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Posts tagged ‘TRANS KIDS’

Data: U.S. Hospitals Transitioned Nearly 6,000 Kids From 2019-2023


By: Ashley Bateman | October 11, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/11/data-u-s-hospitals-transitioned-nearly-6000-kids-from-2019-2023/

Chloe Cole

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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.

How A Ballot Initiative to Save Kids from Trans Madness in California Could Save Them Elsewhere Too


BY: NATHANAEL BLAKE | JANUARY 15, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/01/15/how-a-ballot-initiative-to-save-kids-from-trans-madness-in-california-could-save-them-elsewhere-too/

kids sitting a room while a teacher reads them a book

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The Democrats who run California love “transitioning” kids, including chemically and surgically sterilizing them. But a courageous group of residents is betting California voters are less radical than their politicians and that the tide can turn against gender ideology even on the West Coast.

A proposed ballot initiative by Protect Kids California would put the Golden State’s radical “trans kids” agenda — which has previously been checked only by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s presidential ambition — before the people. 

The initiative would enact three policies:

  • First, it would end the practice of government schools socially transitioning children without telling parents. Schools would be required to inform parents about mental health issues, including gender-identity issues, and to have parental permission before pretending a boy is a girl, or vice versa. 
  • Second, the law would require that sex-specific spaces and sports be based on sex, rather than self-declared “gender identity.” Boys would no longer be allowed to participate in girls’ sports or share the girls’ locker room, showers, and other private spaces. 
  • Finally, the law would prohibit medically transitioning children with chemicals, hormones, and surgeries in an impossible quest to change a child’s sex. Chemically castrating boys and amputating the healthy breasts of troubled adolescent girls would be illegal.

These worthy goals might seem impossible. Even as many other states have enacted such policies, California’s leaders have doubled down on radical gender ideology and transitioning children. But the organizers of the initiative point to polling to argue that California’s voters are on their side on this issue, even if Californians tend to vote for Democrats who are in the grip of gender ideology and the transgender lobby. Erin Friday, one of the leaders of the effort, is a lifelong Democrat, and she is convinced there are many more like her who find the transgender industry’s targeting of children abhorrent.

She may be right. The campaign’s website highlights polling showing that the public is with them, and in an email to me, Friday shared additional polling commissioned by the feminist Women’s Liberation Front showing overwhelming support for the child-protection policies this ballot initiative would enact. 

This ballot initiative would protect children from outside California as well. As Friday has explained, California is a sanctuary state for sexual experiments on children. In the name of gender ideology, California now refuses to return runaways to their out-of-state parents, pays for minors to be chemically and surgically castrated, and shields doctors who flee to California after breaking the laws of other states. Winning in California is a victory for everyone.

Thus, California’s Democrat establishment will do everything it can to stop this. The state attorney general has already written a biased and inaccurate summary of the measure (the title line is literally “RESTRICTS RIGHTS OF TRANSGENDER YOUTH”) that by law is included on the petition pages. And additional resistance is sure to follow — for example, petition signatures will be rigorously scrutinized by people who otherwise denounce election-integrity measures as racist. 

The debate over the measure will be ugly. Its opponents will undoubtedly resort to suicide threats early and often, declaring that this law will push kids to kill themselves. It won’t, but telling kids to take themselves hostage is the transgender movement’s main weapon. After all, the only harm that can come from not transitioning is self-harm. Furthermore, there is no good evidence that castrating or mutilating kids reduces suicides. And in other contexts, we recognize that constantly threatening suicide is manipulative and abusive.

The ugliness won’t end just because the election does. If this measure gets on the ballot and passes, there will be lawsuits. There will be protests that turn into riots. There will be promises of noncompliance from government officials and employees. But it will all be worth it. 

If gender ideology goes down in California, it will fall everywhere. Even the most committed Democrats (and the most craven Republicans — looking at you, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine) will have to acknowledge that it is a political liability. And the collapse could be swift. Many people went along with radical gender ideology not out of conviction, but because they were afraid of being caught on the wrong side of the latest front in the cultural revolution. They will happily abandon it if their fear is taken away, and defeating transgender radicalism in California will do that.

There is work to do before that happy future is realized. The initiative has yet to qualify for the ballot, let alone pass. California residents can print out the petition, sign it, and mail it in. They can also volunteer. And everyone can donate to help fund the effort. Collecting more than a half-million valid signatures isn’t free, to say nothing of countering the mass of lies the media will tell about it.

But it is worth the attempt. 2023 brought a lot of victories in protecting children in Republican states from transgender insanity, but victory requires going on offense, even — especially — in California.


Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

California’s Pro-Trans Child Custody Bill Is Pure Emotional Blackmail


BY: KYLEE GRISWOLD | SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/09/15/californias-pro-trans-child-custody-bill-is-pure-emotional-blackmail/

California Gov. Gavin Newsom

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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 mounting evidence showing pro-trans policies cause the 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.

[READ: Telling Kids To Hate Their Biology Might Be What’s Actually Killing Them]

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.

California Lawmakers Vote To Remove Kids From Any Parents Who Don’t Support Severing Their Genitals


BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | SEPTEMBER 11, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/09/11/california-lawmakers-vote-to-remove-kids-from-any-parents-who-dont-support-severing-their-genitals/

California Capitol

The California legislature passed a bill Friday requiring parents to “affirm” a child’s newfound gender or risk loss of custody.

Assembly Bill 957 was initially proposed to require courts to consider whether parents were “affirming” a child’s identification as transgender in custody cases. The legislation was later amended in June to declare non-affirming parents liable for child abuse.

Republican state Sen. Scott Wilk bluntly recommended parents “flee” the state over the amendment.

“In the past when we’ve had these discussions and I’ve seen parental rights atrophy, I’ve encouraged people to keep fighting,” Wilk said in June. “I’ve changed my mind on that,” Wilk added. “If you love your children, you need to flee California. You need to flee.”

Wilk said he would leave the state himself at the end of his term.

Washington Free Beacon California Correspondent Susannah Luthi Taylor highlighted the law’s ambiguous language, opening the door to broad interpretation.

“The California bill does not define ‘affirmation,’ leaving it unclear if a parent would be required to support a child’s desire to socially transition or receive medical sex-change treatments,” Taylor wrote. “Nor does the bill make distinctions based on a child’s age or mental health record.”

The legislation is now headed for Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk, who is expected to sign it.

California’s latest law on transgenderism follows a cascade of state interference in parental rights to challenge a child’s desire to attempt a changing his-or-her gender. In August, California Democrat Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the Chino Valley Unified School District over new rules compelling teachers and administrators to notify parents of changes in pronoun use, sports participation, or bathroom assignments. A local judge in San Bernadino temporarily suspended the district’s new policy last week while litigation remains underway. The next hearing is scheduled for Oct. 13.

“San Bernardino Superior Court’s decision to issue a temporary restraining order rightfully upholds the state rights of our LGBTQ+ student community and protects kids from harm by immediately halting the board’s forced outing policy,” said the attorney general. “While this fight is far from over, today’s ruling takes a significant step towards ensuring the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of transgender and gender-nonconforming students.”

Last fall, Governor Newsom also signed a bill to “offer refuge” for out-of-state minors seeking trans medical interventions in the state without parental consent. In another assault on parental rights, the new law mandates that doctors hide children’s medical information related to “gender identity” from parents.

Contrary to Democrat claims of protecting children, multiple studies show easing access to adolescent medical interventions in pursuit of transgenderism increases the risk of suicide.

The national suicide hotline is 1-800-273-8255. More resources are here.


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.

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Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco


A.F. Branco Cartoon – No Middle Ground

A.F. BRANCO | on May 14, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-no-middle-ground/

Gov DeSantis is NO Donald Trump but he’s Far better than Minnesota Gov Tim Walz.

DeSantis vs Walz
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Mission Accomplished

A.F. BRANCO | on May 15, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-mission-accomplished-2/

The CNN town hall with Trump looked more like a debate than a town hall.

CNN Trump Town Hall Cartoon
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.

DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump

Georgia, Iowa Overcome Near-Unanimous Democrat Opposition To Ban Child Mutilation Surgeries


BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | MARCH 23, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/23/georgia-iowa-overcome-near-unanimous-democrat-opposition-to-ban-child-mutilation-surgeries/

Young boy celebrating transgenderism

Republican Georgia and Iowa lawmakers sent bills banning sex-change procedures for minors to their governors’ desks this week. Iowa has passed its bill into law, while Georgia’s bill awaits Gov. Brian Kemp’s signature. Kemp has not said whether he’ll sign it.

Georgia Senate Bill 140, which passed along party lines, prohibits injecting children with hormones and surgically mutilating their bodies “for the treatment of gender dysphoria.” Doctors may still be able to prescribe puberty-blocking drugs, however, as the bill only blocks  “irreversible procedures or therapies.” Puberty blockers do inflict irreversible physical damage, but their proponents claim otherwise.

Parental rights advocates still welcome the bill as a step in the right direction.

“This new measure will give Georgia children the legal protections they desperately need,” Kimberly Fletcher, founder and president of Moms For America, said in a press release. “Too many states continue to defend sexual mutilation of children by refusing to implement laws that would properly protect them. This must change.”

On Wednesday, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed SF538 into law, which states that Iowa medical professionals “shall not knowingly engage in or cause any” treatments “for the purpose of attempting to alter the appearance of, or affirm the minor’s perception of, the minor’s gender or sex, if that appearance or perception is inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” The law also prevents doctors from removing a healthy or non-diseased body part or tissue, as well as banning the prescription of hormone blockers to complicate puberty.

“Children should not be pushed to receive experimental medical treatments that can leave them permanently sterile and physically marred for life,” Jeff Edler, a Republican state senator, told The Des Moines Register. “Iowa has a duty to protect its citizens, especially our children.”

In addition to banning body mutilation surgeries for children, Reynolds also signed SF482, a law that would prevent transgender-identifying students from using the opposite sex’s public-school bathrooms.

“Denying the truth that we are either male or female hurts real people, especially vulnerable children,” Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Matt Sharp said in a press release. “By enacting this legislation, Iowa has taken critical steps to protect children from radical activists that peddle gender ideology and pressure children into life-altering, experimental procedures and drugs. Young people deserve to live in a society that doesn’t subject them to risky experiments to which they cannot effectively consent.”

Georgia and Iowa join eight other states that have passed protections for children from sex-change surgeries, including Mississippi, Florida, Utah, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, South Dakota, and Tennessee. Missouri and Kentucky’s legislatures have passed similar bills that are awaiting their governors’ signatures.


Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.

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The Whole Transgender Industry Is Founded On Two Faulty Studies


BY: ASHLEY BATEMAN | FEBRUARY 01, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/01/the-whole-transgender-industry-is-founded-on-two-faulty-studies/

transgender protesters marching
Two studies that formed the foundation of the transgender industry in the U.S. should never have been accepted by the professional community.

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Two Dutch studies 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.

In March 2022, Levine and his co-authors began to articulate concerns regarding the Dutch studies. The scientists published “Reconsidering Informed Consent for Trans-Identified Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults” to characterize the studies’ limitations. The report published in January is a follow-up to that initial report.

“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.

Mister Rogers Tried to Warn Us About the Dangers of Transgenderism


BY: SPENCER DALKE | FEBRUARY 01, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/01/mister-rogers-tried-to-warn-us-about-the-dangers-of-transgenderism/

Mister Rogers Neighborhood clip

“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

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 he was right to be. Gone are the days of Andy Griffith and “Hogan’s Heroes.” Now taxpayer-funded libraries stock their children’s shelves with books teaching kids about masturbation and affirming gender dysphoria. Drag queen story hour chapters bent on exposing children to sexual atypicality have sprouted up from coast to coast. Now even young children, like this 8-year-old boy, are encouraged to parade around in drag.

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.

In his words, “I like you just the way you are.”

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Wisconsin Children’s Hospital Is Stacking Its Bench of Chaplains with Trans Activists


BY: KYLEE GRISWOLD | NOVEMBER 28, 2022

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/wisconsin-childrens-hospital-is-stacking-its-bench-of-chaplains-with-trans-activists-2658789720.html/

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Children’s Wisconsin’s recent chaplain hires are full-fledged left-wing activists who twist religion to advance their preferred social Marxist policies.

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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.

[READ: In Wisconsin, Hospital Shortages Aren’t From Covid, They’re From Vaccine Mandates]

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.


Michigan Is Hiding A Children’s Constitutional Right To Genital Amputation In Its Abortion Amendment

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | OCTOBER 12, 2022

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/michigan-is-hiding-a-childrens-constitutional-right-to-genital-amputation-in-its-abortion-amendment-2658438207.html/

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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 helped lead 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 now represents “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.

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.

Democrats Think Teens Can Kill Babies And Sterilize Themselves But 18 Is Too Young For Self Defense


REPORTED BY: ELLE REYNOLDS | JUNE 09, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/09/democrats-think-teens-can-kill-babies-and-sterilize-themselves-but-18-is-too-young-for-self-defense/

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Unlike committing an abortion or pumping your child full of hormones, the legal purchase or ownership of a gun does not cause anyone harm.

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The same party that wants to raise the legal age for rifle purchases to 21 is also pushing to let minors kill preborn babies and mutilate their own genitals. American adults aged 18-20 already aren’t allowed to purchase handguns (and many states don’t allow them to obtain a concealed carry permit), more or less blocking them from practicing the basic self-defense precaution of stowing a defensive weapon to stop a bad guy with a gun. Now, Second Amendment deniers also want to bar these Americans from owning a rifle, a popular choice for home defense.

But while Democrats want to punish millions of law-abiding, prospective young gun owners for the evil, disturbed actions of a few of their peers, they’re also demanding that kids far younger be allowed to commit infanticide and mutilate their own bodies.

Letting Teens Commit Baby Murder

The radical abortion bill that Democrats renewed after the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade sought to virtually eliminate any restrictions on abortion up to the point of birth. Minors are already allowed to obtain abortions, but the legislation would also nuke state laws mandating parental notification for such young girls. Lest you think this is an incidental inclusion, Democrats have specifically attacked state parental notification laws.

Planned Parenthood’s website doesn’t even try not to sound like a pervert offering kids candy: “If you’re under 18, you may or may not have to tell a parent in order to get an abortion,” it teases.

The ACLU estimates that 350,000 girls younger than 18 get pregnant in America every year, and that 31 percent (or roughly 108,500) of them choose to terminate their babies’ lives. There were 652,639 abortions reported to the Centers for Disease Control in 2014; in the same year, the Guttmacher Institute found that 0.2 percent of abortions — or roughly 1,300 — were executed on girls 14 years old or younger.

Fighting for these young, impressionable girls to get abortions doesn’t just push them into the commission of murder, with the likely accompaniment of lifelong guilt, it also subjects them to trauma themselves. Sarah Eubanks, a former abortion facility employee, described one 12-year-old girl whose grandmother brought her in for an abortion:

I remember that look on her face that she just didn’t understand what was going on. She didn’t want to be there. She started moving around and the doctor said, ‘You need to hold her down.’ I did put my hands on her and said ‘You have to settle down, you gotta be still, you’re gonna hurt yourself. You have to be still.’ And within an instant, she pushed her feet out of the stirrups and started running down the hall with the speculum in her vagina with blood running down her legs. The doctor said, ‘I’m not touching this.’ She was that upset. She just didn’t want to be there. She was screaming.

The hundreds of thousands of preborn babies’ lives lost to the abortionist’s scalpel every year haven’t dampened Democrats’ desires to let adolescent girls (or any women) make the decision to take a human life. But at the same time, the left will throw gun death numbers in your face to push their anti-gun agenda, even when firearm-related homicides are a fraction of abortion numbers, and are far outpaced by defensive gun use. Pew reported 19,384 murders involving a firearm in 2020, compared to up to 3 million “defensive gun uses by victims” per year, according to a CDC study.

Not only do Democrats want to let children kill their babies, they want to let children make damaging and irreversible changes to their own bodies.

Letting Children Sterilize Themselves

A report from Florida Medicaid found that “Available medical literature provides insufficient evidence that sex reassignment through medical intervention is a safe and effective treatment for gender dysphoria,” and “the available evidence demonstrates that these treatments cause irreversible physical changes and side effects that can affect long-term health.” As a result, Florida Medicaid found that experimental procedures like cross-sex hormones or surgeries were insufficiently safe for coverage.

The report also listed the irreversible or potentially irreversible effects of cross-sex hormones, including facial and body hair growth, male pattern baldness, a deepening voice, and an enlarged clitoris for females taking male hormones, and breast growth, infertility, and sexual dysfunction for males taking female hormones. The irreversible effects of surgical interventions, such as elective mastectomies or genital amputations, are obviously far higher.

But those concerning effects didn’t stop the Biden administration’s Justice Department from sending an ominous memo to state attorneys general, threatening legal violations for states that don’t offer various damaging interventions to children.

“A ban on gender-affirming procedures, therapy, or medication may be a form of discrimination against transgender persons,” the memo stated. It also had the arrogance to claim that “it is well established within the medical community that gender-affirming care for transgender youth is not only appropriate but often necessary for their physical and mental health.”

The Biden Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs further spelled out just what is meant by “gender-affirming care,” including social treatment of a child as the opposite sex, puberty blockers, artificial pumps of hormones like testosterone or estrogen, or surgeries like elective mastectomies and amputation of reproductive body parts. OPA recommends “social affirmation” for “any age,” puberty blockers at any time during puberty, hormones beginning in early adolescence, and surgeries for adults or “case-by-case in adolescence.” Some parents try to claim their children “came out as trans” as toddlers.

But No Guns for Law-Abiding Young Adults!

These procedures threaten lifelong damage to children who undergo them, yet the Biden administration and other Democrats want unfettered access to them and punishments for health professionals and parents who question them. They also celebrate the idea of teenage girls taking the lives of their preborn babies, with no parental consent and with no consideration of whether a child has the mental maturity to make such a decision — never mind the fact that it’s an act of murder.

But Democrats are all too happy to further erode Americans’ Second Amendment rights by arbitrarily raising the minimum purchase age for a rifle from one adult age to another. Unlike committing an abortion or pumping your child full of hormones, the legal purchase or ownership of a gun does not cause anyone harm. On the contrary, it often protects against it.

Yet Democrats support letting pubescent children abuse themselves and adolescents kill their children, while insisting that an 18-year-old who passes a federal background check can be denied the constitutional right to self-defense. Are 18-year-olds too immature for constitutional rights? Are children and teenagers old enough for a concocted right to harm themselves and others? I would argue it’s neither — but it can’t be both.


Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.

The Studies Cited To Support Gender-Bending Kids Are Largely Junk Science


REPORTED BY: NATHANAEL BLAKE | MARCH 10, 2022

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/the-studies-cited-to-support-gender-bending-kids-are-largely-junk-science-2656908394.html/

New York Times building

The transgender misinformation machine is at it again. The New York Times recently published an extensive essay arguing against screening before medical transition — if someone says she wants hormones or surgery, doctors should immediately break out the syringes and prep the operating room.

The article, by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich of Bowdoin College, exemplifies how the transgender movement uses misinformation to advance its agenda. Marzano-Lesnevich asserts, “That gender-affirming health care saves lives is clear: A 2018 literature review by Cornell University concluded that 93 percent of studies found that transition improved transgender people’s heath [sic] outcomes, while the remaining 7 percent found mixed or null results. Not a single study in the review concluded negative impact.”

That seems dispositive — unless you look at the studies. The cited literature review was titled the “What We Know Project” and was directed by the LGBT scholar and activist Nathaniel Frank, who cited it in his own New York Times piece on transgenderism a few years ago, writing that “Our findings make it indisputable that gender transition has a positive effect on transgender well-being.”

Poorly Conducted Studies

These proclamations that the science is settled are a bold facade on rickety scaffolding. When this New York Times article invokes the authority of science, it seeks to evoke the image of careful statisticians sifting through data collected by diligent doctors.

But it is actually appealing to self-selected online surveys with cash prizes, studies with tiny samples, and studies that are missing more than half of their subjects. Stacking a bunch of weak studies on top of each other doesn’t provide a strong result, but The New York Times presumes readers won’t bother to check the details — the editors certainly didn’t.

Back in 2019, I took a closer look at the studies the What We Know Project cites, and found a methodological mess. Many of the studies had serious flaws, beginning with small sample sizes. As I noted, “Of the fifty relevant papers identified by the project, only five studies (10 percent) had more than 300 subjects, while twenty-six studies (52 percent) had fewer than 100. Seventeen studies (34 percent) had fifty or fewer subjects, and five of those had a sample size of twenty-five or less.”

The flaws extended far beyond small sample size, and the largest studies tended to be the weakest, often consisting of little more than online surveys with a self-selecting sample. Nor should we put much faith in a study that recruited subjects for an online survey by advertising “on online groups and discussion forums that were dedicated to FTM [female-to-male] members. . . . Upon survey completion, participants were entered into a lottery drawing for cash prizes.”

Even the better-designed long-term studies were often plagued by poor response rates. A European study had 201 out of 546 respond — just 37 percent. And though missing data is, by definition, missing, it is reasonable to suspect that those with poor outcomes are overrepresented among those who could not or would not respond.

Regret Rates

Nor did The New York Times check Marzano-Lesnevich’s claim that “gender-affirming health care has some of the lowest rates of regret in medicine. A 2021 systemic review of the medical literature, covering 27 studies and 7,928 transgender patients, found a regret rate of 1 percent or less.” But read the paper and it is quickly apparent both that the review has significant weaknesses and that The New York Times allowed its conclusions to be misrepresented.

Of the 27 studies used in their analysis, the review authors ranked only five as “good” and only four as having a low risk of bias. Many of the studies had the same flaws as those examined in the What We Know Project (indeed, some studies were used in both).

Another problem is that the majority of the data in the 2021 review came from a single study conducted by a Dutch group retrospectively examining the records of their own gender clinic. But a retrospective review of medical files will only identify regrets from patients who shared them with the gender clinic that performed their surgeries. Furthermore, the study only identified regrets following gonadectomy, and not those who regretted other surgeries, or who never had surgery but did regret taking cross-sex hormones or puberty blockers.

In addition to the problem of allowing a flawed data set to dominate the 2021 review, this illustrates another persistent difficulty with studies of transgender regret, which is that they are often conducted by those who provide medical transition, rather than independent researchers. People whose livelihoods and reputations depend on facilitating medical transition might be less than diligent and rigorous in looking for regret.

To their credit, the authors of the 2021 review do discuss some of the limits and difficulties of their work, writing that various problems:

represent a big barrier for generalization of the results of this study. The lack of validated questionnaires to evaluate regret in this population is a significant limiting factor. In addition, bias can occur because patients might restrain from expressing regrets due to fear of being judged by the interviewer. Moreover, the temporarity of the feeling of regret in some patients and the variable definition of regret may underestimate the real prevalence of ‘true’ regret.

None of these qualifications regarding regret were even hinted at in the published column. Despite The New York Times’ citing it, the 2021 review does not prove that “gender-affirming health care has some of the lowest rates of regret in medicine.”

As the authors note, regret is not only an imperfect measure, but it is often difficult to measure, with no set criteria defining it. In one Swedish review cited by the What We Know Project, it was defined “as application for reversal of the legal gender status among those who were sex reassigned,” which excludes those who succumbed to depression or addiction, or who lived unhappily after transition without seeking to legally detransition.

Gatekeeping before Transition

Furthermore, even if we uncritically accept the results of the 2021 review, it does not support the argument that gatekeeping before medical transition is unnecessary and harmful. Rather, the authors claim that the low regret rate they found “reflects and corroborates the increased [sic] in accuracy of patient selection criteria for GAS [gender affirmation surgery].”

In short, the review argues that medical gatekeeping keeps regret rates low. That The New York Times allowed this review to be used as evidence against medical screening, and in favor of self-ID for medical transition, exemplifies the persistent practice of American transgender activists using studies of (mostly) carefully screened European adults to argue against screening before medical transition, even for children.

Unfortunately, the aggregation of (often questionable) studies, and the exaggeration of their conclusions by activists, is only part of the problem. These efforts to spread misinformation are augmented by the intimidation of dissenting scientists and the suppression of results that trans activists dislike.

Suppressing Dissent

Researchers have learned to fear the wrath of LGBT activists, and take pains to avoid it. Results that undermine the narrative have to be carefully presented lest the public draw the wrong conclusions. Thus, when scientists concluded that there is no “gay gene” they “worked with LGBTQ advocacy groups and science-communication specialists on the best way to convey their findings in the research paper and to the public.”

With regard to transgender ideology, the intimidation is even more overt. For example, Lisa Littman’s qualitative study describing the phenomenon of rapid-onset gender dysphoria met a ferocious response from transgender activists. Similarly, activists smeared Canadian psychologist Kenneth Zucker and forced him out of his position as the leader of a gender identity clinic, even though he sometimes supported transitioning children. He was just more cautious about it than activists wanted. He was eventually vindicated, but targeting him still sent a warning to any researchers who are seen as insufficiently pro-trans.

As these cases demonstrate, the science is being manipulated to fit transgender ideology. Shoddy studies — often conducted by activists and doctors with a stake in medical transition — are boosted if they support the trans narrative, while results and researchers who challenge it are suppressed. This skewed data is then used by trans activists and their allies to shape the discourse.

Uncomfortable facts and stories are kept out of the official narrative. Insightful and moving first-person accounts of transition and detransition are confined to non-traditional outlets such as Substack, as are the warnings of leading trans doctors about the reckless rushing of children into transition. The information bubble is the point.

Going forward, disagreement will be labeled “misinformation” and banned from social media, and dissidents will be labeled as bigots who should be fired from their jobs. Doctors will be required to practice only according to the approved narrative, and educators will encourage children to transition without parental knowledge and consent. Worse still, the government will take children from parents who do not support transition.

The purpose of the transgender misinformation machine is not so much to persuade, but to provide justification for coercion. The point of the lies and distortions is to impose transgender ideology on all of us, especially children.


Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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