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.
The nation is worried about serious national security threats, including Chinese spy aircraft, but the U.S. Department of Defense seems pre-occupied with misplaced priorities. “Woke” policies are taking leftist ideologies to extremes with enforced compliance, even if it hurts the institution.
As in the Obama years, the Biden/Austin policy fully embraces the idea that individuals can change their “sex assigned at birth to a different gender role.” Department of Defense Instruction 1300.28, updated on Dec. 20, 2022, has changed the official vocabulary of this pseudo-science, using the phrase “self-identified gender” instead of “preferred gender” throughout.
WHY? Why is this SO important to the wacky Left? “Gender Dysphoria” is a condition of someone who is CONFUSED about their gender. Do we really need more CONFUSED people in our military? As a Vietnam Vet, I can testify that such people cannot be trusted in the trenches of war. Your confused about your gender? You have NO business in any aspect of military service.
The DOD Instruction stipulates that if a person “self-identifies” as a person of the opposite sex, and if the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS) changes a person’s bureaucratic “gender marker,” a man claiming to be a woman must be treated as a woman, and vice versa.
Military commanders, doctors and nurses, chaplains, and military men and women at all levels must endorse and act on this ideological belief or suffer career penalties if they don’t. Alleged “biases against transgender individuals,” which are prohibited, could include anything from “misgendering” people with the wrong pronouns to expressions of concern about medically questionable hormone treatments or surgeries for adults or military-dependent children.
Individuals who are confused about gender identity deserve compassionate counseling, competent medical care, and complete information about the serious risks and irreversible consequences of “gender-affirming” treatments that do not change biological sex. Instead, a self-diagnosis of gender dysphoria permits only one course of treatment, pushing the service member toward life-changing, often-irreversible transgender “transition,” without an independent “second opinion.”
Commanders are directed to consult with designated “experts,” called Service Central Coordination Cells. The SCCCs have no responsibility for military operations or any obligation to put the needs of the patient first.
Biden’s regulations do not protect or even mention rights of religious liberty for chaplains and people of faith. Nor do they provide options for doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel who object to transgender ideology on moral or ethical grounds.
Once a military doctor approves, transgender transition can be deemed “complete” with or without surgical alteration of healthy body parts. At that point, as the DOD Instruction states several times: “[S]ervice members will use those berthing, bathroom, and shower facilities associated with their gender marker in DEERS.”
This policy denies human biological realities and violates minimal expectations of personal privacy and modesty between men and women. Human dilemmas are discussed in PowerPoint training slide “vignettes,” such as a “female to male” soldier announcing a pregnancy.
Vignette 8 portrays a soldier who transitioned from male to female, without “sex-reassignment surgery,” who wants to use female-designated showers. Another scenario describes a female soldier who is experiencing tension with a “transgender female” roommate.
This is a trick question, since both the discomforted female soldier and a commander who tries to find a solution likely would be accused of “biases against transgender individuals.” Why should a tank commander at Fort Hood have to deal with pronoun etiquette and sticky scenarios instead of training his troops to fight an enemy force?
The latest DOD Instruction admits that some service members who have “completed a gender transition” may not have “resolved the gender dysphoria.” Without any estimate of costs or consequences, additional medical procedures are authorized “If a return to their previous gender is medically required.”
Biden/Austin directives specifically involve the military service academies and Reserve Officer Training Corps (contract) programs, inviting controversies like those affecting civilian female athletes who have lost competitions against biological men.
Revised rules also permit cross-dressing and other “transitioning” behaviors while in “on-duty status.” Previously, time off for “real life experience” (RLE) living as a person of the opposite sex could only occur off-base and off-duty, often for weeks or months. Whether intended or not, the revised policy’s approval of on-base cross-dressing likely will increase “LGBT Pride” celebrations featuring drag queen performances and “family-friendly” story hours for children at military bases worldwide.
When problems ensue, how will we know? In 2018, then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis testified that problems with transgender policies were not being reported up the chain of command because they were considered “personal and private.” Doubling down in December 2022, the DOD released a new instruction, DODI 6400.11, which restricts (without high-level permission) the release of information about “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” “transgender-related information,” and “incidents of harmful behaviors.”
Every year, the Pentagon releases non-personal statistics on sexual assaults, in excruciating detail. Why are officials restricting access to data on “incidents of harmful behaviors” and “transgender-related information”? Congress needs to find out.
A recent independent, high-tech survey on the politicization of the military done by the Heritage Foundation found that among active-duty respondents, 80 percent said the “changing of policy to allow unrestricted service by transgender individuals” has decreased their trust in the military. Sixty-eight percent of active-duty responses reported seeing a “growing politicization,” which is affecting their decision to encourage their children to join the military.
In view of current recruiting problems, the 118th Congress should renewprevious demands for information on woke policies. Congress also should consider mandating that all Defense Department agencies and educational institutions return to recognizing scientific realities of biological sex, not “self-identified gender.” That idea and more are incorporated in legislation just proposed by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Rep. James Banks, R-Ind., called the Ensuring Military Readiness Act of 2023.
Servicemen and women deserve reality-based health care programs, with protection for the rights of doctors and nurses whose medical ethics or religious convictions differ from transgender ideology. Women also deserve separate-sex athletic teams and reasonable privacy in female-only living facilities.
White House and Pentagon leaders who try to deny, dissemble, or withhold information on the existence or results of woke policies in the military are undermining their own credibility. Americans are awake and aware, and they will hold lawmakers accountable for woke-ism that weakens our military in an increasingly dangerous world.
This article was originally published by RealClearDefense.
Elaine Donnelly is President of the Center for Military Readiness, an independent public policy organization that reports on and analyzes military and social issues.
After the 14-year-old was found being sexually assaulted in another state, a judge kept her from loving parents because they questioned her transgender identity. Then she was trafficked again.
In August 2021, by concealing a teen’s newly asserted transgender identity from her parents, Virginia’s Appomattox County High School participated in a chain of events that led to that girl falling into the hands of sexual predators not once, but twice.
When the FBI found Sage (last name of the family withheld for privacy) in Maryland, where she was victimized by a sexual predator, a judge refused to return her to her parents on the grounds they were abusing her in not affirming her as male. Housed in the boys’ quarters of a children’s home away from her parents, she told her mother, she was assaulted again. The girl soon fled, then was brutally sex-trafficked again until her rescue in Texas by law enforcement.
Sage’s Law, or the Child Protection Act, is being introduced this week in the Virginia House of Delegates by Delegate Dave LaRock in honor of this young teen from Appomattox County, Virginia. Sage hopes sharing her story will help protect others from the abuse she suffered at the hands of predators, precipitated in part by the very institutions that should have protected her.
School policies and state laws that encourage concealing information from parents’ purport to protect vulnerable minors. In practice, as tragically demonstrated by Sage’s case, such policies open the door to predators by removing children’s greatest protection from their lives.
Sage’s Law aims to shut that door in three ways. It would require schools to notify parents if their child asserts a gender different from his or her sex; it prevents school counselors from withholding or encouraging minors to withhold information about a child’s gender identity; and it clarifies that raising a child according to his or her biological sex, including decisions about a child’s mental and physical health, may not be construed as abuse.
Sage’s story, compiled from months of interviews, reports, and records, has been lived by countless other families torn apart in the name of gender ideology by activist schools, judges, anddoctors. This is a story of the unbearable cost of parent-exclusion policies, but also of a mother’s love and relentless determination to save her child.
Institutions that Should Protect Endanger Instead
Sage is a slight, pretty, 15-year-old girl with elfin features and an edgy style. Recently, reflecting back on her transgender identification, she told her mom: “I don’t know who I was. I’m a totally different person now. I never was a boy. Everybody was doing it, I just wanted to have friends.”
That self-reflection is consistent with the research showing that upwards of 80 percent of gender dysphoric childrenembrace their sex as they emerge from puberty. Children who are “affirmed” as the opposite sex, however, particularly if puberty blockers are used, consistently go on to further medicalization. Sage’s comment also reflects the reality of social contagion, fueled by social media and increasingly recognized internationally as a factor in the exponential rise in the number of children identifying as transgender.
Yet states such as California allow children as young as 12 to make their own health-care decisions, without their parents but under the authority of the state. In January, Virginia delegates Candi Mundon King, Nadarius Clark, Michelle Maldonado, Sam Rasoul, and Marcus Simon filed a similar bill authorizing courts, social workers, and medical professionals to withhold information from parents and consent to medical procedures for “mature” minors.
The consequences for children and families in states such as California that construe not “affirming” as abuse are particularly dire. In October, progressive Virginia Delegate Elizabeth Guzman announced she would reintroduce her 2020 bill to criminalize parents who do not affirm their child’s transgender identity as guilty of abuse, potentially resulting in the loss of custody.
School Policies Endangering Students
Michele adopted Sage, her biological granddaughter, after the death of her son. Like many gender-dysphoric children, Sage has a history of trauma from that early childhood loss. Related health problems became severe at times, requiring therapy and medical treatment. Her daughter’s previous schools notified Michele when concerns arose, she said, enabling her to have Sage’s treatment adjusted. But when her daughter entered Appomattox County High School in early August 2021, Michele says she was cut out of the loop.
Unbeknownst to Michele, her then-14-year-old’s taste at the time for boys’ clothing, which she described to her mother as simply “dressing emo,” was accompanied by her assertion at school that she was a transgender boy. School records, shared by the family, indicate school staff were calling Sage by her chosen male name and pronouns and at her request concealing this from her parents. Sage recalls her school counselor telling her during the first week of school that since she identified as male she could use the boys’ bathroom.
School records also indicate bullying, although they do not capture the severity of what Sage eventually told her mom: boys were following behind her in a group, touching her, threatening her with knife violence and rape, and even shoving her up against the hallway wall. On Aug. 23, according to school notes, reports were received from students and teachers that Sage had used a boys’ bathroom and encountered hostile boys there. The school counselor met with Sage the next day to direct her to use the nurses’ bathroom for safety reasons.
Sage’s statement that “all the boys at this school are rapists” prompted the school to review hallway footage outside the bathroom, showing that several boys had entered while she was inside. On Wednesday, Aug. 25, the counselor and school resource officer called Sage into a meeting, where she became so emotional that the counselor recorded concern Sage might be “a risk to herself due to being so upset when leaving school.”
Only at this point — after meeting alone with her daughter, after two days had passed and knowledge of the incident had reached all the way to the superintendent, according to the school records — did the school finally contact Michele, she said, still without revealing the male identity her daughter was asserting.
Michele recalls finding a school hall pass labeled with a new name that August evening and Sage telling her for the first time that she was identifying as a boy at school. As Michele sat with her on the floor, Sage tried to stop the tears as she told her mother a group of male students had “jacked” her up against the wall of the boys’ bathroom and threatened her with violence, and that she was terrified of what they would do. Michele tried to comfort her, assuring her she could stay home while they figured out how to handle the bullying.
That night, Sage disappeared. She was found nine days later in Maryland, a victim of sexual assault. That was just the beginning of her family’s ordeal.
Excluding Parents Invites Predators
As Michele’s case illustrates, school policies that exclude parents from critical knowledge of their child’s mental health remove a child’s greatest safeguard from his or her life. While this author could find no such policy posted on the Appomattox High School or school board websites, the school’s actions to “affirm” Sage’s stated gender, name, and pronouns and to permit access to bathrooms of the opposite sex are all consistent with the directives of former Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s 2021 model policies. So is the choice to deceive parents.
In fact, the Northam policies direct that an entire gender transition team and plan be set up for such a child, all in secret from the parents if the child so wishes. This guidance was revoked in 2022 by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, but Virginia Democrats and LGBT groups are fiercely contesting the transparency and parental consent required by the new proposed guidance.
Yet school counselors, unlike parents, have at best an extremely limited knowledge of a child’s mental, emotional, and physical needs. They also have neither the constitutional authority nor the expertise to determine a child’s best interests.
Children who identify as transgender have well-documented mental health co-morbidities and rates of adverse psychiatric events. Even Dr. Erica Anderson, former head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), has raised alarm at the “pitched battle” engendered by professionals who “triangulate” or set children in opposition to their parents.
In Sage’s case, by withholding information about her daughter’s gender identity and related issues, including the severe bullying related to Sage’s transgender exploration, the school destroyed vital opportunities for Michele to discern warning signs in time to assess and respond before tragedy struck.
Predators know transgender kids are vulnerable prey. Sage told Michele months later that some of the transgender websites to which a school counselor referred her linked to “creepy” older men and pornography.
One mother told this author that as soon as her daughter identified online as “female to male,” multiple suspicious “sugar daddy” accounts reached out to her on social media. Roblox, the wildly popular children’s gaming site, has transgender chat rooms with a panic button to “hide your screen from your parents.” Sage, her mother says, was lured to meet sex traffickers by online predators posing as friends.
A Court-Enabled Tragedy
The first call from the FBI came late at night on Sept. 2, her mother recounts: Sage had been found. Michele says investigators told her Sage had been trafficked into Washington, D.C. and then Maryland for nine days of horrific, brutal sexual abuse.
Driving through the night, their backseat full of stuffed animals and cozy blankets, Michele and her husband Roger arrived early the next morning at the Baltimore Courthouse. They were stunned to hear that their child, who had just survived unspeakable trauma, was being held in a juvenile detention cell and that they were being summoned to a hearing late that afternoon before Judge Robert Kershaw. When they entered the courtroom, Sage appeared from the penitentiary remotely, on screen, with only court-appointed attorney Aneesa Khan, an assistant public defender, present in person. “I love you, baby!” Michele cried to her daughter, who responded “I love you too, Nana.” To their shock, Khan spoke up and alleged on Sage’s behalf that she did not wish to return home and had been “both emotionally and physically abused by his parents in connection with [his] expressed male gender identity and desire to live as a trans male.”
Michele had only found out about this claimed male identity the night her daughter disappeared. Yet Michele was willing to use any name or pronoun to bring her home. Sage later told her, Michele says, that Khan “told me to tell the judge my parents hit me, starved me.” Sage also told Michele that Khan “didn’t care how much [Sage] had to lie…but they were going to win this case” to remove Sage from her parents’ custody and place her in a Maryland foster home that would affirm her as male.
Michele is a Virginia Court-Appointed Child Advocate (CASA) with years of experience supporting troubled teens, and she and Roger were quickly cleared of abuse charges. But the allegations were used to take custody of their daughter and bar them from seeing her.
The Cruelty of Ideology
Rather than treat Sage as a victim of horrific sex trafficking and return her to her family, the court dealt with her as a runaway, providing grounds for temporary custody in Maryland. Significantly, under the Interstate Juvenile Compact, even if allegations of abuse are made, juveniles are to be returned to their home state, which is presumed to better be able to assess the child’s needs. Judge Kershaw delayed this return for two months, which led to Sage’s next trafficking episode.
Instead of receiving treatment for her profound physical and emotional trauma, Sage was kept for days in solitary detention as a runaway, then transferred to the Catonsville Children’s Home. Per Judge Kershaw’s order, she was housed according to her “expressed male gender.” Michele says she eventually learned from Sage that she was the only girl in male quarters and that she had been repeatedly assaulted there.
Kershaw held multiple hearings focusing on Sage’s claimed male identity and Khan’s efforts to demonstrate gender identity abuse, including calling two Appomattox school counselors to testify against Sage’s parents. While his final ruling on Nov. 10, 2021, reluctantly conceded lawful custody to the parents, Kershaw opined at length that “more likely than not” Sage had “endured emotional abuse and neglect by his parents,” including “misgendering” and “misnaming.” Astonishingly, Kershaw cited as evidence of parental abuse “running away from Virginia to Maryland,” when in fact Sage was abducted, raped, and trafficked across state lines.
While Sage was in The Children’s Home, Michele says she sent letters and cards multiple times a week and tried countless times to reach her by phone, especially on Sage’s 15th birthday. Months later, Sage commented: “I missed you so much, but I tried not to because you didn’t want me back.” Horrified, her mother asked what she meant. She learned from Sage that Khan had told her that, because she was transgender, Michele didn’t want her anymore — and that not one of her cards or messages had ever reached her daughter.
Sage also eventually told her mother that, while living at the foster home, she skipped classes every day and would “smoke weed and do drugs” with kids she had met. Sage also relayed later that Khan had told her “I don’t give a sh-t if you do drugs, I just want to win this case.” Sage also said Khan had visited the home of one of Sage’s Maryland school friends to enlist her support in contacting Sage, claiming Khan had won the case and resulting in knowledge of Sage’s case spreading around the school.
In a text to a friend at the time, Sage referenced Khan’s intent: “going to the court of appeals, and the supreme court.” It is difficult to avoid Michele’s conclusion that “[t]he only best interest [Sage’s] attorney had was for herself. To put my traumatized child on center stage to push her political or gender agenda!”
Michele begged the court to provide treatment for the trauma Sage had endured and had found placement for her by mid-October, approved by Virginia social services, in Youth for Tomorrow’s program for young victims of sexual exploitation. The judge rejected it because they would treat Sage as a girl.
Not until Nov. 10 did Judge Kershaw approve placement in North Spring, a residential treatment facility that would affirm her claimed male identity. Frightened of being locked in the facility and believing her mother no longer wanted her, Sage texted a friend, “im gonna dip” (leave). On Nov. 12, 2021, Sage says, she cut off her court-required GPS monitor and ran away to meet an online “friend” in Texas she thought was 16.
Once more, the unspeakable happened. Sage fell into the hands of a predator who, police told Michele, raped, starved, drugged, and brutalized her. This time she disappeared for months. For the second time in less than four months, Michele had no way of knowing if her daughter was even alive. But Michele never stopped searching. Finally, a tip she discovered on social media led Texas marshals to her daughter’s rescue in Dallas on Jan. 24, 2022.
For the first time since that conversation on the floor of Sage’s bedroom on Aug. 25 the year before, mother and daughter were able to talk. On the plane ride home, Michele listened as Sage began to unburden her heart, grieving over what she learned but overcome with gratitude that her daughter was alive and restored to her.
Affirmation by Intimidation
Upon her return to Virginia, Sage entered North Spring, the lock-down facility negotiated by the court, with Michele driving four hours each way for her weekly allotted visit. Sage was heavily medicated, suffering from constant nightmares, and fearful of both residents and doctors. Sage told her mother that her counselor also pressured Sage to tell Michele she wanted a “gender-affirming” mastectomy.
Yet, during one of Michele’s visits, Sage asked if her mother could secretly take her to buy girls’ clothes, stating she didn’t want to be a boy anymore, but she was scared to tell the doctors. Pressured by North Spring to let them treat her daughter, Michele reached out to Josh Hetzler, an attorney with Richmond-based Founding Freedoms Law Center, who secured her daughter’s return. After nearly a year of horror, she was finally home safely.
The road ahead is a long one of healing both physically and emotionally. There are confusing lapses in concentration and persistent, terrifying nightmares. In a safe, loving home, surrounded by her pets and easing into at-home learning and therapy sessions, the painful recollections emerge unpredictably, as do the panic attacks. Michele doesn’t press, letting Sage open up at her pace, whether to her or to her beloved uncle Cory, who has moved home to support her.
As she begins to process her ordeal, Sage now desires to protect others from the horrors she experienced. Michele’s heroic, unrelenting determination to save her daughter has turned not only to helping her heal but to preserving other families from what hers endured. Advocates have rallied to help fund legal action through The Gavel Project, and to craft policies that will help protect others.
Sage’s Law
Many children never escape the clutches of sex traffickers. Had it not been for her mother’s relentless love and determination, Sage might never have been found. Michele calls it a miracle. In the starkest of contrasts, the actions of ideologues played a part — twice — in her daughter falling into the traffickers’ hands.
Sage’s public school could have been transparent to Michele about her daughter’s struggles. The court could have returned her to Virginia without furthering a quest to make legal history. The children’s home could have protected her from assault and access to drugs. And doctors could have treated trauma, not pressed living as the opposite sex and mutilative surgery on a victim of sexual abuse. All along, it was her mother who truly had Sage’s best interest at heart.
Sage was failed by adults who thought they were helping but were blinded to their own cruelty by their ideology. Michele tells of countless parents who have reached out to her with their own stories of families and bodies destroyed by school counselors, courts, and doctors who may spend minutes with a child, but assert they have the expertise and authority to usurp decisions from parents who have poured a lifetime into their care.
Sage has shown great courage in sharing her story, and it is time for lawmakers to take a stand for her and many other children by passing Sage’s Law. There is only one acceptable response to her story: never again.
Laura Bryant Hanford is a mother of five and is actively involved in school policy and religious freedom issues in Virginia, where she lives with her family. She served from 2015 to 2018 on Fairfax County Public Schools’ Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee. She was the lead congressional staff drafter of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. She also served at the U.S. Embassy in Romania as the officer in charge of human rights, focusing on ethnic minorities, women, and refugees. She is a graduate of Princeton University.
It’s a strange case out of a small Alaska town that’s attracted national attention — all because of what it says regarding school bathrooms and transgender access.
According to The Washington Post, a female student was expelled from North Pole High School in North Pole, Alaska, after she kneed one of several boys who had entered the girls’ room in an incident on April 4. The male students had allegedly entered the bathroom, The Post reports, as a protest against a transgender student transitioning from female to male who had taken a selfie in the boys’ room.
Fairbanks North Star Borough School District Superintendent Karen Gaborik said the boys had entered the bathroom “as a form of protest.” When the seven boys entered, however, the protest was swiftly ended when one of the girls kneed one of the boys in the groin. Now, her family says she’s been expelled.
The case went national when state Rep. Tammie Wilson, a Republican who hails from North Pole, commented on it during a House Majority news conference on Friday.
“We had an incident last week to where some boys entered the girls’ bathroom, and a girl kneed a boy, feeling threatened. They were blocking her way. And she was suspended from school because she used too much force,”Wilson said, according to KTUU-TV.
Wilson said that the girl had been prevented from leaving the bathroom by the boys and had defended herself.
“If you ever feel threatened, for your safety, whatever force you think you have to go give, I will stand by you and so will your community, and not for those boys who were where they didn’t belong,”Wilson said.
The representative told the station the girl was suspended and missed her prom — the boys were allowed to attend, she said. But the student’s sister took to Twitter to say the girl had actually been expelled. The school wouldn’t confirm what happened to the female student, merely stating that the boys had also been disciplined for “attempting to enter the girls’ bathroom.”
“Gaborik said that in her Fairbanks-area school district, which is geographically ‘larger than the state of Connecticut,’ transgender students can choose to use a gender-neutral, single-stall bathroom that corresponds with the student’s gender identity, or the one that corresponds with the student’s gender at birth,”Meagan Flynn reported in The Post on Monday.
“The decisions are made on an individual basis for each student based on whatever is most comfortable, she said. At North Pole High School, about 16 transgender students have attended the school in the last three years, she said.”
She told The Post that students are encouraged to seek out school staff when they feel threatened, not to act out themselves.
“We do not advocate physical or psychological violence as a means to attain safety,” Gaborik said.
“The entire school community needs to work together to ensure that all students feel welcomed, safe and are able to learn and thrive. We recognize that parents, students and members of our community feel strongly about these issues, but advocating for the use of violence does not contribute to a safe learning environment.”
As for the threat, Gaborik told The Post that an investigation by school administrators found that there was “not evidence that the boys were threatening any student or using any type of force toward students.”
Leaving aside the initial question of the transgender student taking a selfie or the reaction of the boys to it, exactly what wouldn’t make seven males in the girls’ room threatening to the girls inside? Yet the school apparently wants us to pretend nothing threatening happened and that this girl’s reaction was somehow worthy of an expulsion.
“She did the right thing, and we should be backing her, not having her sitting at home wondering whether she made the right decision or not,”Wilson told KTUU.
In another interview with the Fairbanks News-Miner, Wilson framed the question as self-defense.
“Was she supposed to not protect herself?”she said. “She was where she belonged. They were not.”
Meanwhile, Gaborik told The Post that all students disciplined in the situation have the right to appeal any measures taken in the incident. The girl’s family says that they will — and we can only hope that sanity prevails.
A federal judge is allowing a lawsuit against transgender facilities in a school district to proceed, but warned the student-plaintiffs that, if the government allows boys who claim to be female to use the girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, then the girls have no right to “visual bodily privacy.”
Judge Jorge Alonso of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division is allowing a lawsuit to proceed against the school district that adopted the Obama-era transgender policy permitting boys claiming to be female to use the girls’ bathrooms, showers, and locker rooms.
However, the judge informed the girls, represented by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), that, “[s]o far, the right not to be seen unclothed by the opposite sex is not on the Supreme Court’s list.”
The crux of this suit is that defendants seek to affirm the claimed genders of students by allowing male students who claim female gender to use privacy facilities (i.e., bathrooms and locker rooms) designated for use by the female sex and female students who claim male gender to use privacy facilities designated for the male sex … District 211 adopted the policy solely to affirm the claimed genders of those students claiming a gender different from their sex at birth.
Alonso continued, saying the school district has adopted the policy of allowing all transgender students to use the restrooms, locker rooms, and showers of their choice, while it insists all other students “must use the restrooms and locker rooms designated for their sex.”
“Before adopting the policy, District 211 did not investigate the reliability of the science underlying gender-affirmation treatments,” the judge wrote. “Nor did it make any effort to understand the impacts such a policy would have on students exposed to opposite-sex, same-gendered students in locker rooms and restrooms.”
The judge acknowledged the school district’s enforcement of the transgender policy has caused the students “embarrassment, humiliation, anxiety, fear, apprehension, stress, degradation and loss of dignity.”
The students “are at continual risk of encountering (and sometimes do encounter), without their consent, members of the opposite sex while disrobing, showering, urinating, defecating and while changing tampons and feminine napkins,” he added.
Christiana Holcomb, ADF legal counsel, said, “a compassionate approach to protecting students’ privacy” is needed.
“We welcome the court’s decision to allow key claims to move forward,” she added in a statement. “The district officially authorizes opposite-sex use of school privacy facilities, and that violates Title IX. Letting boys into girls’ showers, restrooms, and locker rooms is sexual harassment. Students should be confident that their school will protect their privacy and dignity. So far, this school district has failed to do so.”
Alonso did not allow all the claims of the plaintiffs to move forward. He threw out the students’ argument made in the case that they have the right to “bodily privacy,” saying that right refers to physically being touched by others, “not visual bodily privacy.”
Additionally, the judge dismissed the students’ claim that parents’ right to direct their children’s education applies in this case. Alonso said that right refers only to parents’ choice of type of education or schooling.
As Breitbart News reported in 2016, the district opened its schools’ bathrooms to boys claiming to be female without informing parents. Later, it allowed a boy claiming to be transgender into the girls’ locker room after the Obama administration’s Department of Education threatened the district’s federal funding in the amount of $6 million. Initially, the school district arranged for a private dressing area in the girls’ locker room for the boy, but federal officials complained the arrangement stigmatized the student. Consequently, the district allowed the boy to use the girls’ locker room openly as if he were a biological girl.
The Trump administration has rescinded the Obama administration’s policy and restored Title IX to the understanding that “sex” means biological sex – male or female – rather than perceptions or beliefs about one’s gender.
Since Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, former President Barack Obama admitted his unpopular transgender policy helped to defeat Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton.
As the College Fixreported, Tom Petersen, director of community relations for the school district, said, “The District will continue to defend our practices that affirm and support the identity of all our students.”
In a “backgrounder” on the case, ADF wrote, “If our government is powerful enough to command innocent school children to disrobe in the presence of opposite-sex classmates, then there will be little it will not be powerful enough to do.”
“The restroom policy and locker room agreement thus threaten our very liberty to live our lives in accordance with the most basic expectations of common decency, dignity, and privacy in our bodies,” the law firm added.
The LGBT community is up in arms after the St. Louis Cardinals refused to back down after taking a massive stand for Christianity. The team’s “Christian Day” event this year features Lance Berkman, former Cardinals All-Star Outfielder.
Berkman, a Christian, was criticized when in 2015 he spoke out against transgender bathrooms. The LGBT community branded Berkman a homophobe over his opposition to a Houston city ordinance that would allow individuals to choose bathrooms based on their gender identity rather than their biological sex.
In an interview with The Houston Chronicle at the time, Berkman said that “Tolerance is the virtue that’s killing this country.”
A spokesman for the PrideCenter of St. Louis Pride released a statement expressing his displeasure with the invitation to Berkman.
“Pride St. Louis is disappointed by the decision of the St. Louis Cardinals to provide a public platform for Berkman, an individual whose words and actions towards the LGBTQ+ are divisive and demeaning,”the statement said.
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“We know that the Cardinals can do better, and we want to extend an offer to help them by co-organizing their official LGBT Pride Night at Busch Stadium. Let’s work together to promote love, diversity, and inclusion,” the statement continued.
Many would argue that rather than “divisive and demeaning” what Berkman said about the issue is pretty commonsense.
“The issue is, what to do about a 15 or 16-year-old boy who thinks he’s a girl and wants to shower with the girls,”Berkman said. “Maybe he is [transgender], maybe he’s confused. But I wouldn’t want him in the shower with my daughters. We shouldn’t have the rights of 2 percent of the population trump the rights of the other 98 percent.”
Furthermore, it’s pretty hypocritical of the PrideCenter to lecture the Cardinals about diversity and inclusionwhile they insist Berkman be excluded from the event because of his beliefs.
The Cardinals, however, are sticking to their guns. The team responded to the criticism by pointing out the 30-year tradition of “Christian Day” welcoming “all types of people and organizations.”It also pointed out that it would host LGBTQ Pride Night at Busch Stadium.
The left will continue to try to silence anyone and everyone who disagrees with them — hats off to the Cardinals for not backing down to the pressure.
Rule lets students pick their own bathroom (Creative Commons photo, Public domain)
A motion filed in federal court by the Justice Department on Friday suggests that newly-minted Attorney General Jeff Sessions is reassessing a vague Obama administration order allowing transgender students in America’s public schools to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of their choice.
The Justice Department’s new motion in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals seeks permission to delay a hearing on a previous motion — filed last year — which had asked the court to ease a preliminary injunction by federal district judge Reed O’Connor striking down Obama administration guidance about bathroom and shower use in taxpayer-funded schools.
The Obama administration guidance, sent in May, instructed public school districts across the country to allow transgender students to choose bathrooms and shower stalls consistent with their gender identity, not their biological features. “A school’s failure to treat students consistent with their gender identity may create or contribute to a hostile environment in violation of Title IX,” the guidance said, in reference to the 1972 federal law banning gender discrimination in education.
The U.S. Department of Justice motion to delay came just one day after Sessions was sworn as President Donald Trump’s attorney general. The parties are “currently considering how best to proceed in this appeal,”the motion states, according to ABC News.
The preliminary injunction, entered in August, stems from a 2016 lawsuit filed by the state of Texas in response to the Obama administration’s transgender bathrooms directive. A dozen states have joined the suit, setting the stage for what once appeared to loom as a legal battle that could have huge implications for transgender legal issues.
Image added by WhatDidYouSay.org
The suing states accused the agencies of issuing the guidelines by means of regulatory “dark matter,”a deluge of agency directives, notices, memoranda, guidance documents, and even blog posts which effectively create new policy without congressional legislation or Administrative Procedure Act (APA) protocols. The states claim that this strategy allows agencies to evade judicial review and achieve their policy objectives. (RELATED: Texas Leads 13 States In Lawsuit To Stop Obama Transgender Bathroom Rules)
Judge O’Connor, an appointee of George W. Bush, wrote in the preliminary injunction that Title IX “is not ambiguous”concerning “the biological and anatomical differences between male and female students as determined at their birth.”
A Justice Department spokesman refused to comment on the motion to delay the hearing. Transgender enthusiasts lamented the Justice Department motion.
“Our concern is that it’s a very clear signal that at a minimum the Department of Justice — and possibly more broadly throughout the Trump administration — will not protect transgender students,”Human Rights Campaign legal director Sarah Warbelow told ABC News.
Next month, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a case involving a female Virginia high school student, Gavin Grimm, who insists on using boys’ bathrooms and locker rooms despite the fact that she is a girl. Grimm’s saga dates back to 2014 when the school board in Gloucester County, Virginia refused to allow her to use boys’ bathrooms and locker rooms. The school board chairman at the time, George Burak, observed that other students use bathrooms and locker rooms in addition to Grimm. To placate Grimm, now 17, the school district paid to build a number of unisex, single-person bathrooms for all students — including Grimm — to use. Grimm was unsatisfied. With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, she and her parents sued the school district under Title IX, a comprehensive 1972 federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of biological sex. (RELATED: ACLU Sues To Allow Girl To Use Boys Bathroom, Locker Rooms At Public High School)
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At least one physician has diagnosed Grimm with gender dysphoria, which means that Grimm insists she is actually a boy even though she was born with and lived her life with female reproductive organs. A lower court order — currently stayed — had directed the Gloucester County school district to allow Grimm to use boys’ bathrooms.
John Banzhaf, a famed public interest law professor at the George Washington University Law School, noted in a statement sent to The Daily Caller that the rights and safety concerns of transgender students must be balanced against the rights and safety concerns of everyone else who must use the same set of public bathrooms in a given taxpayer-funded building.
“The concerns about assault are raised not primarily about transgender males, but rather about traditional males who would have a legal defense if found within a female restroom,”Banzhaf said.
We all know about Charlotte NC and the City Council’s attempt to change the designation concerning public restrooms. Also, we are surely well versed in the subsequent HB2 law passed by the North Carolina Legislature banning such legislation.
In reaction to this, the President gave the order of compliance through the Board of Education and the Department of Justice. It was warned that all federally funded schools must comply with Obama’s interpretation of Title IX of the Education Amendment.
This led to the pending lawsuit by twenty states, challenging the president’s interpretation. But now another institution has entered the legal melee.
Three students in the Pittsburgh area who identify as transgender have sued their school district over its new resolution that student should use the restroom that correlates with their biological gender.
Jacob Evancho, who goes by the name Juliet, Erik Ridenour, who goes by the name Elissa, and a third student who has only identified themselves as A.S., have sued the Pine-Richland School District for changing its rules regarding restroom use.
Last month, the Pine-Richland School District overturned its longstanding practice of allowing students to use the restroom that corresponds with their “gender identity.”
This school district has stepped out to bring things back to the way that they have always been. And they are doing this in spite of the fact that they might have to fight this battle alone.
Christian News continues
The Pennsylvania Department of Education also told the outlet (the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) that it believes schools have to uphold the Obama administration’s recent guidelines on the matter.
“All schools in Pennsylvania that receive federal funding are expected to comply with the requirements as outlined by the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice,” said spokesperson Casey Smith. “The Wolf administration is committed to creating a culture of inclusiveness across the commonwealth. The governor will continue to work with the General Assembly to pass comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation that protects all Pennsylvanians.”
In other words, the current administration in Pennsylvania is not going to buck their master. This is a sad time to be an American.
The American Civil Liberties Union’s state director in Georgia has resigned after her young daughters were “visibly frightened” and concerned for their safety when three men dressed in drag entered the women’s restroom with them.
Maya Dillard Smith, whose resignation was first reported by Atlanta Progressive News, wrote: “I have shared my personal experience of having taken my elementary school age daughters into a women’s restroom when shortly after three transgender young adults, over six feet [tall] with deep voices, entered.
“My children were visibly frightened, concerned about their safety and left asking lots of questions for which I, like many parents, was ill-prepared to answer,”she continued.
Smith — who was one of just three African-American state directors in the ACLU and describes herself as “unapologetically black” — said that she could no longer work for the organization, which was been a staunch advocate of allowing men who self-identify as women to use whichever bathroom they please.
“I found myself principally and philosophically unaligned with the organization,”she said.
Smith has launched a new website titled Finding Middle Ground, which is described as a “safe space to talk about civil rights for all.”
The site features a video of a young girl talking about the need to have an honest discussion about transgender issues. “Boys in the girls’ bathroom? I don’t know about that,”the girl says at one point.
“There are some boys who feel like they’re girls on the inside and there are some boys who are just perverts,”the girl continues.
Then, text flashes across the screen that says: “How do we KEEP OUR LITTLE GIRLS SAFE and PREVENT TRANSGENDER DISCRIMINATION? How do we prevent PREDATORS from PREYING on kids in bathrooms?”
“What makes it scary, is that, sometimes strangers take advantage of kids,”the girl continues.
Later, a question pops on screen: “How can we ask these kinds of questions….without being called a homophobe?”
The Target department store chain has made itself infamous for announcing that it will allow transgender people to choose whatever bathroom they want to use at any given time, even though the chain already has many problems with sexual assaults in its stores.
Here are the top twenty sex crime reports from Target’s stores across the nation.
04/2016 – Police have arrested a man accused of exposing himself to a 9-year-old boy in the bathroom of a Target store in Cedar Park in February. Roel Anthony Vasquez, 27, was charged March 24 with indecency with a child by exposure. No one at the store could identify who he was when the incident occurred, so police asked for help from the public by releasing pictures of the suspect from store surveillance video in March.
04/2016 – MIDWEST CITY, Okla. – The District Attorney in Oklahoma County has filed a misdemeanor charge against a man accused of stalking women at a metro Target store. Cody Stephens, 21, lives in Midwest City, not too far from the Target store where he is accused of stalking women.
10/2015 – SOUTH BEND – South Bend police are looking for a man who performed a sexual act Monday afternoon at a Target department store at 1400 E. Ireland Road, according to our news partner ABC57. A 16-year-old girl was shopping at the department store when a man approached her from behind and performed a sexual act on himself at about 2 p.m., police said. The man got away, and police are still looking for him.
11/2015 – San Diego police are searching for a man accused of sexually assaulting a woman in the aisle of a Target store in San Diego, pestering her for a date before reaching under her clothing to grope her. The San Diego Police Department (SDPD) says the incident – being investigated as a case of sexual battery – happened around 9 p.m. on Halloween at a Target located at 5680 Balboa Ave.
10/2015 – A Jefferson man arrested on Friday after police said he followed and then touched a 12-year-old girl and a 13-year-old girl in separate incidents could face “multiple” child sexual assault charges, a prosecutor said in court Tuesday.
Benjamin J. Cooper, 38, was jailed on $5,000 bail after appearing in court. Assistant District Attorney Stephanie Hilton said charges against Cooper are expected to be filed Wednesday.
10/2015 – A 46-year-old man was arrested Saturday in connection with a sexual battery incident, including allegedly grabbing an employee’s buttocks, inside a Target store in Ventura, police said.
Aaron Carter, of Ventura, was reportedly making sexual comments and gestures to several female patrons around 9:33 a.m. inside of a Target store, located on the 4000 block of East Main Street, according to the Ventura Police Department.
09/2015 – ROCKAWAY – A borough man has been accused of sexually assaulting a five-year-old boy and trying to kidnap another in the past two weeks.
Kyriakos Serghides, 34, of Rockaway, was charged on Friday with second-degree attempted kidnapping, second-degree luring, second-degree sexual assault, third-degree terroristic threats, fourth-degree possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose and two counts of third-degree endangering the welfare of a child, Morris County Prosecutor Fredric M. Knapp and acting Rockaway Township police Chief Martin McParland, Jr. said in a joint news release. …
[The] boy told police on Thursday he was at the Target in Rockaway Township when Serghides approached him, Knapp and McParland said in the news release. Serghides threatened to cut the boy if he didn’t go with him, they said.
07/2015 – St. Louis City Police confirmed that they are investigating the sexual assault of a 13-year-old female inside the Target store on Hampton Avenue in south St. Louis Monday night. Police say the suspect walked past the victim, squeezed her buttocks, then walked away. The girl told a relative and police were called.
07/2015 – FRESNO, Calif. – Authorities in Hanford say a man has confessed to placing a hidden camera inside a restroom of a local Target store. The suspect was identified as Eugenio Rodriguez, 32, of Hanford.
Hanford police responded to the store on North 12th Avenue on Wednesday after an employee found the camera in the family restroom. They say the camera was concealed with toilet tissue and had a red light illuminating before the employee turned it off. Officers say the camera didn’t record anything but it did stream live video.
03/2016 – Frank Eugene Pratt, 39, is charged with attempted robbery, second-degree assault, disorderly conduct and drug possession after the incident at Target at 7951 Nolpark Road, police said.
Police responded to the store at about 2 p.m. Saturday on a report that a man had smoked PCP in the store’s restroom, then approached several female victims and assaulted them.
11/2014 – ANDERSON, SC – A Six Mile man accused of taking pictures and video of people using the restroom at Target has been arrested, according to Anderson police.
According to the incident report, police were called to the store on Thursday where one victim said the suspect had a cellphone positioned under the stall to capture video of men at the urinals.
10/2014 – SAN LEANDRO, Calif. – San Leandro police say they have a person in custody for allegedly assaulting two young girls inside two different stores on Monday night.
Police credit surveillance pictures, television news and social media for helping them crack this case so quickly.
09/2014 – CINCINNATI, OH – A Cleves man is facing voyeurism charges after an alleged incident inside a west side Target store.
According to Hamilton County court documents, Mark Klapper, 36, was arrested for looking at a 4-year-old boy’s private parts in a Target bathroom Saturday.
07/2013 – PINOLE, Calif. – A 32-year-old man is under arrest, accused of molesting a 9-year-old boy and taking video of his feet.
Gregory Paul Houchins is being held on $5.1 million bail at the West Contra Costa County detention facility.
Police say he met the child in the video game section of the Pinole Target store two weeks ago. He forced the child to touch his private parts and took him to bathroom where the child got away and ran to his parents.
10/2012 – FOLSOM, Calif. (KCRA) – A jogger and Target security officers helped Folsom police track down and arrest a man wanted in connection with sexual battery and an attempted rape Saturday.
Police arrested Timothy Ortiz, 25, at the Target store on Blue Ravine Road after security officers reported he was following women in the store and masturbating.
07/2009 – ATHENS, Ga. – Athens-Clarke County police have arrested a 26-year-old man for being a peeping Tom in the women’s room at a Target.
Police say Luis Mesqueda Hernandez was caught on security cameras sneaking into the women’s bathroom at the store Sunday afternoon and using his cell phone to take photos of a woman. The store’s security officers detained Hernandez until police arrived.
7/2003 – SOUTH CHARLESTON, West Virginia – A Kentucky man has been charged with the sexual assault of an 11- year-old girl at a Target store.
Surveillance camera images of the suspect leading the girl through the store have been broadcast nationally.
Allen D. Coates, 37, of Irvington, Kentucky, was arrested Wednesday afternoon in the downtown area of Louisville, where he is being held at the Metro Corrections Facility. The arrest followed a “very detailed, very thorough” out-of-state tip, according to South Charleston Police Chief D.W. Dunlap.
In case you want to contact Target’s CEO about their new policy that puts women everywhere at risk, here is his contact information:
Gregg Steinhafel
Email: Gregg.Steinhafel@target.com
Phone: 612-696-6234
Fax: 612-696-6325
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com
Only days after the Target Corp. issued a release confirming its stance on the issue of transgender restrooms, a patron noticed something in the women’s restroom that she felt compelled to photograph. A statement released by Target on April 19 called “inclusivity” a core value belief of Target that should be celebrated. The statement said, “We welcome transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity.”
In a Facebook post, Karen Crawford said, “It’s true. ..I’m in the women’s bathroom at a Target north of LA…they actually took out a stall for women in order to accommodate the ones who have giblets…yes, these are urinals…for men…and so the war on women progresses. …”
The post from Crawford has received much response.
One follower posted: “Dear Target, thank you for being so ‘inclusive’ as to allow men who identify as women to use the rest room with women who identify as women. Some people believe safety, privacy, dignity, and reality are more important considerations than political correctness, but it’s wonderful to see you taking a stand against those bigots. Why should our wives and daughters be treated with decency when there are cross dressing dudes to appease? Again, thank you for your bravery.”
Another user responded: “How can society get so far off based? Lord help us!”
There is much speculation as to the result of Target’s controversial stance. Some fear the decision will encourage sexual predators, which may lead to increased violence toward women and children.
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community branded Berkman 
| Education Editor | 10:36 PM 02/13/2017
We all know about 
personal experience of having taken my elementary school age daughters into a women’s restroom when shortly after three transgender young adults, over six feet [tall] with deep voices, entered.
do we prevent PREDATORS from PREYING on kids in bathrooms?”
What Did You Say? 
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