian Orthodox Church. He told me why he was at the Montgomery County MD rally. I am putting 7 minutes of our chat here so you can hear from people in the trenches. Watch his reactions to Gay BCs and Gender Queer at the end! pic.twitter.com/SoCLuFlqrF
Co-organized by a new group called Coalition of Virtue, these parents are the “intersectional” answer to the Woke Army. The Woke Army are the leftist activists who exploit “black, indigenous, people of color” (BIPOC) to put children in the crosshairs of the “rainbow mafia” in K-12 schools. These parents who defy their stereotypes are the Woke Army’s worst nightmare.
Hundreds of Ethiopian Orthodox Christians from an estimated 40 local churches, including Getahun’s, rallied beside Muslim immigrant families from a dozen mosques and other area community members. Their ranks included a Filipino-Puerto Rican-American Christian dad and a Peruvian-American Catholic mother.
All were here to protest the refusal of the local school board, all affiliated at some point with Democratic Party politics, to allow parents to opt their kids out of sex ed that includes an introduction to homosexual behavior and gender identities that contradict one’s natural sex.
“This hill is where the democrats have chosen [to] die. Bizarre. Totally bizarre,” said a Twitter user.
Today, at the corner of Campus Drive and Mannakee Street, in Montgomery County, Maryland, woke intersectionalism came to die.
Today, June 27, about 1,000 Arab Muslims, Ethiopian Christians, Peruvian Catholics and so many other brown and black immigrant families outflanked the… pic.twitter.com/G623Q6Sw7x
From Rockville to Glendale, Calif., where Armenian American parents oppose school board indoctrination, a new “intersectional” rejection of wokeism includes voters up for grabs by Republican politicians and efforts like No Labels, which may advocate for a third-party presidential candidate in 2024.
“Vote them out!” the Rockville crowd chanted, packed shoulder to shoulder.
The protestors’ demands were simple enough: “Protect families’ rights!” “What do we want? Opt out! When do we want it? Now!” “We want freedom! We want rights!”
Across the parking lot, about a dozen all-white leftist activists stood, chatting with each other. They looked awkward and out of place, with rainbow umbrellas over their heads but no rain yet and soap bubbles from a party machine streaming by.
Later, inside for public comments at a school board meeting, local activist Laura Stewart complained about a video I had posted from a protest of Muslim parents early last month. She objected that it “was retweeted by Elon Musk,” the owner of Twitter.
In video testimony, Stewart omitted a critical detail from her resume: she has been an officer and leader in the Montgomery County Women’s Democratic Club. She has also been vice president of advocacy for the Montgomery County Council of Parent-Teacher Associations and just received the “National PTA Lifetime Achievement Award” from the local council.
The rallying parents are mostly new American citizens. Their lifetime achievement is immigration, acculturation, employment, and parenthood in a new nation where they enjoyed no legacy, no property, no bank account, and no “privilege,” except the inherited grit to navigate a new society with a new language and culture.
If you can believe it, the night before this rally filled with immigrants, the Montgomery County Women’s Democratic Club issued a statement with a newly formed group, “Coalition for Inclusive Schools” that Stewart now leads. It condemned “outside influences” seeking to opt-out children from age-inappropriate sex ed.
The #WokeArmy is dealt a lethal blow. The battlefront: Montgomery County, Maryland. TODAY. The hard-left came after the kids and Muslim parents aren’t having it. 🧵
Montgomery County Public Schools recently refused to allow parents to opt out of indoctrination that relates to… pic.twitter.com/KIMTI1fAIM
This multicultural crowd was anything but “outside influences.” It was filled with recent immigrants who live locally. These parents made an argument that parent groups are increasingly expressing around the country and in Canada, asserting religious freedom rights.
“Our beliefs! Our choice! Religious freedom, raise your voice,” they chanted.
Peruvian-American mother Norma Margulies carried a handmade sign that read: “Respetemos el derecho de las familias a compartir su cultura y religión con sus hijos e hijas!” “Respect the rights of families to share their culture and religion with their children, sons and daughters,” she translated, adding, “It’s a basic right.”
Margulies joined the protest from her home in nearby Fairfax County, Va., with a friend, Tony Sabio. He’s the son of parents from the Philippines and Puerto Rico and a military veteran who rescued a boy from Ukraine.
Sabio said he is running for school board in Fairfax County because of the disenfranchisement of parents. “I’m here for these parents,” Sabio said over the crowd’s chants as he carried the American flag over his shoulders.
In recent years, woke activists have exploited “intersectionality.” That’s a concept critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw invented in 1989 to look at injustices through the prism of an “intersectionality” of various allegedly oppressed social identities. While the idea had some merits, far-left activists and politicians have weaponized it.
In recent days, Maryland and Virginia parents have held sign-making events and parent educational seminars at local places of worship including mosques like the Islamic Center of Maryland and affiliates of the Medhanialem Orthodox Church. Holding signs that read “Respect Our Values” and “Parents Know Best,” they voiced concerns about the sex curriculum being taught to their children.
Across the street from the school system’s offices, a strip of locally owned storefronts showcased the diversity in this suburb community. On Hungerford Drive, an Ethiopian restaurant sits beside Island Pride Jamaican Restaurant, Yunnan Rice Noodle, Aria Halal Supermarket, and 5-10 Quick Mart.
In the crowd, Getahun, the Ethiopian Orthodox cleric, told me he was there to support parental rights as enshrined in the 14th Amendment and the U.S. Constitution. He flipped through copies of the books “The Gay BCs” and “Gender Queer” tucked in my “Mary Poppins” bag of inappropriate books in public schools and furrowed his brow at the images.
“T is for TRANS,” he read, not the usual “trains” in most books teaching the ABCs. “It’s a brave step to take,” he continued, “to take to live as the gender you know is innate.”
The book is meant for toddlers, as young as three.
While the rally primarily focused on the right to opt out of sex curriculum, the attendees also saw the school board’s refusal to address their concerns as an infringement on their religious freedom.
Nearby a rally organizer, Ismail Royer, a director of Islam and religious freedom at the Religious Freedom Institute based in Washington, D.C., said: “This is the intersection, this is the alliance that really matters. This is the moral consensus that is at the heart of the American moral tradition and virtue tradition.”
By about 5 p.m., the rally ended, with Getahun among the last leaving the rally off Mannakee Street and College Drive, as members of this new intersectional alliance chanted, “We will prevail!”
Asra Nomani is a senior contributor at The Federalist. A former Wall Street Journal reporter, she is also the author of “Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance Destroying America’s Freedom.” She is a senior fellow in the practice of journalism at Independent Women’s Network. She can be reached at asra@asranomani.com or @AsraNomani on Twitter.
The shameless corporate media are so desperate for a narrative about LGBT victimhood, they’re pretending threats of violence from angry pro-“pride” perpetrators are instead threats against them. The latest examples are pure propaganda from The Hill and The Washington Post on Monday, which led with scaremongering — “bomb threats over Pride items” — while completely burying the lede: The bomb threats against culturally embroiled retail giant Target came from pro-LGBT activists.
“Target stores in at least five states receive bomb threats over Pride items,” read The Hill’s headline — the only part most people see.
The few readers who actually bothered to click the link were met with this deceptive framing in the first paragraph: “Target stores in at least five U.S. states had to be evacuated over the weekend after receiving bomb threats, the latest example of backlash the U.S.-based retail chain has received for its Pride month merchandise.”
Not until paragraph six, however, did the author reveal that these bomb threats that were emailed to news outlets in multiple states “accused the retail chain of betraying the LGBTQ+ community.”
The Washington Post ran an almost identical headline, burying the real news a full eight paragraphs down and leading instead with: “Target stores in at least five states were evacuated this weekend after receiving bomb threats. Though no explosives were discovered, the incidents tie into the backlash over the retail chain’s Pride Month merchandise.”
This media horsepucky is the latest attempt to push a fake narrative about conservative extremists assaulting the pro-trans department store. That’s why the outlets used words like “latest example,” “backlash,” and “for its Pride month merchandise.” As far as we know, the bomb threats had nothing to do with rainbow merchandise, nor were they related to any other “examples” of “backlash,” such as peaceful conservative boycotts. Instead, they appear to be a direct result of LGBT lunatics not getting their way. The framing is intentional.
This lede-burying exercise from The Hill is just the next page from the same “pride month” playbook the left has been running since May. Before the calendar even flipped to June, Target unveiled its aggressive rainbow merchandise, complete with pro-trans items for children and “tuck-friendly” swimwear. In no time, the company had moved many of its rainbow displays to the back of the store, citing nonspecific “threats.” When Target failed to produce any evidence for these allegations, its plummeting stock suggested the real “threat” was to its bottom line.
That didn’t stop media propagandists from parroting Target’s unsubstantiated claims. PBS, for instance, declared without evidence that Target had endured “intense backlash from some customers including violent confrontations with its workers.” NPR editorialized that the outrage resulted in “threats against employees” — a claim Target didn’t even make in its vague statement.
“Bomb threats” are a new low. But pro-transgender activists, especially those occupying America’s newsrooms, habitually spin their own victimization as victimhood.
For example, when radical LGBT ideologues manipulate impressionable children, activist “journalists” frame concerned parents as “transphobic” and dangerous. When lawmakers take compassionate steps to protect these minors from the clutches of predatory adults or seek to eradicate porn from taxpayer-funded schools, corporate media frame their noble efforts as attacks on “trans rights” and “book bans.” When conservatives plead for dysphoric girls to get mental health help instead of mastectomies, the propaganda press employs emotional blackmail by claiming these girls will commit suicide if they’re prevented from amputating their healthy body parts. When a deranged transgender shooter murders six Christians in cold blood, media activists frame the shooter as the victim.
Public opinion about transgender radicalism is rapidly changing. Based on a Gallup poll out just this week, a majority of Americans (55 percent) believe it’s “morally wrong to change one’s gender.” That’s up four points from 2021, despite poll results also showing more Americans now know a transgender-identifying person. Furthermore, nearly 70 percent of respondents said athletes should only be allowed to play on teams that match their sex, up a full seven points from 2021.
As the cultural tide turns, “pride” activists, with the help of their media allies, have shown they’ll do whatever it takes to maintain their clutch on the narrative — including spinning their own bomb threats against themselves.
Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
Since the boycott of Bud Light seems to have been a rousing success, many people are shifting focus to retail giant Target and its years of supporting radical LGBT groups — one of which even advocates to “transition” children without parental consent. It is so outrageous that even Elon Musk felt compelled to begin asking some questions about it.
Musk, who is considered center-left in most things political was shocked by a recent Fox News article that reported that Target has been supporting the radical gay group GLSEN for years, even though the group “calls for gender ideology to be integrated into all classes, even math,” and spends its donations to get American schools to comply with that policy.
In its tweet, Fox News also noted that GLSEN “encourages secret gender changes among children in schools.”
TARGET TAKES AIM: The retail giant provides annual donations to GLSEN, which calls for gender ideology to be integrated into all classes, even math. https://t.co/f7g9yLDvuOpic.twitter.com/vCK6fqXepa
In its May 26 report, Fox News noted that Target is “partnering with a K-12 education group for which focuses on getting districts to adopt policies that will keep parents in the dark on their child’s in-school gender transition, providing sexually explicit books to schools for free, and integrating gender ideology at all levels of curriculum in public schools.”
Indeed, Fox even obtained a direct quote from Target saying how much they support the organization with their annual donations of tens of thousands.
“GLSEN leads the movement in creating affirming… and anti-racist spaces for LGBTQIA+ students. We are proud of 10+ years of collaboration with GLSEN and continue to support their mission,” the retailer told Fox.
Fox goes on to explain what GLSEN does: “GLSEN calls for gender ideology to be integrated into all classes, even math. It provides educators instructions on how they can make math ‘more inclusive of trans and non-binary identities’ by including ‘they/them’ pronouns in word problems.”
“We advise on, advocate for, and research comprehensive policies designed to protect LGBTQ students as well as students of marginalized identities,” the group itself describes on its own site.
This group that Target has supported urges schools to add “intersex,” “transgender,” “non-binary” and other such left-wing “choices” of sexual identity into all class work from math to science, per Fox.
GLSEN tells schools to keep confidential any information about students “transitioning” or self-identifying as the opposite or some fantasy gender, and to make sure parents are not told of any such information unless explicitly approved by the child.
The group pushes a policy that maintains that schools and faculty “shall ensure that all personally identifiable and medical information relating to transgender and nonbinary students is kept confidential… Staff or educators shall not disclose any information that may reveal a student’s gender identity to others, including parents or guardian… This disclosure must be discussed with the student, prior to any action.”
In a Saturday news release condemning “right-wing extremists,” GLSEN attempted to spin that little nugget of information as such: “Supportive educators are a lifeline to students who do not have the freedom to be exactly who they are safely, and GLSEN will always fight back against policies that force educators to jeopardize student safety.”
The group also seeks to force schools to allow boys who claim to be transgender girls to play in school sports with the girls.
“To date,” Fox added, “the retail giant has donated at least $2.1 million to GLSEN.”
Fox’s shocking report spurred Twitter chief Elon Musk to ask, “Is this true, @Target?”
A Twitter “community note” also appeared on the tweet, noting that, “Target has donated to GLSEN for more than a decade: ‘Target annually supports GLSEN and its mission to create…spaces for LGBTQIA+ students.’” The note also presented links to the radical policies for which GLSEN advocates.
One Twitter user blasted Musk for asking the question, carping, “Oh come on, this is Fox News. You question CNN, MSNBC, but not Fox News? Don’t you think that this is hypocritical?”
But Musk pointed out that he literally was questioning the claims, and tweeted back, “Maybe it’s not true, hence the question.”
So far, Target has not made any statement past its quote to Fox that it supports GLSEN.
This newest wrinkle in Target’s big-dollar support of the radical LGBT lobby comes on the heels of a boycott effort over its “pride” merchandise and for partnering with a company that embraces satanism along with its LGBT advocacy. Target is now hemorrhaging money, as is Anheuser-Busch, following Bud Light’s decision to partner with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
The bad news continues to mount for Target and Bud Light both, and conservatives must keep the pressure on these woke corporations. Examples must be made if we hope to reverse the wide trend in corporate America of donating billions to these organizations whose main goal is to groom our children for their disgusting sexual agenda.:
Warner Todd Huston has been writing editorials and news since 2001 but started his writing career penning articles about U.S. history back in the early 1990s. Huston has appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN and several local Chicago news programs to discuss the issues of the day. Additionally, he is a regular guest on radio programs from coast to coast. Huston has also been a Breitbart News contributor since 2009. Warner works out of the Chicago area, a place he calls a “target-rich environment” for political news.
I recently wrote about the current wave of rainbow-flavored “insurrections” sweeping through America’s red statehouses. I called them part of a color revolution. Color revolutions, you will recall, are traditionally “popular uprisings against authoritarian regimes, such as those that took place in former Soviet countries such as Ukraine and Georgia in the early and mid-2000s.”
In our American color revolution, the script has flipped. Here, red states are the only rebels standing strong in the face of increasingly authoritarian central power — wrapped, of course, in the rainbow flag.
Tennessee recently made a star out of State Rep. Justin Pearson, the code-switching preacher man with the afro who just a few years ago was a repp tie-wearing prep at Colgate, but this year led an invasion of screaming gun-control protesters into the Tennessee Capitol, shut it down, and got himself expelled (temporarily, of course. Plot twist: The lead characters on this show always win in the end!)
We’ve now seen color revolutionaries take to state capitols in Tennessee, Montana, Kansas, Kentucky, Florida, Oklahoma, and Missouri. This week, the color revolution came to Texas. The radicals are on top. And (if you will excuse my French), thanks to their total effete ineffectuality, red states are getting bottomed, hard.
The Best Little Statehouse in Texas
Showrunners set this week’s episode of “Transurrection” in Texas. Why? They can’t turn Texas blue, right? …Right?
Twitter soon filled up with clips of the state Capitol in Austin getting overrun by a shrieking mob of LGBT cuckoos waving transgender flags and shutting down voting on an important bill. They’ve been keeping Austin weird for years, biding their time, and it finally paid off.
A Texas Republican state delegate on the scene tweeted a video of the mob and reported, “Trans activists are losing their minds, shoving signs into [a Texas conservative’s] face, and allowing spit to spew from their mouths while they scream ‘no place for hate.’” You have to admire their shamelessness, frankly. “No place for hate!” they scream, as they bludgeon their enemies.
The “hate” bill in question, naturally, would ban genital mutilation of children statewide. As we know by now, the idea of not being permitted to permanently sterilize and castrate kids makes sterilized and castrated adults very, very mad. How dare you not let us ritually initiate your son into our family-friendly extreme body modification cult!
A local newspaper reported on the action: “More than one hundred protesters rallied at the Capitol in opposition to the bill Tuesday in anticipation of the floor debate, engaging in chants including, “Protect Trans Kids!” and holding signs reading, “Let Trans Kids Grow Up.”
Am I the only one who notices the irony here? They want to “let trans kids grow up” — by putting them on irreversible puberty blockers that literally stop them from growing up. Logic — like charm, charisma, and good looks — is not this group’s strong suit.
But, as always, their ugly tactics work. “As protesters were removed from the House gallery, Democrats in the House on Tuesday successfully delayed debate on Senate Bill 14, which would ban certain gender-affirming medical treatments for transgender minors. Using a procedural tactic … the bill was sent back to the House Committee on Public Health, then voted out of the committee again Tuesday evening,” the paper reported, emphasis mine.
They may still lose in the end, but they survived the day.
I feel like I’m watching a new streaming docudrama show on Netflix: “Game of Throngs.” “The Transmandalorian.” “Sex Reassignment in the City.”
Last week’s episode was set in Montana and guest-starred an unknown man in a dress, an impish scamp named Zooey Zephyr. Zooey is not your typical social media starlet; he’s got a strong jawline, a prominent Adam’s apple, and a deep voice. His script, however, follows the Tennessee storyline virtually line for line. Zooey led his “transurrection” over a new Montana bill that would outlaw transgender interventions for children. Just like in Tennessee, he broke the rules, caused a riot, got ejected, and then used the ejection as a battering ram to take down the Republican leadership. Here’s how Fox reported it:
‘The only thing I will say is if you vote yes on this bill and yes on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands,’ Zephyr said when debating SB99. Critics demanded an apology. However, after refusing to do so, Republicans led the chamber in a 68-32 vote last week to bar Zephyr from accessing the House floor. Zephyr cannot enter the anteroom or gallery but can vote remotely. (Emphasis mine)
Even when they lose they win!
How many times can they run this same storyline? Answer: At least 50 times, one for each state that requires it.
I seem to remember some other event a few years back, when protesters holding flags entered a capitol to stop lawmakers from voting on something. If I recall correctly, a lot of them were sentenced to years in prison for daring to block a vote. I will pray none of the nonbinary furries in the Texas Capitol suffer the same fate! They don’t look like they could last five seconds away from their cats.
The foundation of modern American democracy is that all Americans deserve some kind of representation in the rooms where law and policy are made. Not content to control those rooms in states where they dominate the political scene, some Republicans have said, in essence, that representation is a privilege for communities whose chosen lawmakers don’t offend their sensibilities. (Emphasis mine)
I like to picture flustered Republicans hitting the smelling salts and the fainting couch, like Scarlett’s Aunt Pittypat, when the winsome Zoey Zephyr and his merry band of rebels made a bit of noise during working hours.
Hilariously, the title of Bouie’s column is “A Sinister New Page in the Republican Playbook.” Maybe I shouldn’t say this out loud, but: The Republicans don’t have a playbook.
I wish they had a sinister playbook! How can we get them a sinister playbook and teach them how to use it? Because they absolutely do not know what to do in the face of mob rule. They are off balance. Unprepared. And it will only get worse.
One of these was an almost-10-year-old Cassandra Robinson, who in the photos looks like a muscular little boy with long hair dyed green, and wore “a T-shirt that read: ‘inspired by the STRONG WOMEN in my life.’” There is no 10-year-old on Earth who would dream up a sentence like that and want it on a T-shirt. Is his name a cry for help?
End Game
So, what’s the end goal? This is not just about gun control, or the “right” to castrate 8-year-olds.
Here’s what I think it’s obviously about: performing a radical mutilation surgery on the Constitution. Neutering it, for good — irreversibly even. This is the ultimate prize. Of course, it’s incredibly hard to change the Constitution, with good reason. That’s why it’s rarely been done in our history.
There are a few ways to rewrite the Constitution, but all the paths go through the states. You need three-fourths of states to ratify a new amendment. Insurmountable? Democrats already have 20 to 22 blue and purple states. They need 37, and that means the South is the juiciest prize, especially with its rapidly changing demographics.
Even in red states like Tennessee, they’d only need to flip 10 percent of the voters to win the state house. Age and heart disease will take care of the boomer-aged bitter clingers. College indoctrination will take care of the rest. Every four years a new crop of teenage voters arrives ready to make their “voices heard.” Time is on their side, not ours. And they’ve got all the time in the world.
Well, color me reacquainted! “Our Constitution is one of the most difficult in the world to amend. … But the remoteness of the possibility of formal constitutional change today may be as much a product of constitutional culture as constitutional structure: Several generations of Americans have lost the habit and muscle memory of seeking formal constitutional change.” (Emphasis mine)
Got that? The color revolutionaries are developing new muscle memory they will get to flex again and again as they continue dominating us in their weight class. Meanwhile, hordes of radicals are greedily gnawing through the country’s aging superstructure.
The Color of Money
The “tranissaries” of the revolution are obviously well-funded and blessed with a loyal army of loudmouth fanatics willing to win by any means necessary.
Are you?
I don’t know exactly who is directing and funding the revolutionaries. But it’s clear the country’s largest foundations and NGOs have these unsuspecting states in their sights. They have arrayed the full might of their billions squarely at “voting rights” and “defending democracy.” In other words, they are the architects behind activist mobs and the skilled ballot harvesters that have so far netted them win after win — including the White House.
The Macarthur Foundation and Ford Foundation, which funds dozens of grassroots activist groups including something called the “Texas Civil Rights Project,” are on the case with their billions. The Carnegie Foundation is doing its part for the cause, too. And there are many others. These massive bloodless megaliths are cleverly wrapping themselves in the cozy civil rights issue of the day — poor little trans kids (or election overhauls favored by candidates who love that issue) — and winning enormous popular support.
The wealth of America’s greatest old families is being used to systematically strip the place bare, and they’re looting it of everything that’s not nailed down. Including any stray toddlers. Viva la rainbow revoluçion!
It’s time to build a counterrevolution, fast.
Peachy Keenan is a contributing editor and regular essayist for The American Mind, a publication of The Claremont Institute. She is the author of “Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War” (coming June 6th from Regnery). She also writes at peachykeenan.substack.com , and you can always find her on Twitter @keenanpeachy, at least until she is canceled.
Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, is the largest individual creator on YouTube. His main channel has 144 million subscribers. His most popular video, a recreation of the Netflix hit “Squid Game,” has amassed an astonishing 401 million views. He is admired for his generous charity work and trusted by millions of parents worldwide, who allow their children to watch his kid-focused videos that consist of pranks, over-the-top challenges, and reaction videos.
However, an emerging controversy involving one of his closest friends and longtime co-creator Chris Tyson — who has recently come out as being on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) — is threatening his brand. Millions of young children are being groomed into uncritically accepting transgenderism and trans activism at an impressionable age, unbeknown to many parents who allow them to watch MrBeast videos unsupervised.
My two older kids — aged 7 and 9 — have been fans of MrBeast for some time. The content was wholesome and we’ve had some wonderful conversations about giving back while watching some of his charity videos. I try to make sure that they watch educational videos where possible, but to be honest, most videos on MrBeast’s main channel are just big, loud, dumb, vacuous stunts that have zero educational value and are just fun. Kids need that too.
But the fun stopped six months ago. Chris started wearing nail polish in a video. He grew more and more effeminate, wore ladies’ sweaters, grew out his hair, and manicured his nails. My children started noticing. My daughter commented on Chris’ over pronounced hand gestures to show off his nails. Both she and my son began talking about it. My son said, “He’s acting weird.” My daughter said, “He wants everyone to see his nails and hair. He keeps showing them off. He drops things on purpose just so he can pick them up with his nails.”
After Chris’ shocking transformation in this video, it was no longer possible to ignore the issue. This, of course, is what he wanted. He projected his transformation into our home and demanded that we “have more conversations” about his new lifestyle choices “in the future.” So we did. We spoke about why he thinks he’s a woman, what will happen to his wife and child, and if we still want to watch MrBeast. The result was that my children just wanted silly videos. They found his transformation weird and they felt overwhelmingly sad for his wife and kid. They didn’t want to watch it anymore. MrBeast was always just mindless fun, after all.
All Fun and Games
It has always been the eclectic cast of supporting characters that have made the videos so engaging. There is Chandler (who first appeared in 2018), who is childish — he is afraid of pickles and counts goldfish crackers with sliced cheese melted over the top as a meal. He often appears in videos with his fun and relatable family. Then there is Nolan, a newer member of the group (he first appeared in 2020) who is impish and cheeky and often elevates videos with his all-in, high-energy persona.
At the center of the MrBeast universe are Jimmy and Chris. The pair are childhood friends, and in a 2020 interview, Jimmy revealed that Chris was the very first subscriber to his channel. Chris is integral to the MrBeast brand and he has recently taken over as the host of the highly popular MrBeast Reacts channel. My kids enjoyed watching Chris from the start. He was the most masculine and outdoors-orientated of the group.
In one popular video from 2020, the group goes camping and the humor is largely derived from how soft and incompetent the rest of the team is compared to Chris, who acts like a tour guide, scout leader, and parent to the whole group. While the group flounders, Chris, who grew up enjoying an outdoors lifestyle in North Carolina, states “I’m a mountain man, I’m enjoying myself, we’re going to make it to the top.” Needless to say, when the group hunkers down for the night, tent-raising duty falls to Chris.
This parental instinct came naturally to Chris, who welcomed his first child in June 2020 with his wife Katie, whom he married in 2018. Because of this practical masculinity and sense of humor combined with his general southern-man sensibilities, it came as a massive shock to fans of the show when five months after the birth of his child, Chris announced he was bisexual.
Sexuality Becomes a Theme
Chris’ announcement dovetailed with a broader introduction of mature themes into the MrBeast universe. Also in 2020, core member Karl Jacobs was added to the group. In several interviews, Jimmy has stated that he added Karl after pressure from Chris, who had formed a close bond with him. Karl often presents a childlike and camp persona in MrBeast videos. In 2020, he stated that he believed he was asexual, then in 2021 he awkwardly claimed to be heterosexual. Regardless of his sexuality, what mattered was that the dynamic of the MrBeast crew and content had changed. Sexuality was to the fore and became increasingly visible onscreen.
The close relationship between Karl and Chris fueled rumors that the two were in a relationship. This is something Chris has denied. Still, many fans have blamed Karl for Chris’ evolution, giving rise to the term “the Karl effect.” Speculation surrounding their relationship has increased after Chris finally confirmed in March 2023 that he and his wife Katie had separated. Immediately after the announcement, he reaffirmed that he is bisexual but that he is not involved with Karl. On April 6, Chris announced that he is gender non-conforming and on HRT.
Public Transition
As expected, the backlash online has been intense. There has been abuse directed at Chris by former fans who feel betrayed by his actions. Chris, for his part, has leaned into the typical culture war talking points, mentioning how proud he is “seeing conversations started” because of his actions. His conversion has aligned with a new political awakening and his Twitter account is now littered with the usual talking points one would expect to find from a recent convert — he supports defunding the police and gun control, advocates for trans rights, calls conservative news outlets “grifters,” and thinks orange man bad.
The issue is neatly summed up in a viral tweet by influential drama news channel host Keemstar, who, after chastising critics who left negative comments, stated “This decision is a decision only Chris can make. Do better!” Of course, Keemstar is correct that mindless abuse is unacceptable, but he pushes the completely false idea that Chris’ decision is a private matter. It isn’t. His transition has been playing out in millions of family sitting rooms worldwide.
And make no mistake, despite his good charity work and overall pleasant demeanor, Jimmy is complicit in projecting this adult content into millions of homes. Jimmy is MrBeast and all editorial decisions start and end with him. He has taken a political stance on a massively divisive topic and quietly slipped it into his programming under the radar of many trusting parents. Further, both Jimmy and Nolan have made their support public. Karl has been even more vocal, saying of fans who have questions about the transition: “F-ck the goofy mother f-ckers keep runnin your own stuff.” YouTube has expressed support as well, so it appears unlikely that Chris will leave the show.
What MrBeast is doing is sinister and will have far-reaching consequences. He is grooming an unsuspecting generation of children into uncritically accepting transgender and trans activism at a vulnerable age. Due to the unrivaled reach of MrBeast and the unparalleled and often unmonitored access he has to millions of kids across the globe, he is now, without a shadow of a doubt, the leading source of child-focused, transgender content in the world.
It is imperative that all parents are made aware of this and given the choice of whether they consent to this content. After all, Chris said he wants to have a conversation. Parents need to know that this time, it isn’t an invitation, it’s an ultimatum.
Dr. Eoin Lenihan is an independent educator and extremism researcher. His work has been featured on AlJazeera and Fox News. He has also written for Arutz Sheeva, Quillette, The Post Millennial, and The Daily Caller. His peer-reviewed paper “A classification of Antifa Twitter accounts based on social network mapping and linguistic analysis” was published in Social Network Analysis and Mining, and it is the largest academic quantitative analysis of Antifa to date. You can find more from Eoin on Twitter: @EoinLenihan and on his website: http://www.eoinlenihan.weebly.com.
Does Generation Z take anything seriously? Earnestness is “cringe,” being in love makes one a “simp,” and ambition makes one a “try-hard.”
There is a “deeper ideology lurking in the minds of younger millennials & Gen Z,” as Esmé Partridge writes, “the rejection of idealism in all its forms.” Disenchanted with the world, plagued by hopelessness and nihilism, we have become a generation of zombies — a group of youth that is too dead to live and too alive to die.
No Purpose or Place
In the 1920s, famed novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald described his lost generation as one that had “grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, and all faith in man shaken.”
A century later, Gen Z finds itself in a similar position. The past haunts us, and a stormy future looms over the horizon. Even in our happiest moments, we’ve come to expect something bad just around the corner. Anxiousness afflicts many Zoomers — more than half of us already think humanity is doomed.
Though we share similarities with past generations, Gen Z is unique. Some argue Zoomers will eventually outgrow their crazy beliefs in the same way hippies eventually got jobs and created families. Millennials, however, are only getting more liberal as they age, breaking one of the oldest rules in politics. According to a recent Gallup poll, roughly 1 in 5 Gen Z adults says he or she is LGBTQ.
First and foremost, Gen Z craves distinction. They want to differentiate themselves from the masses by changing the world through fighting climate change, institutional racism, capitalism — you name it. This might explain why 1 in 4 people aged 16-25 wants to become an influencer when he or she grows up.
Why the thirst for power and status? Humans need goals that require effort to attain. We are like archers who need a clear and higher target. The popularity of figures such as Jordan Peterson shows that, especially for young men, it is no longer clear what that target is.
A Developmental Crisis
In the book “iGen,” Jean Twenge observes that more than previous generations, Zoomers aren’t growing up. We don’t have a meaningful target anymore. Gen Z is dating less, quitting jobs, not attending church, and spending half its waking time online. If Zoomers need attention, they use Instagram. Bored? Netflix or Youtube. Horny? Pornhub. Hungry? UberEats.
It’s not surprising that pundits like Jesse Singal and Jonathan Haidt blame social media for Gen Z’s stunted growth. Apps such as TikTok and Instagram have no doubt profoundly affected us, but blaming social media for Gen Z’s mental health epidemic is only half-correct.
Before we had Instagram, we had liberalism. As Patrick Deneen once wrote, “It is less a matter of our technology ‘making us’ than of our deeper political commitments shaping our technology.”
Jaded and Conformist
Inauthenticity has reached its peak with Gen Z. To be part of the in-group, a Zoomer must adopt a live-and-let-live attitude and remain blasé at all times, unattached to all people and things. Like Gen X, they avoid sincerity, choosing instead to be ironic, humorous, or just plain passionless.
For Zoomers, being serious is “cringe.” They dislike partisan politics because it’s rooted in taking differences seriously. Gen Z is disproportionately liberal not because they are passionate card-carrying Democrats — although some of them are — but because they are apathetic. They just want to be left alone by what the media portray as Bible thumpers, old white politicians, and conservatives.
It is revealing that the only time Gen Z ever seems mobilized to take things seriously is when a police officer kills a black man or abortion is restricted. Gen Z is so well catechized into its political religion that within minutes, like a flock of sheep, millions of Zoomers suddenly start sharing infographics, donation pages, and memes all over social media. Gen Z only cares about a particular issue when a so-called victim group is allegedly oppressed, or there’s a threat to its autonomy. As soon as the latest political trend goes away, Zoomers stop caring.
A Generation Without Love
The sexual revolution of the ’60s didn’t bring about communism, as Wilhelm Reich hoped, but capitalism in the sexual market. Now driven by a desire for recognition, Zoomers want sexual empowerment above all else.
To that end, Zoomers avoid caring about finding relationships. As one study found, “only one in 10 Gen Z members say they are ‘committed to being committed,’” preferring solitude (or situationships) to real relationships.
Since seeking commitment is now perceived as exerting pressure, young people must put up a facade of unseriousness and just look for green flags so as not to alienate the person they desire.
Even in a relationship, the psychoanalyzing doesn’t cease. Zoomers analyze texts, obsess over appearance, and worry that their romantic interests are dating other people from Tinder. This perpetual state of uncertainty is so exhausting that many are choosing to either throw out sexual rules completely or abstain from relationships altogether.
Repressed and Insecure
With religious values and sexual norms no longer fixed, many Zoomers struggle to nail down a sense of worth and are thus insecure. Not expressing their real personalities or feelings, these Zoomers live in a perpetual state of “LARPing” and suffer from main character syndrome.
Given their repression of “cringe” thoughts and feelings the in-group might not like, Gen Z’s higher likelihood of engaging in self-harm is unsurprising. To escape the torturous emptiness so many Zoomers find themselves in today, many reach for a razor blade or a smartphone. Either Zoomers gobble down drugs for mental illness, harm themselves, or vainly attempt to produce a sense of self with endless selfies and videos for their followers.
The Zoomers’ obsession with “mental health” and “normalizing” certain behaviors is a byproduct of their unstable self-image. Without knowing how to make sense of their emotions, they outsource the task of understanding themselves to therapists.
Godless and Selfish
More than anything, Gen Z wants to feel alive. They turned out in droves to support BLM in 2020 because it enabled them to experience the emotional highs and lows of religion without the responsibilities. As Twitter user Zero HP Lovecraft wrote, “Christians are persecuted by bureaucrats, tamely and passively,” while black people “are persecuted by cops with guns and gas grenades. … Only one of these is exciting.” In other words, one belief system feels boring and uninteresting, the other eventful and real — hence why many gravitate toward the latter.
Even many modern so-called Christians, as Rod Dreher observed, use religion as “a psychological adjunct to life, a buffer to the harshness of the materialistic, individualistic lives they actually want to lead.” In the context of Zoomers, that makes religion — and its secular woke derivatives — a supposed stimulant for attaining health and well-being. Since Gen Z now worships the “God within,” there has been a rise in gnostic beliefs, self-improvement and wellness cults, astrology and tarot, and, of course, LGBT orthodoxy.
In our post-religious society, life has been reduced to a biological process that must be optimized for the sake of social approval. Instead of prayer, we use painkillers. Instead of aspiring toward good works that glorify God, we engage in meaningless activities that glorify ourselves. And out of that reality has emerged the next undead generation. The horde of Gen Z zombies is mindlessly marching, ready to mobilize but not thrive.
Forrest Robinson is a student at Gordon College in Wenham, Ma. He frequently posts threads on his Twitter @Foz89107323.
It’s difficult to fathom that several families started their day with one less precious child around the breakfast table this morning. It’s also hard to fathom responding to that reality — caused by a transgender mass shooter who left three 9-year-olds and several adults dead in a “targeted attack” at a Christian elementary school — by confessing you misgendered the murderer and blasting your political opponents over the same tired gun-control talking points.
But behind all the partisan smoke and mirrors of the Nashville story is an unmistakable and unavoidable reality: Our modern mental health crisis is out of control.
You don’t even have to dig into the glaring transgender element of the case to acknowledge this fact. No mentally healthy person blasts their way into a building of defenseless children to murder them in cold blood, much less devises a detailed plan literally mapping out how to make it happen. Transgender perpetrator or not, this sick pattern has repeated itself with unsettling frequency.
And though President Joe Biden, his press secretary, and other politicians disgustingly spun the attack to blame so-called “assault weapons” and imply conservatives are complicit in mass murder, the simple reality is that over the past handful of decades, firearms have changed very little. Meanwhile, mental illness has proliferated and our culture’s conception of it dangerously evolved.
That’s why the transgender identity of the shooter can’t be fully ignored — not for those who truly care to understand the gnarly roots of this violence. Despite the protestations of LGBT apologists, gender dysphoria and trans-related narcissism are inextricable from America’s broader mental health emergency.
A Celebration of Sickness
The psychological pendulum has swung woefully far: Illness that was once stigmatized, often to the unhelpful point of suppressing it instead of encouraging the sufferers to seek help, is now celebrated and socially encouraged. If it isn’t teachers brainwashing impressionable kids with sexual confusion and instructing them to keep it secret from their parents, it’s parents catechizing their own children in fallacies. Spend just a fewminutesonTikTok, and you’ll get a glimpse of the affected masses — self-loathing, split personalities, nonsensical pronouns and sexual identities, desperate androgyny, narcissism, bipolar outbursts, and more.
Examples of encouraged mental illness abound — even medical doctors fuel delusion by pretending sex is “assigned” and asking for patients’ preferred pronouns — but here’s one directly in response to the shooting. A group called the Trans Resistance Network made the shooter out to be a victim, blaming the “avalanche” of legislation seeking to protect minors from chemical and surgical castration and accusing conservatives of “nothing less than the genocidal eradication of trans people from society.” Many trans-identifying people suffer from “anxiety, depression, [and] thoughts of suicide,” the group correctly noted, but then associated these struggles not with broader mental unhealth but with “lack of acceptance” of gender dysphoria from “religious institutions.”
Note the group’s promotion of mental instability:
It is a testament to the inner strength and beauty of transgender people, that despite the … constant anti-trans bigotry and violence, so many of us continue to persevere, survive, and even thrive. We will not be eradicated or erased.
The same can’t be said for the innocent lives that were snuffed out in an instant in the Nashville shooting. Where derangement is considered “inner strength and beauty,” mental sickness thrives, and now children, not angry activists, are the ones who have been erased.
At least in part. There’s more to the story for these Christian families, who can cling to the assurance that for a follower of Jesus to be absent from his body is to be present with the Lord. This violent and sin-marred world is not our home, and it’s the closest to hell Christians will ever get. No religious hatred, mental affliction, or targeted attack can eradicate that sure hope.
A Call to Action
Those truths aren’t just a comfort for the broken-hearted, however. They’re a call to action for redeemed sinners. With a focus on eternity, we’re still sojourners here, surrounded by tormented souls with not only deep spiritual needs but physical and mental ones. And so we must fight.
We must fight against the spiritual forces that discourage us and tempt us to doubt and deny truth, and against agents of the devil who seduce our children with sexual fantasies. We must fight for the beauty and sacredness of human life. For the mental and physical health of those within our care. And for the glorious truth of the gospel and the immutable nature of the sexes that leads to human flourishing.
This fight requires compassion. But it also requires that we don’t forfeit the definition of that word to medical professionals who profit from carving up children, or to Marxist ideologues, or to a bad-faith press. Instead, follow the only perfect example: When Jesus saw the “helpless” crowds, “like sheep without a shepherd,” He was “movedwith compassion” toward them. He engaged. He healed.
May He be the source of our compassion as we engage our modern mental affliction, and may He provide the healing we desperately need.
Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
NIH is funding many studies premised upon how little research has been conducted on the long-term health risks of cross-sex hormones. Yet HHS is pushing for more transgender ‘care.’
As the Biden administration pushes the Department of Health and Human Services to make “gender-affirming health care” more widely available, HHS’s own National Institutes of Health is funding multiple studies premised upon how little research has been conducted on the long-term risks of taking cross-sex hormones and whether they improve mental health. The NIH research on transgender issues also emphasizes intersectionality and about half has been on HIV prevention.
The NIH Reporter database, which lists active federally funded research projects, shows 74 with “transgender” in the title, totaling more than $26 million of taxpayers’ money annually. Several NIH-funded studies examine specific health risks of cross-sex hormone treatment — such as associated bone loss and possible increased risk of thrombosis, drug overdose, heart attack, and stroke.
Onlyafew studies evaluate the risk of infertility, even though “the impact of long-term cross-sex hormone therapy on reproductive health is largely unknown,” as one such project states and experts have warned. In contrast, seven studies examine stigma and disparities in health care for transgender people, in response to NIH’s Notice of Special Interest in understanding the role of alleged intersectional stigmas and how they harm health.
Manystudiesaddresshigherincidence of sexually transmitted infections in transgender people, and whether hormone therapy might increase that risk. About half of all NIH-funded research on transgender health, including that which has been completed, relates to HIV prevention among the transgender population, totaling approximately $80 million since 1985.
Transgender males “have some of the highest concentrated HIV epidemics in the world, with a pooled global prevalence of 19% and a 49-fold higher odds ratio of acquiring HIV than non-transgender adults,” according to one project summary. Behavioral factors contribute, another project says, but the role of sex hormones needs further study, since they “are known to modulate the immune response, resulting in changes in host susceptibility to pathogens, vaccine efficacy and drug metabolism.”
Many Ongoing Projects Highlight Lack of Research
While suicide prevention is often cited as a major reason to give dysphoric children puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, only one of the current studies is focused specifically on suicide risk, although several emphasize the lack of long-term studies of cross-sex hormones administered to children and their relation to mental health.
Medical professionals “say more specific research is needed to determine whether medically transitioning as a minor reduces suicidal thoughts and suicides compared with those who socially transition or wait before starting treatment,” according to Reuters.
One NIH-funded project summary acknowledges that the long-term effect of puberty suppression on mental health needs further study and will evaluate children already taking puberty blockers.
During puberty, hormones change the structure and organization of the brain. Puberty blockers “may also disrupt puberty-signaled neural maturation in ways that can undermine mental health gains over time and impact quality of life in other ways,” the Nationwide Children’s Hospital project summary says. “The overall impacts” of puberty blockers “have not been systematically studied,” the summary says.
One of the larger NIH-funded transgender studies, funded at $743,000 annually, is at Boston Children’s Hospital. It notes, “Little is known [emphasis added] about how pubertal blockade, the first step in the medical management of a young transgender adolescent, affects bone health and psychological well-being. … In an exploratory aim, we will also consider the effect of pubertal blockade on anxiety, depression, and health-related quality of life.”
Another research project, “Psychological consequences of medical transition in transgender youth,” begun last year at Princeton University and anticipated to end in 2025, notes the lack of quality research in this area:
Five studies to date have longitudinally examined the relationship between one or both of these interventions [puberty suppression and hormone therapy] and mental health in transgender youth. However, these studies have had relatively small samples, none have been able to isolate the effects of endocrine interventions, none have included a cisgender [non-transgender] comparison group, and none have examined the mechanisms by which endocrine interventions might improve mental health.
A longitudinal study that began in 2015 and will run through at least 2026 acknowledges, “Transgender children and adolescents are a poorly understood and a distinctly understudied population in the United States. … Continuing our current research is imperative to expand the scant evidence-base currently guiding the clinical care of TGD [transgender and gender diverse] youth and thus, is of considerable public health significance.”
As the summary of one ongoing NIH-funded research project on sex hormones’ effects on the developing brain says, “There is little to no empirical data guiding clinical practices” of cross-sex hormone therapy in early pubertal adolescents, “highlighting the need for further research to address the critical knowledge gap.” The research, funded at $3 million so far to Stanford University, “will provide a much-needed foundation for understanding the longitudinal impact of treatments that are already being used [emphasis added] in clinical settings.”
The project will elucidate “how sex hormone therapy alters sex-specific risk for disease … and [its] impact on neural networks implicated in psychiatric disorders.” The research proposed “has never been conducted in early pubertal adolescents,” the summary reads.
NIH Acknowledges Limited Evidence, FDA Hasn’t Approved
The NIH, the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, told Reuters that “the evidence is limited on whether these treatments pose short- or long-term health risks for transgender and other gender-diverse adolescents.” Additionally, the Food and Drug Administration has not approved puberty blockers and sex hormones for children’s transgender medical interventions. As Reuters reported:
No clinical trials have established their safety for such off-label use. The drugs’ long-term effects on fertility and sexual function remain unclear. And in 2016, the FDA ordered makers of puberty blockers to add a warning about psychiatric problems to the drugs’ label after the agency received several reports of suicidal thoughts in children who were taking them. More broadly, no large-scale studies have tracked people who received gender-related medical care as children to determine how many remained satisfied with their treatment as they aged and how many eventually regretted transitioning.
Countries such as Finland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have begun to limit children’s access to transgender health interventions. Early, foundational research from 2011 on transgender medical interventions has been criticized as failing to meet basic research standards.
Before 2012, “there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty-one ever having developed gender dysphoria at all,” according to Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage.” Studies show most children grow out of gender dysphoria, Shrier says.“There are no good long-term studies indicating that either gender dysphoria or suicidality diminishes after medical transition,” according to Shrier.
Meanwhile, despite all the possible health risks, President Joe Biden has issued executiveorders charging “HHS to work with states to promote expanded access to gender-affirming care.” The administration has issued directives that federal health insurance benefits must “provide comprehensive gender-affirming care.” The administration also opposes “conversion therapy — efforts to suppress or change an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.”
Taxpayers are already paying for transgender procedures, as they are covered by some insurers and Medicaid in some states.
I’ll ask again. WHY ARE THESE MENTAL PATIENT LEFTEST SO HYPER ABOUT MUTILATING AMERICA’S CONFUSED CHILDREN? WHAT IS THEIR END GAME?
HHS’s Office of Population Affairs, which is overseen by transgender Dr. Rachel Levine, states there’s no debate: “Research demonstrates that gender-affirming care improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse children and adolescents.” Other proponents acknowledge a lack of research on these hormones’ effect on brain development, but say the pros outweigh the cons.
Growing Transgender Identification
The number of transgender adults in the U.S. is estimated at 1.4 million to 2 million, with an estimated 150,000 to 300,000 transgender children. The number of American children who started on puberty blockers or hormones totaled 17,683 from 2017 to 2021 and has been increasing, according to Reuters.
From 2019 to 2021, at least 56 patients ages 13 to 17 had genital surgeries, and from 2019 to 2021, at least 776 children that age had mastectomies, not including procedures that weren’t covered by insurance, according to Reuters.
The transgender surgery industry grosses more than $2 billion annually and expects to double that by 2030.
Debate Among Medication Providers
“Puberty delay medications are safe and effective,”according to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), a pro-transgender organization that sets standards for trans medical interventions. “Every person, including every TGD person, deserves an opportunity to be their true selves and has the right to access medically-necessary affirming care to enable this opportunity,” WPATH says.
When WPATH recently updated its guidance, authors “were acutely aware that any unknowns that the working group acknowledged — any uncertainties in the research — could be read as undermining the field’s credibility and feed the right-wing effort to outlaw gender-related care,” The New York Times reported. The newspaper is in the midst of an internal fight about its coverage of transgender issues, with some saying it has been too critical of transgender medical interventions.
A draft of the WPATH chapter for adolescents included minimum recommended ages for hormone treatments and breast removal or augmentation, but after criticism from providers and transgender activists, “it was determined that the specific ages would be removed to ensure greater access to care for more people,” WPATH said.
The final guidelines also walked back a recommendation that preteens and teenagers should provide evidence of several years of persistently identifying as transgender, to differentiate from kids whose change in identification is recent, and changed it to a vaguer “sustained” gender incongruence. “In the end, the chapter sided with the trans advocates who didn’t want kids to have to wait through potentially painful years of physical development,” according to the Times.
The final guidelines acknowledged that because of the limited long-term research, treatment without a comprehensive diagnostic assessment “has no empirical support and therefore carries the risk that the decision to start gender-affirming medical interventions may not be in the long-term best interest of the young person at that time.”
Reuters found that gender facilities across the country are not conducting recommended months-long assessments before administering hormones to children. Parents of 28 of 39 minors who had sought transgender interventions told Reuters they “felt pressured or rushed to proceed with treatment.” Gender-care professionals also said some of their peers are “pushing too many families to pursue treatment for their children before they undergo the comprehensive assessments recommended in professional guidelines.”
Studying Causes of Gender Dysphoria
Some of the taxpayer-funded studies may bring clarity to the issue of gender dysphoria by examining its causes. One study will examine social media’s influence on children becoming transgender. A second will study “the life history calendar to examine young transgender women’s trajectories of violence, mental health, and protective processes.”
Another government-funded study will help determine how chromosomes, sexual organs, and hormones combine to create sex differences. Another will “uncover genetic underpinnings of female sexual orientation.”
This byline marks several different individuals, granted anonymity in cases where publishing an article on The Federalist would credibly threaten close personal relationships, their safety, or their jobs. We verify the identities of those who publish anonymously with The Federalist.
The nation is worried about serious national security threats, including Chinese spy aircraft, but the U.S. Department of Defense seems pre-occupied with misplaced priorities. “Woke” policies are taking leftist ideologies to extremes with enforced compliance, even if it hurts the institution.
As in the Obama years, the Biden/Austin policy fully embraces the idea that individuals can change their “sex assigned at birth to a different gender role.” Department of Defense Instruction 1300.28, updated on Dec. 20, 2022, has changed the official vocabulary of this pseudo-science, using the phrase “self-identified gender” instead of “preferred gender” throughout.
WHY? Why is this SO important to the wacky Left? “Gender Dysphoria” is a condition of someone who is CONFUSED about their gender. Do we really need more CONFUSED people in our military? As a Vietnam Vet, I can testify that such people cannot be trusted in the trenches of war. Your confused about your gender? You have NO business in any aspect of military service.
The DOD Instruction stipulates that if a person “self-identifies” as a person of the opposite sex, and if the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS) changes a person’s bureaucratic “gender marker,” a man claiming to be a woman must be treated as a woman, and vice versa.
Military commanders, doctors and nurses, chaplains, and military men and women at all levels must endorse and act on this ideological belief or suffer career penalties if they don’t. Alleged “biases against transgender individuals,” which are prohibited, could include anything from “misgendering” people with the wrong pronouns to expressions of concern about medically questionable hormone treatments or surgeries for adults or military-dependent children.
Individuals who are confused about gender identity deserve compassionate counseling, competent medical care, and complete information about the serious risks and irreversible consequences of “gender-affirming” treatments that do not change biological sex. Instead, a self-diagnosis of gender dysphoria permits only one course of treatment, pushing the service member toward life-changing, often-irreversible transgender “transition,” without an independent “second opinion.”
Commanders are directed to consult with designated “experts,” called Service Central Coordination Cells. The SCCCs have no responsibility for military operations or any obligation to put the needs of the patient first.
Biden’s regulations do not protect or even mention rights of religious liberty for chaplains and people of faith. Nor do they provide options for doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel who object to transgender ideology on moral or ethical grounds.
Once a military doctor approves, transgender transition can be deemed “complete” with or without surgical alteration of healthy body parts. At that point, as the DOD Instruction states several times: “[S]ervice members will use those berthing, bathroom, and shower facilities associated with their gender marker in DEERS.”
This policy denies human biological realities and violates minimal expectations of personal privacy and modesty between men and women. Human dilemmas are discussed in PowerPoint training slide “vignettes,” such as a “female to male” soldier announcing a pregnancy.
Vignette 8 portrays a soldier who transitioned from male to female, without “sex-reassignment surgery,” who wants to use female-designated showers. Another scenario describes a female soldier who is experiencing tension with a “transgender female” roommate.
This is a trick question, since both the discomforted female soldier and a commander who tries to find a solution likely would be accused of “biases against transgender individuals.” Why should a tank commander at Fort Hood have to deal with pronoun etiquette and sticky scenarios instead of training his troops to fight an enemy force?
The latest DOD Instruction admits that some service members who have “completed a gender transition” may not have “resolved the gender dysphoria.” Without any estimate of costs or consequences, additional medical procedures are authorized “If a return to their previous gender is medically required.”
Biden/Austin directives specifically involve the military service academies and Reserve Officer Training Corps (contract) programs, inviting controversies like those affecting civilian female athletes who have lost competitions against biological men.
Revised rules also permit cross-dressing and other “transitioning” behaviors while in “on-duty status.” Previously, time off for “real life experience” (RLE) living as a person of the opposite sex could only occur off-base and off-duty, often for weeks or months. Whether intended or not, the revised policy’s approval of on-base cross-dressing likely will increase “LGBT Pride” celebrations featuring drag queen performances and “family-friendly” story hours for children at military bases worldwide.
When problems ensue, how will we know? In 2018, then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis testified that problems with transgender policies were not being reported up the chain of command because they were considered “personal and private.” Doubling down in December 2022, the DOD released a new instruction, DODI 6400.11, which restricts (without high-level permission) the release of information about “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” “transgender-related information,” and “incidents of harmful behaviors.”
Every year, the Pentagon releases non-personal statistics on sexual assaults, in excruciating detail. Why are officials restricting access to data on “incidents of harmful behaviors” and “transgender-related information”? Congress needs to find out.
A recent independent, high-tech survey on the politicization of the military done by the Heritage Foundation found that among active-duty respondents, 80 percent said the “changing of policy to allow unrestricted service by transgender individuals” has decreased their trust in the military. Sixty-eight percent of active-duty responses reported seeing a “growing politicization,” which is affecting their decision to encourage their children to join the military.
In view of current recruiting problems, the 118th Congress should renewprevious demands for information on woke policies. Congress also should consider mandating that all Defense Department agencies and educational institutions return to recognizing scientific realities of biological sex, not “self-identified gender.” That idea and more are incorporated in legislation just proposed by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Rep. James Banks, R-Ind., called the Ensuring Military Readiness Act of 2023.
Servicemen and women deserve reality-based health care programs, with protection for the rights of doctors and nurses whose medical ethics or religious convictions differ from transgender ideology. Women also deserve separate-sex athletic teams and reasonable privacy in female-only living facilities.
White House and Pentagon leaders who try to deny, dissemble, or withhold information on the existence or results of woke policies in the military are undermining their own credibility. Americans are awake and aware, and they will hold lawmakers accountable for woke-ism that weakens our military in an increasingly dangerous world.
This article was originally published by RealClearDefense.
Elaine Donnelly is President of the Center for Military Readiness, an independent public policy organization that reports on and analyzes military and social issues.
Two Dutchstudies touting the great success of “gender-affirming” medical intervention on youth have been deemed bad research by experts at the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. In the report “The Myth of ‘Reliable Research’ in Pediatric Gender Medicine” published earlier this month, researchers describe how the 2011 and 2014 studies that formed the foundation of the transgender industry in the U.S. should never have been accepted by the professional community, falling “unacceptably” short of modern research standards. The studies led to a global movement of wrongly named “gender-affirming care,” resulting in hormone experimentation on youth and, in some cases, irreversible mutilation.
The Dutch studies had several major flaws, according to the report. Study authors only recorded the cases with the best outcomes, concluded without evidence that gender dysphoria disappeared solely as a result of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and failed to properly examine the risks of the interventions, with disastrous effects.
The American College of Pediatricians responded to the report in a press release on Jan. 25 calling on organizations to “reconsider current protocols for gender dysphoric children.”
“The entire pediatric transgender industry is based on these two Dutch studies,” Michelle Cretella, immediate past executive director of ACPeds and advisory board spokeswoman for Advocates Protecting Children, told me. “This open access report is critical because it exposes the fraudulent foundation of pediatric transgender medicine in the United States.”
The Dutch studies were so foundational to the U.S. movement that the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States was opened by Dr. Norman Spack, a pediatric endocrinologist who was convinced of the necessity of “gender-affirming” interventions after visiting the Dutch physicians who published them, Cretella said.
But if these studies had been published today, the authors conclude, the research would have been recognized as very low quality and would not have encouraged the use of puberty blockers, wrong-sex hormones, and surgery in confused children and young adults in general medical settings.
‘No Evidence’ of Genetic Cause
The report criticizing these studies was published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, and authors E. Abbruzzese, Stephen B. Levine, and Julia W. Mason have years of experience studying so-called gender identity. Levine has worked in the field as a psychiatrist since 1974.
“We had no bias, we are just responding to and trying to articulate the limitations of the studies,” Levine told me. “We are doing harm to an unknown percentage of kids, and the data that is supportive of this work does not really address the issue. The real issue here is what happens to these children when they get into their 20s and 30s.”
Youth who have been hormonally and surgically “transitioned” have major obstacles to their happiness and productivity later in life, Levine said.
“After people have sex reassignment surgeries … they want more surgeries,” according to Levine. “It’s very clear they have continued gender dysphoria. The idea that they are being ‘cured’ by affirmative care is an artifact, it’s a myth.”
Hormone and surgical treatment, and subsequent medical intervention, leads many people to assume this must be a “medical problem” but “we don’t have any evidence that this is genetically determined,” Levine said.
“Just because we have hormone treatment doesn’t mean there is a hormonal defect in the person,” he said. “People believe, erroneously, that there is some genetic, pre-determined factor here, but we have not been able to find a genetic cause.”
Cultural, interpersonal, psychological, and developmental factors all contribute to the development of a person’s behavior, Levine said. Gender dysphoria can be a resulting psycho-social problem.
Biased, Uncontrolled Studies
Though the Dutch studies were found to have selection bias and multiple, uncontrolled variables, they were broadly applied in the U.S.
“The Dutch study researchers only took healthy kids from supportive and reasonably healthy families,” Levine said. “They carefully screened kids, so if they had major developmental problems they were not included in the studies. But in the U.S. … the vast majority of these kids have a history of psychiatric issues before they developed gender dysphoria. The Dutch rejected these kids from their research.”
The Dutch study had 196 participants initially and only put 70 in the protocol. Only 55 then completed the protocol. As well as having selection bias, the study was uncontrolled.
“Wisely, the Dutch people gave these kids and their families continued psychotherapy during this protocol,” Levine said. “Is the positive results they found due to the psychotherapy, improvement as they got older, or affirmative care? This is an uncontrolled study. They cannot make conclusions about what caused what. But the world took this as scientific evidence.”
In the U.S., youth who had rapid-onset gender dysphoria and didn’t even meet the baseline criteria for the Dutch study began receiving interventions in pediatric clinics, with doctors utilizing the studies as justification. Furthermore, when the Dutch began this project there was also much less awareness of autism, Levine said. A very large percentage of these kids that have come to American facilities are on the autism spectrum, according to Levine.
Courageous Pediatricians Have Resisted
ACPeds physicians have spoken out against sexual disfigurement and medical intervention in youth with gender dysphoria for years.
“There are a handful of us physicians within ACPeds and across the country who have the courage and expertise to speak out on this issue,” Cretella said. “When we are able to do so in an environment open to dialogue, we are met with significant appreciation and affirmation by fellow physicians and laypersons alike.”
Most colleagues, Cretella said, appreciated ACPeds’ stance, acknowledging that the studies affirming medical intervention in gender dysphoric youth were likely flawed or fake; but too many feared losing their jobs to speak out against transgender interventions.
“Trans interventions are big money,” Cretella said. “Billionaire elites promote trans ideology over truth across all public institutions and media platforms, and [in America] a severe cancel culture results in everything from severe harassment and doxing to ending one’s career.”
Fortunately, signs of sound medical ethics triumphing over junk science are breaking through, Cretella said.
In the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Finland, cultures that embraced transgender interventions for youth early on have reversed course. France has urged greater caution in these cases.
In the United States, Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., has rooted his administration in medical ethics and utilized the best science to establish pro-child treatment of gender confusion with psychotherapy, Cretella said.
Currently, about 13 other states are attempting similar legislative efforts.
Ashley Bateman is a policy writer for The Heartland Institute and blogger for Ascension Press. Her work has been featured in The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, The New York Post, The American Thinker and numerous other publications. She previously worked as an adjunct scholar for The Lexington Institute and as editor, writer and photographer for The Warner Weekly, a publication for the American military community in Bamberg, Germany. Ashley is a board member at a Catholic homeschool cooperative in Virginia. She homeschools her four incredible children along with her brilliant engineer/scientist husband.e who lives in Virginia.
“Boys are boys from the beginning. Girls are girls right from the start.” No, those aren’t the words from a tweet banned for “hate speech” — though they could be. They’re prophetic lines from none other than Mister Rogers, who put the immutable truths to a tune decades before the trans craze.
Resurfaced in a recent TikTok, the clip shows Fred Rogers, host of the classic children’s show “Mister Rogers Neighborhood,” singing his ditty “Everybody’s Fancy,” which goes:
Boys are boys from the beginning Girls are girls right from the start Everybody’s fancy Everybody’s fine Your body’s fancy and so is mine
Girls grow up to be the mommies Boys grow up to be the daddies Everybody’s fancy Everybody’s fine Your body’s fancy and so is mine
TRIGGER WARNING. ⚠️ This is the most upsetting thing you will see all weekend. https://t.co/eVLPZ3J3RI
In his first appearance on “The Tonight Show” starring Johnny Carson in 1980, Rogers delved into the song’s importance. When Carson asked Rogers a series of lighthearted questions about his show and asked how Rogers communicates important themes to his audience of children, it didn’t take long for the host to pivot to the topic of sex. “Are they too young for that?” Carson asked.
That’s how they learn the difference between boys and girls, Rogers replied. “Sometimes children think that they might change, they might have to change after a while,” he continued, to which the audience laughed.
But Rogers wasn’t laughing. “You know, we laugh about that now,” he said, “but it’s because we had that concern when we were little.”
Some have argued that Rogers was simply the product of his generation or speculated that he was a homosexual to explain his gentle demeanor. In a 1969 Senate Commerce Committee hearing, however, Rogers made his case clear: “I’m very much concerned about what’s being delivered to our children in this country.”
And of course, some of Disney’s most recent productions have forged ahead with an increasingly explicit LGBT agenda for children. The latest “Toy Story” installment, “Lightyear,” boasted a lesbian kiss. “Baymax!” taught kids that men can have periods.
“Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” was not a political program, but it tackled issues, both big and small, that troubled children. This included not only instilling truths about the immutability of the sexes, but reassuring kids that they wouldn’t get sucked down the bathtub drain or lose an ear during a haircut.
“Children are concerned when they get their first haircut that the barber’s going to cut more than hair,” Rogers said on “The Tonight Show.” So to assuage kids’ fears, he visited a barber to ask whether the trimmer cuts more than hair.
It isn’t that Rogers hated children who wanted to be unique—far from it. As he stated in the Senate hearing, he merely wanted to address the “inner drama of childhood.” Long before libraries began hosting drag queen story hour, Rogers tried to warn us about the dangers of gender-bending. But in true Mister Rogers’ fashion, he did so while celebrating each person for being “fancy” and unique, no transgender interventions required.
After the 14-year-old was found being sexually assaulted in another state, a judge kept her from loving parents because they questioned her transgender identity. Then she was trafficked again.
In August 2021, by concealing a teen’s newly asserted transgender identity from her parents, Virginia’s Appomattox County High School participated in a chain of events that led to that girl falling into the hands of sexual predators not once, but twice.
When the FBI found Sage (last name of the family withheld for privacy) in Maryland, where she was victimized by a sexual predator, a judge refused to return her to her parents on the grounds they were abusing her in not affirming her as male. Housed in the boys’ quarters of a children’s home away from her parents, she told her mother, she was assaulted again. The girl soon fled, then was brutally sex-trafficked again until her rescue in Texas by law enforcement.
Sage’s Law, or the Child Protection Act, is being introduced this week in the Virginia House of Delegates by Delegate Dave LaRock in honor of this young teen from Appomattox County, Virginia. Sage hopes sharing her story will help protect others from the abuse she suffered at the hands of predators, precipitated in part by the very institutions that should have protected her.
School policies and state laws that encourage concealing information from parents’ purport to protect vulnerable minors. In practice, as tragically demonstrated by Sage’s case, such policies open the door to predators by removing children’s greatest protection from their lives.
Sage’s Law aims to shut that door in three ways. It would require schools to notify parents if their child asserts a gender different from his or her sex; it prevents school counselors from withholding or encouraging minors to withhold information about a child’s gender identity; and it clarifies that raising a child according to his or her biological sex, including decisions about a child’s mental and physical health, may not be construed as abuse.
Sage’s story, compiled from months of interviews, reports, and records, has been lived by countless other families torn apart in the name of gender ideology by activist schools, judges, anddoctors. This is a story of the unbearable cost of parent-exclusion policies, but also of a mother’s love and relentless determination to save her child.
Institutions that Should Protect Endanger Instead
Sage is a slight, pretty, 15-year-old girl with elfin features and an edgy style. Recently, reflecting back on her transgender identification, she told her mom: “I don’t know who I was. I’m a totally different person now. I never was a boy. Everybody was doing it, I just wanted to have friends.”
That self-reflection is consistent with the research showing that upwards of 80 percent of gender dysphoric childrenembrace their sex as they emerge from puberty. Children who are “affirmed” as the opposite sex, however, particularly if puberty blockers are used, consistently go on to further medicalization. Sage’s comment also reflects the reality of social contagion, fueled by social media and increasingly recognized internationally as a factor in the exponential rise in the number of children identifying as transgender.
Yet states such as California allow children as young as 12 to make their own health-care decisions, without their parents but under the authority of the state. In January, Virginia delegates Candi Mundon King, Nadarius Clark, Michelle Maldonado, Sam Rasoul, and Marcus Simon filed a similar bill authorizing courts, social workers, and medical professionals to withhold information from parents and consent to medical procedures for “mature” minors.
The consequences for children and families in states such as California that construe not “affirming” as abuse are particularly dire. In October, progressive Virginia Delegate Elizabeth Guzman announced she would reintroduce her 2020 bill to criminalize parents who do not affirm their child’s transgender identity as guilty of abuse, potentially resulting in the loss of custody.
School Policies Endangering Students
Michele adopted Sage, her biological granddaughter, after the death of her son. Like many gender-dysphoric children, Sage has a history of trauma from that early childhood loss. Related health problems became severe at times, requiring therapy and medical treatment. Her daughter’s previous schools notified Michele when concerns arose, she said, enabling her to have Sage’s treatment adjusted. But when her daughter entered Appomattox County High School in early August 2021, Michele says she was cut out of the loop.
Unbeknownst to Michele, her then-14-year-old’s taste at the time for boys’ clothing, which she described to her mother as simply “dressing emo,” was accompanied by her assertion at school that she was a transgender boy. School records, shared by the family, indicate school staff were calling Sage by her chosen male name and pronouns and at her request concealing this from her parents. Sage recalls her school counselor telling her during the first week of school that since she identified as male she could use the boys’ bathroom.
School records also indicate bullying, although they do not capture the severity of what Sage eventually told her mom: boys were following behind her in a group, touching her, threatening her with knife violence and rape, and even shoving her up against the hallway wall. On Aug. 23, according to school notes, reports were received from students and teachers that Sage had used a boys’ bathroom and encountered hostile boys there. The school counselor met with Sage the next day to direct her to use the nurses’ bathroom for safety reasons.
Sage’s statement that “all the boys at this school are rapists” prompted the school to review hallway footage outside the bathroom, showing that several boys had entered while she was inside. On Wednesday, Aug. 25, the counselor and school resource officer called Sage into a meeting, where she became so emotional that the counselor recorded concern Sage might be “a risk to herself due to being so upset when leaving school.”
Only at this point — after meeting alone with her daughter, after two days had passed and knowledge of the incident had reached all the way to the superintendent, according to the school records — did the school finally contact Michele, she said, still without revealing the male identity her daughter was asserting.
Michele recalls finding a school hall pass labeled with a new name that August evening and Sage telling her for the first time that she was identifying as a boy at school. As Michele sat with her on the floor, Sage tried to stop the tears as she told her mother a group of male students had “jacked” her up against the wall of the boys’ bathroom and threatened her with violence, and that she was terrified of what they would do. Michele tried to comfort her, assuring her she could stay home while they figured out how to handle the bullying.
That night, Sage disappeared. She was found nine days later in Maryland, a victim of sexual assault. That was just the beginning of her family’s ordeal.
Excluding Parents Invites Predators
As Michele’s case illustrates, school policies that exclude parents from critical knowledge of their child’s mental health remove a child’s greatest safeguard from his or her life. While this author could find no such policy posted on the Appomattox High School or school board websites, the school’s actions to “affirm” Sage’s stated gender, name, and pronouns and to permit access to bathrooms of the opposite sex are all consistent with the directives of former Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s 2021 model policies. So is the choice to deceive parents.
In fact, the Northam policies direct that an entire gender transition team and plan be set up for such a child, all in secret from the parents if the child so wishes. This guidance was revoked in 2022 by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, but Virginia Democrats and LGBT groups are fiercely contesting the transparency and parental consent required by the new proposed guidance.
Yet school counselors, unlike parents, have at best an extremely limited knowledge of a child’s mental, emotional, and physical needs. They also have neither the constitutional authority nor the expertise to determine a child’s best interests.
Children who identify as transgender have well-documented mental health co-morbidities and rates of adverse psychiatric events. Even Dr. Erica Anderson, former head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), has raised alarm at the “pitched battle” engendered by professionals who “triangulate” or set children in opposition to their parents.
In Sage’s case, by withholding information about her daughter’s gender identity and related issues, including the severe bullying related to Sage’s transgender exploration, the school destroyed vital opportunities for Michele to discern warning signs in time to assess and respond before tragedy struck.
Predators know transgender kids are vulnerable prey. Sage told Michele months later that some of the transgender websites to which a school counselor referred her linked to “creepy” older men and pornography.
One mother told this author that as soon as her daughter identified online as “female to male,” multiple suspicious “sugar daddy” accounts reached out to her on social media. Roblox, the wildly popular children’s gaming site, has transgender chat rooms with a panic button to “hide your screen from your parents.” Sage, her mother says, was lured to meet sex traffickers by online predators posing as friends.
A Court-Enabled Tragedy
The first call from the FBI came late at night on Sept. 2, her mother recounts: Sage had been found. Michele says investigators told her Sage had been trafficked into Washington, D.C. and then Maryland for nine days of horrific, brutal sexual abuse.
Driving through the night, their backseat full of stuffed animals and cozy blankets, Michele and her husband Roger arrived early the next morning at the Baltimore Courthouse. They were stunned to hear that their child, who had just survived unspeakable trauma, was being held in a juvenile detention cell and that they were being summoned to a hearing late that afternoon before Judge Robert Kershaw. When they entered the courtroom, Sage appeared from the penitentiary remotely, on screen, with only court-appointed attorney Aneesa Khan, an assistant public defender, present in person. “I love you, baby!” Michele cried to her daughter, who responded “I love you too, Nana.” To their shock, Khan spoke up and alleged on Sage’s behalf that she did not wish to return home and had been “both emotionally and physically abused by his parents in connection with [his] expressed male gender identity and desire to live as a trans male.”
Michele had only found out about this claimed male identity the night her daughter disappeared. Yet Michele was willing to use any name or pronoun to bring her home. Sage later told her, Michele says, that Khan “told me to tell the judge my parents hit me, starved me.” Sage also told Michele that Khan “didn’t care how much [Sage] had to lie…but they were going to win this case” to remove Sage from her parents’ custody and place her in a Maryland foster home that would affirm her as male.
Michele is a Virginia Court-Appointed Child Advocate (CASA) with years of experience supporting troubled teens, and she and Roger were quickly cleared of abuse charges. But the allegations were used to take custody of their daughter and bar them from seeing her.
The Cruelty of Ideology
Rather than treat Sage as a victim of horrific sex trafficking and return her to her family, the court dealt with her as a runaway, providing grounds for temporary custody in Maryland. Significantly, under the Interstate Juvenile Compact, even if allegations of abuse are made, juveniles are to be returned to their home state, which is presumed to better be able to assess the child’s needs. Judge Kershaw delayed this return for two months, which led to Sage’s next trafficking episode.
Instead of receiving treatment for her profound physical and emotional trauma, Sage was kept for days in solitary detention as a runaway, then transferred to the Catonsville Children’s Home. Per Judge Kershaw’s order, she was housed according to her “expressed male gender.” Michele says she eventually learned from Sage that she was the only girl in male quarters and that she had been repeatedly assaulted there.
Kershaw held multiple hearings focusing on Sage’s claimed male identity and Khan’s efforts to demonstrate gender identity abuse, including calling two Appomattox school counselors to testify against Sage’s parents. While his final ruling on Nov. 10, 2021, reluctantly conceded lawful custody to the parents, Kershaw opined at length that “more likely than not” Sage had “endured emotional abuse and neglect by his parents,” including “misgendering” and “misnaming.” Astonishingly, Kershaw cited as evidence of parental abuse “running away from Virginia to Maryland,” when in fact Sage was abducted, raped, and trafficked across state lines.
While Sage was in The Children’s Home, Michele says she sent letters and cards multiple times a week and tried countless times to reach her by phone, especially on Sage’s 15th birthday. Months later, Sage commented: “I missed you so much, but I tried not to because you didn’t want me back.” Horrified, her mother asked what she meant. She learned from Sage that Khan had told her that, because she was transgender, Michele didn’t want her anymore — and that not one of her cards or messages had ever reached her daughter.
Sage also eventually told her mother that, while living at the foster home, she skipped classes every day and would “smoke weed and do drugs” with kids she had met. Sage also relayed later that Khan had told her “I don’t give a sh-t if you do drugs, I just want to win this case.” Sage also said Khan had visited the home of one of Sage’s Maryland school friends to enlist her support in contacting Sage, claiming Khan had won the case and resulting in knowledge of Sage’s case spreading around the school.
In a text to a friend at the time, Sage referenced Khan’s intent: “going to the court of appeals, and the supreme court.” It is difficult to avoid Michele’s conclusion that “[t]he only best interest [Sage’s] attorney had was for herself. To put my traumatized child on center stage to push her political or gender agenda!”
Michele begged the court to provide treatment for the trauma Sage had endured and had found placement for her by mid-October, approved by Virginia social services, in Youth for Tomorrow’s program for young victims of sexual exploitation. The judge rejected it because they would treat Sage as a girl.
Not until Nov. 10 did Judge Kershaw approve placement in North Spring, a residential treatment facility that would affirm her claimed male identity. Frightened of being locked in the facility and believing her mother no longer wanted her, Sage texted a friend, “im gonna dip” (leave). On Nov. 12, 2021, Sage says, she cut off her court-required GPS monitor and ran away to meet an online “friend” in Texas she thought was 16.
Once more, the unspeakable happened. Sage fell into the hands of a predator who, police told Michele, raped, starved, drugged, and brutalized her. This time she disappeared for months. For the second time in less than four months, Michele had no way of knowing if her daughter was even alive. But Michele never stopped searching. Finally, a tip she discovered on social media led Texas marshals to her daughter’s rescue in Dallas on Jan. 24, 2022.
For the first time since that conversation on the floor of Sage’s bedroom on Aug. 25 the year before, mother and daughter were able to talk. On the plane ride home, Michele listened as Sage began to unburden her heart, grieving over what she learned but overcome with gratitude that her daughter was alive and restored to her.
Affirmation by Intimidation
Upon her return to Virginia, Sage entered North Spring, the lock-down facility negotiated by the court, with Michele driving four hours each way for her weekly allotted visit. Sage was heavily medicated, suffering from constant nightmares, and fearful of both residents and doctors. Sage told her mother that her counselor also pressured Sage to tell Michele she wanted a “gender-affirming” mastectomy.
Yet, during one of Michele’s visits, Sage asked if her mother could secretly take her to buy girls’ clothes, stating she didn’t want to be a boy anymore, but she was scared to tell the doctors. Pressured by North Spring to let them treat her daughter, Michele reached out to Josh Hetzler, an attorney with Richmond-based Founding Freedoms Law Center, who secured her daughter’s return. After nearly a year of horror, she was finally home safely.
The road ahead is a long one of healing both physically and emotionally. There are confusing lapses in concentration and persistent, terrifying nightmares. In a safe, loving home, surrounded by her pets and easing into at-home learning and therapy sessions, the painful recollections emerge unpredictably, as do the panic attacks. Michele doesn’t press, letting Sage open up at her pace, whether to her or to her beloved uncle Cory, who has moved home to support her.
As she begins to process her ordeal, Sage now desires to protect others from the horrors she experienced. Michele’s heroic, unrelenting determination to save her daughter has turned not only to helping her heal but to preserving other families from what hers endured. Advocates have rallied to help fund legal action through The Gavel Project, and to craft policies that will help protect others.
Sage’s Law
Many children never escape the clutches of sex traffickers. Had it not been for her mother’s relentless love and determination, Sage might never have been found. Michele calls it a miracle. In the starkest of contrasts, the actions of ideologues played a part — twice — in her daughter falling into the traffickers’ hands.
Sage’s public school could have been transparent to Michele about her daughter’s struggles. The court could have returned her to Virginia without furthering a quest to make legal history. The children’s home could have protected her from assault and access to drugs. And doctors could have treated trauma, not pressed living as the opposite sex and mutilative surgery on a victim of sexual abuse. All along, it was her mother who truly had Sage’s best interest at heart.
Sage was failed by adults who thought they were helping but were blinded to their own cruelty by their ideology. Michele tells of countless parents who have reached out to her with their own stories of families and bodies destroyed by school counselors, courts, and doctors who may spend minutes with a child, but assert they have the expertise and authority to usurp decisions from parents who have poured a lifetime into their care.
Sage has shown great courage in sharing her story, and it is time for lawmakers to take a stand for her and many other children by passing Sage’s Law. There is only one acceptable response to her story: never again.
Laura Bryant Hanford is a mother of five and is actively involved in school policy and religious freedom issues in Virginia, where she lives with her family. She served from 2015 to 2018 on Fairfax County Public Schools’ Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee. She was the lead congressional staff drafter of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. She also served at the U.S. Embassy in Romania as the officer in charge of human rights, focusing on ethnic minorities, women, and refugees. She is a graduate of Princeton University.
Minnesota’s teaching licensure board will soon require all teachers to be card-carrying Marxists. The card will literally say “licensed teacher,” but recently approved revisions redefine state licensure in expressly Marxist terms: Academic knowledge is out, and power struggle among the classes is in. To be licensed in Minnesota starting in 2025, every teacher must not merely teach about, but personally advocate, the core tenets of critical race theory and transgender ideology.
The state’s insistence that every teacher positively affirm homosexual behaviors and transgendered identities understandably aggravates consciences among moral traditionalists, but the issues run deeper than the “culture war.” What is at stake is the nature of knowledge, the future of liberty, and the prospects for a sustainable social order. In a word: civilization.
A perfunctory hearing on Aug. 24, 2022, and the resulting order for implementation with slight revisions by a solitary administrative judge in December cemented the new regime. The revised Standards of Effective Practice require radical changes to teachers’ curriculum selection, classroom management style, and self-understanding of the teaching vocation. The education departments at colleges and universities also must document their fulfillment of the new standards or else have their program certifications rescinded by Minnesota’s Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB).
The new requirements require teachers to positively affirm extremist leftist positions about human nature and sexual practices in order to be allowed to teach in government schools.
Teachers will be required to choose “anti-racist” — i.e. critical race theory — instructional strategies for students. An administrative judge told the state to amend No. 4 here requiring teachers to expose children to sexual identities. It will likely still go into effect, with slightly different language.The new license requires teachers to affirm transgenderism.
The revisions represent only the latest attack against American heritage in Minnesota’s public schools. In 2013, the state education department successfully removed the four presidents featured on Mount Rushmore from social studies standards.
Susan B. Anthony, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan also got the ax that year, as did the Magna Carta. References to the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were relativized, as students were to be instructed that those documents do not contain universal principles of ordered liberty, but merely the opinion of one powerful group of 18th-century men.
A decade later, the vanguard has advanced again. The revised teacher licensing rules strike the following from the mathematics standards: “addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, whole numbers, fractions, decimals, and percentages.” They insert this for teachers of all subjects: “The teacher fosters an environment that ensures student identities such as race/ethnicity, national origin, language, sex and gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical/developmental/emotional ability, socioeconomic class, and religious beliefs are historically and socially contextualized, affirmed, and incorporated into a learning environment where students are empowered to learn and contribute as their whole selves.”
It no longer suffices simply to discuss the controversies of radical reform; teachers and students must also become advocates for change: “The teacher creates opportunities for students to learn about power, privilege, intersectionality, and systemic oppression in the context of various communities and empowers learners to be agents of social change to promote equity.” Minnesota’s Scandinavian ancestors must be turning over in their graves at this new smorgasbord of Marxist truffles.
The PELSB’s “Statement of Necessity and Reasonableness” for the licensure changes draws support from two states just as blue as Minnesota. From New York, PELSB gleans: “Inclusive curriculum and assessment … works toward dismantling systems of biases and inequities, and decentering dominant ideologies in education.” In Illinois, each teacher must internalize a Marxist mentalité: “The culturally responsive teacher and leader will explore their own intersecting identities, how they were developed, and how they impact daily experience of the world.”
Illinois has expressly abandoned what Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, called “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” In place of objective truth, “what is seen as ‘correct’ is most often based on our lived experiences.” As in New York, so also in Illinois — and soon in Minnesota — all teachers must practice what cultural Marxists preach: “Assess how their biases and perceptions affect their teaching practice and how they access tools to mitigate their own behavior (racism, sexism, homophobia, unearned privilege, Eurocentrism, etc.).”
But to whom? Neither the people nor their elected officials decided the matter. A solitary administrative judge, appointed by the governor, ordered the implementation of the radical licensure changes after merely recommending a few tweaks.
The labyrinth of administrative procedure affords limited opportunity for appeal, but one can hope that a teacher, a parent, or a teacher-preparation college will petition for declaratory relief. If nothing else, PELSB’s radical rewriting of human nature smacks of a state-imposed religion, in violation of the First Amendment’s no establishment clause, not to mention the dereliction of duty when schools jettison mainstream academic content in favor of extremist ideology.
If recourse to the courts should fail, another remedy remains, modeled for the free world in Norway in 1942. When the National Socialists ordered parents to enroll their children in indoctrination camps with just three weeks’ notice and required all school teachers to implement a Nazi curriculum, the people simply would not have it. Five out of every six teachers resigned.
A similar proportion of parents flooded the Norwegian education bureau with letters — literally, laundry baskets full of letters — registering their protests. Adolf Hitler’s henchmen were grossly outnumbered, and the Nazis’ outward control of state agencies never penetrated to the hearts and minds of the people. The fusion of Viking blood with Lutheran “here I stand” courage made otherwise docile Norwegians invincible. Whether the Minnesotans can muster similar resolve soon will become evident to all.
The Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT advocacy organization, has targeted conservative commentator Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire; the person who runs the Libs of TikTok Twitter account; and Seth Dillon, CEO of the satire site The Babylon Bee, accusing them of causing violence in a new report titled “Online Harassment, Offline Violence.”
The report argues, “Anti-equality, online extremists are leading a proactive and coordinated campaign of hate against hospitals and medical providers who offer gender-affirming care for transgender, non-binary and questioning youth.”
The report states it consists of “an informal exploration across Facebook and Twitter” that identifies “24 different hospitals and providers, across 21 states, who were directly attacked online following harassing, inflammatory and misleading posts from Libs of TikTok, Matt Walsh, and other right-wing accounts.”
Relying on misleading allegations of “lies” and “misinformation,” the report draws a line of causation from Libs of TikTok posting a video from a particular hospital detailing its own practices to inevitable online outrage resulting in angry tweets, emails, and phone calls from individuals, causing the hospital to stop youth-oriented transgender advocacy and/or practices and ultimately resulting in legislative efforts to ban the practices in the first place. The report gives examples of hospitals and doctors receiving hostile or angry communications, threats, and specifically, the false bomb threats against Boston Children’s Hospital.
The report insists, “What occurred in Boston is just one example of coordinated campaigns of hate, violence, and harassment being waged both online and offline against health care providers and children’s hospitals simply for providing age-appropriate, best practice, medically necessary medical care to transgender youth.” However, its claim of offline violence remains abstract and assumed. It provides no examples of actual violence.
Accusations of Hate Speech
Detailing what it argues is a coordinated campaign to target pro-LGBT organizations, the report notes: “hate speech accounts such as Libs of TikTok or Matt Walsh, a known transphobe at the alt-right news site The Daily Wire, post an inflammatory message full of disinformation about gender affirming care and call out a specific hospital or doctor by name.” The alleged campaign continues with “right-wing politicians looking to rile up the most extreme members of their base join in spreading the same transphobic rhetoric from their platforms, in some cases going so far as to introduce legislation to regulate children’s hospitals and gender affirming care providers.”
The final “stage” of these campaigns involves hospitals discontinuing transition practices for minors or legislative efforts that heavily regulate or ban said practices. The report concludes by placing responsibility on social media companies, arguing, “Social media companies have a responsibility to act and to not be bystanders while angry mobs intimidate LGBTQ+ people and our allies into silence.” Continuing, “Without intervention from social media companies, this will just lead to more hate speech, more threats, and more violence.”
Again, without citing any actual examples of violence, the report’s implication is that all negative interactions, from tweets to illegal activity like bomb threats, are essentially equal. The report’s authors then go further by arguing direct causation between the posting of information and the dangerous response. Their conclusion is that authorities must prevent or punish those posting the original information, which allegedly “caused” the violence.
Attempt to Silence Criticism
While obviously any form of violence or threats against an individual or organization is wrong and should be handled by the authorities, the popular left-wing argument that responsibility falls to commentators is absurd — even more so as the targets of their anger quite literally share the information left-wing activists post themselves. What the Human Rights Campaign and other LGBT activists stubbornly refuse to consider is that the outrage and anger are perfectly justifiable. Despite activists’ best efforts, many people reasonably view transgender surgeries on minors as barbaric and destructive.
What these organizations are attempting to do is stigmatize anyone who participates in such criticism by accusing them of contributing to any potential violence that may occur. More to the point, they want to intimidate conservative commentators to prevent them from discussing or sharing provocative LGBT activism, often in their own words, in a way that will result in criticism or outrage. So convinced they are morally justified, they view the natural result of the public viewing this information with outrage and legislative pushback as inherently violent and hateful.
In truth, what we see is the very nature of the democracy they champion in action. A children’s hospital boasts of performing elective double-mastectomies on teenagers as young as 15, as the Boston Children’s Hospital does on its website, and the public is rationally outraged. They express their outrage to the hospital and to their elected representatives, who introduce legislation. The left typically champions public protest and the targeting of organizations with phone calls, tweets, and emails when they disagree with a policy or product decision. Such action only appears to become “violence” and “hate” when the left supports what an organization is doing.
In terms of “causing” things like fake bomb threats or threatening voicemails, the idea that illegal behavior from one individual is the fault of a completely unrelated individual is dangerous and irrational. Libs of TikTok sharing a video produced by a children’s hospital is not a direct link to an unstable person calling in a bomb threat later on. Only the person making the call is responsible. Whatever motivated them to do so is entirely within their control. We simply cannot allow the left to continue bullying critics of their agenda by accusing us of causing violence by doing so.
Chad Felix Greene is a senior contributor to The Federalist. He is the author of “Surviving Gender: My Journey Through Gender Dysphoria,” and is a social writer focusing on truth in media, conservative ideas and goals, and true equality under the law. You can follow him on Twitter @chadfelixg.
No matter how you define “marriage,” there is zero respect for it in the so-called Respect for Marriage Act. You may believe it serves to federally codify the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision that rejected marriage as a male-female union. Maybe it would do so temporarily. But that’s not the endgame.
If you’re paying attention, you can see that the Senate’s recent 62-37 vote for cloture on HR 8404 puts us one step closer to abolishing state recognition of marriage entirely. That’s where this train is headed.
This will happen the same way such things always happen — through a demonization campaign that frames skeptics as bigots who are guilty of discrimination. That’s how you get Democrat-pliable Republicans such as Mitt Romney and craven Supreme Court justices like Anthony Kennedy to sign on. That’s how you manufacture a public opinion cascade, warning average Americans that they’ll be pummeled with lawsuits and ostracism if they dare think out loud.
And that’s how Democrats in Congress are likely in the not-too-distant future — via HR 8404 — to make the case that marriage actually comes with privileges that discriminate against the unmarried. Disagree? You’re a bigot who deserves to be socially ostracized! Self-censorship in the face of such accusations will pave the way, as always.
Collectivists Hope to Destroy Private Life and Regulate Relationships
Once they’ve gotten to that point via HR 8404 and Republicans who supported the measure, congressional Democrats will doubtless push us to agree that marriage is a discriminatory institution. We’ll start seeing more anti-marriage initiatives supported by singles, millennials, Julias, and gen Z, all well-groomed for the moment by teacher’s unions, academia, and media.
They’ll fall for the pitch that we can all just write up domestic partnership contracts instead. “Marriage” would then become nothing but a legal relationship (a contract) between two (or more) people for any purpose at all. Bureaucrats would broker those contracts. This proposal is all mapped out in Sunstein and Thaler’s 2008 book “Nudge.” It’s also been promoted for decades by internationally acclaimed feminist legal scholar Martha Fineman who writes that a system of contracts replacing marriage will help the state “regulate all social interactions.”
Under a system that abolishes state recognition of marriage, the family could no longer exist autonomously or unmolested by the state. How could it if the state no longer recognizes marriage as the foundation of the family unit? The government would have no requirement to recognize religious rites of marriage as valid. Thus, it would meddle more deeply in religion and religious communities that recognize bonds of kinship through blood ties.
We Become Atomized Individuals in the State’s Eyes
The atomization resulting from this will have repercussions that go beyond the bill’s guarantee to treat any difference of opinion as a federal crime. If we continue on this path, the government will no longer have to recognize any biological relationships. It need not recognize any legal right you might have as the parent of your biological child. Why should it? It would have already abolished its recognition of the union that produced the child.
Some of this process has already been completed through gender-neutral language in documents like passports, birth certificates, or the rules of the 117th Congress that do not recognize the words “mother,” “father,” “son,” or “daughter.”
Much groundwork has also been laid by surrogacy and abortion laws that treat children as chattel to buy, sell, and dispose of at will. And why would the state have to recognize any other relationships resulting from marriage if it no longer recognizes marriage? It could ignore your blood relationships to brother, sister, aunt, uncle, or any familial bond. In this scenario, you’d likely need a license to raise your own child, an old communist goal that the so-called Respect for Marriage Act conjures up.
When all there is are bureaucratized domestic partnership arrangements, the government would no longer need to recognize spousal privilege and thereby could legally coerce spouses to testify against one another in court. It could also abolish the default path of survivorship through which your inheritance goes to your spouse or next of kin. Instead, the state would be free to redistribute your nest egg at will in its great bureaucratic wisdom.
Indeed, there is no reason to doubt that the Respect for Marriage Act serves as a midwife to the radical left’s long-held goal of abolishing state recognition of marriage. It will allow the government to regulate our relationships, rendering each of us naked before its power.
We are each being set up for a pre-arranged marriage with Big Government operating as our abusive spouse.
Such Atomization Is a Totalitarian Necessity
The path to human atomization is the natural arc of all totalitarian systems in the making. They must always first isolate people in order to control them through terror, as Hannah Arendt noted in her work “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” Tyrants always mask their intentions by borrowing from tradition, using words like “respect for marriage,” “love,” or “equality” as they march us all into virtual solitary confinement.
There’s nothing new about this trajectory. It’s a long-standing vision of all totalitarian systems, which first came into the open with the Communist Manifesto’s proclamation, “Abolish the family!” Communists referred to traditional religion as “the opiate of the people” while setting up communism as a pseudo-religion that demanded unquestioning loyalty. The resulting dependency then truly becomes the fentanyl of the people.
Such deceptions are why Schumer and company talk about marriage as though the government has some sort of litmus test for “love.” But anyone with half a brain knows that love’s got nothing to do with a functioning state’s interest in marriage. Marriage is an institution that exists to allow for a structured society and for the protection of children.
Of course, we easily forget such facts while living in a nation that increasingly promotes infanticide, assisted suicide, recreational drug use, child pornography, and other ways to torture and kill our children. In fact, virtually all of their policy positions are tailor-made for family breakdown, community breakdown, and for hostility toward religious communities.
But maybe you like feeling lonely and alienated, like the idea of a childless and hopeless future, and are all for the state regulating your personal relationships and conversations. Well, then, you’ll like the “Respect” for Marriage Act.
But the destruction of bonds of affection and loyalty in the private spheres of life makes sense from the point of view of statists. Those loyalties get in the way of their ambitions for power and social engineering. They are invested in isolating us so that we become dependent upon them.
Stella Morabito is a senior contributor at The Federalist. She is author of “The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.” Her essays have appeared in various publications, including the Washington Examiner, American Greatness, Townhall, Public Discourse, and The Human Life Review. In her previous work as an intelligence analyst, Morabito focused on various aspects of Russian and Soviet politics, including communist media and propaganda. Follow Stella on Twitter.
Twelve Republicans disregarded their constituents’ wishes and aided Democrats in deriding the First Amendment rights of religious Americans by passing the deceptively-named Respect For Marriage Act without including any of their colleagues’ proposed protective amendments.
Of the 12 Republicanswho voted to advance the RFMA to a vote on the floor, three needed to change their minds before a final vote on the bill to keep the bill from passing. It is clear from the 61-36 vote on Tuesday night that Sens. Roy Blunt of Missouri, Richard Burr of North Carolina, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Susan Collins of Maine, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Rob Portman of Ohio, Mitt Romney of Utah, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Todd Young of Indiana did not change their minds.
Instead of using amendments as prerequisites for their support, these Republicans opened the door for their congressional colleagues to reject three separate attempts to give the bill robust legal protections for religious Americans who believe marriage is between a man and a woman.
The RFMA as it stands doesn’t just repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between male and female, by codifying the Supreme Court’s approval of same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges. It goes further by enabling LGBT activists, who have already made a habit of exploiting the legal system to target religious Americans, and the politically motivated Department of Justice to bring civil action against anyone they say violates the terms of the legislation.
Under the guise of vague language, the RFMA could allow for the legal victimization of wedding vendors, adoption agencies, bakeries, and any other entities run by people of faith who refuse to offer services condoning same-sex marriage based on religious convictions.
Despite the RFMA’s problems, the 12 GOP senators echoed their support for the legislation by once again voting in favor of it.
For their willingness to cave to the Democrats’ agenda, those Republicans were thanked by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer from the Senate floor ahead of the vote.
“I also want to acknowledge my Republican colleagues who voted in favor of advancing this legislation. Because of our work together, the rights of tens of millions of Americans will be strengthened under federal law,” he said. “That’s an accomplishment we should all be proud of.”
Other Republican senators, however, understood the risks the RFMA poses to Americans and offered solutions in the form of amendments that sought to clarify the bill’s cushioned language.
Sen. Mike Lee put forth an amendment that explicitly stated that the federal government “shall not take any discriminatory action against a person, wholly or partially on the basis that such person speaks, or acts, in accordance with a sincerely held religious belief, or moral conviction” that marriage is between one man and woman. The amendment would have also allowed anyone who is wrongfully targeted by the government over their beliefs about marriage to sue.
My amendment simply prohibits the Federal Government from retaliating against schools, businesses, and organizations because of their religious beliefs about same-sex marriage.
That amendment, which required 60 votes to be adopted, ultimately failed.
Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. James Lankford also introduced amendments designed to clarify language and ensure religious liberty protections for all Americans.
Lankford’s amendment guaranteed that the RFMA’s obscurity would not be wielded against organizations with traditional marriage beliefs. Rubio’s amendment eliminated the private right to sue from the RFMA.
All Americans should be honored and no one should be discriminated against—no one. The Respect for Marriage Act isn’t about equality or maintaining the status quo. It is about silencing and disadvantaging people that disagree. pic.twitter.com/xp4JbZczdm
Both amendments required a simple majority but failed.
Now that the RFMA has passed the Senate, the House is expected to vote on the updated bill as soon as this week.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who will likely assume the position of House speaker in January, told reporters early on Tuesday that he agrees with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) which says that the RFMA would “betray our country’s commitment to the fundamental right of religious liberty.”
“Catholic Bishops say religious protections in the Respect For Marriage Act are insufficient and far from comprehensive and treat religious liberty as a second-class right. As you know, that’s currently in the Senate. Do you agree with that assessment by the Catholic Bishops?” one reporter asked.
“I agree with them, yes,” McCarthy confirmed.
House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy says he agrees with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which says the Respect For Marriage Act would "betray our country’s commitment to the fundamental right of religious liberty.” pic.twitter.com/ZbJIOytynJ
McCarthy’s willingness to signal strong opposition to the bill, which garnered support from 47 House Republicans earlier this year, shows that he is listening to conservative voters who overwhelmingly reject this legislation.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
The transgender movement has a science problem. Trans activists and their allies are trying to silence their critics by accusing them of “science denialism,” but they are inadvertently illustrating the anti-science nature of transgender dogmas. For example, a recent opinion piece in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) — titled “Protecting Transgender Health and Challenging Science Denialism in Policy” actually demonstrates that rejecting transgender ideology is the best way to protect health and defend scientific integrity.
Of course, the authors, a couple of Yale professors plus a student, set out to prove the opposite. They open by asserting:
A virulent brand of science denialism is emerging in the U.S. legal system, as states enact bans on gender-affirming health care. Misused clinical research and disinformation have provided legal cover for bans on essential treatments for transgender and gender-expansive (TGE) people. Many of these bans restrict Medicaid reimbursement of gender-affirming care for people of all ages or prohibit gender-affirming care for minors. The recent end of federal protection for abortion and the lifting of Covid-19 protections such as mask mandates may signal an expansion of this dangerous force in health policy.
Yes, the complaints about the Dobbs decision and the ending of mask mandates are real and not a parody of upscale liberal white women. The rest is just loudly repeating transgender orthodoxies, with imprecations for doubters. And despite its apologists’ accusations of misused research and disinformation on the part of critics, transgenderism is indeed a dogmatic form of mysticism. Science has nothing to do with it.
Transgenderism denigrates the reality of bodily sex in order to exalt a non-corporeal sense of gender identity. It does not make a scientific claim, but a spiritual or metaphysical claim — that we have something like a gendered soul in a sexed body and that mismatches are possible and are best resolved by modifying the body into a facsimile of the other sex.
This extraordinary claim cannot be proven and must be taken on faith. Consequently, transgender advocates and allies, such as those writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, do not even attempt to provide a scientific explanation for transgenderism. Rather, because there is no physical need for medical transition, transgenderism has to be self-authenticating, proving itself by whatever mental health benefits can be attributed to it. This is why trans advocates are constantly (and falsely) telling parents that the alternative to transition is suicide — it’s the only argument they have; the only physical harm that can result from not transitioning is self-harm.
TRANSGENDERISM
As this demonstrates, so-called gender-affirming care is abnormal medicine. It hugely disrupts healthy bodily functions for dubious mental benefits. It is like using intense chemotherapy to treat anxiety. Thus, the case for transition, especially for children, needs to meet an extremely high standard of evidence.
Predictably, the authors of the NEJM article fail to do this. They argue that the case for transition is robust and accuse their opponents of disinformation and cherry-picking data but tracing their citations back through their own previouswork provides more assertion than evidence. The studies they cite cannot escape the usual weaknessesplaguing this area of study: poor response rates, bad sampling methods, small sample sizes, short time-frames, and a reliance on patient self-evaluation.
Even less convincing are their attempts to dismiss the side effects of medical transition, which undermine the claims of any benefits. For example, the NEJM writers suggest that the use of puberty blockers in cases of precocious puberty means they are also safe to use in transition — but the former use simply delays a natural, healthy puberty until the appropriate age, while the latter prevents it from ever happening. Even the New York Times has noticed that using puberty blockers for gender-confused children may have major downsides.
TRANSGNDERING ISSUES.
Of course, the elephant in the room is that studies on transition, and especially transitioning children, are overwhelmingly conducted by those whose careers depend upon proving the benefits of transition. The doctors who are chemically castrating teenage boys, or amputating the healthy breasts of adolescent girls, are all-in. To admit that these procedures are a mistake would be a confession of horrific, possibly even criminal, medical malpractice that would end their careers.
Likewise, many of the formerly respectable gatekeepers of medicine and scientific research have been deeply compromised by transgender ideology. From medical associations to hospitals, there is a multitude of people who are in too deep to admit error, even as transgender ideology collapses.
The fact-free nature of transgender ideology is apparent in the latest standards of care issued by WPATH (World Professional Association of Transgender Health), a pro-trans group that is treated as the leading authority on transgender medicine. The organization eliminated many of its recommended age restrictions for medical transition in order to protect from malpractice claims physicians who were transitioning children younger than the previous standards — after all, doctors can’t violate a standard of care that doesn’t exist. And bizarrely, WPATH declared “eunuch” to be a valid gender identity, a decision reached, in part, by relying on online forums filled with violent fantasies of child sexual abuse.
These cranks and creeps have captured the establishment, from medicine to academia to the Democratic Party. And they intend to use their power to intimidate and silence critics. They do not care that their attempts are dishonest and incoherent. For instance, the NEJM writers admit that the scientific “consensus is ever evolving,” yet they posit this as a reason to shut down debate and deregulate transitioning children.
They are not perturbed by the inconsistency, for they are engaged in the exercise of power, not reason. They do not care about winning the argument but about intimidating people into compliance. And so, they rely on credentialism and cries of “science denialism” and “misinformation” — following the same approach used to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, the lab-leak theory of Covid-19’s origins, and skepticism about extended school closures and masking toddlers — to protect their faith in gender identity and the pediatric transitions it demands.
But try though they might, they cannot alter biological reality. They may live by the lie of gender ideology, but they cannot make it true.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Children’s Wisconsin’s recent chaplain hires are full-fledged left-wing activists who twist religion to advance their preferred social Marxist policies.
Wisconsin’s premier children’s hospital has had its fair share of scandal, particularly with regard to religious liberty and leadership, but the bar just keeps getting lower: Children’s Wisconsin is now hiring trans activists as chaplains and “spiritual care interns.”
Children’s staff members were first notified of such new hires when fliers were posted around the inpatient units advertising, “Meet Your New Chaplain: Kate Newendorp.” The first tip-off to Newendorp’s beliefs about the sexes was featured prominently on the posters, with a proclamation of her pronouns as “she/her/hers” and those of her fiance, a female who goes by “they/he.”
“Working in a pediatric hospital is a dream come true!!” Newendorp is quoted on the flier. “I am so excited to be working alongside everyone and am pumped to be part of the team. Think of me as your friendly next-door neighbor!”
The poster is just your garden-variety job announcement, but a deeper dive shows that Newendorp’s social Marxist views aren’t confined to a push for preferred pronouns. The new chaplain is all-in for transgender surgeries, abortion, and a rejection of religious teaching when it cuts against her personal comfort.
Despite biblical Christian doctrine affirming the sanctity and humanity of life in the womb, the existence of only two distinct sexes, and the immorality of same-sex relations in both the Old and New Testaments, the new “chaplain” proudly rejects all of this.
“Love Jesus. Be gay. Get ordained,” she wrote on Facebook in June, with pictures of herself in rainbow garb. “What better way to celebrate Pride than being ordained?! Many thanks to my church and classis for being willing to stand for queer folks being included in ministry and for allowing me to follow God’s call.”
Several months later, on Oct. 17, 2022, after announcing her engagement to her female fiance who identifies as transgender, the Children’s Wisconsin “chaplain” spouted off about her church online. “Also, your casual reminder that my validity as an ordained minister is currently under review by my denomination because of the love I feel for my fiancé. Do better Church, because I’m not going anywhere. I was called,” she wrote.
Newendorp doesn’t just reject biblical relationships in her own life; she’s a full-fledged left-wing activist who twists religion to advance her preferred leftist policies. Her Twitter bio announces that she’s a “Chaplain desiring to shake things up” and says she’s “Daydreaming about … a time where God isn’t referred to with male pronouns.” On Facebook, she shared a blasphemous poem called “Jesus at the Gay Bar”:
But she’s also used her religion card to proclaim that loving your neighbor looks like “getting vaccinated and masking up” and voting for Democrats, and that “Abortion is a religious freedom.”
“People of all genders and sexualities have and need abortions. Abortion is healthcare,” Newendorp wrote with misinformation about maternal deaths. “I am an ordained minister who supports a person’s right to choose what is right for their life and their body. I am pastor [sic] who is pro-choice.”
In January, Newendorp started a GoFundMe “on behalf of Jennifer London” to help her fiance “Jensen” undergo a double mastectomy, known in the transgender-activist world by the euphemism “top surgery.”
Since moving to Wisconsin for her role at the children’s hospital, Newendorp appears to have become friendly with the other chaplains, posting pictures of herself going wedding dress shopping with fellow Children’s chaplain Ian Butts. This indicates Newendorp is not the only anti-Christian person installed in a religious role at the hospital to help families deal with life-and-death medical situations.
If Butts’ name sounds familiar, that’s because he was the chaplain who interrogated Children’s staff members who submitted religious exemption requests over the disastrous Covid shot mandate that left many hospitals dangerously understaffed. As part of the invasive vetting process, Butts grilled employees about their religious beliefs to determine whether their theology met his standards for being allowed their First Amendment rights and freedom to make their own medical decisions.
As I reported in these pages at the time, “The questions included the specifics of the employees’ personal religious convictions and their vaccination record, with Butts pressing on what he considered to be contradictions. Two particularly leading questions regarded the specifics of how the employees would keep their patients safe without being vaccinated, implying a moral implication of refusing a vaccine, as well as how they could square working for a hospital that mandated something so contrary to their personal convictions as a condition of employment.”
“We have already seen that Children’s holds little value for respecting deeply held religious beliefs, given their recent COVID Religious Waiver Committee. But this feels like a step too far. This feels like they have actively recruited activists into this field to further their progressive agenda,” one former Children’s Wisconsin employee told The Federalist of the trans activist chaplains. “I think this situation really calls into question who do we want guiding the spiritual development of our children — especially children who are stuck in a hospital, isolated, sometimes alone, and extremely vulnerable and easily impressionable.”
Children’s also recently posted a flier for a “Spiritual Care Intern” named Meg Trimm, who demanded to be referred to by the third-person plural pronouns “They” and “Them.” This chaplain intern was “an LGBTQ+ community educator and LGBTQ+ teen safe space facilitator” who believes “a professional chaplain’s job is not to convert anyone or preach religion, but to empower each person to find and use the hope and resilience systems they already have.”
Like Newendorp, Trimm rejects biblical teaching such as the concurrent depravity and creation in God’s image of people of all skin colors to instead espouse the most radical of left-wing political and theological views. Trimm has shared numerous TikToks of herself “deconstructing my white supremacy,” explaining that “gender is infinite,” proclaiming, “God is TRANSGENDER!!!” and saying, “God has a purpose for your life, and it might be fricken queer!”
“I am deeply concerned with this new infiltration of trans activists into our chaplain and faith-based services,” the former Children’s employee told The Federalist. “We have already witnessed the erosion and lost of public trust in fields of psychology, psychiatry, social work and general mental health counselors due to the rise of activists in these areas. Now parents have to worry about this as well?”
TRANSFORMING
Like other pediatric hospitals that have recently come under fire for mutilative transgender interventions, the “Gender Health Clinic” at Children’s Wisconsin advertises medical interventions and surgeries for children up to age 16, with no specified age the hospital deems too young. It advertises that its services include “top surgery” (meaning a mastectomy that mutilates a child’s healthy and developing breasts), wrong-sex hormones, and allegedly “reversible” puberty-blocking hormones, although that isn’t what the experts and “science” say.
While the National Health Service used to claim such gender-bending interventions were “reversible,” it has since backpedaled, admitting:
Little is known about the long-term side effects of hormone or puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria. … It’s also not known whether hormone blockers affect the development of the teenage brain or children’s bones. Side effects may also include hot flushes, fatigue and mood alterations. … [Gender-affirming] hormones cause some irreversible changes, such as: breast development (caused by taking oestrogen), breaking or deepening of the voice (caused by taking testosterone). Long-term cross-sex hormone treatment may cause temporary or even permanent infertility.
If health-care workers in the “Gender Health Clinic” at Children’s Wisconsin decide it’s “appropriate,” they prescribe puberty blockers to children at their first visit, even if they’ve never been evaluated by a mental health professional. And while the hospital says it doesn’t pump kids full of wrong-sex hormones on the first visit, it “can work to quickly start hormones at a follow-up clinic visit, usually within a few weeks.”
Furthermore, the pediatric hospital states on its “gender health history” form: “We offer gender-affirming Spiritual Support to all our patients.” Andy Brodzeller, an external communication director for Children’s, failed to explain what “gender affirming Spiritual Support” means despite being asked repeatedly.
“Our chaplains are trained to support and engage families of various faith and personal backgrounds in a health care setting,” Brodzeller said in response to a Federalist inquiry. “They only interact with patients if specifically requested by a family. Families are also always free to seek the services of their own personal faith leader. Regarding your question about parental involvement related to care for gender diverse kids, parents and guardians are essential to all care decisions. Clear, informed consent of all parents/guardians is required before proceeding with all treatments.”
But with trans activist “chaplains” like Newendorp and Trimm stacking the pediatric hospital’s spiritual support bench, and a promise from Children’s to “offer gender-affirming Spiritual Support to all our patients” (emphasis mine), people in the Children’s community are rightly concerned.
“We have many parents and families at Children’s who are deeply religious and hold traditional Judeo-Christian values. Will these new chaplains be able to serve the need of these families objectively?” the former Children’s employee added. “How will they properly support a grieving parent who is dealing with a child’s traumatic injury? How will they properly counsel a child who may be alone in the hospital due to a single parent working to make ends meet and maintain insurance?”
How indeed.
Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
One of the comforting fictions conservatives are increasingly tempted to tell themselves is that if they just move to a red state or county, the insanity of the woke left won’t affect them and their family. Ensconced in safely Republican communities, perhaps they’ll be free not just from disastrous Democrat policies but also from the pernicious sexual propaganda of the left. For conservatives with children, this is especially important.
But it’s a mirage. There is no American town or hamlet remote or red enough to prevent the infiltration of leftist ideology, which today often comes from institutions that in an earlier era would have been seen as the guardians of a decidedly Christian civic virtue. Not only are left-wing activists taking over these institutions, but they are also working to ban conservatives, and especially Christians, from the public square altogether.
There is nowhere today that conservatives can run and hide from the left. They can either surrender or stand and fight.
Consider what’s playing out in the small town of Taylor, Texas, population 16,807. Situated about 40 miles northeast of deep-blue Austin, it has long been precisely the sort of place conservative families might move to raise their children — a quiet and peaceful town full of churches in a deep-red part of the Lone Star State.
For decades, Taylor has staged a Christmas — not “holiday” — parade down Main Street. The Taylor Christmas Parade of Lights is a beloved tradition that for the past 10 years or so has been organized under the auspices of the Taylor Area Ministerial Alliance, or TAMA, a coalition of local churches.
Last year, as a result of an oversight in the application process, an LGBT advocacy group called Taylor Pride was included in the parade. The oversight in this case was that the old ladies who volunteer to organize the parade and process float applications had never heard of a group called Taylor Pride and didn’t realize what it was. (And no wonder, before the summer of 2021 the group had never staged a public event.)
By the time parade organizers found out, it was too late. Two men dressed in drag, one as a female Santa and the other scantily clad in glitter, were suggestively gyrating to dance music on the Taylor Pride float as it rolled down Main Street in the annual Christmas parade — as it happened, right in front of a float for Saint Mary’s Catholic School, which was full of children.
Parents and attendees were understandably outraged. Soon after the parade, TAMA decided that in the future, parade entries must be consistent with traditional biblical and family values, and made an announcement to that effect ahead of this year’s parade. The point, as TAMA’s statement made clear, was not to exclude any individuals or groups from attending or even participating in the parade, but to ensure the floats were family-friendly and not contrary to Christian teachings.
In response, the Taylor City Council announced it would stage a separate, city-sponsored parade, calling it the “Very Merry Holiday Parade and Celebration” — on the same night as the traditional TAMA parade, following immediately behind it on the same route, for the express purpose of giving Taylor Pride and other LGBT groups a parade of their own. As a recent post on the City of Taylor’s official Facebook page explained, the city is doing this because “we are committed to being inclusive and diverse in the City of Taylor.”
A spokesman for the city has since falsely characterized the situation to at least one local news outlet, saying TAMA had “made it clear that they did not want certain people to be a part of the parade,” and, “They were going to go in a little bit of a different direction … and make it a little bit more exclusive.”
This is exactly the opposite of what’s happened. The only thing that’s changed is that TAMA has realized that LGBT groups like Taylor Pride have targeted their town and attempted, with some success, to infiltrate and undermine their traditional civic celebrations of Christmas. So they decided to push back and insist on the survival of their traditions. Good for them.
The point here is that Taylor might as well be every conservative community in America. It’s located in Texas’s 31st Congressional District, one of two congressional districts in Texas that have never been represented by a Democrat. Voters there just reelected Republican Rep. John Carter for the 11th time. He ran unopposed. Taylor also sits in Williamson County, where nearly every elected office is held by a Republican.
Indeed, Taylor is the last place in the country where a family attending a Christmas parade organized by a coalition of local churches would expect to see two men in drag dancing inappropriately on a float rolling down Main Street. Yet like many such towns across the country, the city council and municipal staff are eager to prove just how enlightened and woke they are. Send in the drag queen holiday floats.
By now, Christians in Taylor must surely know that next year, there will be only one parade down Main Street in December — and it won’t be the Taylor Christmas Parade of Lights. Unless they vote the city council out of office and clean house in City Hall, traditions like the Christmas parade will soon be a thing of the past there, another lost battle in a never-ending war of attrition waged by the left. Same goes for the public library and the public schools. If conservatives don’t take them over, the left will.
It might just be one small town in Texas, but Taylor stands as a cautionary tale. It isn’t enough to move to a red state or a Republican district. You are going to have to fight the left, and win, or surrender to them. There is nowhere left to hide.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
Michigan voters will decide Tuesday whether children in that state can obtain puberty blockers at Planned Parenthood facilities without parental consent. Proposal 3 would also give Michigan children a constitutional right to be castrated or surgically sterilized — again, without the consent of a parent.
Parental rights have become a fiercely contested battleground. Historically, your right to determine what’s in the best interest of your child has gone without question. It’s the oldest, most fundamental liberty we know, enshrined in legal doctrine since 1690.
But too often today, ideology determines whether your parental rights will actually stand in court. If a parent opposes her child’s desire to pretend to be the opposite sex, courts increasingly treat that parent’s rights as expendable.The sexual confusion of children overshadows parents’ rights to remain in their children’s lives as a potent force.
In a courtroom down the hall, however, the rights of neglectful or drug-abusing parents are treated with kid gloves, under the theme of family preservation. Activist courts stand ready to protect your parental rights, but only when your narrative matches their own.
‘I’m God in this Case’
Less than a year ago, Abigail Shrier shocked readers with her story of a California judge who stripped a father of his parental rights because he showed insufficient support for performing irreversible medical procedures on his sex-confused son. These cases are popping up all around the country. Sexual ideology is becoming the governing factor in a child’s placement, trumping the will and the voice of a parent.In a state whose governor was elected on a parental rights platform, Virginia Del. Elizabeth Guzman brazenly introduced a bill that would charge a parent who fails to affirm a child’s “sexual orientation or gender identity” with a felony. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed legislation that makes his state a “refuge” for trans-identifying minors who seek irreversible medical procedures. Just make it to the Golden State … and there is nothing your objecting parents can do.
One case in the sleepy university town of Charlottesville, Virginia, provides some insight into how a parent can suddenly get framed as “the bad parent” in a custody battle, merely for questioning a child’s sexual confusion.
Sarah Schultz told me she spent more than a half-million dollars trying to retain joint custody of her 15-year-old daughter who first claimed she was bisexual and then began to question her sex. Schultz pled for a “wait and see” approach and for the right to have an influence in her daughter’s maturing adolescence. Despite Sarah’s ex-husband’s earlier fentanyl overdose, she says, a judge gave primary custody of the daughter to her dad, who permitted both bisexual and heterosexual sleepovers. In the past four years, Schultz has seen her daughter fewer than five times.
Schultz said the appointed guardian ad litem viewed her faith as a threat to her daughter’s emerging sexuality.“I’m God in this case,” Schultz recalled her daughter’s guardian ad litem saying. The court saw her daughter as a girl in an “authentic process to discover her identity,” Schultz explained, while the father was commendable because he was “allowing her sexuality to blossom.”
Courts often use the “safety of the child” as a guise to award custody to a parent who mirrors the left’s narrative. Note the irony here. How can you be a good parent unless you are willing to oppose something harmful your child thinks she wants at the time? A teenager sees hormones and irreversible surgeries as a mirage of liberation. A concerned parent sees what a disfigured body and the inability to have children will mean 10 years from now.
A Pernicious Double Standard
Treatment of parental rights in the world of foster care and adoption, meanwhile, is a vastly different story.
A mother can give birth to a baby who spends two months in the NICU, crying for endless hours as he detoxes from the heroin his mother ingested during pregnancy, and she or her mother can still take the baby home. Parental rights are treated as sacrosanct, even though most of the maltreatment of children actually occurs at the hands of parents or their paramours.
“Family preservation” is the holy grail courts and welfare agencies pursue, often at the expense of the actual safety of children. As Naomi Schaefer Riley explains in her book, “No Way To Treat A Child,” “child welfare workers and family-court judges … believe that foster care, to the extent that it should be used at all, is an endless holding pattern for a child while parents get their affairs in order.” Sadly, many never do.
In an effort to preserve parental rights, children languish in care for years. The common complaint in foster care is “the clock.” Though a child is legally eligible for adoption after roughly two years in care, drug-abusing parents can play out the clock, attend a few recovery meetings, fulfill a requirement or two on the reunification plan — and the clock starts over. Many children age out of the possibility of adoption because the court favors parental rights over children’s attachment needs.
The Use and Abuse of Parental Rights
Given the current capricious approach of many courts, the question to ask is: Just how safe are your parental rights? If the issues at hand are related to your child’s confusion about his sex, then your parental rights can be bargained away in court far too easily. But if the court frames those rights as a matter of “family preservation,” they are nearly carved in stone.
The contrast between how parental rights are viewed, depending on the left-wing bias of courts and state agencies, should disturb everyone. The right of conscientious parents to shape their child’s life is among the most cherished of all human freedoms. That right is increasingly threatened, as the militancy of transgender ideology invades the private realm of parent and child.
How safe are your parental rights then? Only as safe as the left wants them to be.
Paula Rinehart, LCSW, is a therapist in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the author of the book “Sex and the Soul of a Woman.” She writes about family and culture.
The Florida Board of Medicine has voted to ban sex change surgeries and hormone therapy for children under the age of 18 after hours of deliberation and testimony Friday. The guidelines, first released April 20, 2022, state that anyone under 18 cannot receive hormone therapy or puberty blockers. It also bans “gender reassignment” surgery for children and adolescents. The Florida Medical Board released the guidance in response to guidance from the US Department of Health and Human Services endorsed sex change procedures for teens.
The vote came after the board heard testimony from several individuals who had DE transitioned. One such individual, Chloe Cole, said she decided to transition after being “introduced to inappropriate content, and an echo chamber of far-Left ideology, such as that sex and gender are separate, women are inherently victims, men are inherently superior, and that dysphoric children need hormones and surgery in order to live.”
BREAKING: The Florida Board of Medicine has voted to ban sex change "treatments" for underage children.
“Few medical issues are more contentious than the question of medical treatments for minors who may or may not have gender dysphoria. Those children deserve the utmost compassion, which starts by treating them as individuals, not as enlistees in a cause,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, Chairman of Do No Harm, an organization dedicated to depoliticizing healthcare, told the Daily Caller. “Compassion also requires basing care on rigorous scientific inquiry, not on dubious, agenda-driven studies or the demands of activists.”
"Over 2 years post-op…my nipples leak fluid and they stain my clothes. I have no breasts. I want to be a mother some day and yet I can never naturally feed my future children. My breasts were beautiful and now they have been incinerated for nothing." – @ChoooColepic.twitter.com/M4toFQc0Wx
Other detransitioners took aim at puberty blockers, which some claim are a harmless method for teenagers to explore their gender. A study released earlier this month revealed that 98% of those who receive puberty blockers go on to receive sex change treatments such as surgery or hormone therapy.
Parents of transgender youth who supported sex change treatments for children also testified at the hearing.
Chaos erupted as board members announced an end to speaker testimony, and gave attendees an email to submit testimony into the public record. As board members filed out before returning to vote, protestors screamed “Let them speak! Let them speak!”
From coast to coast, transgender activists are working to push chemical castration and genital mutilation on minors at all costs. In September, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 107 into law, blocking officials from enforcing other states’ laws that hinder access to transgender medical procedures and drugs for minors.
Meanwhile, in Virginia, the Pride Liberation Project (PLP) is organizing resources to help confused minors whose parents are not supportive of their gender and/or sexual identity experimentation to run away from their homes to stay with a “queer-friendly” adult. The potential for predatory behavior with this initiative is alarming.
PLP leader, Aaryan Rawal, now a college student, does not seem to be concerned about the risks of sending confused children into strangers’ houses “within 1-2 days” of their separation from their families. He sent messages to PLP members, mostly high school and middle school students, that the organization could offer rides and money promptly.
As reported by Asra Nomani, on July 15, 2022, Rawal wrote on Discord, “We can pay for Ubers, Lyfts, and other passes if you need to leave immediately. … In the short term, we can provide a couple of hundred dollars … through Venmo or Zelle.” For the longer term, he offers more money. “We can also set up a dedicated ActBlue fundraising page for you and get allies to donate. In the past, this has led to thousands of dollars in donations. All of this money is yours.”
At best, PLP is helping children run away from home. But it seems there is a sinister drive behind this network. Children are among our society’s most vulnerable, and those confused and separated from their parents are ripe prey. It is suspicious that identity disagreements within families, notably during this era of the social contagion of gender dysphoria and confusion — particularly among middle schoolers, would ever justify removing children from their families and placing them with strangers. Would these same actors argue that we take away a 13-year-old conservative girl from her liberal parents who refuse to affirm her political identity and place her with a random identity-affirming adult male stranger?
This is illegal and absurd. Saying so is common sense, not bigotry, as members of groups like PLP and Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) Pride suggest on social media. These groups are manipulating the political landscape to obliterate parental rights and push transgenderism on children — even in elementary schools.
On its website, PLP boasts that it has advocated for the books “Gender Queer” and “Lawn Boy” to remain in public school libraries. Its members have promoted compelled speech (via mandatory pronouns). Multiple PLP members spoke at a July 2022 Fairfax County School Board meeting in favor of proposed changes to the Family Life Education (FLE) curriculum that include lessons on transgender transitioning as early as fourth grade and co-ed FLE instruction to make students who identify as transgender feel more comfortable.
Arguably not by coincidence, the students who spoke at the board meeting all carried the same message: “Queer” students feel frightened and depressed. The PLP speakers repeatedly cited 50 percent as the community’s depression rate and suggested that changes to the FLE curriculum would help them feel supported. Their messages were so consistent, in fact, it would not be surprising if someone else wrote them.
On Sept. 25, 2022, Rawal sent PLP members detailed talking points and provided media training for the student walkout that occurred later that month. The walkout was meant to object to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s efforts to preserve parental rights and roll back Ralph Northam’s heavily politicized “Model Transgender Policies.” Rawal encouraged students to say that these efforts would “hurt Queer students,” “erase [their] existence,” and cause depression and potentially suicide.
In Q&A forums with PLP walk-out participants, Rawal further told a student who was not permitted to hang flyers in the school to proceed. “My honest response is do it anyway. Admin won’t penalize over flyers distributed manually…” Rawal also offered reimbursements of up to $25 for walkout expenses. When he realized he needed megaphones for the walkout and nearby stores were sold out of them, he wrote “f—, let me dm rigby.” Notably, Robert Rigby, a retired teacher and co-chair of FCPS Pride appears to be helping to organize and support PLP initiatives as well.
Adults organizing groups such as PLP are providing resources to help children run away from home. These minors, who are not permitted by law to drink alcohol or smoke tobacco, could potentially travel to California — now a so-called “gender-affirming” sanctuary state — to obtain permanent and irreversible surgical procedures, and/or medication, without their parents’ consent.
These transgender ideology pushers are not simply accepting, they are aggressive in encouraging medical experimentation among children and keeping parents in the dark. Permanently scarring children behind a parent’s back is a particular kind of evil we will, hopefully, look back on in disbelief.
Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a mother, author, and member of the Independent Women’s Network.
The Pentagon’s investigation into the U.S. military in 2021 found about 100 individuals engaged in extremist activities out of a force of 2 million. It appears investigators were looking in the wrong place. The search for extremists might have yielded better results had they examined the Department of Defense Education Activity (DODEA), the government agency that administers K-12 education to the children of military personnel.
The Claremont Institute’s recently released report“Grooming Future Revolutionaries” describes shocking indoctrination taking place at overseas schools. It is a must-read, especially for military parents of the nearly 70,000 children in these schools.
I am a military spouse and the mother of a former DODEA student. The particular teacher training that was the focus of Claremont’s report is the reason, in part, why I lost all trust in the system.
In May 2021, I saw that DODEA would be holding an “Equity and Access Summit” for teachers and administrators. Knowing that “equity” means different things to different people, I wanted to get a sense of what it meant at DODEA. When I managed to gain access to the recordings, I was absolutely floored by what I saw and heard.
As the Claremont report shows, the summit featured hours of teacher training steeped in critical race and gender identity theories.
Claremont released a video of summit clips in which a principal talks about a student who felt like he’d done something wrong because he’s a “young, white male.” The teacher said she didn’t know what to tell him — but she seemed pleased with the breakthrough. Perhaps she was just following the lead of DODEA’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) chief Kelisa Wing, who is currently under investigation by DOD for a history of disparaging comments toward white people.
Video Evidence of Teachers Pushing CRT
The report also highlights literature teacher Gregory DeJardin’s presentation called “Combating 1- Sided Narratives (Decolonize the Curriculum).” DeJardin insists teachers become social activists and interviewed several students in his class at Vicenza High School in Italy about their difficulties with “majority culture.” It was painfully apparent in their answers that they were parroting his dogma, as one student said: “[School] is getting better about being more diverse and not taking a very normative perspective but there are definitely issues and I feel like it is still incredibly skewed to the white, male, heterosexual and Protestant gaze.”
Betty Roberts, an educator at Robinson Barracks Elementary School in Germany, talked about critical literacy. She wants her students to look deeply into textbook versions of events to find hidden biases. She asks her students questions like: “Is the American Revolution still being fought today?” She presses further and asks if the American Revolution was just a “transition from one group of rich white men to another group of rich white men.” Roberts goes on to express her gratefulness to the teachers’ union for its training on white fragility because she recognized her need for cultural humility.
Normalizing Transgenderism
Aside from the relentless instruction on anti-racism and white privilege, a clear effort was underway to normalize transgender identities and the notion of a gender spectrum. Genevieve Chavez and Lindsey Bagnaschi, presenters of “Ally 101 — Creating an Inclusive Classroom for LGBTQ+ Students,” talked about gender transitions they have facilitated for students at their schools in Spain and Germany, respectively — sometimes without parental knowledge or consent.
And many LGBT educators apparently belong to a system-wide resource-sharing group on Schoology curated by a DODEA educator. Chavez recommends resources from the group such as “Teaching with Mx. T” and “Teaching Outside the Binary.” But there is another similar group that’s passcode protected — and it’s for students. Teachers can add students to their own LGBT chat rooms in Schoology, and parents are not invited.
If teachers run out of content from people like “Mx. T,” they can use Discovery Education, which many recommended during the summit. One of the programs is “Speak Truth to Power.” This program offers lesson plans that are “flexible, standards-aligned digital resources, designed to educate, engage and inspire the next generation of human rights defenders.” Sounds good, doesn’t it — until you see that transgender activist Jazz Jennings is one of those human rights defenders. But Discovery Education is password-protected, with one portal for students and another for teachers, so we really have no idea what’s being promoted to our children via third-party content creators who can update information in real-time.
Congress Needs to Do More
Our children deserve to learn in an environment free from divisive ideologies, and thankfully, DODEA’s activism has not gone unnoticed by Congress. Rep. Vicky Hartzler, R-Mo., wrote a letter to DOD asking why teachers are being trained to secretly “transition” children at overseas schools. After a year, she still had not received an answer. She also introduced H.R. 4764, the No CRT for our Military Kids Act.
In the Senate, Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., offered an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2023 to prevent DODEA schools from hiding important medical information from parents — but it was voted down.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., introduced a Servicemember Parents Bill of Rights amendment to the NDAA to provide for more transparency and accountability in DODEA schools. It was adopted in committee with bipartisan support by a vote of 39-19 and is in the House-passed NDAA.
But Congress needs to do much more to ensure the safety of our military children and also that of any DODEA educator who is being intimidated into conformity. It will likely take years to sort out the mess at DODEA, so in the meantime, Congress could consider extending the military’s Non-DOD Schools Program to all students instead of only to those who are not in close proximity to a DODEA school.
Whatever the case, it looks like an extremist stand down is in order for DODEA, and it just might net more than the .005 percent found among our uniformed force.
Amy Haywood is a former senior legislative assistant for a U.S. House representative and an educator with years of experience working in a research-based program to help third culture kids adjust to life overseas. She holds a master’s degree in national security and strategic studies from the U.S. Naval War College.
In less than one month, if Proposal 3 passes, children will have a right under the Michigan constitution to walk into one of Planned Parenthood’s 12 so-called “gender affirming” facilities in the state and, without parental knowledge or consent, obtain puberty blockers. And with Planned Parenthood of Michigan promising “gender affirming” care “via telehealth in the coming months,” Michiganders’ kids won’t even need to leave their house to obtain these sterilizing drugs.
Passage of Prop 3 will also give boys a constitutional right to be castrated and girls the right under Michigan’s constitution to be sterilized by way of a hysterectomy or the removal of their ovaries — all without their parents’ consent.
Deceptive marketing by Planned Parenthood and far-left politicians, such as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, hides this reality from Michigan voters, leading Prop 3 to be uniformly referred to as “the abortion amendment” even though the expansive language of the proposed constitutional amendment reaches far beyond abortion. And on abortion alone, notwithstanding proponents’ claims that “passing this amendment simply restores the same protections that Michiganders had for five decades under Roe v. Wade,” Prop 3 goes far beyond the controlling Roe-Casey precedent: If passed, the constitutional amendment would create an extreme regime in Michigan of abortion on demand, at any time, for any reason, without informed or parental consent, and paid for by taxpayers.
The expansive and legalistically worded language of Prop 3, crafted by Planned Parenthood and left-wing backers, however, extends beyond abortion to create a constitutional right to several aspects of what transgender activists call “gender-affirming care,” despite it being neither affirming nor caring. And Prop 3 extends that right to all individuals, including children.
This is not merely a political point, and it is not a worst-case-scenario argument based on how some liberal activist judge or justice might interpret Prop 3. This reality flows from the plain language of Prop 3 and rests on general legal principles of constitutional construction.
It’s Right in the Text
Here is the pertinent language Prop 3 would etch into the Michigan constitution as Article 1, Section 28, with the key language underscored:
“(1) Every individual has a fundamental right to reproductive freedom, which entails the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion care, miscarriage management, and infertility care. An individual’s right to reproductive freedom shall not be denied, burdened, nor infringed upon unless justified by a compelling state interest achieved by the least restrictive means. …
(2) The state shall not discriminate in the protection or enforcement of this fundamental right.
* * *
(4) For the purposes of this section:
A state interest is “compelling” only if it is for the limited purpose of protecting the health of an individual seeking care, consistent with accepted clinical standards of practice and evidence-based medicine, and does not infringe on that individual’s autonomous decision-making.
* * *
(5) This section shall be self-executing….
Prop 3 Applies to Men and Women AND Boys and Girls
By its express terms, Prop 3 applies to “every individual” and guarantees an “individual’s right.” The proposed constitutional amendment further provides that “the state shall not discriminate in the protection or enforcement of this fundamental right.”
As a matter of constitutional interpretation, then, the rights guaranteed by Prop 3 would be rights that both adults and children possess as “individuals,” and the rights apply equally to males and females.
This proposal represents a huge demarcation from controlling Michigan law, under which minors must have parental consent to obtain medical treatment or receive prescription medications, with the only current exception being the judicial bypass provisions governing minors seeking abortions. Specifically, Michigan law currently provides that to obtain an abortion, females under the age of 18 must have the written consent of one parent or legal guardian, but the law allows a girl to seek permission for an abortion from a judge, called a “judicial bypass.” A court must grant a judicial bypass if the judge finds either that “the minor is sufficiently mature and well-enough informed to make the decision regarding abortion independently of her parents or legal guardian,” or “the waiver would be in the best interests of the minor.”
In the context of abortion, Prop 3 guts Michigan’s requirements for either parental consent or a judicial bypass, first by declaring that the amendment applies to all “individuals” and second by expressly providing that “the state shall not discriminate in the protection or enforcement of this fundamental right.” Treating females under 18 differently than those 18 or over is a textbook example of discrimination.
Section 4 of the amendment further cements the reality that minors must be treated equivalent to adults for purposes of the rights Prop 3 would establish. That section of the proposed amendment expressly limits the justifications allowed for regulating abortion or the other rights Prop 3 would inscribe in the constitution.
Under Section 4, the state may only regulate abortion and the other rights covered by the proposed constitutional amendment if it is necessary to “protect[] the health of an individual seeking care,” and “does not infringe on that individual’s autonomous decision-making.”
The rights of parents do not matter; Mom and Dad have no rights. And even the health of the girl does not matter because, under the plain language of the amendment, the state’s interest cannot “infringe” on the “individual’s autonomous decision-making.”
This legal analysis flows straight from the plain language of Prop 3, but case law from other states where a state constitutional right to abortion exists confirms this analysis. For example, in Alaska and Florida, courts have declared parental consent and parental notification statutes unconstitutional. And courts in California, Massachusetts, and New Jersey have struck parental consent statutes.
Prop 3’s grant of such “autonomous decision-making” is not limited to abortion, however. Rather, the plain language of the proposed constitutional amendment provides that the right to “reproductive freedom,” “entails the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to … sterilization … or infertility care.”
Under Michigan law currently, minors cannot be chemically or surgically sterilized (or rendered infertile) without their parents’ consent, and even then most physicians would refuse to sterilize a minor — except in the case of transgender-identifying patients.
The modern medical community has embraced the transgender ideology that teaches that human beings can be born “in the wrong body,” and that the appropriate treatment for such individuals consists of making their bodies appear to conform to their “internal sense” of gender.
The first step in such wrongly named “gender-affirming” medical response consists of prescribing puberty blockers to children. Puberty blockers, at a minimum, render children temporarily infertile by preventing them from maturing sexually, and a longer-term use renders them sterile. The surgical procedures used under the guise of “gender confirmation” — castration, hysterectomy, and the removal of ovaries — likewise sterilize the patients.
In fact, it is this very destruction of children’s future fertility and the medical rendering of them sterile that has led to several states banning the use of puberty blockers and surgical “gender confirming” procedures on minors. For instance, in Iowa, the Legislature made these legislative findings to explain its proposed ban on puberty blockers and surgical procedures that sterilize children:
Puberty blockers prevent gonadal maturation and thus render children taking these drugs infertile. Introducing cross-sex hormones to children with immature gonads as a direct result of pubertal blockade is expected to cause irreversible sterility. Sterilization is also permanent for those who undergo surgery to remove reproductive organs[.] … For these reasons, the decision to pursue a course of hormonal and surgical interventions to address a discordance between an individual’s sex and sense of gender identity should not be presented to or determined for children who are incapable of comprehending the negative implications and life-course difficulties resulting from these interventions.
But in Michigan, if passed, Prop 3 guarantees children the right to “make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to … sterilization,” and without “discrimination,” giving boys and girls the right to obtain puberty blockers and surgical sterilization without parental notice or consent.
If passed, Section 4 of the proposed constitutional amendment will further guarantee that the Michigan Legislature cannot interfere in transgender minors’ decisions to obtain puberty blockers or surgical “gender reassignment” through castration, removal of ovaries, or a hysterectomy. That section, as excerpted above, provides that the state may only regulate such procedures for the limited purpose of “protecting the health of an individual seeking care, consistent with accepted clinical standards of practice and evidence-based medicine,” and then, only so long as it “does not infringe on that individual’s autonomous decision-making.”
But the “accepted clinical standards of practice” by the supposed “mainstream” medical organizations is, at a minimum, to provide puberty blockers to children, with a steady movement toward the cash cow that is surgical interventions for minors.
Planned Parenthood Targets Kids One Way or Another
Again, these conclusions flow directly from the plain language of the proposed constitutional amendment. But here the public would be wise to note two significant facts: Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan helpedlead the ballot initiative to amend the Michigan constitution through the passage of Prop 3, deceptively described as the “Reproductive Freedom for All” amendment, and Planned Parenthood nowrepresents “the second largest provider of ‘gender-affirming hormone therapy.’” In fact, less than two weeks ago, Planned Parenthood launched an ad marketing puberty blockers to minors.
What Planned Parenthood and its extremist political partners don’t want publicized, however, is that a “Yes” vote for Prop 3 will not merely make abortion-on-demand, for any reason, at any time, and without informed or parental consent the law of Michigan: It will guarantee that children have an unfettered “right” to “transition” by obtaining puberty blockers and surgical sterilization, parents be damned.
With less than one month to go before Michiganders cast their final ballots, little time remains to give proof to the left’s lie that Prop 3 is about codifying Roe. It is not. It is about sacrificing the children of the state — both born and unborn.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
“The Detransition Diaries: Saving Our Sisters” is a cautionary tale that exposes not only how influential the spread of trans ideology is on social media and in doctors’ offices, schools, and therapy sessions, but also how that same ideology weaponizes vulnerable young women’s identity struggle against them.
The film from the Center for Bioethics and Culture documents the testimonies of three women — Helena, Cat, and Grace — who went through various forms of so-called “gender-affirming” prescriptions and procedures only to discover that the wrongly named “treatments” marketed to make them feel better about their bodies did more harm than good.
The featured women do not shy away from mentioning the irreversible procedures and damage this mutilative movement had on their bodies and souls, but they also don’t leave viewers feeling hopelessly doomed in a world that works overtime to normalize the destruction of healthy bodies.
Social Contagion
The documentary starts with the women explaining not just how they learned about transgender ideology but why it appealed to them.
“I don’t think anybody would have described me as gender nonconforming, or a tomboy or anything like that,” Helena admitted.
Though Helena said she never would have been considered “gender nonconforming” or even a tomboy, after hours of scrolling Tumblr, the social contagion of transgender ideology took root in her mind and began fueling her mental health problems.
“By the time I was about 13, I started to feel really depressed. I started self-harming. I started developing an eating disorder. That kind of isolation led me to go on Tumblr because I was spending a lot of time online generally,” Helena said. “I was introduced to a belief system that it had a lot to do with gender, but it was more like, ‘If you don’t fit in, that’s a sign that you’re trans. If you don’t like your body, that’s a sign that you’re trans. And if you transition, all these problems will be fixed.’”
Similar to Helena, Cat’s interest in “transitioning” was piqued when she was 13 after she visited a website boasting all things trans, prompting her to determine she had gender dysphoria.
Grace testified that she had “a lifelong like preoccupation and discomfort with my body” that turned out to be a “very normal sort of young adult female issues.” It’s not uncommon for children and young adults like Grace to feel uncomfortable in their growing bodies, but the vast majority outgrow their sex-related woes if left alone. For instance, in one Canadian study of boys with gender-identity disorder released last year, over time, nearly 88 percent of the subjects “desisted,” or abandoned their desire to identify as the opposite sex.
Grace, however, wasn’t left alone. After years of feeling “lost,” suicidal, and depressed, she jumped at the opportunity to alter her body. Grace also attributed her eventual decision to take testosterone and go through with a double mastectomy at 23, something she said she regrets, to “trans influencers” online.
“I was looking at trans influencers who had the body that I wanted and reading all of that stuff like the happy testimonials, also feeling the hysteria of the online trans community which was really freaking out because Donald Trump was president and they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s going to be illegal to transition.’ It felt like it was a little bit of time pressure,” Grace said.
How could vulnerable young women not entertain the idea of “transitioning” when it is marketed as the end-all to their mental distress? Especially since it is plastered all over social media, and “doctors” advertising castration and mutilation get endless positive press coverage.
There’s plenty of scientific evidence to suggest that kids, especially girls, are heavily influenced by this shameless online trans peddling and the ideology’s popularity among their friends. That’s why “transition” procedures on U.S female adolescents alone quadrupled between 2016 and 2017.
The online world of trans ideology is so pervasive that when Grace began to question whether amputating her breasts was a wise decision, she admitted that she believed she was experiencing “internalized transphobia.”
As Helena explained, it was easy to get swept up into the world of “social justice ideology” with just a few taps on a screen:
In this social justice ideology, there’s kind of a hierarchy of who is the most oppressed versus who is the most privileged. The further along you are on the oppressed scale, that means you know that your opinion is listened to more. I found myself in this place where I had found the only community of other girls who are more like me in terms of personality. I could relate to them, but it was so enmeshed in this kind of belief system that made me feel really guilty about being a cis, straight, white girl. You begin to feel a kind of pressure to constantly apologize for yourself. “OK, well, how do I not be this privileged person anymore?” And one thing that’s really easy to do is just change your pronouns.
Changing pronouns, of course, was just the beginning. Eventually, Helena, Cat, and Grace all began taking testosterone.
Beyond the Screen
When Helena didn’t get the affirmation she wanted from her parents over her gender confusion, she sought help from her school’s guidance counselor and psychologist, both of whom were more than willing to push the teen to “transition” behind her parents’ backs.
“Ironically, one of the things that really kind of supported my idea of being trans was that before I was trans, none of the adults in my life at school or anything really cared that much. They didn’t really see that I was struggling. But when I said I was trans, then they all wanted to like bend over backwards to help me be trans,” she said.
Helena eventually found an in with a medical office that, after she requested it, prescribed her the maximum dosage of testosterone on her first visit.
Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for public school officials to urge and aid kids who want to reject their sex. This is documented well on the Libs of TikTok Twitter account. But schools aren’t the only trans-crazed accomplices.
“After just a 30-minute conversation, the doctor prescribed testosterone over the phone,” Cat said. “It was pretty clear she did not look at my chart, because she would have seen some things that would at least be cause for concern, because like I had a history of suicide attempts, I had been institutionalized before, I had been to inpatient eating-disorder treatment. The outcome of that conversation was, ‘Here’s your drugs.’”
At first, the young women saw what they believed was an improvement in their sex-related confusion and other problems.
“It did kind of feel like, you know, one of the better antidepressants that I’d ever taken in my life,” Cat recalled.
Eventually, however, Helena, Cat, and Grace all learned that taking drugs designed to inhibit their bodies’ natural functions was not the cure they’d hoped it would be. It ultimately left them feeling physically ill, angry, and even more depressed than before.
But in the case of Helena, who was on testosterone for 17 months, her health professionals never considered her symptoms to be a result of the male hormone. Instead, she was prescribed more medications to combat what her hospital’s psych unit deemed borderline personality disorder and psychosis.
“My life just became like a total disaster,” Helena said. “I wasn’t functioning at all. I wasn’t holding down a job. I wasn’t going to school. I just felt like a monster. Once I stopped the testosterone, the symptoms all went away and I started feeling like myself again.”
It was then that Helena gave up on the idea of doing surgeries, saying, “I just became so dysfunctional that I wasn’t really able to have the mental wherewithal to go through the process of calling surgeons, dealing with insurance.”
Cat, a singer, had plans to dive deeper into the trans world with a double mastectomy and legal name change but paused those when she realized “how detrimental the changes to my voice had been and how devastated I was that I had made irreversible changes to myself.”
Grace, who went through with her double mastectomy, experienced regret and the unnerving feeling that no matter how much she altered her body, “this will never be over for me.”
“I just was realizing that there might not be a light at the end of the tunnel like I thought there was. I also don’t really feel like a man, I just feel like a woman who has had her breasts cut off,” Grace admitted.
It was then that she began thinking about all of the irreversible damage her body was subjected to because she was told it was necessary to combat her gender confusion.
“I’m concerned that the testosterone may have affected my fertility and potentially will cause me some like infertility issues, but I really don’t know,” Grace said. “…I feel, I think more than anything else, regret over that. I just hadn’t been thinking about having children at that time. I didn’t think I really wanted them, and that’s something that I began to really want in my mid-20s.”
All Hope Is Not Lost
There were plenty of people, organizations, and resources available to Helena, Cat, and Grace when they first considered “transitioning,” but support for their “detransition” was severely lacking — so they started doing their own research.
“I started looking into a lot of studies, and what I found is that there actually isn’t much quality evidence supporting medical transition as the best treatment,” Cat said. “I started to grow concerned with scientific and medical misinformation being tried by the trans community.”
These young women found a way around the smokescreen with help from truthtellers such as Posie Parker, who ignored the threat of censorship from Big Tech to state hard and fast truths about sex.
“I went on YouTube, and I just searched ‘trans women aren’t women’ because I had never ever listened to gender-critical people or TERFs because I was just told they were hateful people,” Cat explained.
Helena found solace in talking to others like her who had started taking hormones and considering surgeries before waking up to the deception.
“I realized that like, oh, OK, there’s a lot of people going through this. It’s not just a handful of people. It’s like hundreds and thousands of people going through this. And so once I started meeting these people, I just started having conversations,” she said.
Those conversations are why it’s so important for young women like Helena, Cat, and Grace to share their stories.
“I’m really worried about other people who are getting sucked into thinking that gender transition is the answer to problems that would be better solved elsewhere,” Grace said. “I am hopeful, but I think it’s going to be a really ugly time. … The fallout is going to be really severe from all of the detransitioners. … But our voices can no longer be denied.”
Helena, Cat, and Grace will be labeled transphobic and hateful for speaking up, but their transparency offers a message of warning and of hope for real care that parents, policymakers, and people all around the world need to hear: Mangling healthy bodies is a sickness, not a cure.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Paivi Rasanen must make God laugh. The 27-year member of Finland’s Parliament on trial for tweeting a Bible verse confounds so many pagan slogans.
She’s a mother of five children and grandmother of 10 who didn’t need abortion to simultaneously pull off two demanding careers: medicine and politics. An empathetic woman who eagerly shows pictures of grandbabies on her phone and expresses concern for strangers’ travel plans, Paivi (pie-EE-vee) also refuses to subjugate her reason to emotional manipulation.
She holds fast to Christian teachings about sex as reserved exclusively for lifelong marriage between one man and one woman, for which she’s been prosecuted and investigated now for three years and will be in court again this November. Her case could affect international law and is a foreboding example of where identity politics policies are quickly heading across the world.
“If we break the gender system and if we break the natural marriage system between one man and one woman, then we have dangerous consequences, especially to children,” Paivi told The Federalist in person this summer in Chicago.
This woman of science also firmly believes in supernatural revelation. In her pamphlet on Christian marriage that Finland’s top prosecutor is seeking to ban as “hate speech,” Paivi writes that “Jesus’s death and resurrection is the core of the entire Christian faith. On this the Bible stands or falls. If one does not believe it, there is nothing left of Christianity. And … if I believe this, it follows logically that I must believe everything else Christ teaches in the Bible through the Apostles and Prophets.”
Paivi speaking to a sold-out audience of Christians in Chicago, Illinois, this summer. (Joy Pullmann / The Federalist)
Persecution Spreads the Gospel
As it has often in history, persecution has created global opportunities for Paivi to spread Christian theology: about sex, its design for lasting human happiness, and Christianity’s warm welcome to those struggling with every kind of sin from the God “who hates nothing He has made.” The 2004 booklet “Male and Female He Created Them,” which prosecutors want to ban entirely and fine Paivi for writing, has gone from a few copies in a few conservative Lutheran churches to translated into half a dozen languages and read all over the world.
Rasanen’s 2004 booklet, printed from the online PDF and in its new second edition distributed worldwide.
Paivi and her husband Niilo (nee-loh) spoke this June in Budapest alongside megastar Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and his wife. Paivi said she’s seen especially strong support from Eastern European countries because many there still remember the Communists interrogating people about the Bible, as Finnish police did to Paivi three times for a total of 13 hours.
The Rasanens flew to Chicago right after Budapest so Paivi could speak at the sold-out Christian “Issues, Etc.” conference on June 25. In pearls, a flowered dress, and silvered golden hair, the petite 62-year-old asked the American crowd to pray that her case would “allow for more chances to preach the gospel in public.”
Rasanen’s case is on appeal in Finland and may end up in the European Court of Human Rights, developing precedents that could affect the world. If she loses in court, Paivi told a Christian outlet last year, “It will also affect religious freedom in other Western countries. LGBT groups have a very good network across national borders. They will try to achieve the same in other countries in Europe.”
In Q&A after her talk, Paivi said Finnish Prosecutor General Raija Toiviainen is expected to push the case as far as possible because Toiviainen has said identity politics is her top priority. Paivi’s legal help from Alliance Defending Freedom International has told The Federalist they are also prepared to appeal her case as far as possible should she lose.
Image courtesy Issues, Etc.
Persecution Amplifies Word of God’s Mercy for Sinners
Toiviainen claims agreeing with the Bible that sodomy is a sin is a criminal expression of hatred toward homosexuals. Paivi and her legal team have pointed out that if the court interprets the law this way, it will effectively outlaw Christianity and free speech in Finland.
Rather than rejecting homosexuals, as she’s been accused in court, Paivi glows with happiness when relating that gay people have disclosed her “Bible trial” has brought them to faith. In speeches and court testimony, Paivi has emphasized she not only bears no animosity toward homosexuals or transsexuals, she earnestly desires them to join her Christian family by receiving the eternal life that Jesus Christ offers freely to every person.
Paivi has been dragged into European courts and smeared in the press for years as a spewer of “hate speech.” Yet while battling severe jet lag that her husband said often gives her migraines, Paivi expressed not even a flicker of animosity toward her persecutors in Chicago.
Instead, when The Federalist asked if her three-year-and-counting prosecution might be orchestrated by political enemies, she seemed stumped. She conferred with her husband and finally suggested she was simply an easy target as a well-known figure in Finland.
“In all my career I have been known as a Christian and as a biblical Christian who doesn’t accept abortion and homosexual acts and so on,” Paivi told The Federalist. “And that’s why I think that perhaps it is the reason why the prosecutor has targeted just me.”
Family Unites to Fight for Other Families
Acknowledging the Biblical directive that only men serve as pastors has never tied Paivi to the kitchen — although perhaps she’d like to retire there given the suffering her political career has inflicted. Niilo prodded Paivi into running for office nearly three decades ago to try to stop Finland from forcing doctors like her to perform abortions, they told The Federalist.
Niilo Rasanen is a pastor and theology professor at a Lutheran Bible college. Niilo’s widowed mother lived with the couple while their children were young, and Paivi’s parents moved nearby and “helped a lot,” Paivi said. That, with Niilo’s flexibility while earning his doctorate, allowed Paivi to enter public service without sacrificing their children’s needs, they said.
During the five years when Niilo was writing his dissertation, “he was always at home when the children came home” from school, Paivi noted. Paivi and Niilo occasionally pulled out their phones to translate Finnish words into English or check they were using the right words, but Finns learn at least two foreign languages in school, Swedish and English.
Niilo and Paivi Rasanen in Chicago, Illinois, in June 2022. (Joy Pullmann / The Federalist)
In response to a question from the Chicago audience, Paivi revealed threats against her family. When she campaigned against child pornography, she said, a convicted pedophile entered their front yard and threatened their children: “It was quite a difficult time because we had to keep safe our children and they were a little bit afraid many years after that.” The most violent of the recent threats include a rape threat against her son, she said.
These external threats may have helped strengthen family bonds. Paivi and Niilo’s faces light up when they talk about their now-grown children, whom the Rasanens say are a great joy and regularly text their parents Bible verses and prayers.
“The task is communal, we do it together,” Niilo said of their marriage and family. “It has been so busy and hard time in this politic area — very, very busy, very long days. If you are not doing it together, it will not work.”
“I think what has been a great power in our life is that we have felt that these callings and tasks that we have, that they are common,” Paivi added.
From Church Only at Christmas to Global Witness
Born in 1959, Paivi grew up in a remote area near Finland’s border with Sweden, in the village of Konnunsuo. Her father was the agricultural director for a prison there. He oversaw the prisoners raising vegetables and animals to feed and support themselves. Paivi remembers as a girl watching piglets being born.
Her parents went to church only at Christmas, she said, but she learned the Bible from Sunday School and at prison church services. Her family also hosted missionaries to the prison, and they explained Christianity to Paivi and her two younger siblings.
A skilled student, especially in mathematics, young Paivi read all the books in her tiny village library that was open only two hours per week, she said. An adult biography of Nobel Prize-winning Polish scientist Marie Curie particularly inspired Paivi: “I admired her. I thought that I would like to be like her, to do something great.”
At the University of Helsinki, she studied both mathematics and medicine for a half year, but it was too much. So Paivi decided to focus on medicine because “I wanted to work with people.”
Organizing up to 70 Christian students for five years of weekly door-to-door evangelism in university deepened her faith, Paivi told The Federalist: “It was a very important time for me because there were students from different faculties and I had to defend my views, and I had to know [the] Bible because they asked difficult questions.”
She met Niilo doing summer missionary work among immigrants in London, and they married in February 1985, a year after Paivi started working as a doctor. They welcomed their children in 1988, 1990, 1992, 1994, and 1996.
Because Paivi kept organizing debates and speakers about abortion among fellow medical students and doctors, the Christian Democrat political party asked her to run for office. The Christian Democrats are a small party that focuses on faith and family. From 2011 to 2015, Paivi served as Finland’s Minister of the Interior as part of a coalition government.
She Fights Like a Woman
Paivi has fought steadfastly not by disposition, but by compunction. She and Niilo chuckled quietly when noting that in university, she flatly refused all public speaking offers and leadership positions.
In person, the two Finns are true to type and their “Minnesota nice” American cousins: polite, soft-spoken, and deferential. In Chicago, Paivi and Niilo attempted for some 15 minutes to get the Uber app to work on their Finnish cell phones before they could be prevailed upon by this journalist to accept a ride.
She would have walked the mile to the conference, Paivi assured, as they had the day before, but that morning’s rain would bedraggle her hair and dress right before her speech. After a bit of emotional discomfort at allegedly imposing, followed by a quick, rain-unaffected arrival, Paivi laughed softly, expressed thanks, and commented that this would be a good anecdote for The Federalist profile.
Paivi Rasanen during audience Q&A in Chicago. Because English is a second language for Paivi, she was given the written questions in advance.
Although she’s a public figure who regularly appears on TV, including a variety show that dressed her in a bear costume to sing to her grandchildren (she showed photographic evidence), Paivi habitually asks for others’ thoughts rather than discussing her own. It’s yet another contradiction to women’s mag-celebrated attributes: expressing her femininity not only doesn’t abrade Paivi’s character, it complements it.
Paivi doesn’t assert herself as a “girl boss” who assumes masculine prosthetics, despite years of public leadership that could have taught her to do so. Her apparent emotional security in being the woman God made her bestows its own authority and charm.
Only Men and Women Fit Perfectly Together
That acceptance of one’s sex as a gift from God is also a foundation of the theological booklet that helped land Paivi in court indefinitely. Cultural Marxism foments a war between the sexes, but the Bible teaches that love means total self-giving: Husbands sacrifice everything to love their wives, and wives submit to their husbands as they do to God. The true war is not between the sexes, but against them, and in war clear chains of command are necessary to protect everyone.
The 1960s feminist war fomented between the sexes has now expanded into a war on sex itself. Now even recognizing the differences between men and women and the exclusive fertility of natural marriage is heading toward being criminalized across the West, and with it the Christianity that protects and celebrates these natural realities.
When she wrote the booklet, Paivi was already well-known as a Christian member of Parliament representing Hame, a rural Finnish province about an hour north of Helsinki. Pastor Juhana Pohjola, elected bishop of Finland’s non-state Lutheran church in 2021, had asked Rasanen to respond to proposals for government licensing of homosexual relationships. Here was a government endorsement of severing natural biological bonds between parents and children that raised both political and theological concerns.
Rasanen’s resulting 24-page booklet is a succinct summary of Christian sexual ethics. “People who submit themselves to God’s guidance in the Bible are repeatedly amazed at how the very Bible teachings hardest to understand contain God’s deep wisdoms,” Rasanen writes in the English translation.
“No choice of policies is ethically neutral,” she notes. “…In actuality, the acceptance of homosexual partnerships meant a more profound change in values than was willingly acknowledged at the time.” For example, she notes, in Finland, those proposing a homosexual partnerships act promised it would affect adults only. Yet immediately after the act passed, the proponents moved to make taxpayers pay for lesbians to be artificially inseminated and for homosexual couples to adopt children who could never know either a father or mother.
The act’s proponents also promised that Finland’s state church could maintain Christianity’s historic teachings if state recognition of homosexual couples passed. Paivi’s trial today, under a law passed seven years after the booklet was published, directly refutes that claim. It also highlights how impossible it is to reconcile the hard-won natural law framework that protects everyone equally with the identity politics that provides special rights to only government-favored groups.
Seeking an Internet Interdiction
Writing the booklet is one of three charges Toiviainen has filed against Paivi. It forms the sole count against Pohjola, the pastor who published the booklet. The two other counts against Paivi relate to her tweet of a Bible verse at the nominally Lutheran state church for sponsoring a homosexual pride parade and comments in a public radio debate she participated in years ago.
How can the #church ’s doctrinal foundation, the #bible, be compatible with the lifting up of shame and sin as a subject of #pride ?” #lgbt#helsinkipride2019 Finnish Christian MP under hate crime investigation for quoting scripture – Premier
How can the #church ’s doctrinal foundation, the #bible, be compatible with the lifting up of shame and sin as a subject of #pride ?" #lgbt#helsinkipride2019 Finnish Christian MP under hate crime investigation for quoting scripture – Premier https://t.co/0GEJ5tZEb6
In 2019, several Finns lodged complaints against Paivi’s tweet. Police investigated, interrogating Paivi about her beliefs three times. Although the police ultimately recommended against prosecuting Paivi, prosecutors sifted through her three-decade public record. They dug up the three alleged hate crimes and charged her.
The charges against Paivi fall under the legal category of “war crimes and crimes against humanity.” The prosecutors have asked for Paivi’s writings and audio clips to be completely banned from the internet and for her, Pohjola, and his church to be fined up to a third of their annual incomes, but courts could put Paivi in prison for up to six years if she’s found guilty. Pohjola could be imprisoned for up to two years.
During Paivi and Pohjola’s trial in early 2022, thousands of Finnish supporters gathered in Helsinki outside the court. Free speech supporters in other countries rallied at Finnish embassies. The American Family Research Council sent Pastor Andrew Brunson, whom Turkey detained for two years for preaching Christianity, to give Paivi a pledge of prayers from Christians around the world. U.S. members of Congress, international human rights groups, and coalitions of religious believers have also petitioned the Finnish government to stop prosecuting Rasanen and Pohjola’s human rights to free speech and religious exercise.
“It is important that we have the freedom of speech and freedom of religion,” Paivi told The Federalist in Chicago. “Freedom of speech because it is important for everyone. It is important for every minority and majority. For Christians, it is crucial because we have the commandments of Jesus to tell the good gospel to all people…”
“Also I think that it is important to respect in society also everyone’s right to speak and argue and oppose you,” she continued. “So this is [a] fundamental issue.”
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
President Joe Biden will direct the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to expand access to “gender-affirming” care at a Pride month event Wednesday, the White House said. Biden will issue an executive order telling HHS to strengthen efforts to ban conversion therapy and increase access to sex change treatment for transgender Americans, including for children. The order will also target legislation passed in some Republican-led states to limit the promotion of LGBT material to children, such as Florida’s parental rights law.
Breaking: President Biden has signed an executive order blocking federal funding for conversion therapy. https://t.co/iXbzR6vhO0
The executive order explicitly endorses “gender-affirming” care, a euphemism for treatments, oftentimes irreversible, that facilitate a sex change, such as hormone therapy or sex-change surgeries. The Biden administration has staunchly supported providing those treatments to children.
“The President’s Order charges HHS to work with states to promote expanded access to gender-affirming care,” the White House said in a fact sheet. “The Department of Justice has intervened and filed statements of interest in lawsuits across the country challenging state laws that seek to ban transgender children from accessing gender-affirming health care and participating in school activities as unconstitutional.”
Biden will sign the order surrounded by LGBT childrenfrom Texas and Florida, two states which
Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, the first openly-transgender American to serve in a Senate-confirmed position, reportedly endorsed the order in a statement: “Today’s executive order continues the Biden Administration’s work against prejudice and makes it easier for people living in this country to live their lives openly and freely without fear of harassment, scorn or attack.”
Lia Thomas and gender-bending allies say their delusional and norm-shattering behavior is fine because they’re happy, but that’s textbook narcissism, and we’ve enabled it far too long.
Transgender-identifying swimmer Lia Thomas — a man who claims to be a woman and recently dominated his NCAA female competitors — finally broke his silence with an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” and here’s what he wants you to know: “I’m happy.”
Thomas was thrust into the limelight after the lackluster male swimmer took wrong-sex hormones for a year and subsequently the women’s Division I swimming title, causing quite a stir. When ABC interviewer Juju Chang asked about his competitive advantage — the question Thomas’s teammates, opponents, and critics can’t get past — Thomas shrugged it off.
“There’s a lot of factors that go into a race and how well you do, and the biggest change for me is that I’m happy,” Thomas said in an undeniably male pitch. This “happy” theme permeated the whole interview, interspersed with an air of entitlement from the swimmer.
“I also don’t need anybody’s permission to be myself and to do the sport that I love,” Thomas declared, adding later, “Trans people don’t transition for athletics. We transition to be happy and authentic and our true selves.”
The kicker for Thomas, which is obvious to the watching world, is that actually, yes, you do need permission to be yourself and play the sport you love when that self defies the laws of biology and that sport is a collegiate program designed for the very real, immutable category of “women.” Any other student-athlete knows that if her “authentic self” is obese or jacked up on steroids, for instance, she will not get permission to play a collegiate sport, her sincere love for it notwithstanding. Where does the gender-bending left get the idea that they’re entitled to inclusion without permission?
The sorry state of the NCAA and the country’s cultural mores at large are actually in many ways a result of the “Lia Thomas mindset,” more commonly known as narcissism. When science and empirical data have said, like Chang, that males have a competitive advantage over females, the transgender-allied left, like Thomas, have dismissed it with a “They’re happy!” and a “Let them be their authentic selves!”
The rejoinder is obvious and unavoidable: What about the very real women whom Thomas dominated by virtue of him being a man? What about their happiness and their “authentic selves” as the best female swimmers? What about his troubled peers who have been flashed by Thomas’s penis in the women’s locker room and been forced to expose themselves in front of him? Although a happy Thomas insists, “Trans women are not a threat to women’s sports,” what are the runners-up supposed to do with the mountain of evidence to the contrary?
The rules of the game have been set not by logic nor reason nor basic and once-widely accepted facts, but by the narcissism of the minority. Perhaps — if their entitlement and lack of empathy rise to the level of diagnosable narcissism — the correlation of that narcissism with the trans-allied left should be no surprise. After all, research shows a leftist ideology, mental health issues, and LGBT identity go hand in hand in what’s known as the mental health-sexuality-liberalism nexus. If Thomas actually has gender dysphoria, perhaps that mental health issue corresponds with other mental health problems, narcissistic personality disorder being no exception.
The predictability of the narcissism, however, is no excuse for it. Nor is empathy for those with mental health problems a license to indulge them, especially when it comes at the expense of others. Thomas and the swimmer’s gender-bending allies have declared that their delusional and norm-shattering behavior is fine because they’re happy, but that’s textbook narcissism, and we’ve enabled it far too long.
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
Forcing children to sleep and undress next to kids of the opposite sex effectively puts up a ‘Christian kids need not apply’ sign on public recreation activities.
This spring I got an email from 4-H, a club I participated in as a child, effectively communicating that my Christian family need not apply to summer camps and other activities sponsored by the quasi-public organization. (County governments often sponsor 4-H activities.) This email was signed by a 4-H staffer who put pronouns in his signature and told me, “Youth are assigned cabins based on gender indicated on the 4-H camp application and registration,”suggesting children were roomed by gender identity rather than sex.
Naturally, I was concerned that my tween daughter and son might be roomed overnight with an emotionally disturbed camper or counselor if I enrolled them in this camp. Based on numerous reported stories, I know that if this did happen, the camp likely would not even tell me, so I’d only hear about it after the fact from my kids. When I emailed again to confirm I was understanding this correctly, the staffer refused to answer definitively whether campers could be placed in private facilities such as bedrooms and bathrooms with transgender individuals. That’s an unacceptable risk to children’s well-being, as well as a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Given how socially contagious LGBT identification is, it’s not just about transgender issue but also exposing children to sexual information and pressures far earlier than they are ready. Hand in hand with grouping children by gender identity is forcing conversations about what that means, which pushes children earlier and earlier to declare and investigate sexual behaviors. This is destabilizing to their identity, not “affirming” it.
Given 4-H national’s commitment to the toxic “diversity, equity, inclusion” ideology, the fact that my Christian kids now cannot equally access lots of their programming due to 4-H’s choice to sexualize their activities was no surprise. But I still wanted to see in writing that my red county in my red state was indeed giving tax breaks and other government privileges to an organization that might room children overnight with troubled people of the opposite sex against their parents’ will. The answer is yes. (Thanks, Republicans!)
Everywhere We Go, Someone Wants to Talk Dirty to My Kids on the Public Dime
It’s not just places kids get naked. It’s everywhere. I cannot take my children to the public library anymore, either, because the shelves are so full of pornographic and hostile books that it’s not a safe place for them. There, too, self-righteous LGBT activism has resulted in effectively banning my children from yet another public place and weaponizing my own tax dollars against my children’s safety. The shelves and displays in our library are full of books telling my children lies such as that “men can become women” and “some boys have girl brains” and “gender is a social construct.” I’m happy to have these conversations with my children when they are ready, but I know my six-year-old, and he is not ready. My eight-year-old is not ready, and neither are my 10- and 11-year-old, frankly. It’s grotesque and evil to put books at their eye level that deliberately aim to confuse them about something so deep and important. To do this is to usurp not only my parental wisdom and authority over my own children but to usurp my children’s right to an innocent, emotionally secure childhood.
It Won’t Happen, And When It Does, You Bigots Will Deserve It
These all prove that rapidly rewriting American laws to ignore sexual differences has effectively banned Christian families from equal participation in public facilities and activities. It’s not just Christian families, it’s any family that thinks it imprudent to lodge their sometimes-undressed daughters with an emotionally traumatized male at summer camp or to obtain swimming lessons at a public pool. This all descends from the massive bait and switch inherent to the LGBT policy agenda. We were told it was only about extending government sanction to what consenting adults do behind closed doors. We were told it was about allowing people to visit loved ones in hospice and inherit without legal difficulties. It wasn’t going to affect our families, remember?
Anyone who raised concerns about how calling sexual activities that cannot create a family “marriage” would affect children, faith, and families was smeared as a know-nothing bigot. Anyone who wanted to logically think through how legally equating men to women in the social keystone of marriage would have a domino effect on many other laws and social arrangements was also smeared as a hateful bigot, all the way up to highly intelligent and reasoned Supreme Court dissents. It’s the same toxic play we’ve seen work ever since: Anyone with a contrary opinion or even unanswered questions is not engaged, but simply smeared.
Men and Women Are Different, And That Matters
The fact is that equating homosexual relationships to marriage very often requires explaining adult sexual behaviors to tiny children. Erasing the differences between the sexes in marriage also leads irrevocably to erasing the differences between the sexes everywhere else, from bathrooms to pools to summer camps. Breaking down all sexual differences also results in discrimination against religious expressions that acknowledge men and women are different, and these differences are divinely ordered.
Thus upending the natural sexual order has resulted, not in the falsely promised “equality,” but in simply flipping which social system will rule. For what we were prevented from discussing or even seeing was the fact that these two regimes — treating the sexes as different and complementary versus seeing them as neutered and interchangeable — are mutually exclusive.
You cannot have both transgender swimmers and single-sex sports competition. You cannot have both the sexual profligacy pushed by the dominant LGBT activist class and protect children from sexualized childhoods and predatory social situations. You must have one or the other.
In the absence of clarity about this reality combined with effective use of power on reality’s behalf, abrasive, antisocial activists have fully taken over every public space. Any further sorties are merely tinkering around the edges of their all-encompassing kingdom.
Children Are No Longer a Protected Class, They’re Targets for Groomers
So instead of achieving equality, what we have really achieved is the subversion of children’s developmental needs to adult desires. Instead of equality, we have replaced legal preferences for the only sexual arrangement that produces the most stable future citizens — lifelong married biological parents — with legal preferences for sexual arrangements that harm children and send religious folk to the back of the public bus.
Therefore, all who believe in protecting children from marinating in sexual imagery and ideas everywhere they go are the new underclass in our political regime, and in many cases no Republican officials will even recognize our legitimate concerns, let alone fight for our daughters. That’s certainly the case here in Indiana, where Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb won’t sign bare-minimum legislation protecting girls’ sports and nobody is even talking about making our libraries, camps, and pools safe for families (even though that’s one of the few value-added policies a state like Indiana can offer its citizens).
Many of our major public and private institutions are making the public square completely hostile to a happy childhood and faith. Their “solution” to alleged bigotry was institutionalizing actual bigotry. “Our kind” aren’t wanted in “their” territory, you see. Maybe we would be allowed to have separate pools and summer camps funded by our own money, as long as the ACLU doesn’t sue them out of existence like they do Christian hospitals and foster care agencies.
What we weren’t told was that letting homosexuals out of the closet would require stuffing all the children and Christians inside.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
New York Times columnist Charles Blow recently claimed to be “truly shocked” by a poll showing President Biden with a 33 percent approval rating. I was shocked, too — how could his approval rating be that high?
Blow, of course, is surprised at Biden’s unpopularity, and worried that the Democrats are stumbling into a bloodbath in the November midterms. Blow is paid to understand and explain politics and culture to his readers. That he is surprised reveals a lot about the bubble he is in. And his meandering analysis of Democrats’ problems illustrates how the ideology making Democrats unpopular is also preventing them from understanding why they are unpopular.
Blow initially blames Biden — for being too much of a “decent man … sober and straightforward” rather than a “showman.” This is a ludicrous assessment of a politician, who, until age caught up with his tongue, was one of D.C.’s preeminent bloviators. Nonetheless, Blow’s ordinary partisan delusion is less interesting than the ideological blind spots revealed when he turns to genuine sources of Biden’s unpopularity, such as “the fear of crime and the pinch of inflation” and that “Republicans are playing heavily into culture war issues.”
Class and Culture Wars Merge
Although Blow does not seem to realize it, these issues combine to reinforce voters’ disapproval of Biden. Democratic failures on bread and butter issues such as crime and inflation are related to the culture-war radicalism that has captured their party. Twitter, not the blue-collar union hall, is now the heart of the Democratic Party, which is controlled by the educated, urban professional-managerial class, epitomized by woke, union-busting CEOs. This faction has merged the class and culture wars — championing cultural radicalism, entrenching its own economic interests, and neglecting the common good.
The Democrats are the party of wealthy diversity consultants lecturing hourly workers about white privilege and cis-heteropatriarchy while inflation eats away at wages and investment firms buy up homes in the hope of making America a nation of permanent renters. The governing priorities of those running the Democratic Party are sending government money to their clients (from teachers unions to Planned Parenthood) and waging culture war.
Dems Are Fanatical Culture Warriors
And they are fanatical culture warriors. Consider Blow’s complaint that the GOP is “challenging the teaching of Black history and the history of white supremacy in schools, as well as restricting discussions of L.G.B.T. issues and campaigning against trans women and girls competing in sports with other women and girls.” He adds that “Republicans are using white parental fear, particularly the fears of white moms.”
This litany of whines highlights the bubble Blow and his audience at The New York Times are in. Ordinary Americans know the difference between teaching history and teaching poisonous ideology derived from critical race theory. Americans understand that it is unjust for males to compete in women’s sports, and that it is perverse to teach young children about sex and gender ideology. They are angry when educators encourage children to transition, and outraged when they hide it from parents.
Voters have also noticed that the cultural left never stops where it says it will. We were assured that the LGBT movement was about tolerance for consenting adult relationships; now it is about transgender toddlers, child drag queens, and men in girls’ locker rooms. We are also now told that being anti-racist somehow means judging people based on the color of their skin. Blow and other bubbled liberals may be okay with mastectomies for confusedteenage girls, but most Americans are not.
This cultural radicalism erodes Democrats’ ability to govern competently. Sometimes this is the result of neglecting the basic tasks of government in order to prioritize boutique cultural issues, other times it is a direct consequence of ideology, as exemplified in the crime wave resulting from woke prosecutors and defunding the police.
Cushioned from Consequences
In either case, wokeness is an ideology for those who are cushioned from its consequences. Indeed, wokeness is primarily a phenomenon of the college-educated, and especially the well-off; it is a niche, luxury political philosophy that thrives among the privileged and in the shelter of academia.
But though it is often a political liability, there are ways it serves the interests of its adherents. In particular, woke ideology legitimates the rule of the woke over the non-woke, and justifies economic exploitation and socio-political repression. Wokeness claims to reveal the systems of unjust oppression that permeate society; it focuses on race, sex, and gender, and relegates economic class to a second-tier concern. This allows many of the privileged and powerful to claim to be righteous allies of the oppressed without having to sacrifice economic or social power or position. Indeed, many can claim to be oppressed themselves. This is why wokeness tends to focus on BIPoC and LGBT representation in boardrooms and Ivy League campuses, rather than helping the working class.
The Wicked Working Class
Thus, it is to be expected that woke discourse often suggests that the working class (especially working-class whites) have it coming for their sins of racism, sexism, transphobia, and so on — the wicked deserve punishment, not sympathy. This is why pundits such as Blow are so quick to accuse dissenters of racism and bigotry. And it is why the woke left supports oligarchic power in pursuit of its aims, and eagerly uses economic, technological, and cultural power to suppress dissent.
This is why professors are having to submit woke loyalty oaths in the form of diversity statements, and why mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training has become the norm in the corporate world. This is why the left is eager to use social media censorship to suppress “misinformation” — which in many cases is truth that is inconvenient to the regime (e.g., the Hunter Biden laptop story).
It is also why the left cannot understand its own failures. They have isolated themselves in a bubble that has drifted so far from reality and the concerns of normal voters that even electoral disaster may not bring them back to Earth. Cocooned in privilege and ideology, they think Biden is doing just fine. But most Americans have had enough of a government that is more committed to transitioning children than to controlling crime and inflation.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
News broke Wednesday the Florida Senate had passed a bill to dismantle Walt Disney World’s half-century-old “independent special district” status, an arrangement whereby Disney has been allowed, since 1968, essentially to govern itself. Gov. Ron DeSantis says Disney’s self-governing status should be subject to review, to ensure that it is still “appropriately serving the public interest.”
Good. Disney is reaping its just reward for inserting itself into the political debate about Florida’s parental rights bill, which Disney lost in spectacular fashion. Republican governors and lawmakers across the country should be taking notes. This is how you deal with big corporations that try to throw around their weight and force woke policies on voters and families. You punish them, not just because they deserve it, but also, as Voltaire famously put it, pour encourager les autres.
Disney was no doubt betting that DeSantis and Florida Republicans would do what Republicans have almost always done in the face of woke corporate pressure: simply back down. That’s what South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem did last year when at the behest of the NCAA she vetoed a bill that would have protected girls’ sports from trans ideologues.
Same with Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who vetoed a measure banning genital mutilation and hormone treatments for minors (he was subsequently overridden by the state legislature). Same goes for then-Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who in 2015 infamously caved to corporate pressure and gutted his state’s religious freedom law.
Indeed, at any other time and place, with almost any other Republican governor and legislature, Disney would almost certainly not have faced any consequences for wading into the debate over the parental rights bill. After all, since when do Republicans actually wield power against the enemies of their voters and defend ordinary families from powerful woke corporations? Almost never.
By breaking that mold, DeSantis has set a clear example that other GOP governors and state lawmakers should follow. If a corporation like Disney wants to insert itself in a political battle that has nothing to do with its business — in this case, a fight over whether to prohibit classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity to children in kindergarten through the third grade — then it should be prepared to pay a heavy cost. Simply put, corporations that do what Disney did, publicly lobbying against the rights of parents to have a say in whether their young children are exposed to sexually explicit subject matter, have marked themselves out as enemies of a free people and should be treated as such. If Disney wants to make war on families in Florida, then the proper role of a democratically elected government is to go after Disney with every power at its disposal. Maybe that means they lose tax breaks that were once justified for purely economic reasons. Same for the special status Walt Disney World has enjoyed all these years, governing a 40-square-mile area in central Florida as it sees fit.
This isn’t about the economic arguments, not anymore. Whatever merit there was to the notion that Disney “serves the public interest” before the fight over parental rights has completely vanished. Now that Disney has taken a stand against families and parents, there can be no doubt: Disney does not serve the public interest in Florida, and Floridians owe it nothing.
Conservatives should understand this, but not all of them do. Over at National Review, Charles Cooke has decided to stand athwart history, as it were, and yell: “Independent special district status is complicated!” His complaint with DeSantis is that there was no need to punish Disney over its opposition to the parental rights bill because the bill passed. Disney lost, DeSantis and Republicans won. Moreover, he adds, until a month ago, “Walt Disney World’s legal status was not even a blip on the GOP’s radar. No Republicans were calling for it to be revisited, nor did they have any reason to.”
Did they not? What changed in the last month that might have prompted them to revisit the issue? Could it be that Disney came out publicly as a very real threat to Florida parents who don’t want their second-graders instructed about sexual orientation and gender identity? Could it be that the fight over the parental rights bill revealed Disney as something other than an entertainment brand and Walt Disney World as something other than a beloved family theme park? Could it be, in fact, that this entire affair has exposed Disney as a malign force in Florida’s civic life?
That Cooke can’t grasp this, and instead attacks DeSantis by tediously explicating the particulars of Florida’s independent special districts, shows the naiveté of conservatives in general and Republican politicians in particular on woke corporations pushing extremist agendas. Cooke argues there are lots of independent special districts in Florida, and that Walt Disney World “is unique not in its type but only in its particulars.” Orlando International Airport and the Daytona International Speedway, he notes, have a similar independent status. Why single out Disney?
To ask is to answer. Did the Orlando International Airport or the Daytona International Speedway wage a public campaign against the parental rights bill, and while doing so commit to pushing a “queer” agenda on children? No, they didn’t. Disney did. That makes all the difference.
If the airport and the speedway had behaved the way Disney did then yes, Florida lawmakers should have absolutely punished them. (Thanks to the impending revocation of Walt Disney World’s special status, it’s unlikely the airport or speedway or any other entity in Florida with a similar status will decide to follow in Disney’s footsteps, which is part of the point.)
Cooke further laments that singling out Disney is a mistake because, “Walt Disney World is deeply rooted in Florida’s soil, as a result of agreements the Florida legislature made with it in good faith. To poison that soil over a temporary spat would be absurd.”
But here again Cooke — and really, it’s not about Cooke, it’s about the accommodationist strain on the right that he and NR represent — misunderstands the nature of the fight. This is not a “temporary spat,” as Disney itself has made clear. It’s an ideological and cultural war that corporations like Disney will never stop waging.
For many years now, only one side in this war has been crying “no quarter” before every battle. The other side has pretended not to believe it and surrendered time and again, with predictable results. Finally, DeSantis and Florida Republicans have taken the enemy at their word and responded in kind. Republicans everywhere should go and do likewise.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis once again led the way in protecting parental rights in education last week when he signed into law a bill that prohibits age-inappropriate “classroom instruction” on “sexual orientation and gender identity” in kindergarten through third grade. The legislation also requires parental consent for any health care services offered at school, and school districts “may not prohibit or discourage parental notification of or involvement in critical decisions affecting a student’s mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being.”
Contrary to the fear-mongering, there is nothing “controversial” about this law. Yet it certainly does throw a spanner in the works for the radicals, neurotics, and degenerates in control of corporate America, the establishmentmedia, and Hollywood, who are evidently on board with schools serving as platforms for perverts, predators, and groomers. The obscene obsession with hypersexualizing children that exploded about two years ago needs to be understood in the context of the left’s wider agenda to promote moral relativism and sexual deviance, a campaign they have been gaslighting Americans into accepting as “progressive.” Decades ago, Marxists ditched class warfare and economics in favor of sexual politics and culture as a vehicle for executing revolution. Ever since, they have been shrewdly redefining marriage, family, sexuality, and gender, to the point where “tolerance” and “diversity” now means foisting porn, perversion, and predators on our families. Those who won’t stand for it are cunningly condemned as bigots.
Although the tactics have changed, the underlying objective is no different from the philosophy of their ideological forebears in Communist hellholes like the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: the fundamental transformation of society by co-opting and perverting the nuclear family, the most influential societal unit, and the bedrock of Judeo-Christian values.
A Nationwide Trend
Brainwashing school-aged children as young as five into becoming transgender-affirming disruptors of the nuclear family is not just a thing happening out west in crazy California, Oregon, Colorado, and Washington State. In Virginia, Michigan, and Texas, parents have expressed disgust and outrage over sexually explicit materials in school libraries. In Connecticut, eighth graders were given a foul school assignment asking them to share their sexual desires in the form of pizza toppings. A couple in Florida accused their 12-year-old daughter’s elementary school of covertly coaching her in gender confusion, which they believe led to her suicide attempt.
After last year’s gubernatorial election in Virginia, Democrat Terry McAuliffe learned the hard way that parents don’t want this trash for their kids. It turns out white suburban women don’t take kindly to school boards covering up the brutal rape of a 14-year-old girl by a “gender-fluid” student. Then there’s the Wisconsin teacher who apparently used a link in her email signature block to redirect students to an LGBT resource site and sex toy shop, and the Missouri teacher charged with sending dozens of nude photos and videos of himself to students, including a girl under 15.
Against this stunning backdrop, the U.S. Senate is poised to confirm the catastrophic Biden administration’s Supreme Court nominee, a radical judge with a 25-year career history of leniency toward individuals convicted of possessing or distributing child pornography. The left-wing media was quick to normalize and defend this disturbing trend, while endeavoring to humanize the depraved pedophiles in question.
A recent op-ed in The Hill spelled out the horrific reality behind the euphemistic phrase “child pornography.” It is the recording of violent acts of torture committed against terrified, defenseless pre-pubescent children and even infants by adult men, and distributed for the sadistic pleasure of the sickos who consume it, perpetuating a fiendish and expanding industry.
The Shift to Cultural Marxism
From the classroom floor to the Senate floor, none of this is a coincidence. Over the course of the 20th century, cultural Marxists realized that the class warfare narrative was never going to lure enough Americans to achieve a fundamental transformation of this nation. Despite the Soviet Union directing and subsidizing communist infiltration of U.S. government agencies, trade and teachers’ unions, and even churches and seminaries beginning in the 1930s, classical Marxism proved a flop. The left’s tactical response was two-fold:
Firstly, in reimagining Marxism in terms of sex and culture, they used maneuver warfare to simply attack the hill from a more advantageous position.
Secondly, pushing the falsehood that the Red Scare was just a conspiracy of the early 1950s deluded Americans into thinking the communist threat was a hoax when, in truth, it never went away.
Meanwhile, whether the battleground is economics or culture, the greatest threat to the twisted Marxist ideology has always been the Christian family. Christians know, as St. Paul writes, that every family in heaven and on earth receives its true name, not from the state, or a party, or society, or some fanciful “village,” but from God the Father. Hence the repression of religious families, the laicization of schools, and the prohibition of religious education that began with the Bolsheviks. In the 1950s, under the Khrushchev regime, Nikolai Ilyachev, the chief ideologist for a reinvigorated antireligious propaganda blitz, summed it up well when he stated that “in Soviet society, a family is a cell of Communist education or a refuge of backward conceptions.” The left’s contempt for those who remain faithful to God’s commandments and the truth revealed by Christ has never changed.
With Your Eyes Clear, Stand Up and Fight
Resisting the soul-destroying lies being force-fed to innocent children means supporting candidates who fear God more than some punk journalist, and who are bold enough, DeSantis style, to stand up to the Marxist schemers waging this cultural revolution. The politically suicidal Republicans and moderate Democratsflirting with the idea of supporting a historically unpopular Biden administration’s pedo-lenient Supreme Court pick might want to simultaneously start researching their post-political career options.
Most importantly, we must return to Christ. He is the only remedy for the sickness and squalor rotting this country from within. So read the Bible, pray, catechize your children, go to church, and yank your kids out of the rainbow-parading, gender expansive-promoting indoctrination camps posing as schools.
Every communist who has ever haunted the earth understands that to control society, you must control the family. They ironically possess a deeper, albeit disordered, appreciation of the mustard seed principle than do many Christians. The nuclear family, the smallest societal unit, has the potential for the most profound cultural influence. As Pope Leo XIII explained, family life is “the cornerstone of all society and government.” It’s time to reinvigorate our Judeo-Christian heritage and start using the Marxists’ tactics against them.
Carina Benton is a dual citizen of Australia and Italy and a permanent resident of the United States. A recent West Coast émigré, she is now helping to repopulate the country’s interior. She holds a master’s degree in education and has taught languages, literature, and writing for many years in Catholic and Christian, as well as secular institutions. She is a practicing Catholic and a mother of two young children.
In a recent legal settlement, Catholic Charities West Michigan successfully challenged Michigan’s decision to bar state funds to adoption agencies that do not serve same-sex couples. The settlement forced Michigan to reimburse the charity for its legal fees and other costs. Using an argument that has now become familiar to most Americans, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a lesbian mother of two and former gay rights activist, charged Catholic adoption agencies with discriminating against same-sex couples. In response, the Catholic adoption agencies used the same logic, accusing the Michigan state government of discriminating against Catholics and effectively denying them their religious freedom.
While Christians should celebrate this recent victory, it’s nonetheless sad this appeal had to be made. When gay marriage was legalized in Obergfell v. Hodges, Christians were assured that they could practice their faith and live out their values in peace, but this was almost immediately proven wrong. As the ink of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion was drying, LGBT groups immediately went after Christian bakers, florists, photographers, popular chicken sandwich chains, and other Christian organizations for their religious beliefs.
Defense Based on Reason not Faith
This war will continue so long as Christians keep using the religious freedom defense. Even though this argument has the best chance of winning in legal courts, it is unconvincing in the court of public opinion. As more Americans drift away from Christianity, they increasingly view this defense for denying service to same-sex couples not as a valid objection, but as a childish copout: “The Christian God doesn’t like gay people.”
Rather, it’s important to establish that most Christian churches are established on natural law (that is, moral laws based on objective truth) as much as the Bible. To be sure, faith and reason both matter enormously, but for an increasingly secular populace, actions and policies must be defended on the basis of reason much more than faith.
This has been the case with abortion, with the pro-life position steadily gaining popular support as it has adopted more reason-based arguments. The pro-life movement has grown because it has argued that unborn babies are people, and therefore abortion is murder. Although the Bible acknowledges this argument, the argument itself isn’t strictly based on the Bible.
Reasons Against Same-Sex Couples Adopting
Similarly, in issues involving marriage and children, Christians need to appeal to reason more than their faith. In the case of same-sex couples adopting, two issues need to be addressed. First, do all couples have a right to adopt a child? Second, do children have a right to a father and mother?
Concerning whether all couples have a right to adopt, the answer is that they do not. As any couple who has gone through the process of adoption understands all too well, many screenings and conditions have to be met. Someone from the adoption agency will inspect their home, rifle through their personal information, interview them and others, and then, after so many legal hurdles, possibly allow a child to live with them. Even then, the biological parent may change his or her mind and take back the child.
As painful and expensive as this process is, it is necessary because children are human beings with rights of their own, not objects a couple acquires out of boredom or simply some charitable impulse. Consequently, adoption agencies must discriminate among couples wanting to adopt, only selecting those who meet the criteria of good caretakers.
A Right to a Mother and Father?
This leads to the second issue of whether a child’s rights include having a mother and father, as opposed to two fathers or two mothers. The science on this is mixed, both because it’s a politically charged issue and because it’s a difficult thing to measure. One may say that a loving committed couple is enough, but one may contend that a loving committed heterosexual couple is necessary.
Katy Faust persuasively argues this latter view in her excellent book “Them Before Us.” She explains that men and women represent two distinct and essential supports to a child growing up; fatherhood and motherhood are not interchangeable or dispensable. Furthermore, she argues that a child does best with his or her biological parents in nearly all cases. For Faust, adoption is an alternative that should only be considered in cases of serious abuse or neglect.
Not only does Faust support her argument with a multitude of studies, but she has both a homosexual parent and an adopted child. Even though her situation would suggest that same-sex adoption should be treated the same as any other parental arrangement, her reasoning leads her to think otherwise.
Faust’s example is a good model for all Christians trying to serve their community in accordance with their values. Whatever charitable work they do — whether it is finding homes for orphans or allowing those orphans to be born in the first place — it is done for the person in need, first and foremost. This is not a political or religious issue, but a human one.
It is not a coincidence that this means they are doing God’s will in the process. Contrary to what opponents claim, Christian values are based on objective truth, not blind faith to various Bronze Age prejudices. As such, the goal is not about winning, but about making the world a better place.
Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an MA in humanities and an MEd in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for The Federalist, The American Conservative, and The Imaginative Conservative, as well as the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter.
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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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