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John Daniel Davidson Op-ed: To Beat the Dodgers’ Anti-Christian Hate, MLB Stars Must Refuse to Play Ball


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | JUNE 01, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/01/to-beat-the-dodgers-anti-christian-hate-mlb-stars-must-refuse-to-play-ball/

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The Los Angeles Dodgers’ appalling decision to honor an anti-Christian hate group called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence during their “Pride Night” on June 16 has been met mostly with a deafening silence from the vast majority of Major League Baseball players. Even Catholics, whose faith is particularly singled out for mockery by this LGBT hate group, have been largely mute.

As of this writing, only four players in the entire league have said anything about it, and one of those four has already caved to the rainbow mob. The only Catholic player to come forward has been Trevor Williams, a starting pitcher for the Washington Nationals. Williams denounced the Dodgers and called on his fellow Catholics “to reconsider their support of an organization that allows this type of mockery of its fans to occur.”

The only Dodgers player to come forward so far has been relief pitcher Blake Treinen, who also released a clear statement Tuesday criticizing the Dodgers organization for honoring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, rightly saying the group “promotes hate of Christians and people of faith.”

The statements from Williams and Treinen were infinitely better than the cowardly response of Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw, who contented himself with a nonresponse. Instead of addressing the issue head-on, he weakly announced the return of “Christian Faith and Family Day” at Dodger Stadium after a hiatus. “For us, we felt like the best thing to do in response was, instead of maybe making a statement condemning or anything like that, would be just to instead try to show what we do support, as opposed to maybe what we don’t,” Kershaw told the Los Angeles Times recently.

For Kershaw, it seems, the Dodgers should get a pass for awarding a group that openly mocks Christians as long as the Christians get an appreciation night of their own later in the season. What nonsense. It’s like having Christian appreciation night at the Temple of Artemis right before marching the Christians off to the Colosseum. Far from being “the best thing to do,” it would have been better had Kershaw said nothing.

His cowardice was overshadowed, though, by the Toronto Blue Jays’ Anthony Bass, who performed his very own Maoist struggle session over the weekend, giving a scripted apology for the crime of posting something mildly supportive of the Bud Light and Target boycotts.

“I recognize yesterday that I made a post that was hurtful to the Pride community, which includes friends of mine and close family members of mine, and I am truly sorry for that,” Bass said, promising to educate himself and make better decisions moving forward.

Not good enough, Blue Jays manager John Schneider told reporters. “We’re not going to pretend like this never happened,” said Schneider. “We’re not going to pretend like it’s the end and move on. There are definitely more steps that are going to follow.”

The double standard here isn’t hypocrisy; it’s meant to demonstrate hierarchy. The Dodgers can insult every Christian in the country, and only two guys will speak up. But a single post obliquely critical of transgenderism means Bass gets flogged in public by the Blue Jays. As my colleague David Harsanyi pointed out, no one was hurt by Bass’s tepid support for boycotts of multibillion-dollar corporations; the real point of all this is “to chill speech and transform relatively common positions about faith and irrefutable biological truths into blasphemous utterances, whether done in private or not.”

And it looks like the Dodgers, the Blue Jays, and the entire MLB are going to get away with it — unless the players themselves make a stand.

As welcome as the statements by Williams and Treinen were, they weren’t enough. Faced with what amounts to open hostility to the Christian faith, MLB players need to do more than issue statements. As Mollie Hemingway suggested the other day on Twitter, players who support religious tolerance should refuse to take the field on June 16 in protest. If the Dodgers want to insult Christians by honoring a group that blasphemes their faith, then players should simply decline to participate that day. It would send a clear message that the MLB pursues aggressive LGBT activism at its peril.

Players could take inspiration from the great Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax, who refused to play in the first game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. “From what I’ve been told, there are no dispensations for this particular day,” Koufax told reporters. The decision to prioritize his faith over baseball is one he had made years earlier, and in fact, Koufax missed a number of games throughout his career when they fell on major Jewish holidays. At one point, he told a reporter that a “man is entitled to his belief and I believe I should not work on Yom Kippur. It’s as simple as all that and I have never had any trouble on that account since I’ve been in baseball.” Saner times, those.

It might be, though, that the courage of Williams and Treinen is becoming contagious. On Wednesday, Robby Starbuck said a large group of MLB players “will refuse to wear pride or trans flags of any kind this year if asked to by their teams. This includes star players.” That would be great if it actually happens. Players should no more be asked to wear pride or trans flags than they should be asked to wear Christian crosses or any other religious symbol — which is exactly what pride and trans flag have become.

But it would be better if a large group of players, including star players, pushed back in a more forceful way and stood up for religious tolerance by sitting out on June 16. They would become instant heroes in a country where most people think it’s wrong to honor hate groups that mock other people’s religious faith. But more important than becoming heroes, they would simply be doing the right thing, which is its own reward.

I’ve argued recently that we’re not really fighting a “culture war” in the sense we have previously understood it, but a religious war in which everyone must choose a side. The controversy now engulfing the MLB is part of that religious war, and every player in the league is involved in it whether they want to be or not. They, too, must choose a side.

Choosing sides will mean different things for different people, but for those who choose the side of the Tao — of objective moral truth, of resistance to the fascism of the left — it’s going to mean some sacrifice. For example, MLB players who refuse to play might face financial penalties. They will certainly be denounced by the media as bigots. Their careers might suffer in the long term.

So be it. Everything is at stake in this fight, and the fate of the country at this point depends more on MLB players refusing to take the field, or suburban moms refusing to shop at Target, or dudes refusing to buy Bud Light, than on who we elect as our next president, or how the debt limit debate shakes out.

This isn’t a fight any of us can escape. Corporate America has decided to wage a religious war on everyone, to force trans ideology and LGBT propaganda on the whole of society, so now everyone must decide what they’re going to do about it. Baseball players have a clear decision before them, one that could galvanize support for them and give courage to the rest of us. Here’s hoping — and praying — they make the right choice.

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.

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The Most Passionate Science Deniers Are Pro-Trans ‘Experts’ Who Profit from Carving Up Kids


BY: NATHANAEL BLAKE | NOVEMBER 29, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/29/the-most-passionate-science-deniers-are-pro-trans-experts-who-profit-from-carving-up-kids/

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From medical associations to hospitals, countless people are in too deep to admit error, even as transgender ideology collapses. 

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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 previous work provides more assertion than evidence. The studies they cite cannot escape the usual weaknesses plaguing 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.

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War On Parents: Male Teacher Asked This Mom’s 11-Year-Old ‘Transgender’ Daughter to Sleep in Boys’ Cabin


BY: KELSEY BOLAR | AUGUST 10, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/10/war-on-parents-male-teacher-asked-this-moms-11-year-old-transgender-daughter-to-sleep-in-boys-cabin/

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At the beginning of the school year in 2019, Jennifer received an email from her daughter’s 5th-grade teacher. The teacher, a male, was using a different name for her then-10-year-old daughter. Jennifer thought it was a mistake. The teacher must have accidentally emailed the wrong parent. But then, Jennifer went to her daughter’s room and found a yellow Post-It note stuck to her dresser with that same name, along with the pronouns “they/them.”

“Do you have a new nickname?” Jennifer asked.

Her daughter responded yes.

Jennifer didn’t think much of it beyond harmless identity exploration. But a couple of months later, Jennifer received a more concerning call from a school counselor informing her that her daughter had used the words “suicide” and “cutting” with a friend. The counselor recommended her daughter start seeing a therapist who was contracted with the school. That therapist was free to use, accessible during school hours, and qualified to handle her daughter’s mental health problems, Jennifer was told. Worried about her daughter, Jennifer said yes. But because her daughter was only 10 at the time, Jennifer would have to go into the school and give written permission.

Jennifer lives in a suburb of Washington state, where children as young as 13 years old can access their own medical and mental health services without parental knowledge or consent. Parents in these cases are billed by insurance companies with no explanation of benefits, meaning they’re stuck with the tab but have no ability to know what services or treatments their child received.

When consenting for her daughter to see the school therapist, Jennifer made sure to tell the therapist that her daughter had been talking about her sexuality and gender identity. She shared that while she and her husband believed their daughter was too young to be exploring these ideas, they’d “love her no matter where she ends up.” The therapist made no mention of her own views on the subject or her affirmation-based treatment model where, if a child declares he or she is transgender or non-binary, the therapist would affirm the child’s stated identity.

So, for two and a half months, Jennifer’s daughter was meeting with a school therapist once a week who was treating her as a boy, using male pronouns and a made-up name. When Jennifer would ask how the sessions were going, the therapist acted as though nothing big had come up.

‘Coming Out’

Then in February 2020, right before COVID-19 hit, Jennifer received a phone call from the school therapist with a two-fold purpose: to request that she and her husband come to the school in three days for a meeting where the therapist would assist their daughter in officially coming out to them as a boy, and to obtain parental permission to allow her daughter to stay overnight in the boy’s cabin for an upcoming school trip.

Sensing the meeting wouldn’t go well — and worse, would set them up in an adversarial position with the daughter they loved — Jennifer and her husband called it off.

“We were never going to let her do that, I don’t care who she thinks she is,” Jennifer said. “There are so many reasons not to put a girl in a cabin with a bunch of boys and a male adult teacher. So many safeguarding fails.”

At that point, Jennifer and her husband decided to take more drastic measures. They were skeptical that their 11-year-old daughter was transgender and believed the school and the therapist were actually leading her to identify as a boy. So, they revoked their consent for their daughter to see the school therapist, took away her access to online devices, and soon, unenrolled her from public school altogether.

“I already knew I couldn’t trust the school with my daughter when she was in fifth grade,” Jennifer said. “And going onto the middle school, she would be turning 13. And then I wouldn’t even know. They wouldn’t have to tell me what was going on.”

Identifying as a Boy

Jennifer’s daughter first identified as transgender when she was 10 years old and enrolled in an online drawing program. Prior to that, Jennifer and her husband had restricted their daughter’s access to online devices. But since their daughter was an artist, they agreed to what they thought was a harmless online art program.

Yet, a year and a half later, Jennifer learned it was through that group of online art friends that her daughter was introduced to ideas of sexuality and gender.

“She talked about being asexual at 10 years old,” Jennifer said. “Which of course she’s asexual at 10 years old. But that’s an identity.” She then talked about being demi sexual, gay, non-binary, and finally landed on transgender.

The transgender identity was heightened when her daughter began conversing with a group of girls at school who, at ages 10 and 11 years old, also identified as some form of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. The friends appeared to compete over who could have the edgiest, most unique identity.

“She was trying to fit in. She was trying to have friends,” Jennifer said.

Once her daughter was out of school and no longer communicating online with peers who valued queer identities, her transgender identity lost its importance. Slowly, Jennifer said, her daughter started to let it go.

‘Wasn’t Making Her Happy’

“Her mood changed drastically,” Jennifer said. Identifying as transgender “wasn’t making her happy.”

Since giving up on being transgender, Jennifer has talked with her daughter about everything that happened over the year and a half she spent exploring identifying as a boy. After repeated unanswered requests, Jennifer also obtained notes from the school therapist, which confirmed her suspicion that the therapist was encouraging her daughter’s transition behind her back.

“I was so upset because [the school therapist] was using male pronouns for my daughter from the first moment, from the first notes,” Jennifer said. “He, him. And it seemed like all that she was doing with my daughter was helping her advocate for herself whenever somebody ‘misgendered’ her.”

This included Jennifer’s older two sons, who didn’t even know their sister was identifying as a boy. It also included a boy at the school who Jennifer said got in trouble for “misgendering” her daughter.

“At the school, they’re not just affirming and encouraging my daughter in this delusion,” Jennifer said. “It’s deluding other kids too. They are teaching kids to deny their own sense perceptions.”

More recently, Jennifer felt enough time had passed that she could ask about the idea of staying in the boy’s overnight cabin for three nights without feeling embarrassed or self-conscious.

Jennifer’s daughter told her, “That wasn’t my idea. That was the school’s idea. My teacher asked me.”

“Kids want to please adults,” Jennifer said. “My daughter felt she had to answer yes.”

After that incident, Jennifer said her daughter, who is now 13, decided she didn’t want to go on the 5th-grade overnight trip. Though it wasn’t then, it’s now clear to her why.

‘Going to War Together’

Jennifer feels betrayed by educators, therapists, doctors, and liberal politicians whom she spent a lifetime supporting. That list includes President Joe Biden, who told parents in March that affirming their child’s transgender identity is “one of the most powerful things you can do to keep them safe and healthy.”

“A lot of people think that using the pronouns and affirming a child who says they’re the opposite sex, that that is about kindness,” she said, explaining:

Everybody’s very confused about this. Because the T has purposefully been attached to LGB, which is a completely separate issue. We know the LGB community was mistreated, and so people don’t want to do that again with trans-identified people, so everybody’s being super careful, and they want to be kind. But it’s a different situation. With LGB people, they’re saying, ‘Just let us be who we are.’ And there’s no medical consequences.

But with transgender-identified people or people who identify as the opposite sex, it’s very much a medical situation and it’s about the harm medicalization causes. Children are cutting off their healthy breasts and testicles and doing things to their bodies that they can’t undo. So that is completely different. Of course parents are concerned when their children identify this way because it carries a heavy medical burden which they will have for the rest of their life. They become sewn to the medical industrial complex. They will have to take drugs. They will probably have to have other surgeries. We don’t even know all the health consequences at this point. It’s an experiment happening right now on children.

In the past, most parents followed the watchful waiting approach. Children were not medically or socially transitioned, and the vast majority became comfortable with their sex when they went through puberty. Today, parents are being told that affirmation is the only acceptable response to a transgender declaration. Jennifer’s story is just one example of how there is another possible outcome if a child is not affirmed.

“They might desist,” she said. “Isn’t that preferable to a lifetime of harmful medical procedures?”

For more from IWF’s Identity Crisis series, click here.

Editor’s note: Last names have not been used to protect a minor’s privacy.

Kelsey Bolar is a contributor to The Federalist and a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Forum. She is also the Thursday editor of BRIGHT, a weekly newsletter for women, and the 2017 Tony Blankley Chair at The Steamboat Institute. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, daughter, and Australian Shepherd, Utah.

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