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Posts tagged ‘REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH’

Victims Of Erasing Sex Distinctions Lead Growing Coalition Against Trans Mutilation


BY: JENNIFER LAHL | NOVEMBER 10, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/11/10/victims-of-erasing-sex-distinctions-lead-growing-coalition-against-trans-mutilation/

logo from Genspect conference with pink and blue pill

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JENNIFER LAHL

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Last week in Denver, several hundred people gathered in person for the Genspect conference, “The Bigger Picture,” while many more from all over the world joined online. Genspect’s founder, Stella O’Malley, has the intentional strategy of hosting their annual conference at the same time and in the same location as the annual World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) meeting. 

Last year they gathered in Killarney, Ireland, when WPATH met there, and next year they will host their gathering in Lisbon, Portugal, piggybacking off of the WPATH dates and location. It’s an interesting strategy offering WPATH attendees to come to Genspect’s sessions for free whereby they can engage with a different perspective, as well as putting WPATH on notice that there is a growing movement of those who want to offer a “healthy approach to sex and gender.”

I was unable to attend their gathering last year in Ireland, but when O’Malley invited me to speak at the Denver conference, I was happy to accept. The speaker’s list was a who’s who of those fighting gender ideology, some for many years.

On the Front Lines of the Gender Wars

Michael Shellenberger opened the conference with a bold claim that time is up for WPATH and that soon he would release his “WPATH files” on his Substack, where he will show the receipts he has on the pseudoscientific standards of care and practices of WPATH. Amid robust applauses, attendees were encouraged to post on X using #TimesUpWPATH. A lifelong member of the Democrat Party, he lamented how far the left has fallen from the principles that drew him to that party.

Highlights for me were hearing from the brilliant Leor Sapir on “Institutional Capture (How gender ideology has been embedded within America).” Sapir chronicled Obama’s 2010 anti-bullying initiative, which was at first sex-based directed, and then expanded in 2011 to include gender language in the antibullying initiative.

Following this was the 2015 letter from James Ferg Cadima in the Office of Civil Rights, stating, “The Department’s Title IX regulations permit schools to provide sex-segregated restrooms, locker rooms, shower facilities, housing, athletic teams, and single-sex classes under certain circumstances. When a school elects to separate or treat students differently on the basis of sex in those situations, a school generally must treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity.”

Wonder how America got to this place? Perhaps a well-intentioned initiative to combat bullying quickly led us down the path where boys can have access to spaces that were once protected for girls.

Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright and scientist Heather Heying did an excellent job, patiently and thoroughly stating the obvious, that there remain only two sexes no matter what others assert. They marveled at the fact that even once-trusted scientific journals are now claiming that “The idea of two sexes is overly simplistic.”

Two mothers, January Littlejohn and Erin Friday, gave impassioned speeches about their daughters who believed the lie that they were born in the wrong body. Littlejohn spoke about her daughter’s middle school working behind their back to encourage this idea and talked about her decision to bring forth a lawsuit, restoring rights and protections to parents over their own children.

Friday, an attorney by training who works with Our Duty, had many in tears using Hans Christian Anderson’s story of “The Snow Queen” to parallel her own efforts to save her daughter from the evils of gender ideology. She is a force in the state of California, fighting laws passed by Gov. Gavin Newsom while trying to raise funds to get initiatives on the ballot to put before voters which will protect children and parental rights. She appealed to the audience that if the transing of children can be stopped in California this will have an enormous positive effect across the whole country.

Stories of Destransitioning and Whistleblowers

Any conference like the one hosted by Genspect naturally needs to include the voices of those most harmed by “gender affirmation therapy,” those who transitioned and have now detransitioned once they realized their decision to transition didn’t fix any of their mental health issues, and as is often the case, made things worse. Chloe Cole and Prisha Mosley both spoke about their deeply personal experiences. Many other detransitioners attended the conference as well. It was wonderful to see how their tragic stories have brought them together in the spirit of camaraderie. 

And who doesn’t love a good whistleblower story like Jamie Reed? Reed blew up the internet back in February with her expose, “I thought I was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle.”

Since 2018, Reed served as a case manager at Washington University, in their Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, until she came to the realization that she could no longer condone the treatment children were receiving. Her remarks at Genspect were a rallying cry for the political left to wake up and stop harming children. As a lifelong leftist, she implored the audience not to give up on the left, but to help them return to principles.

The title of my own talk — “Transgender Assisted Reproduction: where is this going?” — was a convergence on my years of work in assisted reproductive technology and how this technology will most likely be needed by trans-identifying people, especially children who are fast-tracked to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries. 

When I first found out that children were being offered fertility preservation procedures, knowing

that “gender affirmation care” harms natural and normal fertility, I began speaking up and producing documentary films about the lack of medical ethics and evidence-based medicine supporting these practices. Pre-puberty, children are offered to cryopreserve their ovarian or testicular tissue because their gametes, (ova and sperm) are not yet mature. Post-puberty, the child will have mature ova and sperm, so they are offered to freeze and bank their gametes. 

The data is clear. Most assisted reproductive technology cycles fail. Data is coming out about the harms and risks to children being created by these technologies. The maxim, “First, Do No Harm” is being ignored in offering hope of future children, when in fact this is considered an experimental procedure with no data on this population. From the audience’s reactions and comments, it was clear that this is a whole new level of doubling down on harming children to advance an ideology that ignores biological reality, evidence-based medicine, and medical ethics.

Times up, WPATH.

Jennifer Lahl, MA, BSN, RN, is a filmmaker and founder of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. She is on X @JenniferLahl

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Family, Health, LGBTQ+ AND TRANSGENDER, Political

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California Bill Would Make Insurance Fund Unlimited Attempts to Create Motherless and Fatherless Children


BY: KATY FAUST | JUNE 14, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/14/california-bill-would-make-insurance-fund-unlimited-attempts-to-create-motherless-and-fatherless-children/

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Marriage, once the most child-friendly institution in the world, has now been redefined in the name of equality. It was argued same-sex couples just wanted to visit one another in the hospital, have access to the same inheritance laws, and get the same tax breaks as heterosexuals. We were told ad nauseam that marriage had nothing to do with children. 

Eight years post-Obergefell and it is clear we were lied to. As we have seen in every country that has redefined marriage, the redefinition of parenthood follows quickly on its heels. Court decisions mandating the state-sanctioned falsification that children have “two moms” at birth; deeming the term “mother” and “father” unconstitutional; Andrew Cuomo supporting commercial surrogacy in the name of “fairness and equality” for “LGBTQ+ New Yorkers” — in all of this, it is clear that children are the permanent victims of gay marriage.

Gay marriage and children’s right to their mother and father cannot coexist.

California’s Senate Bill 729 offers one of the clearest connections between adult “equality” and child victimization. Take it from the child-violating bill’s co-author Sen. Caroline Menjivar who notes that this legislation “is critical to achieving full-lived equality for LGBTQ+ people.” The bill has passed in the Senate and advanced to the Assembly. As of June 1, it’s been referred to the Committee on Health and is awaiting a hearing date. But how does this bill provide full-lived “equality” for LGBT couples?

First, SB 729 redefines infertility. For the purpose of insurance coverage, infertility is typically defined as 12 months of unprotected heterosexual sex without pregnancy or birth. But what about gay couples? Twelve months — or 12 years — of unprotected homosexual sex will never produce a baby. Thus, California’s more “equitable” definition of infertility will include “a person’s inability to reproduce either as an individual or with their partner without medical intervention.”

Never mind that every adult operating under this expanded infertility definition will be creating a child who is intentionally motherless or fatherless — a child who will experience the inevitable mother-hunger or father-hunger as they are deprived of their natural right to both. True “equality” seems to require that children lose a parent (or two). 

Next, because same-sex couples cannot create children organically, synthetic baby-making is required. SB 729 will force insurance companies to cover in-vitro fertilization (IVF) for the medically and relationally infertile. Never mind that children created in-vitro (in glass) experience higher rates of physical and developmental struggles. “Equality” demands that a child’s conception be directed by a technician rather than in the loving embrace of his or her own mother and father. 

Third, while two female bodies have double the eggs, and two male bodies have double the sperm, bigoted biology requires one sperm and one egg for every new life to begin. Therefore, SB 729 will require insurance companies to fund the participation of reproductive third parties — someone else’s, sperm, egg, womb, and/or embryo — to make sure single men, lesbians, or gay couples are not disadvantaged. Never mind that this will subject children to the identity struggles often experienced by children created via sperm or egg donation. Never mind that womb-rental infants suffer intentional severing of the maternal bond — largely regarded as a foundation for life-long trust and attachment. (And no, surrogacy is not just like adoption.) “Equality” must be achieved, even at the expense of denying children a relationship with a biological parent and/or their birth mother. 

Finally, biology puts no limit on a heterosexual couple’s pregnancy attempts, while single and same-sex couples are limited by the high cost of IVF. That’s why SB 729 will grant everyone unlimited embryo transfers. Once you’ve selected your child’s genetic parent from that sperm or egg catalog, created your dozens of embryos, discarded or donated the undesirables, sex-selected to your preference, and frozen the majority for later — or possibly for never — then the sky’s the limit! You can implant however many tiny humans you want in your womb, or that of a hired stranger.

Never mind that only 7 percent of lab-created babies will be born alive due to the high-risk nature of IVF pregnancies, eugenic screenings, and the abortion selective reduction to which they’re subjected. We already have 1 million babies on ice in this country, many of whom have been functionally abandoned — but at least the 93 percent of lab-created babies who die in California will do so at the hands of a truly diverse population.

California’s proposed bill is not unlike other recent attempts in Minnesota, Washington, and nationally to treat children as items to be cut and pasted into any and every adult relationship. But this is the inevitable result of equating two things that can never be equal: opposite-sex and same-sex relationships. There is only one kind of marital relationship capable of producing children and thus only one coupling that deserves to be incentivized and institutionalized.

In the marriage and family world, the pursuit of “Equality” based on adult emotions and preferences will always result in true inequality for children. And unfortunately for America’s children, our highest court insists that there is no distinction between these two types of parental pairings, even though one leads to wholeness for children, and the other to lifelong loss.

Katy Faust is President of Them Before Us, author of the book “Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children’s Rights Movement” and the forthcoming book “Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City.” You can follow her on Twitter @Advo_Katy.

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