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
Since the boycott of Bud Light seems to have been a rousing success, many people are shifting focus to retail giant Target and its years of supporting radical LGBT groups — one of which even advocates to “transition” children without parental consent. It is so outrageous that even Elon Musk felt compelled to begin asking some questions about it.
Musk, who is considered center-left in most things political was shocked by a recent Fox News article that reported that Target has been supporting the radical gay group GLSEN for years, even though the group “calls for gender ideology to be integrated into all classes, even math,” and spends its donations to get American schools to comply with that policy.
In its tweet, Fox News also noted that GLSEN “encourages secret gender changes among children in schools.”
TARGET TAKES AIM: The retail giant provides annual donations to GLSEN, which calls for gender ideology to be integrated into all classes, even math. https://t.co/f7g9yLDvuOpic.twitter.com/vCK6fqXepa
In its May 26 report, Fox News noted that Target is “partnering with a K-12 education group for which focuses on getting districts to adopt policies that will keep parents in the dark on their child’s in-school gender transition, providing sexually explicit books to schools for free, and integrating gender ideology at all levels of curriculum in public schools.”
Indeed, Fox even obtained a direct quote from Target saying how much they support the organization with their annual donations of tens of thousands.
“GLSEN leads the movement in creating affirming… and anti-racist spaces for LGBTQIA+ students. We are proud of 10+ years of collaboration with GLSEN and continue to support their mission,” the retailer told Fox.
Fox goes on to explain what GLSEN does: “GLSEN calls for gender ideology to be integrated into all classes, even math. It provides educators instructions on how they can make math ‘more inclusive of trans and non-binary identities’ by including ‘they/them’ pronouns in word problems.”
“We advise on, advocate for, and research comprehensive policies designed to protect LGBTQ students as well as students of marginalized identities,” the group itself describes on its own site.
This group that Target has supported urges schools to add “intersex,” “transgender,” “non-binary” and other such left-wing “choices” of sexual identity into all class work from math to science, per Fox.
GLSEN tells schools to keep confidential any information about students “transitioning” or self-identifying as the opposite or some fantasy gender, and to make sure parents are not told of any such information unless explicitly approved by the child.
The group pushes a policy that maintains that schools and faculty “shall ensure that all personally identifiable and medical information relating to transgender and nonbinary students is kept confidential… Staff or educators shall not disclose any information that may reveal a student’s gender identity to others, including parents or guardian… This disclosure must be discussed with the student, prior to any action.”
In a Saturday news release condemning “right-wing extremists,” GLSEN attempted to spin that little nugget of information as such: “Supportive educators are a lifeline to students who do not have the freedom to be exactly who they are safely, and GLSEN will always fight back against policies that force educators to jeopardize student safety.”
The group also seeks to force schools to allow boys who claim to be transgender girls to play in school sports with the girls.
“To date,” Fox added, “the retail giant has donated at least $2.1 million to GLSEN.”
Fox’s shocking report spurred Twitter chief Elon Musk to ask, “Is this true, @Target?”
A Twitter “community note” also appeared on the tweet, noting that, “Target has donated to GLSEN for more than a decade: ‘Target annually supports GLSEN and its mission to create…spaces for LGBTQIA+ students.’” The note also presented links to the radical policies for which GLSEN advocates.
One Twitter user blasted Musk for asking the question, carping, “Oh come on, this is Fox News. You question CNN, MSNBC, but not Fox News? Don’t you think that this is hypocritical?”
But Musk pointed out that he literally was questioning the claims, and tweeted back, “Maybe it’s not true, hence the question.”
So far, Target has not made any statement past its quote to Fox that it supports GLSEN.
This newest wrinkle in Target’s big-dollar support of the radical LGBT lobby comes on the heels of a boycott effort over its “pride” merchandise and for partnering with a company that embraces satanism along with its LGBT advocacy. Target is now hemorrhaging money, as is Anheuser-Busch, following Bud Light’s decision to partner with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
The bad news continues to mount for Target and Bud Light both, and conservatives must keep the pressure on these woke corporations. Examples must be made if we hope to reverse the wide trend in corporate America of donating billions to these organizations whose main goal is to groom our children for their disgusting sexual agenda.:
Warner Todd Huston has been writing editorials and news since 2001 but started his writing career penning articles about U.S. history back in the early 1990s. Huston has appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN and several local Chicago news programs to discuss the issues of the day. Additionally, he is a regular guest on radio programs from coast to coast. Huston has also been a Breitbart News contributor since 2009. Warner works out of the Chicago area, a place he calls a “target-rich environment” for political news.
This article describes disturbing products and messages.
Target furthered its commitment to advancing radical gender ideology this month when it partnered with a Satan supporter who called for the eradication of anyone who disagrees with the mutilation of children to supply transgender-themed merchandise to Target’s “pride” collection.
The recent collaboration between Target and the U.K.-based brand Abprallen and its designer “Erik,” a self-proclaimed “gay trans man,” features a sweatshirt emblazoned with a caduceus wrapped in a “cure transphobia not trans people” ribbon, a rainbow UFO tote bag that states “too queer for here,” and a pink “we belong everywhere” fanny pack.
Erik’s products, which are showcased on Target’s website, average just a couple of stars. One five-star review penned by the designer, however, restated excitement that one of the largest U.S. retailers would stock this type of clothing.
“These have already got the transphobes infuriated with me and I feel like quite the celebrity to think that they believe this is all some big conspiracy and I have any power to brainwash anyone when I’m just some guy drawing pictures!” the designer wrote in an Instagram post announcing the partnership.
What Erik didn’t mention in the social media defense of Abprallen products is that “just drawing pictures” includes a long history of producing and selling goods that elevate Satan and transgenderism in the same breath. One quick glance at the designer’s website and Instagram shows dozens of designs featuring satanic and sacrilegious symbols such as pentagrams, “Satan respects pronouns” T-shirts, “gay as hell” stickers, and stained glass windows covered up by “trans bodies are holy.”
“So, for me, Satan is hope, compassion, equality, and love. So, naturally, Satan respects pronouns. He loves all LGBT+ people. I went with a variation of Baphomet for this design, a deity who themself is a mixture of genders, beings, ideas, and existences. They reject binary stereotypes and expectations. Perfect,” Erik wrote.
One particularly graphic image on the designer’s Instagram shows a naked demonic creature with a horned skull and mutilated breasts.
“Being called a demon is something I can cope with, and the idea of a trans demon is pretty damn cool, most of my work focusses on gothic or dark and satanic imagery juxtaposed with bright colours and LGBT+ positive messages,” Erik wrote in the caption.
In addition to promoting explicit evil, Erik often uses violent language and imagery, with products such as a “burn down the cis-tem” lighter, a “we bash back” mace, and “time’s up for transphobes” skull pins to call for action against people who take issue with radical gender ideology and the dangerous mutilation and castration it prescribes. Erik also sells merchandise promoting the murder of babies in the womb.
“In order to keep transphobes at bay we must eradicate them, it is very important to not engage in conversation with them – fascists do not listen to reason and they do not deserve the trans person’s valuable time,” Erik wrote in early March.
Target’s embrace of someone who promotes the explicit fusion of radical gender ideology and Satanism might seem recent but it’s not. In 2021, when a man dubbed a “homophobic heckler” asked a Target employee if the company supports “satanic pride propaganda,” the red-shirted employee replied “Yeah, both, Satan and Pride” without missing a beat.
Since 2012, Target has happily stocked the front of its stores with pro-LGBT T-shirts, accessories, pet items, party supplies, and decor. In recent years, Target expanded the reach of messages like “trans people will always exist,” “queer,” and “live laugh lesbian” to the children’s section.
Even well before the scheduled commencement of “pride month” in June, Target began selling “light binding effect” tops and “tuck-friendly” shorts in the children’s clothing section.
Target isn’t the only company elevating people and products that blend transgenderism and demon worship. In recent years, Hollywood stars like Lil Nas X and Sam Smith have tried to advance the LGBT agenda using demonic shoes, music videos, and performances with clear links to Satan.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
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 Presiden
I recently wrote about the current wave of rainbow-flavored “insurrections” sweeping through America’s red statehouses. I called them part of a color revolution. Color revolutions, you will recall, are traditionally “popular uprisings against authoritarian regimes, such as those that took place in former Soviet countries such as Ukraine and Georgia in the early and mid-2000s.”
In our American color revolution, the script has flipped. Here, red states are the only rebels standing strong in the face of increasingly authoritarian central power — wrapped, of course, in the rainbow flag.
Tennessee recently made a star out of State Rep. Justin Pearson, the code-switching preacher man with the afro who just a few years ago was a repp tie-wearing prep at Colgate, but this year led an invasion of screaming gun-control protesters into the Tennessee Capitol, shut it down, and got himself expelled (temporarily, of course. Plot twist: The lead characters on this show always win in the end!)
We’ve now seen color revolutionaries take to state capitols in Tennessee, Montana, Kansas, Kentucky, Florida, Oklahoma, and Missouri. This week, the color revolution came to Texas. The radicals are on top. And (if you will excuse my French), thanks to their total effete ineffectuality, red states are getting bottomed, hard.
The Best Little Statehouse in Texas
Showrunners set this week’s episode of “Transurrection” in Texas. Why? They can’t turn Texas blue, right? …Right?
Twitter soon filled up with clips of the state Capitol in Austin getting overrun by a shrieking mob of LGBT cuckoos waving transgender flags and shutting down voting on an important bill. They’ve been keeping Austin weird for years, biding their time, and it finally paid off.
A Texas Republican state delegate on the scene tweeted a video of the mob and reported, “Trans activists are losing their minds, shoving signs into [a Texas conservative’s] face, and allowing spit to spew from their mouths while they scream ‘no place for hate.’” You have to admire their shamelessness, frankly. “No place for hate!” they scream, as they bludgeon their enemies.
The “hate” bill in question, naturally, would ban genital mutilation of children statewide. As we know by now, the idea of not being permitted to permanently sterilize and castrate kids makes sterilized and castrated adults very, very mad. How dare you not let us ritually initiate your son into our family-friendly extreme body modification cult!
A local newspaper reported on the action: “More than one hundred protesters rallied at the Capitol in opposition to the bill Tuesday in anticipation of the floor debate, engaging in chants including, “Protect Trans Kids!” and holding signs reading, “Let Trans Kids Grow Up.”
Am I the only one who notices the irony here? They want to “let trans kids grow up” — by putting them on irreversible puberty blockers that literally stop them from growing up. Logic — like charm, charisma, and good looks — is not this group’s strong suit.
But, as always, their ugly tactics work. “As protesters were removed from the House gallery, Democrats in the House on Tuesday successfully delayed debate on Senate Bill 14, which would ban certain gender-affirming medical treatments for transgender minors. Using a procedural tactic … the bill was sent back to the House Committee on Public Health, then voted out of the committee again Tuesday evening,” the paper reported, emphasis mine.
They may still lose in the end, but they survived the day.
I feel like I’m watching a new streaming docudrama show on Netflix: “Game of Throngs.” “The Transmandalorian.” “Sex Reassignment in the City.”
Last week’s episode was set in Montana and guest-starred an unknown man in a dress, an impish scamp named Zooey Zephyr. Zooey is not your typical social media starlet; he’s got a strong jawline, a prominent Adam’s apple, and a deep voice. His script, however, follows the Tennessee storyline virtually line for line. Zooey led his “transurrection” over a new Montana bill that would outlaw transgender interventions for children. Just like in Tennessee, he broke the rules, caused a riot, got ejected, and then used the ejection as a battering ram to take down the Republican leadership. Here’s how Fox reported it:
‘The only thing I will say is if you vote yes on this bill and yes on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands,’ Zephyr said when debating SB99. Critics demanded an apology. However, after refusing to do so, Republicans led the chamber in a 68-32 vote last week to bar Zephyr from accessing the House floor. Zephyr cannot enter the anteroom or gallery but can vote remotely. (Emphasis mine)
Even when they lose they win!
How many times can they run this same storyline? Answer: At least 50 times, one for each state that requires it.
I seem to remember some other event a few years back, when protesters holding flags entered a capitol to stop lawmakers from voting on something. If I recall correctly, a lot of them were sentenced to years in prison for daring to block a vote. I will pray none of the nonbinary furries in the Texas Capitol suffer the same fate! They don’t look like they could last five seconds away from their cats.
The foundation of modern American democracy is that all Americans deserve some kind of representation in the rooms where law and policy are made. Not content to control those rooms in states where they dominate the political scene, some Republicans have said, in essence, that representation is a privilege for communities whose chosen lawmakers don’t offend their sensibilities. (Emphasis mine)
I like to picture flustered Republicans hitting the smelling salts and the fainting couch, like Scarlett’s Aunt Pittypat, when the winsome Zoey Zephyr and his merry band of rebels made a bit of noise during working hours.
Hilariously, the title of Bouie’s column is “A Sinister New Page in the Republican Playbook.” Maybe I shouldn’t say this out loud, but: The Republicans don’t have a playbook.
I wish they had a sinister playbook! How can we get them a sinister playbook and teach them how to use it? Because they absolutely do not know what to do in the face of mob rule. They are off balance. Unprepared. And it will only get worse.
One of these was an almost-10-year-old Cassandra Robinson, who in the photos looks like a muscular little boy with long hair dyed green, and wore “a T-shirt that read: ‘inspired by the STRONG WOMEN in my life.’” There is no 10-year-old on Earth who would dream up a sentence like that and want it on a T-shirt. Is his name a cry for help?
End Game
So, what’s the end goal? This is not just about gun control, or the “right” to castrate 8-year-olds.
Here’s what I think it’s obviously about: performing a radical mutilation surgery on the Constitution. Neutering it, for good — irreversibly even. This is the ultimate prize. Of course, it’s incredibly hard to change the Constitution, with good reason. That’s why it’s rarely been done in our history.
There are a few ways to rewrite the Constitution, but all the paths go through the states. You need three-fourths of states to ratify a new amendment. Insurmountable? Democrats already have 20 to 22 blue and purple states. They need 37, and that means the South is the juiciest prize, especially with its rapidly changing demographics.
Even in red states like Tennessee, they’d only need to flip 10 percent of the voters to win the state house. Age and heart disease will take care of the boomer-aged bitter clingers. College indoctrination will take care of the rest. Every four years a new crop of teenage voters arrives ready to make their “voices heard.” Time is on their side, not ours. And they’ve got all the time in the world.
Well, color me reacquainted! “Our Constitution is one of the most difficult in the world to amend. … But the remoteness of the possibility of formal constitutional change today may be as much a product of constitutional culture as constitutional structure: Several generations of Americans have lost the habit and muscle memory of seeking formal constitutional change.” (Emphasis mine)
Got that? The color revolutionaries are developing new muscle memory they will get to flex again and again as they continue dominating us in their weight class. Meanwhile, hordes of radicals are greedily gnawing through the country’s aging superstructure.
The Color of Money
The “tranissaries” of the revolution are obviously well-funded and blessed with a loyal army of loudmouth fanatics willing to win by any means necessary.
Are you?
I don’t know exactly who is directing and funding the revolutionaries. But it’s clear the country’s largest foundations and NGOs have these unsuspecting states in their sights. They have arrayed the full might of their billions squarely at “voting rights” and “defending democracy.” In other words, they are the architects behind activist mobs and the skilled ballot harvesters that have so far netted them win after win — including the White House.
The Macarthur Foundation and Ford Foundation, which funds dozens of grassroots activist groups including something called the “Texas Civil Rights Project,” are on the case with their billions. The Carnegie Foundation is doing its part for the cause, too. And there are many others. These massive bloodless megaliths are cleverly wrapping themselves in the cozy civil rights issue of the day — poor little trans kids (or election overhauls favored by candidates who love that issue) — and winning enormous popular support.
The wealth of America’s greatest old families is being used to systematically strip the place bare, and they’re looting it of everything that’s not nailed down. Including any stray toddlers. Viva la rainbow revoluçion!
It’s time to build a counterrevolution, fast.
Peachy Keenan is a contributing editor and regular essayist for The American Mind, a publication of The Claremont Institute. She is the author of “Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War” (coming June 6th from Regnery). She also writes at peachykeenan.substack.com , and you can always find her on Twitter @keenanpeachy, at least until she is canceled.
The Montana House of Representatives came to a halt Monday after a crowd of transgender activists flooded the public gallery and shouted down the speaker. Demonstrators chanted “let her speak” after lawmakers refused to lift a censure on Democrat Rep. Zooey Zephyr over spewing hate-filled comments on the House floor last week. Zephyr, a first-term representative from Missoula and the first transgender-identified member of the lower chamber, mocked Republican prayers during debate on a bill to ban medical interventions for minors with gender dysphoria.
“The only thing I will say is if you vote yes on this bill, and yes on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands,” Zephyr said.
Rep Zooey Zephyr of Missoula said the following when debating SB99 Amendments.
“The only thing I will say is if you vote yes on this bill and yes on these amendments I hope the next time there’s an invocation when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.” pic.twitter.com/wuhlympbLq
— Montana Freedom Caucus (@MTFreedomCaucus) April 18, 2023
The bill in question ultimately cleared the chamber.
Republicans revoked Zephyr’s ability to speak on the House floor until issuing an apology.
“It is up to me to maintain decorum here on the House floor, to protect the dignity and integrity,” said House Speaker Matt Regier last week, according to the Associated Press. “Any representative that I don’t feel can do that will not be recognized.”
“Hate-filled testimony has no place on the House floor,” said Republican Rep. Caleb Hinkle, who serves on the House Freedom Caucus, which introduced the measure to censure Zephyr.
Mob demonstrators descended on the Capitol Monday to demand the lower chamber reinstate debate privileges. The crowd erupted after lawmakers voted again to keep Zephyr quiet when the freshman representative tried to speak on a bill restricting child pronoun changes in K-12 classrooms. Speaker Regier refused to acknowledge the chamber’s censured colleague igniting a roar of interruption from the gallery. Lawmakers were forced to pause proceedings as police in riot gear arrested disruptors, according to Montana Public Radio.
BREAKING: The Montana House of Reps has been shut down by left-wing protesters who are there protesting the censure of transgender Democrat Rep. Zooey Zephyr, that was led by the @MTFreedomCaucus, for telling his Republican colleagues they have "blood on their hands" for passing… pic.twitter.com/MnOyO4FhlN
Riot Police clear the Montana Capital making 5 arrests after a mob of Trans Activists stormed in demanding ‘trans rights’ and ‘her her speak’ in reference de to a Transgender legislator who had been silenced by the House Speaker for his violent rhetoric. pic.twitter.com/UijIeCd41t
Zephyr defended those arrested outside the statehouse.
“My constituents and community came up and shouted ‘let her speak’ — I felt pride in them,” Zephyr said. “Because when they stood up, they are standing on behalf of democracy.”
The scenes on day three of the saga at the Montana Capitol come weeks after transgender activists stormed the Tennessee statehouse at Nashville over similar legislation. The “insurrection,” as defined by an assault on a Capitol building, was led by a trio of Democrat lawmakers who were stripped of their committee assignments. Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson were temporarily expelled from the legislature for using a bullhorn amid the demonstrations. Both were reinstated by local officials.
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.
AU.S. district court judge ordered University of Wyoming sorority sister plaintiffs to reveal their names in a lawsuit against Kappa Kappa Gamma’s University of Wyoming chapter for allowing a transgender-identifying man to be inducted.
According to local news, “The six sorority sisters sued the Kappa Kappa Gamma’s parent organization, its president and the school’s first transgender sorority member late last month in a closely watched case. They alleged that the sorority did not follow its bylaws and rules, failed to uphold its mission, breached its housing contract with members, and misled them by admitting a transgender student.” The plaintiffs filed the suit anonymously as “Jane Does” and assigned the pseudonym “Terry Smith” to the trans-identifying sorority member.
Patsy Levang, a member of Independent Women’s Network’s North Dakota Chapter and former Kappa Kappa Gamma National Foundation president, told The Federalist that the plaintiffs asked for anonymity twice out of fear of “retribution,” but the judge denied their requests. Concerns for the women’s safety have become extra heightened after college swim athlete Riley Gaines was attacked by transgender radicals at San Francisco State University. According to Levang, one of the original seven plaintiffs left the case after the judge’s decision.
“These are young, young women — between 18 and 21, and we want to do nothing to jeopardize their safety,” said Levang, who added that the girls will have “guaranteed” security at all times during public appearances.
‘An Erection Visible Through His Leggings’
If the lawsuit is unsuccessful, transgender-identifying man Artemis Langford, who was admitted into the sorority in 2022, will move into the Kappa Kappa Gamma chapter house in the fall of 2023.
The lawsuit states that Langford is 6’2’’ tall, weighs 260 pounds, has not undergone any apparent chemical or surgical trans medical interventions, and rarely attempts to look like a female. It also reveals that the female plaintiffs feel extremely uncomfortable around Langford, who has allegedly engaged in bizarre and even “threatening” behavior, such as staring at the women without talking for hours, asking inappropriate questions, and at one point having “an erection visible through his leggings.”
During the recruitment process, Langford “avoided answering questions about his hobbies, passions, or involvement in other organizations,” according to the lawsuit. Instead, it says, he inquired about whether he could live in the sorority house and “talked about his desire to be near cadavers and to touch dead bodies.”
“One sorority member walked down the hall to take a shower, wearing only a towel. She felt an unsettling presence, turned, and saw Mr. Smith watching her silently,” the lawsuit reads. The suit also alleges that Langford “repeatedly questioned the women about what vaginas look like, breast cup size, whether women were considering breast reductions and birth control.”
During a yoga class sponsored by the Panhellenic Union for sorority members at the University of Wyoming, Langford allegedly “sat in the back of the room for an hour and watched the assembled women flex their bodies.” The suit also alleges that Langford has repeatedly used his phone to covertly take pictures of the women in the sorority house without their consent.
When one plaintiff raised her concerns about Langford, chapter officials — under the direction of national leadership — gave her materials so she could “educate” herself. And a witness in the case was allegedly “threatened with discipline if she does not agree that [Langford] is a woman.”
‘Intimidated’ into Inducting a Man
The plaintiffs said they were “intimidated” into inducting Langford into the sorority, and according to reports about the lawsuit, officers and employees from the national organization “actively pressured members of the chapter to support [Langford’s] admission to the sorority, ignoring bylaws and standing rules that would have foreclosed his initiation.” The voting process was also allegedly altered for Langford, and he was not admitted via secret ballots, as is standard practice.
The lawsuit contends that instead of following official bylaws, Kappa Kappa Gamma admitted Langford based on a 2018 “Guide for Supporting Our LGBTQIA+ Members,” which says the sorority accepts both “women” and “individuals who identify as women.” After the lawsuit was filed, Kappa Kappa Gamma Executive Director Kari Kittrell Poole reiterated the sentiments within the guide, telling the Associated Press that the sorority does not discriminate based on so-called gender identity.
However, the collegiate plaintiffs disagree with Poole on what it fundamentally means to be a woman. “An adult human male does not become a woman just because he tells others that he has a female ‘gender identity’ and behaves in what he believes to be a stereotypically female manner,” they said.
“[Kappa Kappa Gamma] has been a place that values the good, the true, the beautiful, the leadership growth in women,” Levang told The Federalist. Levang made it clear she doesn’t oppose Langford’s decision to identify as a woman. She does, however, oppose the destruction of female-only organizations, the integrity and politicization of her former sorority, and the safety of the University of Wyoming Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority sisters.
“I look at those young women, and I think they deserve at least what I was afforded,” said Levang. “This whole thing takes single-sex organizations and just throws it out the door. It’ll literally destroy [women’s spaces]. But then I think the overall plan is to destroy the level that women have gained.”
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
Given the recent stupidity on the view regarding Christianity vs Taliban – Joy Behar enjoying Sharia Law.
Actress and singer Patti LuPone recently appeared on The View, saying that she does not know the difference between the “religious right” in the US and the Taliban. The Taliban has been constantly monitored by human rights organizations for extrajudicial murder, public executions, torture, and floggings.
Whoopi Goldberg chimed in: “You’re not the only person who has said that.” – Full story at Human Events
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 Presiden
Netflix subscriptions. Marriage. Terms of service agreements. Text messages. Social media posts. Pregnancy. Amazon purchases. Aging.
According to our consumerist social catechism, each of these actions is reversible. Click “cancel.” Get a divorce. Dig through your privacy settings and revoke permissions (even though you know you’re never going to). Unsend. Delete. Get an abortion. Return for free with a preprinted label. Get plastic surgery.
For young people raised in this “Ctrl-Z” world, unfamiliarity with the irreversible breeds suspicion, which translates to avoiding commitments. It’s no surprise few of my generational peers are getting married and having kids — although the culture tells us those commitments are still changeable, they’re actually messy to get out of and necessarily close other doors.
We are taught to believe limitations are inherently oppressive and therefore bad. Keeping your options open, on the other hand, is liberating and therefore desirable.
Some limitations, like those of becoming a parent, we choose to enter into and therefore can choose to avoid — which young people increasingly do. Other limitations are innate and unalterable. But to the restriction-averse, that inescapable nature makes those even more threatening. One of those fearsomely unchangeable limits is our biology: We are afraid to be limited by our natural sex.
Here’s how Amelia Blackney, a 13-year-old girl who decided to start going by the plural pronouns “they/them” and identifying as “non-binary,” explained her decision to CNN:
That way it’s like I’m not a part of any gender or I can be both genders at the same time. My pronouns now put me at a place where I can decide between different genders. That feels right.
If limitations are to be avoided — or overthrown — why would you tie yourself down to being either a girl or a boy? Why limit your prospects to growing up to be either a man or a woman? If you could be gender-fluid, all doors remain open to you. You don’t have to choose to be a she or a he, you can be they! Your options become unlimited. Subscription to being a woman, canceled.
Another child, 14-year-old Sylvia Chesak, described how she was “uncomfortable” thinking of herself as “just” a “she,” and chose to use “any pronouns” as a result.
These children, or the adults who egg them on, revolt against the sex they say was “assigned” in infancy. The nonsense language of “assigned at birth” doesn’t only make the wrong assumption that sex is nonexistent until it’s decreed by a doctor. It also makes the subtle implication that by doing the “assigning,” a doctor is imposing a category — a limit — on an infant that is inherently restrictive and must be abolished. Physical limitations like a man’s inability to get pregnant don’t matter, just like the physical limitations of a kid with Coke-bottle glasses who wants to become a pilot don’t matter to the adults telling him he can “be whatever he wants to be.”
One mother wrote in Time magazine about choosing not to call her child, named Zoomer, either a boy or a girl because she didn’t want to impose the “chains” and “restrictions of the gender binary.” Even after her child expressed a desire to be treated as a particular sex, the woman insisted on calling her child “they” in the article.
Elsewhere, she says, “The aim isn’t to create a genderless world; it’s to contribute to a genderfull one.” In other words, rejecting the sex binary isn’t about erasing sexuality, but removing all of its categorical limits.
A Swedish mother similarly explained that she refused to acknowledge her child’s sex “just as I don’t want to decide what they grow up to do…”
Telling children they can be and do “anything” helped create a generation petrified of narrowing their own options. They date around indefinitely to keep options open in case something better comes along. In the same way, kids learn to keep open the “option” of being a boy or a girl or a xe. Your natural sex is bad because it limits your possibilities.
Of course, your possibilities become far more limited when a doctor chops off your breasts or genitals or pumps you with hormones that may permanently alter your voice and body and keep you from ever having children. But just examine the messaging those hormones are marketed by: They’re reversible. You can just stop taking them. Here’s what Google would tell a curious teen, though the fine print is far more complicated than the highlighted answer suggests:
The messaging for puberty blockers is even more overt. Delay puberty, St. Louis Children’s Hospital tells kids, if you want “more time to explore [your] options.” What teen wouldn’t want that?
The reality is, of course, that some limits are outside our control. As for the limits we choose by the commitments we make, it’s far more paralyzing to artificially keep every option open than to choose wisely and live within the natural limitations of an ordered life. For kids getting transed into oblivion, that paralysis may be literal. But for all of us, refusing to commit to decisions worthy of our commitment will leave us lonely, exhausted, and bitter. Eventually, people who don’t want to limit their “options” by getting married usually realize one day that they don’t like any of the options left. Those who never put down roots typically end up adrift.
Thankfully, accepting our finitude is liberating. By recognizing the divine order that confines us, we are freed from struggling against it, and freed to do well in the things that are within our power.
In that latter realm, we have the gift of making choices and commitments, not so that we will avoid ever making them, but so that we may choose what is good. From choosing to work hard, to be loyal friends, to profess our faith, to raise children, to be faithful to our spouses, good choices place obligations on us, many of which are permanent. The fulfillment of those obligations enriches our lives, offering a depth of meaning and satisfaction that “keeping our options open” can never provide.
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
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 Presiden
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 Presiden
A California mom is outraged after her daughter’s school district upheld a “parental secrecy policy” allowing school officials to offer gender counseling without informing parents.
Aurora Regino said her 11-year-old daughter’s elementary school in the Chico Unified School District helped her transition from female to male during the last school year, but a guidance counselor kept her in the dark during the entire process.
“During one of the meetings, my daughter told the counselor she wanted to tell me about her new identity. They ignored her request and did nothing to support her in letting me know what was going on at school,” she told board members at a meeting last Wednesday.
The board weighed a measure that would allow for “more parental inclusion” but ultimately voted to keep the existing so-called “parental secrecy policy” in place with a 3-2 vote.
“It was a really sad decision that they made, but unfortunately I wasn’t extremely surprised,” Regino told “Fox & Friends First” host Todd Piro on Tuesday.
“This policy that they have in place, to keep these situations a secret from the family, is incredibly damaging. It was extremely damaging in my case with my daughter. She was bullied and she didn’t have the support that she needed from her family and, also, she was outed within the school with other people within the office knowing her new gender and pronouns that she didn’t even tell them, and she had to go through those feelings of wondering how they even knew all on her own.”
California mom Aurora Regino speaks to her daughter’s school board ahead of a vote offering more transparency for parents. (Chico Unified School Board of Education)
Regino, who is suing the district for keeping her in the dark about her daughter’s identity and transition, lambasted the policy as “incredibly dangerous” and said the struggle to advance parental rights in the area had been hard-fought.
She told Piro her daughter is doing well, but she is determined to speak out on behalf of her family and others with similar experiences, so everyone knows what is taking place in public schools.
“When this originally happened to our family, nobody could’ve ever told me that this was going on, especially at the young age of elementary school,” she said.
The policy that board members voted to uphold, according to Regino, extends to children as young as pre-kindergarten who are approximately five years old and reaches through the 12th grade.
“It’s incredibly damaging that they’re upholding such a crazy policy for such young children,” she continued after a moment, arguing that such a tumultuous time in children and adolescents’ lives is when they need parental guidance the most.
San Francisco State University endorsed the erasure of women this week when its top student affairs administrator released a statement reaffirming the transgender activists who attacked women’s rights speaker Riley Gaines.
Gaines, who rose to fame after speaking up about the unfairness of men masquerading as women to gain an advantage in women’s sports, was assaulted last week after she attempted to address a crowd at a Turning Point USA event about the necessity of female spaces, especially in athletic settings. The chaos ensued mere hours after White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre encouraged radical gender ideologues to “fight back” against people who called for sex-specific spaces.
Footage of the attack on SFSU’s campus shows the former NCAA swimmer being chased by a crowd yelling “trans rights are human rights” and calling the swimmer a “transphobic b-itch.”
Gaines reported that, during the chaos, she was assaulted by at least one man and trapped in a room for three hours. The mob also attempted to extort money from her in exchange for her freedom before she was finally able to escape. Gaines said neither campus police nor attending school administrators took steps to stop the violence.
“This is proof that women need sex-protected spaces,” Gaines tweeted.
Instead of punishing the hysterical students who “ambushed” Gaines, the school and alumni cheered on the angry mob.
Shortly after Gaines was attacked, SFSU’s Vice President for Student Affairs & Enrollment Management Jamillah Moore released an official statement encouraging the students who harassed the speaker.
“Today, San Francisco State finds itself again at the center of a national discussion regarding freedom of speech and expression. Let me begin by saying clearly: the trans community is welcome and belongs at San Francisco State University,” she wrote.
Moore also claimed that the students that are seen on footage roughhousing Gaines chose to “protest peacefully.”
“Thank you to our students who participated peacefully in Thursday evening’s event. It took tremendous bravery to stand in a challenging space. I am proud of the moments when we listened and asked insightful questions. I am also proud of the moments when our students demonstrated the value of free speech and the right to protest peacefully,” Moore said.
Gaines quickly condemned Moore’s statement and confirmed that she plans to sue the school for failing to protect her from violence.
“I’m sorry did this just say PEACEFUL….,” Gaines replied. “I was assaulted. I was extorted and held for ran[s]om. The protestors demanded I pay them if I wanted to make it home safely. I missed my flight home because I was barricaded in a classroom… We must have different definitions of peaceful.”
Just last month, an angry mob of Stanford law students shut down a talk led by Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan with profane insults and threats of violence and death. Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez eventually apologized but the students and administrators who participated in the chaos were left largely unpunished.
Stanford Law School’s Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach, who confronted Duncan about the “harm” she claimed he caused to students, doubled down on their defiant challenge and refused to apologize even after she was put on administrative leave.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
In a surreal moment at the Country Music Awards last week, co-host Kelsea Ballerini joined with several drag performers to belt out a campy version of her single, “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too),” an anthem taking aim at Tennessee laws denying wrongly named “gender-affirming care” for children.
The performance was steeped in queerness, both in the pretend “oppression” of performers literally center stage at a nationally-broadcast awards show and in the academic sense, where drag serves as a kind of postmodern harlequin dance. Choreographed to confront its audience, the unspoken subtext of the number was that it’s time for you to pick a side, and you had better be careful which side you pick.
This was a brazen show of strength. Think “shock and awe,” only with lots of bedazzling.
A Vicious Activist Cult
The left picked their side. And the side they picked was the side of a school shooter who became for them an emblem of their cultural movement: Cast as a victim of “hateful” traditional religious values, a tragic figure broken by her desire to “be seen,” the shooter was sainted, her death a kind of religious redemption play. The narrative coalesced around her supposed suffering because the left was never going to surrender its stranglehold on politicized victimhood. That’s where all the power is.
At the tip of the cultural Marxist spear today is the trans cult. Just a year ago, it was the racialist cult of Black Lives Matter. Their presence is smothering in cultural spaces by design. In fact, their defiance of norms is predictable. After all, over the last seven years or so we’ve seen veneers of civil comradery peeled back, or else worn so thin as to become transparent.
A public pause to mouth the platitudes of togetherness is no longer required in a society so clearly divided along ideological lines. Indeed, such niceties are ridiculed as a sign of weakness or inauthenticity. “Where was your Christian god that day?” the left sneered. “Guess your church can’t protect you, after all.”
In glib taunts that displayed their misunderstanding of God’s earthly role in traditional religions, they laid their ideology raw before the bodies of three 9-year-olds were even cold. And that ideology, like the martyr it created when it embraced the killing of Christians as a blasé bump on the road to their utopia, now wants to be seen. The devil wants his due. There can be no other explanation for the leftist urge to celebrate the “visibility” of a vicious activist cult, or to claim“transgender Americans shape our Nation’s soul,” especially in the immediate wake of the slaughter of Christians by a trans person. Their ostentatious obeisance to these damaged people was a liturgy performed with rapturous audacity on the American stage. It, too, was meant to “be seen.”
Whether it’s a country music drag act, a trans-identified light beer, a trans-allied wizard, or a march by college students demanding the surrender of natural rights to the state, the memetics of cultural Marxism is performative, phony Maoist struggle sessions delivered in swarms to project strength and to dispirit opponents by displaying the inevitability of the mob and its power. It’s a cultural troll. It’s their way of telling you that they are in charge and that you are helpless. You will conform. You must. What else is there?
It was in response to this attempted coup against Western liberal culture and the Enlightenment itself that I’ve written what I believe to be a clarion call for the individualist; but it, too, was something of a performance: It proclaimed, but it didn’t explain.
Cultural Marxism Demands Cultural Hegemony
Briefly, we must reject the premises of the cultural Marxist because cultural Marxism itself cannot live peaceably with federal republicanism or individual autonomy. In fact, it demands the opposite: All things are constrained by the state and its desires. Rule must be universal. Governing individuals is like herding cats, whereas ruling over a collective molded by both state pressures (law, force) and social forces (shame, shunning) is a more gratifying task, especially because the molding, if done well, creates a populace that reflects back the will of the state to itself. The state is now God, and its citizens, made in the state’s image, are its supplicants.
The whole of the cultural Marxist project is to create and maintain cultural hegemony. It’s that sameness we saw in the uniformed Maoists with identical haircuts, and the sameness we see in our own social justice Red Guard with their ubiquitous cotton-candy hair and tribal piercings. There can be no deviation from the new standards, built atop the rubble of old traditions the Marxists seek to destroy. To create the New Man, you must kill off the Olds. To arrive at Year Zero, you must erase all those years that came before it. To save the culture, you must first destroy it completely.
Cultural Marxism is dystopia peddling utopia through grievance narratives and rank emotionalism. It grants the self-styled dispossessed enormous power over those it casts as oppressors, which is itself determined by an intersectional calculus among victim groups.
Yet this power is temporary. Because what its authors seek, ultimately, is authoritarian. The useful idiots will soon be replaced by a ministerial elite, who will guide the filthies during The Great Reset. With policed conformity. Asceticism. Sameness. Every thought you think, every word you utter, and every move you make, must be approved by the state. And you’ll beg them for that privilege.
Blinded By ‘Being Seen’
The useful idiots enjoy wielding power, but they never seem to recognize that once they’ve ground down all opposition and extirpated all difference, once they’ve rooted out every intolerance they can conjure, there are no more battles to fight, no more ideas to be born, no more purpose left to live. To speak in a language they understand, their project reduces us to the means of production, slaves to the most successful oligarchs, earthly deities who delight in our serfdom, providing us safety and sustenance in exchange for conformity, and a surrender of self to a greater good they determine. Enlightened feudalism, in short. And we’re tilling their fields.
But that’s the endgame, and those who’ve embraced the cultural Marxist paradigm can’t see it coming. Their identity politics and the power their “oppression” yields appeal to their egos. They are blinded by the narcissism of “being seen,” and by the thrill of cultural control, however temporary. They revel in bullying.
All of our major institutions have taken up the trans cause for the same reasons they took up the cause of BLM: to gather power, destroy norms, attack traditions, and create the conditions of tribalism that must exist before the collective comes together out of the ruins of universal cancellation. The last man standing is the New Man, the perfect servant to a benevolent master.
Where we once were conceived of statist authoritarianism as an iron boot forever pressing on our necks, today it’s a Christian Louboutin red-bottomed pump, worn by a dude in a lace dress and zebra thong, stomping on our faces forever. Only we’re compelled to dig the kink.
The revolution will be accessorized, and you’ll learn to like it, or else.
Jeff Goldstein is a lapsed academic and writer living in Colorado. He likes tacos, ’79 Cabernets, and his favorite color is magenta.
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 Presiden
Following the Twitter censorship of Federalist CEO Sean Davis, several journalists, and a sitting member of Congress who all reported on the “Trans Day Of Vengeance” after the Nashville Shooting, the Media Research Center (MRC) published a shocking study about “free speech” on Twitter. Despite many claims to the contrary, the MRC found the company has become moreoppressive since Elon Musk acquired the platform.
According to data from the MRC’s Free Speech America’s CensorTrack.org database, there have been 293 cases of documented censorship since Musk took over from Nov. 4, 2022, through Mar. 4, 2023. This is 67 more cases than the 226 instances reported by CensorTrack.org from pre-Musk Twitter during the same time last year.
The Media Research Center also found Twitter’s methods of censorship recently became more severe. “In 245 of the 293 (84%) documented cases of censorship on CensorTrack.org, Twitter locked users’ accounts, and in nearly all cases users were required to delete the content to regain access to their accounts,” reports the MRC. “Under the old Twitter regime, by contrast, only 136 of the 226 (60%) documented cases of censorship consisted of locked accounts.”
An astounding 62 percent of the censorship cases under Musk’s leadership involved tweets critical of transgenderism. “At least 182 of the 293 (62%) documented cases of censorship recorded in the CensorTrack.org database for Twitter under Musk involved users being censored for speech critical of the left’s woke ‘transgender’ narrative,” writes the MRC.
On Tuesday, Federalist CEO Sean Davis, other journalists, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene were locked out of Twitter for reporting on the “Trans Day Of Vengeance” following the deaths of three children and three staff members at a Christian school in Tennessee at the hands of a transgender shooter.
Twitter claimed Davis’ objectively true tweet reporting on the panned “Trans Day Of Vengeance” violated the app’s rules “against violent speech.” Not only did Twitter lock Davis out of his account, but it also defamed him by falsely claiming he had “threatened, incited, glorified, or expressed a desire for violence.” “Twitter has a right to ban me for whatever reason it wants, but it doesn’t have a right to viciously lie about me,” Davis wrote, addressing the ban.
Davis has also been subjected to Twitter’s insidious shadow banning that carried over from the platform’s previous regime. And Federalist Senior Editor John Davidson has been locked out of his account for a full year because he tweeted the biological fact that Rachel Levine, the Biden administration’s transgender assistant secretary for health, is a man. Both Davis and Davidson have made appeals since Musk purchased the company over, but both remain censored on Twitter.
A year ago, Musk claimed he saw Twitter as the “de facto town square” and that “failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy.” Unfortunately, as the anecdotal evidence and data from MRC show, Musk’s “free speech absolutist” Twitter rebrand has failed to live up to the hype.
“No amount of lofty rhetoric or grandiose plans from Musk about his love of free speech and facts can compete with the cold, hard reality that the service he owns doesn’t just oppose free speech; Twitter detests it,” wrote Davis.
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
Talk about bad luck! What are the odds of the Nashville school shooter being a transgendered person who is ALSO mentally ill?
Arguably, there were hints.
In a form of modern Lysenkoism, young transgenders overwhelmingly come from homes with signs that say: “In This House, We Believe: Black Lives Matter, Women’s Rights Are Human Rights, No Human Is Illegal, Science Is Real, Love Is Love, Kindness Is Everything.”
Specifically, a study of adolescent and young adult transgenders found that the adults in the home who identify as “parents” were 91.4% white; 70.9% had a bachelor’s degree or higher and 85.9% favored gay marriage. Parent respondents were 91.7% female.
This is a weirdly specific profile. Only about a third of Americans have B.A.s; a third of the population is white and female, and about a third supported gay marriage (until it was made a capital offense to oppose it — changing even Barack Obama’s mind!)
How many other biological conditions are correlated with political ideology?
I guess there’s “long-haulCOVID.” So there are two biological FACTS where the main vector is: Liberal White Women. And of course, innumerable studies have shown that mental illness is far more prevalent in liberals than conservatives, which may be the umbrella condition.
On the other hand, counterfactual self-identifications are popping up all over. For example, the media are currently self-identifying as purveyors of information, and Trump is self-identifying as a bad-ass tough guy who can get the job done.
For nearly two weeks now, the media have produced wall-to-wall coverage of … a rumor started by Trump himself. On March 18, he posted on his social media site: “THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE & FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!”
Tuesday came and went without his supposed antagonist, New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, making any arrest, but the media can’t stop talking about Trump. (You ever get the impression that Trump and the media are working together?)
In response to the press’s flood-the-zone coverage of a rumor started by someone they call a liar, Trump has been self-identifying as a total stud, the hero who built the wall and kept the country open while others quaked in the face of COVID!
Last week, he posted a picture of himself — carefully selected for its bad-assedness — swinging a baseball bat next to a photo of Bragg.
What justifies this tough-guy image?
I agree 100% with the issues Trump ran on in 2016, but this is the guy who claimed to have a bone spur in his foot to avoid actual military service.
The complete opposite of his image on “The Apprentice,” barking “You’re fired!” at hapless employees, the real Trump couldn’t fire anyone. He asked former campaign aide-turned-lobbyist Corey Lewandowski to fire his attorney general, Jeff Sessions.
A slew of other Trump administration employees were fired by tweet — just the way George Patton did! These include: White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. He fired his FBI director, James Comey, by handing the dismissal letter to the White House press corps before telling Comey, who found out by watching TV (in this one case, style points to Trump).
Sitting with Democrats and Republicans at the White House, Trump wimped out on the Second Amendment, announcing that he supported a whole laundry list of anti-gun proposals, including taking arms away without due process. He even mocked Republicans for being “afraid of the NRA” — unlike him, the tough guy willing to swing a baseball bat at a photo. The NRA, he said, has “power over you people, but they have less power with me.”
A few days later, the NRA stopped by the Oval Office — and Trump retracted it all, tweeting out his unwavering support for the Second Amendment.
He released prisoners because Kim Kardashian told him to, bombed Syria because his daughter told him to, and shut down the country because a scaredy-cat cable news host told him to.
This is the guy who sells superhero NFTs of himself? Where does he get the idea that people see him as a macho fighter, as opposed to a spaghetti-spined nitwit who couldn’t stand up to girls like Ivanka and Paul Ryan? (Hey, whatever happened to that wall?)
As soon as there was blowback on the ridiculous baseball bat meme, here was Trump, backpedaling as fast as his bone-spurred feet would let him. He told some cockamamie story about how he never even noticed the picture! (Because Trump isn’t at all obsessed with his own image.)
I’m not allowed to offer a professional opinion without conducting an examination, but based on the symptoms, there’s a good chance that Trump is a liberal white woman.
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 Presiden
It’s no secret many on the left love to politicize tragedies, but the reaction from some to Monday’s deadly shooting at a Christian school in Nashville has reached a whole new level of malevolent. Local authorities have identified the shooter as Audrey Hale, a 28-year-old woman who pretended to be male and had reportedly attended the school years prior. After entering the Covenant School shortly after 10 a.m., the shooter killed six people before being gunned down and killed by police. Among the victims are three 9-year-old children and three school staff members.
Nashville Police Chief John Drake characterized the shooting as a “targeted attack” and said authorities discovered “a manifesto” and detailed maps of the school showing points of entry. Drake also confirmed “there is some theory” to the idea that Hale’s transgender identity contributed to her decision to target the school but that authorities are still investigating the motive. Police said Hale was considering “another location” to target, but after “a threat assessment by the suspect [and] too much security, [she] decided not to.”
Immediately following the attack, leftists began using the horrific tragedy as an opportunity to promote their radical agenda and spew insensitive remarks.
Joe Biden
During moments of crisis, Americans should be able to count on their president to put aside politics and bring the country together. But not when that president is Joe Biden. After talking about how much he loves chocolate chip ice cream on Monday, Biden used the Nashville shooting to push for more gun control.
“The shooter … reportedly had two assault weapons and a pistol. … So, I call on Congress again to pass my assault weapons ban,” Biden said.
Biden on Nashville shooting: "It's heartbreaking, a family's worst nightmare…we have to do more to stop gun violence…I call on Congress again to pass my assault weapons ban."pic.twitter.com/10sArjE8mC
During her remarks in Monday’s White House press briefing, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre not only used the shooting to call for increased gun control, but appeared to blame the tragedy on Republicans.
“How many more children have to be murdered before Republicans in Congress will step up and act to pass the assault-weapons ban?” she asked.
Jean-Pierre weighs in on school shooting in Nashville:
"How many more children have to be murdered before Republicans in Congress will step up and act to pass the assault weapons ban?pic.twitter.com/bQp6S3Q4nu
ABC News Senior National Correspondent Terry Moran wasted no time in seemingly tying the shooting to Tennessee Republicans, who recently passed legislation protecting minors from experimental transgender surgeries, wrong-sex hormones, and drag shows. After providing viewers with details on the shooting, Moran immediately segued into discussing the legislation Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee approved earlier this month.
IT BEGINS: ABC's Terry Moran ties the Nashville school shooting to Tennessee's recently-passed legislation banning the hormonization and mutilation of minors. The shooter was 28. pic.twitter.com/MfKdOpQZIf
Washington Post contributor and former New York Times columnist Mike Wise went out of his way to thank a Twitter user, who referred to Tennessee as “an intolerant state that brainwashes children through religious indoctrination.”
“This is as deep and real as it gets. Thank you,” Wise wrote.
A Washington Post contributor just thanked someone who posted that the Christian school in Nashville that was shot up today was a religious indoctrination center pic.twitter.com/U6hW9AP6C4
The Virginia Democrat blasted Republicans with an unserious and bad-faith attack, saying the GOP thinks drag shows pose a greater physical danger to children than guns do.
Benjamin Ryan
In a now-deleted tweet, independent reporter and NBC News contributor Benjamin Ryan attempted to correlate the shooting with the fact that The Daily Wire, a conservative news outlet, is based in Nashville.
“Nashville is home to the Daily Wire, a hub of anti-trans activity by @MattWalshBlog, @BenShapiro, and @MichaelJKnowles,” Ryan wrote.
Anna Skinner
Newsweek Senior Writer Anna Skinner spent her Monday afternoon writing an article titled, “Tennessee Republicans’ Ban on Drag Shows Mocked After Mass Shooting,” in which she spun the news to be about bashing Tennessee Republicans and lamented that so-called “assault weapons” are still legal in the state.
“Tennessee Republican legislators are getting slammed after at least three children and three adults were killed in a mass shooting at a Nashville private school on Monday,” Skinner wrote. “Twitter users assailed state GOP officials in the wake of the bloodshed.”
Kyle Griffin
MSNBC Executive Producer Kyle Griffin published a tweet evoking similar absurdity.
Hayes Brown
MSNBC Opinion Writer Hayes Brown took a page from Griffin’s playbook and politicize the tragedy. In his column, Hayes bizarrely argued that “much of [America’s] gun policy is presaged on the idea that guns are cool,” and “[t]hat was the unspoken understanding behind the rapid spread of the AR-15.”
Republicans “think that their toys, their totems of masculinity, their props for playing the hero, are more important than the lives lost,” he wrote.
While now titled, “The gap between GOP gun rights fantasy and Nashville’s reality,” the article originally displayed the headline, “6 are dead in Nashville. Let’s revisit how much the Tennessee GOP loves guns.”
— James Lindsay, ultra-low social credit (@ConceptualJames) March 27, 2023
Josephine Harvey
In a so-called “news” article titled, “Gun-Loving GOP Congressman From Nashville Torched For Response To School Shooting,” Huffington Post Senior Reporter Josephine Harvey attempted to create a controversy surrounding GOP Rep. Andy Ogles — who represents the district that includes the Covenant School — by bringing up a 2021 Christmas photo of Ogles’ family holding firearms.
In her article, Harvey claimed the picture is a “gun-glorifying Christmas photo” and went on to cite tweets from leftists attacking Ogles for posting it on Facebook well over a year ago.
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
It’s difficult to fathom that several families started their day with one less precious child around the breakfast table this morning. It’s also hard to fathom responding to that reality — caused by a transgender mass shooter who left three 9-year-olds and several adults dead in a “targeted attack” at a Christian elementary school — by confessing you misgendered the murderer and blasting your political opponents over the same tired gun-control talking points.
But behind all the partisan smoke and mirrors of the Nashville story is an unmistakable and unavoidable reality: Our modern mental health crisis is out of control.
You don’t even have to dig into the glaring transgender element of the case to acknowledge this fact. No mentally healthy person blasts their way into a building of defenseless children to murder them in cold blood, much less devises a detailed plan literally mapping out how to make it happen. Transgender perpetrator or not, this sick pattern has repeated itself with unsettling frequency.
And though President Joe Biden, his press secretary, and other politicians disgustingly spun the attack to blame so-called “assault weapons” and imply conservatives are complicit in mass murder, the simple reality is that over the past handful of decades, firearms have changed very little. Meanwhile, mental illness has proliferated and our culture’s conception of it dangerously evolved.
That’s why the transgender identity of the shooter can’t be fully ignored — not for those who truly care to understand the gnarly roots of this violence. Despite the protestations of LGBT apologists, gender dysphoria and trans-related narcissism are inextricable from America’s broader mental health emergency.
A Celebration of Sickness
The psychological pendulum has swung woefully far: Illness that was once stigmatized, often to the unhelpful point of suppressing it instead of encouraging the sufferers to seek help, is now celebrated and socially encouraged. If it isn’t teachers brainwashing impressionable kids with sexual confusion and instructing them to keep it secret from their parents, it’s parents catechizing their own children in fallacies. Spend just a fewminutesonTikTok, and you’ll get a glimpse of the affected masses — self-loathing, split personalities, nonsensical pronouns and sexual identities, desperate androgyny, narcissism, bipolar outbursts, and more.
Examples of encouraged mental illness abound — even medical doctors fuel delusion by pretending sex is “assigned” and asking for patients’ preferred pronouns — but here’s one directly in response to the shooting. A group called the Trans Resistance Network made the shooter out to be a victim, blaming the “avalanche” of legislation seeking to protect minors from chemical and surgical castration and accusing conservatives of “nothing less than the genocidal eradication of trans people from society.” Many trans-identifying people suffer from “anxiety, depression, [and] thoughts of suicide,” the group correctly noted, but then associated these struggles not with broader mental unhealth but with “lack of acceptance” of gender dysphoria from “religious institutions.”
Note the group’s promotion of mental instability:
It is a testament to the inner strength and beauty of transgender people, that despite the … constant anti-trans bigotry and violence, so many of us continue to persevere, survive, and even thrive. We will not be eradicated or erased.
The same can’t be said for the innocent lives that were snuffed out in an instant in the Nashville shooting. Where derangement is considered “inner strength and beauty,” mental sickness thrives, and now children, not angry activists, are the ones who have been erased.
At least in part. There’s more to the story for these Christian families, who can cling to the assurance that for a follower of Jesus to be absent from his body is to be present with the Lord. This violent and sin-marred world is not our home, and it’s the closest to hell Christians will ever get. No religious hatred, mental affliction, or targeted attack can eradicate that sure hope.
A Call to Action
Those truths aren’t just a comfort for the broken-hearted, however. They’re a call to action for redeemed sinners. With a focus on eternity, we’re still sojourners here, surrounded by tormented souls with not only deep spiritual needs but physical and mental ones. And so we must fight.
We must fight against the spiritual forces that discourage us and tempt us to doubt and deny truth, and against agents of the devil who seduce our children with sexual fantasies. We must fight for the beauty and sacredness of human life. For the mental and physical health of those within our care. And for the glorious truth of the gospel and the immutable nature of the sexes that leads to human flourishing.
This fight requires compassion. But it also requires that we don’t forfeit the definition of that word to medical professionals who profit from carving up children, or to Marxist ideologues, or to a bad-faith press. Instead, follow the only perfect example: When Jesus saw the “helpless” crowds, “like sheep without a shepherd,” He was “movedwith compassion” toward them. He engaged. He healed.
May He be the source of our compassion as we engage our modern mental affliction, and may He provide the healing we desperately need.
Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
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 Donald Trump.
After naming Richard/Rachel Levine, a man who parades around in ladyface, as one of its 2022 “Women of the Year,” USA Today is back to remind us that it doesn’t know — or doesn’t care — what a woman is.
Earlier this week, the outlet released its list of 2023 honorees, and the name getting the most attention is that of Minnesota state Rep. Leigh Finke, a pink-haired man who dresses like a woman and has been in office for less than 12 weeks.
Nothing says “we respect women” like elbowing them out of their own awards to laud a man who makes a mockery of womanhood. Finke isn’t the only man coopting the “woman of the year” pedestal. Here are eight other men who have displaced women at their own game.
Rachel Levine
Finke’s predecessor as USA Today’s token male Woman of the Year, Rachel (formerly known as Richard) Levine, failed upward into a cushy Biden administration gig after condemning thousands of nursing home residents to die of Covid in Pennsylvania.
The Federalist Senior Editor John Daniel Davidson is still locked out of Twitter for clearly acknowledging that Levine is a man.
Caitlyn Jenner
Caitlyn Jenner, formerly known as Bruce, was a recipient of one of Glamour Magazine’s Women of the Year awards in 2015. Jenner, a 6’2” former Olympian who began going by “Caitlyn” in 2015, came away with the title of the magazine’s “Transgender Champion.” (One of Jenner’s co-recipients that year was the now-disgraced girlboss fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, whatever that says about the awards committee’s wisdom.)
After Glamour’s decision to name Jenner, a man, among its “women of the year,” James Smith, whose police officer wife was posthumously recognized by the magazine after she died rescuing people from the World Trade Center on 9/11, returned his wife’s award, calling Jenner’s recognition an “insult.”
“Was there no woman in America, or the rest of the world, more deserving than this man?” he asked in an open letter to the magazine.
Laverne Cox
The year before Jenner scored Glamour’s “Woman of the Year” title, the magazine handed it to another man: Roderick Laverne Cox, who now goes by “Laverne.”
Cox’s award from Glamour followed his June 2014 Time Magazine cover, a glowing profile that openly discussed the trans lobby’s attempt to coopt the gay rights movement and boasted about “Fixing Nature’s Mistake.”
MJ Rodriguez
Among Time Magazine’s “Women of the Year” in 2022 was MJ Rodriguez (born Michael Anthony Rodriguez Jr.), a male stage performer who “identifies as an AfroLatina trans woman,” according to Time.
Over the course of the same year, Rodriguez was lauded as the first transgender entertainer to receive a Golden Globe and an Emmy nomination for lead acting.
Laurel Hubbard
Before he began taking experimental hormones, Hubbard competed in men’s weightlifting. After he competed against women at the 2020 Olympics as part of New Zealand’s team, finishing dead last in the super-heavyweight category, Hubbard was nonetheless named “sportswoman of the year” by New Zealand’s University of Otago. The accolade has been around since 1908.
Ebony Harper
California’s Assembly District 7 named Ebony Harper, a man, as its 2021 Woman of the Year. This year, Harper also received a “California Woman Making History” recognition from Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis. He’s the executive director of a group called “California TRANScends.”
Cecilia Chung
Several years earlier, in 2014, another California district honored a man who goes by the name Cecilia Chung as its “Woman of the Year.” Phil Ting, San Francisco’s assemblyman, bestowed the award on him a year after Chung successfully pressured San Francisco officials to make their city the first in the country to pay for uninsured residents’ mutilative sex surgeries.
Bonus: Lia Thomas
Lia Thomas, a man who competed under his given name, William, through his sophomore year of college, was nominated by the University of Pennsylvania for the NCAA’s 2022 Woman of the Year award. While Thomas wasn’t ultimately selected for the national recognition, his nomination kept female Penn students from being tapped — just like his national championship in the women’s 500-yard freestyle a few months earlier displaced his female competitors from the top of the winners’ podium.
After the controversial championship, NBC News was caught doctoring Thomas’s face to look less masculine.
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
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.
Tennessee Senate Republicans passed a bill Monday that could block transgender people from changing their listed sex on government-issued documents including driver’s licenses and birth certificates. The proposed legislation, known as House Bill 239 – Senate Bill 1440, defines the term “sex” for use in the Tennessee Code as a “person’s immutable biological sex as determined by anatomy and genetics existing at the time of birth and evidence of a person’s biological sex.” It also clarifies that “evidence of a person’s biological sex” includes, but is not limited to, “a government-issued identification document that accurately reflects a person’s sex listed on the person’s original birth certificate.”
While it cleared the state Senate, the bill stalled in the state House due to potential budgetary impacts. In a floor speech Monday, its sponsor, Republican state Sen. Kerry Roberts, argued the legislation promotes “consistency” in the state code, rejecting concerns brought in a fiscal note, Axios reported. Krista Lee Carsner, executive director of the Tennessee General Assembly’s fiscal review committee, noted the proposed language “may result in increases to state and local expenditures associated with compliance measures, potential civil litigation and could jeopardize federal funding; however, due to multiple unknown factors, a precise fiscal impact cannot be determined.”
Tennessee Senate Republicans approved a bill defining “biological sex.” (David Underwood/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
In the fiscal note, Carsner says the state Department of Education asserts that the legislation could risk federal funding awards for several programs amounting to nearly $1.3 billion in the 2023-2024 fiscal year. The state Department of Health, which receives more than $750 million in federal grant funding, notes Title X; Women, Infants, and Children; and various other federal grants specify an alternate definition of “sex.” The state could lose funding if found out of compliance with federal requirements.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee recently approved legislation restricting drag shows, gender reassignment surgeries for minors. (AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)
In a statement Monday, Human Rights Campaign condemned the Tennessee Senate for passing the bill.
“Extremist Tennessee Senators are continuing their assault on LGBTQ+ Tennesseans’ ability to live their lives openly and honestly,” the advocacy group’s legal director, Sarah Warbelow, said. “This is their latest cruel attempt to stigmatize, marginalize and erase the LGBTQ+ community, particularly transgender Tennesseans. Let’s be clear: the goal of this bill is to exclude the LGBTQ+ community from nondiscrimination protections in the state of Tennessee and to perpetuate a false narrative of who transgender people are.”
Transgender advocates have condemned the Tennessee bill defining sex. (Getty)
Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has not said publicly whether he supports the bill. However, earlier this month, Lee did sign legislation banning healthcare providers in the state from legally prescribing puberty blockers or hormones for minors and performing gender transition surgeries for minors.
He also signed off on a law that prohibits drag shows from public property within 1,000 feet of schools, public parks or places of worship and limits them to age-restricted venues. The law includes criminal provisions for “adult cabaret performances” held in public areas where they could be seen by children. Both laws take effect on July 1.
Fox News Digital reached out to Lee’s office Wednesday for comment regarding House Bill 239 – Senate Bill 1440.
Danielle Wallace is a reporter for Fox News Digital covering politics, crime, police and more. Story tips can be sent to danielle.wallace@fox.com and on Twitter: @danimwallace.
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 Donald Trump.
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 Donald Trump.
Pro-life activist Abby Johnson addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 2, 2023, at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Washington, D.C. | The Christian Post/Nicole Alcindor
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — A women-centered panel at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference focused on defending human dignity and how the panelists believe the culture has lost sight of God’s intended vision for humankind.
The panel, “Some Tuff Mutha,” featured pro-life advocate Abby Johnson, founder of And Then There Were None; Penny Nance, CEO and president of the conservative group Concerned Women for America; and Kimberly Fletcher of Moms for America. Radio host Sandy Rios served as the moderator for the panel.
One of the ways the panelists believe human dignity has been lost is through the practice of abortion, which has killed 63.5 million Americans since it was legalized in 1973.
Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood clinic director (read more about her here and here), drew attention to the Food and Drug Administration modifying restrictions on abortion pills and enabling women to obtain prescriptions for the drugs at major retail pharmacies. Under the Biden administration, the FDA “greenlit abortion into the home of every woman across the country,” she said.
“We have created abortion facilities in every woman’s home across the country,” Johnson added, lamenting the risk this imposes on women.
The former abortion clinic director noted that the full extent of the ramifications of the FDA’s decision is still unknown, highlighting the lack of medical supervision surrounding at-home chemical abortions. According to a 2009 study, the complication rate for chemical abortions is four times higher than for surgical abortions.
Johnson cited several concerns she has with the modified regulations, such as women potentially hemorrhaging to death in their bathroom. She also emphasized that women will be looking into the toilet to see the remains of their “fully-formed baby.”
“And then they’re going to have to make a decision,” she said. “‘What do I do with this fully-formed baby? What do I do with this child? Do I scoop the child out of the toilet? Do I take the child to be buried? Do I flush my child down the toilet?’”
The pro-life advocate raised further concerns about the psychological impact of seeing their child’s remains.
Nance added that abortion is the “ultimate disrespect of human dignity,” but stressed that God still loves and can redeem women who have had abortions.
The conservative leader pointed to another loss of human dignity, criticizing the Biden administration’s treatment of women. She asserted that the Administration seemingly believes “men can do everything better than women, including being women,” highlighting the appointment of Rachel (Richard) Levine, a man who identifies as a woman, to the position of U.S. Assistant Secretary of Health. In 2022, USA Today listed Levine, a man who identifies as a woman, as its Woman of the Year.
Nance said CWA intends to “stand up for the unique dignity of American women” and encourages other Americans to do the same.
“We are fearfully and wonderfully made as male and female,” she said. “That is the ultimate disrespect, to deny who we are and how God created us in that unique, dignified position as American women.”
Speaking about public education, Fletcher shared how, when she talks to mothers, she tells them how “parental rights are fundamental and supreme.”
“We as parents have got to stand up,” she said. “First of all, we have to know what’s coming our way.”
Fletcher noted that mothers are attending school board meetings, reading the sexual content in books made accessible to their children, and being lectured for sharing such things out loud. She also pointed to incidents involving comprehensive sex education being taught to early elementary school students or schools instructing young children about changing their sex.
The parental advocate asserted that conservative Christian women haven’t been voting or paying enough attention to what’s happening at their school boards. This demographic of women, she added, can “repair” what’s wrong in the education system.
In terms of fixing what they see as negatively impacting the culture, Johnson said God wants His people to participate in “daily victories,” imploring those gathered to use their “voice” and “speak boldly” on these issues.
Nance seconded Johnson’s challenge, adding that the “Holy Spirit is alive and well,” and whether it be at school board meetings or outside abortion facilities, she called on everyone to speak the “truth” and fulfill God’s command to “care for the least of these.”
The project creates video game-like avatars with which people can envision specific body parts they want to target with surgery to make themselves look more masculine or feminine.
The National Institutes of Health is funding a study to create 3D avatars for transgender-identifying people to envision the body they imagine they should have and then medically alter their figure accordingly. Another NIH-funded project aims to allow trans folks to adopt a voice congruent with their sex-denying identity. Multiple taxpayer-funded studies on transgender issues focus on “intersectionality,” disparity, and HIV.
The NIH Reporter database, which lists active federally funded research projects, shows 75 with “transgender” in the title, totaling more than $26 million of taxpayers’ money annually.
The NIH is wasting taxpayer dollars on a project titled “Personalized 3D avatar tool development for measurement of body perception across gender identities,” which purports to help people with gender dysphoria by mapping the difference between their actual physical embodiment and what they believe their body to be. But instead, it indulges their illness by defying science and denying the immutability of sex.
The tool (a prototype is pictured here) would scan individuals to create personalized 3D visualizations with which they can interact on mobile and desktop devices. Those behind the project say they are trying to create technology that “can potentially improve clinical outcomes by identifying specific sets of body parts as targets for treatments to improve body congruence.” In other words, the research project will create video game-like avatars with which people can envision specific body parts they want to target with surgery — which includes removing healthy organs, shaving facial bones, and more — to make themselves look more masculine or feminine.
The study is at the University of Toronto, Canada, and has received $288,000 so far. It began in 2021 and is scheduled to run through 2024.
Other Taxpayer-Funded Research on Ideal Voice, Acne, and Sex Ed
Another taxpayer-funded study addresses how transgender-identifying people experience challenges in adopting a voice characteristic of their so-called identity. Trans individuals “report that producing a voice congruent with their gender identity is crucial to affirming their gender identity. There are a variety of gender affirming services available, but medical interventions, such as surgery or hormones do not … ensure satisfaction with vocal gender.”
A third NIH-funded study looks at acne in the trans-identifying population. “Little is known about the interplay of endogenous and exogenous hormones on acne incidence, severity, impact, treatment, and experience,” the summary says.
NIH is also funding “A fully functional online interactive sexual education tool” for “transgender and gender expansive (TGE) youth.” Such children “are at high risk of several sexual health outcomes that have life-long impacts including sexually transmitted infections, early, unwanted pregnancies, and unwanted sexual contact/intimate partner violence. … [C]urrent educational and clinical structures largely ignore their experiences,” according to the project summary. The tool will clarify “that gender-affirming medical interventions do not prevent unintended pregnancies.” It will also address what it calls “difficulties navigating partner consent because it is often described in heteronormative, binary terms in sexual education classes.”
The bluehead wrasse, a small fish and sequential hermaphrodite, meaning it contains both types of reproductive organs, will be the subject of another taxpayer-funded transgender study: “Organisms that naturally undergo sex transformations in response to changes in their social environment provide excellent systems in which to investigate mechanisms of behavioral sex specification.” Adult female bluehead wrasses can rapidly switch sex in response to changes in social structure, according to the project.
Four ongoing NIH-funded studies related to transgenderism mention “disparities” in their project titles and three mention “stigma.” NIH even issued a Notice of Special Interest in understanding how so-called “intersectional stigmas” harm health. About half of all NIH-funded transgender research, including that which has been completed, relates to higher rates of HIV among the transgender population, totaling approximately $80 million since 1985.
Despite all the possible health risks, President Joe Biden has issued executiveorders charging “HHS to work with states to promote expanded access to gender-affirming care.” The administration has issued directives that federal health insurance benefits must “provide comprehensive gender-affirming care.”
Taxpayers are already paying for transgender procedures, as they are covered by some insurers and Medicaid in some states.
Woke Waste
House Budget Committee Republicans have announced “woke waste” is among the spending cuts they want in a debt limit deal. According to the House Budget Committee:
The recent omnibus included millions of dollars in funding for woke policies that American taxpayers shouldn’t be footing the bill for, including $1.2 million for “LGBTQIA+ Pride Centers,” $1 million for a space for “gender-expansive people of color” … and $750,000 for “Transgender and Gender nonconforming and Intersex (TGI) immigrant women in Los Angeles.”
Under the Republican plan, billions of dollars in savings would also come from ending the Environmental Protection Agency’s “environmental justice” programs, enacting new work requirements for welfare, halting Biden’s student loan forgiveness, and getting back unspent Covid-19 pandemic funds.
This byline marks several different individuals, granted anonymity in cases where publishing an article on The Federalist would credibly threaten close personal relationships, their safety, or their jobs. We verify the identities of those who publish anonymously with The Federalist.
NIH is funding many studies premised upon how little research has been conducted on the long-term health risks of cross-sex hormones. Yet HHS is pushing for more transgender ‘care.’
As the Biden administration pushes the Department of Health and Human Services to make “gender-affirming health care” more widely available, HHS’s own National Institutes of Health is funding multiple studies premised upon how little research has been conducted on the long-term risks of taking cross-sex hormones and whether they improve mental health. The NIH research on transgender issues also emphasizes intersectionality and about half has been on HIV prevention.
The NIH Reporter database, which lists active federally funded research projects, shows 74 with “transgender” in the title, totaling more than $26 million of taxpayers’ money annually. Several NIH-funded studies examine specific health risks of cross-sex hormone treatment — such as associated bone loss and possible increased risk of thrombosis, drug overdose, heart attack, and stroke.
Onlyafew studies evaluate the risk of infertility, even though “the impact of long-term cross-sex hormone therapy on reproductive health is largely unknown,” as one such project states and experts have warned. In contrast, seven studies examine stigma and disparities in health care for transgender people, in response to NIH’s Notice of Special Interest in understanding the role of alleged intersectional stigmas and how they harm health.
Manystudiesaddresshigherincidence of sexually transmitted infections in transgender people, and whether hormone therapy might increase that risk. About half of all NIH-funded research on transgender health, including that which has been completed, relates to HIV prevention among the transgender population, totaling approximately $80 million since 1985.
Transgender males “have some of the highest concentrated HIV epidemics in the world, with a pooled global prevalence of 19% and a 49-fold higher odds ratio of acquiring HIV than non-transgender adults,” according to one project summary. Behavioral factors contribute, another project says, but the role of sex hormones needs further study, since they “are known to modulate the immune response, resulting in changes in host susceptibility to pathogens, vaccine efficacy and drug metabolism.”
Many Ongoing Projects Highlight Lack of Research
While suicide prevention is often cited as a major reason to give dysphoric children puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, only one of the current studies is focused specifically on suicide risk, although several emphasize the lack of long-term studies of cross-sex hormones administered to children and their relation to mental health.
Medical professionals “say more specific research is needed to determine whether medically transitioning as a minor reduces suicidal thoughts and suicides compared with those who socially transition or wait before starting treatment,” according to Reuters.
One NIH-funded project summary acknowledges that the long-term effect of puberty suppression on mental health needs further study and will evaluate children already taking puberty blockers.
During puberty, hormones change the structure and organization of the brain. Puberty blockers “may also disrupt puberty-signaled neural maturation in ways that can undermine mental health gains over time and impact quality of life in other ways,” the Nationwide Children’s Hospital project summary says. “The overall impacts” of puberty blockers “have not been systematically studied,” the summary says.
One of the larger NIH-funded transgender studies, funded at $743,000 annually, is at Boston Children’s Hospital. It notes, “Little is known [emphasis added] about how pubertal blockade, the first step in the medical management of a young transgender adolescent, affects bone health and psychological well-being. … In an exploratory aim, we will also consider the effect of pubertal blockade on anxiety, depression, and health-related quality of life.”
Another research project, “Psychological consequences of medical transition in transgender youth,” begun last year at Princeton University and anticipated to end in 2025, notes the lack of quality research in this area:
Five studies to date have longitudinally examined the relationship between one or both of these interventions [puberty suppression and hormone therapy] and mental health in transgender youth. However, these studies have had relatively small samples, none have been able to isolate the effects of endocrine interventions, none have included a cisgender [non-transgender] comparison group, and none have examined the mechanisms by which endocrine interventions might improve mental health.
A longitudinal study that began in 2015 and will run through at least 2026 acknowledges, “Transgender children and adolescents are a poorly understood and a distinctly understudied population in the United States. … Continuing our current research is imperative to expand the scant evidence-base currently guiding the clinical care of TGD [transgender and gender diverse] youth and thus, is of considerable public health significance.”
As the summary of one ongoing NIH-funded research project on sex hormones’ effects on the developing brain says, “There is little to no empirical data guiding clinical practices” of cross-sex hormone therapy in early pubertal adolescents, “highlighting the need for further research to address the critical knowledge gap.” The research, funded at $3 million so far to Stanford University, “will provide a much-needed foundation for understanding the longitudinal impact of treatments that are already being used [emphasis added] in clinical settings.”
The project will elucidate “how sex hormone therapy alters sex-specific risk for disease … and [its] impact on neural networks implicated in psychiatric disorders.” The research proposed “has never been conducted in early pubertal adolescents,” the summary reads.
NIH Acknowledges Limited Evidence, FDA Hasn’t Approved
The NIH, the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, told Reuters that “the evidence is limited on whether these treatments pose short- or long-term health risks for transgender and other gender-diverse adolescents.” Additionally, the Food and Drug Administration has not approved puberty blockers and sex hormones for children’s transgender medical interventions. As Reuters reported:
No clinical trials have established their safety for such off-label use. The drugs’ long-term effects on fertility and sexual function remain unclear. And in 2016, the FDA ordered makers of puberty blockers to add a warning about psychiatric problems to the drugs’ label after the agency received several reports of suicidal thoughts in children who were taking them. More broadly, no large-scale studies have tracked people who received gender-related medical care as children to determine how many remained satisfied with their treatment as they aged and how many eventually regretted transitioning.
Countries such as Finland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have begun to limit children’s access to transgender health interventions. Early, foundational research from 2011 on transgender medical interventions has been criticized as failing to meet basic research standards.
Before 2012, “there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty-one ever having developed gender dysphoria at all,” according to Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage.” Studies show most children grow out of gender dysphoria, Shrier says.“There are no good long-term studies indicating that either gender dysphoria or suicidality diminishes after medical transition,” according to Shrier.
Meanwhile, despite all the possible health risks, President Joe Biden has issued executiveorders charging “HHS to work with states to promote expanded access to gender-affirming care.” The administration has issued directives that federal health insurance benefits must “provide comprehensive gender-affirming care.” The administration also opposes “conversion therapy — efforts to suppress or change an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.”
Taxpayers are already paying for transgender procedures, as they are covered by some insurers and Medicaid in some states.
I’ll ask again. WHY ARE THESE MENTAL PATIENT LEFTEST SO HYPER ABOUT MUTILATING AMERICA’S CONFUSED CHILDREN? WHAT IS THEIR END GAME?
HHS’s Office of Population Affairs, which is overseen by transgender Dr. Rachel Levine, states there’s no debate: “Research demonstrates that gender-affirming care improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse children and adolescents.” Other proponents acknowledge a lack of research on these hormones’ effect on brain development, but say the pros outweigh the cons.
Growing Transgender Identification
The number of transgender adults in the U.S. is estimated at 1.4 million to 2 million, with an estimated 150,000 to 300,000 transgender children. The number of American children who started on puberty blockers or hormones totaled 17,683 from 2017 to 2021 and has been increasing, according to Reuters.
From 2019 to 2021, at least 56 patients ages 13 to 17 had genital surgeries, and from 2019 to 2021, at least 776 children that age had mastectomies, not including procedures that weren’t covered by insurance, according to Reuters.
The transgender surgery industry grosses more than $2 billion annually and expects to double that by 2030.
Debate Among Medication Providers
“Puberty delay medications are safe and effective,”according to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), a pro-transgender organization that sets standards for trans medical interventions. “Every person, including every TGD person, deserves an opportunity to be their true selves and has the right to access medically-necessary affirming care to enable this opportunity,” WPATH says.
When WPATH recently updated its guidance, authors “were acutely aware that any unknowns that the working group acknowledged — any uncertainties in the research — could be read as undermining the field’s credibility and feed the right-wing effort to outlaw gender-related care,” The New York Times reported. The newspaper is in the midst of an internal fight about its coverage of transgender issues, with some saying it has been too critical of transgender medical interventions.
A draft of the WPATH chapter for adolescents included minimum recommended ages for hormone treatments and breast removal or augmentation, but after criticism from providers and transgender activists, “it was determined that the specific ages would be removed to ensure greater access to care for more people,” WPATH said.
The final guidelines also walked back a recommendation that preteens and teenagers should provide evidence of several years of persistently identifying as transgender, to differentiate from kids whose change in identification is recent, and changed it to a vaguer “sustained” gender incongruence. “In the end, the chapter sided with the trans advocates who didn’t want kids to have to wait through potentially painful years of physical development,” according to the Times.
The final guidelines acknowledged that because of the limited long-term research, treatment without a comprehensive diagnostic assessment “has no empirical support and therefore carries the risk that the decision to start gender-affirming medical interventions may not be in the long-term best interest of the young person at that time.”
Reuters found that gender facilities across the country are not conducting recommended months-long assessments before administering hormones to children. Parents of 28 of 39 minors who had sought transgender interventions told Reuters they “felt pressured or rushed to proceed with treatment.” Gender-care professionals also said some of their peers are “pushing too many families to pursue treatment for their children before they undergo the comprehensive assessments recommended in professional guidelines.”
Studying Causes of Gender Dysphoria
Some of the taxpayer-funded studies may bring clarity to the issue of gender dysphoria by examining its causes. One study will examine social media’s influence on children becoming transgender. A second will study “the life history calendar to examine young transgender women’s trajectories of violence, mental health, and protective processes.”
Another government-funded study will help determine how chromosomes, sexual organs, and hormones combine to create sex differences. Another will “uncover genetic underpinnings of female sexual orientation.”
This byline marks several different individuals, granted anonymity in cases where publishing an article on The Federalist would credibly threaten close personal relationships, their safety, or their jobs. We verify the identities of those who publish anonymously with The Federalist.
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 Donald Trump.
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.
As the debate over transgender medicalization erupts nationwide and more states pass laws banning the mutilation of adolescents’
bodies, one largely unanswered question remains: Why are so many mothers trans-ing their children?
Sometimes called “Munchausen syndrome by proxy,” the term refers to a disorder in which a parent draws attention to themselves by projecting a disease or psychological condition onto their child even though the child is not unwell.
According to psychiatrists interviewed by The Christian Post, these are indeed complex phenomena. The family dynamics and factors at play, particularly when a parent is psychologically unstable and might be trans-ing their child to gain attention, even if such cases are believed to be rare, are worthy of discussion.
Dr. Miriam Grossman, author of the forthcoming book Lost in TransNation: A Child Psychiatrist’s Guide Out of the Madness, told The Christian Post that the terms Munchausen’s syndrome and “Munchausen’s by proxy” are no longer cited in professional journals. In today’s psychiatric literature, these syndromes are referred to as “factitious disorders.” The by-proxy cases are factitious disorders that are imposed on another person, including the imposition of gender confusion onto children, Grossman added.
According to the medical history journal Versailus, the term Munchausen, which was used to define this mental disorder, was coined in 1951 by Richard Asher after a German man named Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, also known as Baron Münchhausen, and was based on a fictional character whose name had become proverbial as the narrator of false and hyperbolic tall tales. Such tall tales were a feature in the German writer Rudolf Erich Rapse’s 1785 novel Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia.
“When it’s a plain factitious disorder, it’s a person who either makes up or exaggerates medical symptoms, and that may sometimes involve falsifying medical tests,” Grossman told CP.
A factitious disorder by proxy includes the falsification of physical or psychological signs or symptoms or induction of injury or distress in another person where the individual presents the victim to others as being ill or injured, she continued, adding that an example of this is putting sugar in a urine sample to present oneself as a diabetic.
Such tampering with urine has been known to happen. In 1977, British pediatrician Dr. Roy Meadow published one such account in the Lancet of a mother who had done so with her 6-year-old daughter Kay’s urine to make her appear to be ill. This mother had also fed her 14-month-old son high doses of salt for the same reason. Between bouts of these attacks of sickness, the very young boy was, the doctor noted, otherwise “healthy and developing normally.”
Meadow’s cautiously written landmark article, “Munchausen Syndrome, The Hinterland of Child Abuse,” documents that the 14-month-old ultimately died of salt poisoning and that an autopsy showed gastric erosions “as if a chemical had been ingested.”
Since that time, a body of literature has emerged on this subject and the mental disorder has been analyzed in other journals and news articles. Examples include a 2004 feature story in the New Yorker titled, “The Bad Mother,” and a book published in 2000 titled, Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy Abuse: A Practical Approach. It has even been referred to in pop culture. Rapper Eminem’s 2002 single “Cleaning Out My Closet” mentions being a victim of this syndrome. In 2003, the first known memoir written by a victim of this abuse, titled Sickened by Julie Gregory, was published.
This deceptive behavior that accompanies factitious disorders is evident even in the absence of external rewards. Such an external reward might be a large outpouring of sympathy and attention following a diagnosis, perhaps even generous financial assistance to help with the costs of fighting the disease.
In October 2017, the journal Child Abuse & Neglect published an article titled “The perpetrators of medical child abuse (Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy) — A systematic review of 796 cases” that detailed the findings of researchers Gregory Yates and Christopher Bass who examined hundreds of cases involving this psychiatric condition.
Yates and Bass found that nearly all of the abusers were female (97.6%) and about that same percentage were the victims’ own mothers (95.6%). Approximately three-fourths of the abusers were married and the mean caretaker age when the child presented with some sort of illness was 27.6 years. In nearly half of all cases reviewed, the perpetrators of the abuse were reported to be in a healthcare-related profession (45.6%). And nearly a quarter of those who had medically abused children had obstetric complications (23.5%) or had histories of childhood maltreatment (30%).
Of the hundreds of cases reviewed, the most common psychiatric diagnoses documented were self-imposed factitious disorders (30.9%), personality disorders (18.6%), and depression (14.2%).
Factitious disorders are indeed admittedly strange.
“Most of us don’t want to be ill and we don’t want the people we care for to be ill. It is very odd,” explained Grossman. “But the mind does some really odd things and in the case of a parent who would do this to a child, they have significant emotional problems. What is it that they’re seeking here? They’re seeking attention and validation. And they’re doing it by victimizing their child.”
“To try and understand that you’d have to try and understand the history of the parent, who the parent is, what sort of emotional disorders they’re struggling with, what sort of inner emotional issues. Were they neglected as a child?”
While there has been growing awareness of how trans identities are spreading rapidly among youth, especially among women in their 20s, teens, and younger via a peer contagion — which was thoroughly explored in Lisa Littman’s study, titled “Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria,” published in Plos One in 2018 — what has gone unexamined is if a concurrent social contagion is happening among parents of trans-identifying children. And is this spreading among a subset of parents who crave attention and claim to have a gender-dysphoric child?
At this point, Grossman believes it’s merely speculation, but that it is nevertheless a reasonable question to consider.
“It’s fair to ask if perhaps [this is happening] among parents who are trying very hard to be what’s now being called ‘woke’ or whether a parent who is well-intentioned and who wants the best for their child but notices certain behaviors. And these days we’re being led to believe that almost anything could be related to being transgender: if a child doesn’t fit in, a child who is unhappy with their body, a child that has trouble making friends or is withdrawn,” Grossman offered. “Even the most well-intentioned parent who simply wants to help their child, it certainly may cross their mind. Maybe this (transgenderism) is the issue.”
Dr. Roger Hiatt, a child and adolescent psychiatrist based in Tennessee who is also licensed to practice in Arkansas and has an office in the town of West Memphis, is convinced there are parents who indisputably push gender ideology and experimental medicalization on their children: puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormones, and body mutilating surgeries. Yet, from his experience, for every parent who is clearly driving this agenda with their child, there are probably 10 more who’ve been misled by groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics or the Pediatric Endocrine Society, which have both rubber-stamped the “affirmation-only” model and publicly opposed state legislative efforts to curtail the experimental medical practices.
Hiatt has treated over 200 gender dysphoric patients. In the first 15 years of his career, he encountered only two such patients, both of whom were males who identified as females. In the last seven years, however, the vast majority of these patients have been adolescent girls identifying as boys.
“It is definitely true that for every case that I’ve dealt with where I felt like the parent was actively, aggressively pushing the transgender identity there are more than 10 [parents] who are either neutral or very ambivalent about the whole process,” Hiatt recounted in an interview with CP.
“The impression is being portrayed that there is an absolute consensus in the medical community that ‘gender-affirming’ care is the only option that would be appropriate in dealing with a kid who, from the moment they identify themselves as gender-questioning or even transgender then immediately the process unfolds to socially transition them followed by puberty blockers, followed by cross-sex hormones, followed by surgery.”
But despite corporate media repetition, this supposed consensus is “absolutely not” a shared view among most doctors, he insists.
“It’s difficult to attribute motive to a parent in terms of why they do what they do. In terms of a child who is questioning or being actively encouraged to pursue a transgender lifestyle and identity, in my experience those situations, the typical scenario is a mother who encouraged it,” Hiatt said.
The psychiatrist told CP he once saw a case where the parents were divorced, the mother was aggressively pushing the child’s trans identity, and the father was adamantly against it. Although they had joint custody, social institutions such as the hospital and the public school system were actively siding with the mother’s stance that the child must identify as the opposite sex.
Hiatt has seen several patients who have what he described as “medicalized presentation” where a parent — often the mother but it could be either — has been actively inducing or doing things that result in the child needing medical care. The parents who present with this get a “secondary gain,” the benefit of being a parent of a child in medical distress.
These dynamics can also present as gender confusion.
“Once the child has been identified as gender dysphoric or transgender, there is a huge push in much of the medical community to medicalize that child, to address the issue with medical interventions,” he said. “It basically locks in both child and parent to a patient role or the parent of a patient role. And not only for the parent but also for the child there is a secondary gain from that: feeling important or different, unique or special. That absolutely is a factor, not in every case, but in many cases.”
When asked how factitious disorders develop in people and why a parent would want to impose a medical condition on their child, Hiatt stressed that there is an unmistakable delusional component that cannot be ignored.
“The notion that any intervention or group of interventions can actually change a boy to a girl or a girl to a boy is an absolute lie. It’s not even possible. All that can be done is that society can be compelled to treat the patient a certain way. Interventions can take place that can cause physical changes to the body to make the individual appear a certain way. But in the end, it does nothing to the individual chromosomally and they continue to require medical interventions for the rest of their lives if they choose to continue to portray themselves this way,” Hiatt said.
“In terms of where [factitious disorders] come from, it’s multi-factorial. There is almost universally psychological trauma or abuse, depression, anxiety, other mental health issues and concerns that are in the child and typically in the parent as well that in some regards where they feel like ‘Wow, I’ve found a solution to all my problems.’”
Some prominent institutions pushing medicalized gender transition assert that a child will be better off after experimental drugs are prescribed or a patient undergoes sex change operations. Yet because of the distinctly delusional component of the parents’ minds, they genuinely don’t feel like they are doing anything wrong. Indeed, they actually do believe they are helping their child.
Prior to finishing his psychiatry training, Hiatt gave a grand rounds presentation on a condition called Folie à deux, a French phrase meaning “folly of two,” and it is what is known as a shared delusional disorder.
The disorder, first conceptualized in 19th century French psychiatry by Charles Lasègue and Jules Falret, is also known as Lasègue–Falret syndrome. The condition is similar to and equally as unusual as those who believe that their child was born in the wrong body. This rare disorder produces similar social dynamics seen in families with children mired in gender confusion. In this shared delusion disorder, the inducer who has a psychotic disorder operates as the primary actor influencing another person or possibly more, the secondary actors, with delusions based on that delusional belief.
In 2021, Hiatt provided expert testimony in support of Arkansas’ Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act, which prohibited prescribing puberty blockers, opposite sex hormones, and performing body mutilating sex-change surgeries on youth who are 18 years old or younger. The bill passed overwhelmingly through both chambers of the state Legislature only to be vetoed by then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson. The Legislature subsequently overrode his veto.
Mere weeks later, as was expected, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit against the state on behalf of three trans-identifying youth, asserting that the law was unconstitutional. The law is currently being litigated in the courts. Breaking with Hutchinson, then-Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, who is now the state’s lieutenant governor, stated that she would defend the law in court.
At the state level, Hiatt firmly believes that laws such as the SAFE Act are necessary and vitally important. Nationally, however, he thinks medical malpractice lawsuits in coming years will probably be required and more effective as many of those who steer children down this destructive path will be reluctant to do so if they know that it will likely result in serious personal financial losses.
The medical establishment in the U.S. has, by and large, adopted and advanced what has become known as the “Dutch protocol.”
As CP reported in 2018, the first thorough study of the drug Triptorelin used as a puberty blocker on a child who was suffering from gender confusion was published out of the Netherlands in 1998 when a pediatric endocrinologist, together with a psychologist, decided to use the medication on a 13-year-old patient.
The rationale was that the 13-year-old should have the drug because the effects of going through puberty would be too traumatic to endure and “pausing” those signals in the brain would give the child time to adjust and then later decide whether to have a series of sex-change surgeries. This approach migrated across the Atlantic in the following years and guidelines favoring the “gender-affirmative” approach became widely accepted within prominent U.S. hospitals and in professional societies such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society. The first pediatric gender clinic in the U.S. opened in 2007 in Boston, Massachusetts.
Yet even pioneers of the Dutch protocol, such as Dr. Thomas Steensma, have in recent years criticized the approach of the American medical establishment, noting that the group of young people who doctors in the Netherlands treated in its earlier years was much smaller.
“Where does the large flow of children who have suddenly registered for transgender care since 2013? And what is the quality of life like for this group long after sex change? There is no answer to those questions,” Steensma said in 2021.
“The research on the small group of people from before 2013 may not apply to the large group that there is now. We conduct structural research in the Netherlands. But the rest of the world is blindly adopting our research. Every doctor or psychologist who engages in transgender care should feel the obligation to do a good before-and-after measurement.”
Likewise, Dr. Annelou de Vries, who was part of the same Dutch Protocol collaborative, stressed in an October 2020 commentary for the AAP Pediatrics journal, adolescents with recent-onset gender dysphoria who had no previous no childhood history of gender distress, were not part of their study protocol.
Grossman, who was also interviewed by Matt Walsh in The Daily Wire film “What is a Woman?” notes that her greatest distress is seeing the victims of this mass experiment. In that film, she explains that she received a phone call from a mother whose 14-year-old daughter had been prescribed puberty blockers and, as a result, was dealing with osteoporosis, an ailment that causes brittle bones and is common in senior citizens, not adolescents.
“And we know about the kids being victims but I feel like we don’t talk about the parents being victims,” she said soberly.
Something else is at work, she believes, and that’s a pervasive and sinister anti-male sentiment that indelibly contributes to young boys suffering confusion over their sex.
“Now, I’m not minimizing women who have been treated badly, abused or worse, by men,” Grossman was quick to add, “but overall, there has been a war on men and on boys.”
“We sometimes find that there is a mother who really has a hatred or deep resentment of men because of things that she has gone through earlier in her life. And that without even realizing it she can influence her son to have that same negativity about being male. Children want to please their parents. And more than anything else, children want their parents’ love. And it’s not impossible that a boy might pick up on his mother’s animosity toward men and feel like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be like that.’”
“The boys might be overhearing conversations with the mom, with friends or relatives or what have you. Anti-male kind of stuff and that does not help the boy’s identity of himself as being a male,” she continued.
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 Donald Trump.
A student has reportedly been suspended by a Catholic high school for the remainder of the school year for believing that God created two genders and protesting against transgender students using girls’ bathrooms.
Since November, Josh Alexander has allegedly been suspended from St. Joseph’s Catholic High School in Renfrew, Ontario. Alexander was allegedly punished by the school for organizing a protest against transgender students using girls’ bathrooms. Alexander said he launched the demonstration after two girls at his school confided in him that they were uncomfortable sharing bathrooms with biological males. Alexander, an 11th-grade student, was reportedly barred from attending St. Joseph’s Catholic High School for the remainder of the school year.
Alexander informed The Epoch Times that St. Joseph’s Catholic High School told him that his attendance at the school would be “detrimental to the physical and mental well-being” of transgender students. Alexander said the school labeled his beliefs as “offensive” and “bullying” because there was a transgender student in his class. Alexander insists that he has no plans to be violent in defending his ideology, and doesn’t feel as though he is bullying anyone.
“Offense is obviously defined by the offended. I expressed my religious beliefs in class and it spiraled out of control,” Alexander explained. “Not everybody’s going to like that. That doesn’t make me a bully. It doesn’t mean I’m harassing anybody. They express their beliefs and I express mine. Mine obviously don’t fit the narrative.”
He said, “This whole issue isn’t about identity. It’s about biology and morality.”
Alexander told The Post Millennial, “They’re using it as a technicality to say that they’re not disciplining me, and it’s just a form of exclusion to protect the other students.”
However, Alexander is already enrolled at St. Joseph’s Catholic High School, which reportedly bars him from enrolling at any other education programs.
Alexander said, “I am unable to do any other form of education because as long as I’m enrolled in the Catholic board, I’m not allowed to take an alternative route of education. So I’m enrolled, but I’m not allowed to attend school. So right now I actually have no form of education.”
Alexander stated that he plans to file a human rights complaint on the grounds of religious discrimination.
Alexander is appealing his suspension. However, his appeal is reportedly being held up because Alexander previously asked for parental independence so as not to drag his parents into this quandary.
Alexander’s lawyer James Kitchen said, “He does live with his parents and they have an excellent relationship. He seeks guidance from them and they gladly give it to him. But he runs his own life. And that’s actually by design, because that’s how his parents raised him to be.”
St. Joseph’s Catholic High School principal Derek Lennox and Mark Searson, the director of education for the Renfrew County Catholic District School Board, both said they could not comment on the situation.
Two Dutchstudies touting the great success of “gender-affirming” medical intervention on youth have been deemed bad research by experts at the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. In the report “The Myth of ‘Reliable Research’ in Pediatric Gender Medicine” published earlier this month, researchers describe how the 2011 and 2014 studies that formed the foundation of the transgender industry in the U.S. should never have been accepted by the professional community, falling “unacceptably” short of modern research standards. The studies led to a global movement of wrongly named “gender-affirming care,” resulting in hormone experimentation on youth and, in some cases, irreversible mutilation.
The Dutch studies had several major flaws, according to the report. Study authors only recorded the cases with the best outcomes, concluded without evidence that gender dysphoria disappeared solely as a result of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and failed to properly examine the risks of the interventions, with disastrous effects.
The American College of Pediatricians responded to the report in a press release on Jan. 25 calling on organizations to “reconsider current protocols for gender dysphoric children.”
“The entire pediatric transgender industry is based on these two Dutch studies,” Michelle Cretella, immediate past executive director of ACPeds and advisory board spokeswoman for Advocates Protecting Children, told me. “This open access report is critical because it exposes the fraudulent foundation of pediatric transgender medicine in the United States.”
The Dutch studies were so foundational to the U.S. movement that the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States was opened by Dr. Norman Spack, a pediatric endocrinologist who was convinced of the necessity of “gender-affirming” interventions after visiting the Dutch physicians who published them, Cretella said.
But if these studies had been published today, the authors conclude, the research would have been recognized as very low quality and would not have encouraged the use of puberty blockers, wrong-sex hormones, and surgery in confused children and young adults in general medical settings.
‘No Evidence’ of Genetic Cause
The report criticizing these studies was published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, and authors E. Abbruzzese, Stephen B. Levine, and Julia W. Mason have years of experience studying so-called gender identity. Levine has worked in the field as a psychiatrist since 1974.
“We had no bias, we are just responding to and trying to articulate the limitations of the studies,” Levine told me. “We are doing harm to an unknown percentage of kids, and the data that is supportive of this work does not really address the issue. The real issue here is what happens to these children when they get into their 20s and 30s.”
Youth who have been hormonally and surgically “transitioned” have major obstacles to their happiness and productivity later in life, Levine said.
“After people have sex reassignment surgeries … they want more surgeries,” according to Levine. “It’s very clear they have continued gender dysphoria. The idea that they are being ‘cured’ by affirmative care is an artifact, it’s a myth.”
Hormone and surgical treatment, and subsequent medical intervention, leads many people to assume this must be a “medical problem” but “we don’t have any evidence that this is genetically determined,” Levine said.
“Just because we have hormone treatment doesn’t mean there is a hormonal defect in the person,” he said. “People believe, erroneously, that there is some genetic, pre-determined factor here, but we have not been able to find a genetic cause.”
Cultural, interpersonal, psychological, and developmental factors all contribute to the development of a person’s behavior, Levine said. Gender dysphoria can be a resulting psycho-social problem.
Biased, Uncontrolled Studies
Though the Dutch studies were found to have selection bias and multiple, uncontrolled variables, they were broadly applied in the U.S.
“The Dutch study researchers only took healthy kids from supportive and reasonably healthy families,” Levine said. “They carefully screened kids, so if they had major developmental problems they were not included in the studies. But in the U.S. … the vast majority of these kids have a history of psychiatric issues before they developed gender dysphoria. The Dutch rejected these kids from their research.”
The Dutch study had 196 participants initially and only put 70 in the protocol. Only 55 then completed the protocol. As well as having selection bias, the study was uncontrolled.
“Wisely, the Dutch people gave these kids and their families continued psychotherapy during this protocol,” Levine said. “Is the positive results they found due to the psychotherapy, improvement as they got older, or affirmative care? This is an uncontrolled study. They cannot make conclusions about what caused what. But the world took this as scientific evidence.”
In the U.S., youth who had rapid-onset gender dysphoria and didn’t even meet the baseline criteria for the Dutch study began receiving interventions in pediatric clinics, with doctors utilizing the studies as justification. Furthermore, when the Dutch began this project there was also much less awareness of autism, Levine said. A very large percentage of these kids that have come to American facilities are on the autism spectrum, according to Levine.
Courageous Pediatricians Have Resisted
ACPeds physicians have spoken out against sexual disfigurement and medical intervention in youth with gender dysphoria for years.
“There are a handful of us physicians within ACPeds and across the country who have the courage and expertise to speak out on this issue,” Cretella said. “When we are able to do so in an environment open to dialogue, we are met with significant appreciation and affirmation by fellow physicians and laypersons alike.”
Most colleagues, Cretella said, appreciated ACPeds’ stance, acknowledging that the studies affirming medical intervention in gender dysphoric youth were likely flawed or fake; but too many feared losing their jobs to speak out against transgender interventions.
“Trans interventions are big money,” Cretella said. “Billionaire elites promote trans ideology over truth across all public institutions and media platforms, and [in America] a severe cancel culture results in everything from severe harassment and doxing to ending one’s career.”
Fortunately, signs of sound medical ethics triumphing over junk science are breaking through, Cretella said.
In the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Finland, cultures that embraced transgender interventions for youth early on have reversed course. France has urged greater caution in these cases.
In the United States, Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., has rooted his administration in medical ethics and utilized the best science to establish pro-child treatment of gender confusion with psychotherapy, Cretella said.
Currently, about 13 other states are attempting similar legislative efforts.
Ashley Bateman is a policy writer for The Heartland Institute and blogger for Ascension Press. Her work has been featured in The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, The New York Post, The American Thinker and numerous other publications. She previously worked as an adjunct scholar for The Lexington Institute and as editor, writer and photographer for The Warner Weekly, a publication for the American military community in Bamberg, Germany. Ashley is a board member at a Catholic homeschool cooperative in Virginia. She homeschools her four incredible children along with her brilliant engineer/scientist husband.e who lives in Virginia.
“Boys are boys from the beginning. Girls are girls right from the start.” No, those aren’t the words from a tweet banned for “hate speech” — though they could be. They’re prophetic lines from none other than Mister Rogers, who put the immutable truths to a tune decades before the trans craze.
Resurfaced in a recent TikTok, the clip shows Fred Rogers, host of the classic children’s show “Mister Rogers Neighborhood,” singing his ditty “Everybody’s Fancy,” which goes:
Boys are boys from the beginning Girls are girls right from the start Everybody’s fancy Everybody’s fine Your body’s fancy and so is mine
Girls grow up to be the mommies Boys grow up to be the daddies Everybody’s fancy Everybody’s fine Your body’s fancy and so is mine
TRIGGER WARNING. ⚠️ This is the most upsetting thing you will see all weekend. https://t.co/eVLPZ3J3RI
In his first appearance on “The Tonight Show” starring Johnny Carson in 1980, Rogers delved into the song’s importance. When Carson asked Rogers a series of lighthearted questions about his show and asked how Rogers communicates important themes to his audience of children, it didn’t take long for the host to pivot to the topic of sex. “Are they too young for that?” Carson asked.
That’s how they learn the difference between boys and girls, Rogers replied. “Sometimes children think that they might change, they might have to change after a while,” he continued, to which the audience laughed.
But Rogers wasn’t laughing. “You know, we laugh about that now,” he said, “but it’s because we had that concern when we were little.”
Some have argued that Rogers was simply the product of his generation or speculated that he was a homosexual to explain his gentle demeanor. In a 1969 Senate Commerce Committee hearing, however, Rogers made his case clear: “I’m very much concerned about what’s being delivered to our children in this country.”
And of course, some of Disney’s most recent productions have forged ahead with an increasingly explicit LGBT agenda for children. The latest “Toy Story” installment, “Lightyear,” boasted a lesbian kiss. “Baymax!” taught kids that men can have periods.
“Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” was not a political program, but it tackled issues, both big and small, that troubled children. This included not only instilling truths about the immutability of the sexes, but reassuring kids that they wouldn’t get sucked down the bathtub drain or lose an ear during a haircut.
“Children are concerned when they get their first haircut that the barber’s going to cut more than hair,” Rogers said on “The Tonight Show.” So to assuage kids’ fears, he visited a barber to ask whether the trimmer cuts more than hair.
It isn’t that Rogers hated children who wanted to be unique—far from it. As he stated in the Senate hearing, he merely wanted to address the “inner drama of childhood.” Long before libraries began hosting drag queen story hour, Rogers tried to warn us about the dangers of gender-bending. But in true Mister Rogers’ fashion, he did so while celebrating each person for being “fancy” and unique, no transgender interventions required.
Photo by Mike Ruane/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
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The Colorado State University Health Network plans to host multiple vocal workshops this week to teach transgender and non-binary students to alter their voices to sound feminine, masculine, or neutral, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.
According to the CSU website, the university will host three sessions teaching transgender and non-binary students how to change their voices to better align with their chosen gender identity. All three courses are free and offered to students regardless of whether they are on hormonal therapy.
“teaching transgender and non-binary students how to change their voices to better align with their chosen gender identity.”
“Voice Feminization Workshop,” the first course, will be held on January 31, and it welcomes “transfeminine and nonbinary individuals” to attend. The class promises to introduce attendees to “vocal exercises utilized for voice feminization.”
A “Voice Neutralization Workshop” will be held on February 1 to teach non-binary individuals how to make their voices sound neutral and neither feminine nor masculine.
“The class provides an overview of vocal features related to perceptually masculine, feminine, and androgynous voices,” the website states.
CSU will host the final session, a “Voice Masculinization Workshop,” on February 2, which seeks to train “transmasculine and nonbinary individuals” how to alter their voices to sound more masculine.
Maggie Hendrickson, the director of the Pride Resource Center, told the university’s news publication, the Rocky Mountain Collegian, “We really don’t want people to think that they have to be like on hormones, or so far along in their transition, or out, or any other precursors to coming to the workshop.”
“It’s just another way for people to feel more comfortable in their bodies,” Hendrickson continued. “A lot of people just think about transitioning as like, hormones and surgery, but there’s lots of other ways to socially or culturally or not medically transition. It’s really [for] people [who] are interested in voice training or experience any type of dysphoria that they think this could help with. That’s who the intended audience is for, and so this is just another tool for folks to kind of explore gender and the way that they’re received by others.“
The courses will be facilitated by Annie Schubert, a certified speech-language pathologist and clinical vocologist at the Speech and Language Stimulation Center in Fort Collins.
The center offers multiple voice programs, including “Transgender Voice Services,” which aim to train clients to modify their voices to sound like the opposite gender. The training works on altering pitch, resonance, and intonation patterns.
“Driven by each client’s goals and gender identity, we provide voice training services for transgender or gender-diverse clients seeking to modify their voice,” the Speech and Language Stimulation Center website states. “At SLSC, we prioritize using both objective feedback from voice analysis software as well as each client’s self-analysis of their speech samples across the duration of training. Above all, it is our goal to provide a supportive environment for each client on their path toward confidently presenting their gender identity.“
Schubert told the Rocky Mountain Collegian that the introductory courses also teach “vocal hygiene” and “healthy voice principles” to ensure individuals do not cause strain or injury when attempting to modify their voices.
“We talk about the different vocal features that lead to a listener to perceive a voice to be more feminine or masculine, or in that kind of gender-neutral range, and then we break it down into its parts,” Schubert stated. “So [that means] learning about the difference between average pitch and pitch variation and the different prosody and intonation patterns that lead a voice to be perceived more masculine or more feminine.“
Schubert, CSU, and the Health Network did not respond to a request for comment, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.
Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed new legislation over the weekend that appeared to bar permanently deforming transgender surgeries for minors, but things aren’t always what they seem. Senate Bill 16, titled “Transgender Medical Treatment and Procedures,” was a top priority for lawmakers who introduced the measure two days after the legislature opened on Jan. 17.
Despite immediately receiving praise from numerous figures critical of transgender ideology, including a detransitioner, the bill signed into law Saturday certainly isn’t perfect. In fact, it doesn’t do much of anything.
The new law signed by the Utah governor, who has a history of introducing himself by stating his so-called preferred pronouns, only bars transgender procedures and hormone interventions for minors who have not been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. In other words, minors can find a sympathetic physician steeped in wrongly named “gender-affirming care” who will give them a diagnosis that enables them to pump their bodies full of wrong-sex hormones and amputate their healthy organs. Teens focused on gender-bending can even be diagnosed online.
“who have NOT been diagnosed with gender dysphoria.“
Furthermore, under the new Utah law, once individuals turn 18, they’re free to do whatever they want. They can even schedule transgender surgeries on their 18th birthday.
“Legislation that impacts our most vulnerable youth requires careful consideration and deliberation,” Cox said in a press release after his signature. “More and more experts, states and countries around the world are pausing these permanent and life-altering treatments for new patients until more and better research can help determine the long-term consequences.”
Cox also thanked the legislation’s sponsor, State Sen. Michael Kennedy, while giving a passing mention of the deficiencies in the new law. “While not a perfect bill, we are grateful for Sen. Kennedy’s more nuanced and thoughtful approach to this terribly divisive issue,” Cox said.
Ideally, Cox would have sided with lawmakers a year ago in their attempt to fight back against the transgender craze. In March last year, the statehouse had to override the governor’s veto of legislation prohibiting men from invading women’s sports.
“We will continue to push the Legislature for additional resources to organizations that work to help this important Utah community,” Cox said on Saturday. “While we understand our words will be of little comfort to those who disagree with us, we sincerely hope that we can treat our transgender families with more love and respect as we work to better understand the science and consequences behind these procedures.”
Despite its reputation as a deep-red state, Utah has been no exception to cultural currents imposing transgender ideology on children across the nation. Last fall, a Utah LGBT group sponsored an “all ages” back-to-school drag show with performers whose names sound like “anal leakage” and “genitalia” when pronounced aloud.
“Bright red Utah is now led by a cut-rate Gavin Newsom imitator named Spencer Cox,” Carlson said. “He’s beyond belief.”
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.
On Thursday, a three-judge panel of the Colorado Court of Appeals ruled against Masterpiece Cakeshop baker Jack Phillips, arguing he violated the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act by refusing to bake a cake for a gender transition celebration.
Critics of the ruling point to Phillips’ earlier “win” at the Supreme Court, which narrowly ruled in his favor, as the reason the baker continues to be targeted by activists. In 2017, former Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion that some have argued essentially said Phillips could have lost his Supreme Court case if it hadn’t been for Colorado officials openly disparaging Phillips and his Christian views.
That narrow decision has allowed Phillips to continue to be persecuted, critics say. At the Washington Examiner, Quin Hillyer argued that the Supreme Court’s “search for the narrowest possible result merely invited further, seemingly endless rounds of new litigation.”
The latest lawsuit against Phillips comes from an activist attorney, Autumn Scardina, in Colorado who called Masterpiece Cakeshop on the same day the Supreme Court announced it would take his prior case – in which he was accused of discrimination for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. The attorney requested Phillips create a custom cake that was pink on the inside and blue on the outside to celebrate a gender transition. According to the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which represents Phillips, the attorney also called back to request a cake depicting Satan smoking marijuana in order to “correct the errors of [Phillips’] thinking.” Phillips declined to make either cake because of the messages they depicted. The activist has now sued.
“Naturally, Colorado’s courts ignored the patently offensive request for a Satan cake and instead again held Phillips responsible for illegal discrimination based on gender, his religious objections notwithstanding,” Hillyer wrote. “Today’s affirmation by the appeals court of the lower court’s ruling takes ample advantage of the loophole left open by the Supreme Court while cherry-picking from other Supreme Court religious liberty decisions to reach its desired, anti-Phillips conclusion.”
On Twitter, prominent conservative PoliMath also blamed the Supreme Court for the ongoing legal struggles of Masterpiece Cakeshop.
“The result of John Roberts pushing for the narrowest possible ruling in the earlier Masterpiece case is that they continued persecuting Jack Phillips for years,” PoliMath tweeted. “They will continue to do this to him until he dies.”
The result of John Roberts pushing for the narrowest possible ruling in the earlier Masterpiece case is that they continued persecuting Jack Phillips for years
The appeals court on Thursday argued that Phillips only refused to bake the cake after learning the client was transgender and wanted to use the cake to celebrate his birthday and gender transition.
“Thus, it was Scardina’s transgender status, and her desire to use the cake in celebration of that status, that caused Masterpiece and Phillips to refuse to provide the cake,” the court wrote, arguing the cake “expressed no message.”
But ADL argues that “Phillips works with all people and always decides whether to take a project based on what message a cake will express, not who is requesting it.”
“Over a decade ago, Colorado officials began targeting Jack, misusing state law to force him to say things he does not believe. Then an activist attorney continued that crusade,” the ADF said in a statement. “This cruelty must stop. One need not agree with Jack’s views to agree that all Americans should be free to say what they believe, even if the government disagrees with those beliefs.”
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 Donald Trump.
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.
Four Republican Texas state representatives asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday to review new transgender student policies for public schools. State Representatives Bryan Slaton, Brian Harrison, Tony Tinderholt, and Mark Dorazio signed a letter calling on Paxton to examine the Texas Association of School Boards’ (TASB) 2023 “radically pro-transgender” guidance, according to a copy of the letter tweeted by Slaton.
The representatives accuse TASB of disseminating legal advice that seems to discourage schools from reporting child abuse, denies parental rights, and claims female students don’t have legal protection to a private restroom or locker room, the letter stated.
“This radically pro-transgender legal advisory appears to encourage school districts to refrain from reporting child abuse and obscure information regarding children exhibiting gender dysphoria from their parents,” the four congressmen stated. “This document also makes a bold declaration that says young girls would have no law protecting them from having a school district permit a biological male to enter their restroom or locker room.
The TASB legal advice is “highly concerning” as it “may be effectively creating state policy,” they said.
The school board association said that having a transgender child use separate gender-neutral facilities could make some students “feel that such an arrangement negatively singles them out and isolates them from their peers,” according to the document.
“Consequently, the transgender student may request to use communal sex-specific facilities that match the student’s gender identity. There is no law that prohibits a district from granting the transgender student’s request to use these facilities,” TASB advised. “If other students or their parents object to the use of a sex-specific facility by a transgender student, a school district may be able to amicably address the competing interests by making individual-user facilities and private areas available for all students.”
The decision on whether students should play on sex-specific sports teams is in murky waters, according to the TASB letter. Despite Texas law requiring students to play on teams separated by their biological birth, TASB advises school districts to “assess each request individually and determine the best course of action based on a thorough evaluation of all of the issues and potential risks, and in consultation with the district’s attorney.”
TASB also counseled schools on the legality behind preventing unsupportive parents from knowing about their child’s gender dysphoria and choosing a different name or pronoun.
“Texas educators typically work with parents to decide on appropriate accommodations for transgender students. Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind that transgender students are at particular risk of harm, including self-harm, when a parent disagrees with the student’s gender identity,” the document stated.
“As such, a student may request that a district employee not tell his or her parent about the student’s gender identity. School officials should proceed with caution in this case, in accordance with district policy regarding student counseling, crisis intervention, and child abuse,” TASB added.
For seven decades, Miss Universe has been owned by men — and it will continue to be owned by one. The new male owner, however, attended the latest contest in a sparkly, floor-length gown showcasing after-market cleavage.
The new transgender-identifying owner of the worldwide beauty pageant made a backward speech about empowering women during the televised contest over the weekend (where Miss USA R’Bonney Gabriel was crowned). Anne Jakkaphong Jakrajutatip, a man who purports to be a woman and the CEO of Thailand-based media distribution company JKN Global Group, which bought the Miss Universe Organization for $20 million last year, dolled himself up as a woman on stage and framed his new ownership of the organization as a win for feminism.
“It has been 70 years that Miss Universe Organization run by men. But now, time is up, is the moment really, for women to take the lead,” Jakrajutatip said. “Welcome to the new era of the global women’s empowerment platform. Welcome to the Miss Universe Organization. From now on is going to be ran by women, owned by a trans woman, for all women, for all women really around the world to celebrate the power of feminism.”
Anne Jakrajutatip, the new owner of Miss Universe, delivered an empowering speech yesterday: “Welcome to the new era. From now on it’s gonna be run by women, owned by a trans woman, for all women around the world.” pic.twitter.com/TJXV8EPkAv
Jakrajutatip’s new ownership of Miss Universe is no win for feminism. Rather, it’s completely the opposite. A man parading around as a female and telling women they should feel empowered because their femininity can be worn as a costume or replicated based on a man’s whims is a slap in the face to women everywhere.
Beauty pageants exist to showcase the unique embodiment of women, which naturally excludes men. When organizations such as Miss Universe allow for those biological differences to be reduced to theater or “womanface,” then traditionally women-only spaces and contests are eradicated — as even the concept of womanhood is chipped away.
Whether it’s a local YMCA pool, a high school bathroom, a state prison, or college athletics, female safety, privacy, and competition are being sacrificed to appease males, many of whom are mentally ill. Pretty soon, beauty pageants will crown men instead of women — as already happened in New England. And “Miss” Universe herself might soon be a “Mr.”
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.
Last week, conservative journalist Andy Ngo published screenshots of the singer’s Instagram page. On the left, Smith is seen handsomely seated with his prestigious Oscar. The ensuing photos highlight his attempt to transition into someone who is “non-binary,” or a person who believes he was born a third sex or above the sexes altogether. The logic defies everything we know about human biology down to the binary nature of our chromosomes.
British pop star Sam Smith has been documenting their powerful transition from being a gay man to becoming a #trans nonbinary person. pic.twitter.com/TckztWIT4H
No one seems to know what a woman is these days, but does anyone even remember what a man is? Smith’s progression in Ngo’s photos underscores the erasure of cultural masculinity declared “toxic” by millennials. When you lose sight of what it means to be a man — what it means to look like a man, act like a man, and live like a man — you de facto lose the values that form the foundation of healthy masculinity. But our culture doesn’t even know what a man is.
Around this time last year, my Federalist colleague John Daniel Davidson provided a definition.
“If we’re going to defend manliness as good and virtuous and necessary for a healthy republic, then we need to be clear about what it is and what it is not,” he wrote, continuing:
Yes, men should be physically strong. They should also exemplify traditional masculine virtues like courage, independence, and assertiveness. But why? Not so they can sh-tpost about how ripped or good-looking they are compared to libs, but so they can protect and defend those who are weak.
That is the organizing principle behind the entire concept of manliness: it is not a style or a pose or an adornment. It is a way of being, of living according to the principle that you are responsible for the welfare of others, and should sacrifice yourself for their sake.
What does that mean in practice? It means stepping in to help those in need, whether it’s a woman being harassed or a stranger whose car has broken down. It means risking your own safety to protect someone being attacked, instead of just filming the attack on your phone and posting it online like a beta.
It also means marrying and remaining faithful to the same woman your entire life, and raising a family with her. It means working whatever hours and at whatever job in order to provide for that family. It means going to church every Sunday, whether you feel like it or not, to pass your faith on to your kids. It means getting up in the middle of the night to feed a colicky baby. It means taking your two-year-old daughter to swim class and singing all the songs — your own sense of dignity be damned.
I’m not sure I could write a better definition, amplifying the stoic virtues of physical strength, mental fortitude, and sacrificial living driven by a desire to strengthen the weak and protect the vulnerable.
Where we break is sexuality, and writing as a gay man, I know we don’t see eye to eye on certain fundamental differences. I may never live up to the picture of masculinity Davidson’s worldview prescribes, and I may never have children, but we can agree to disagree like adults. And that’s where the left has gone mad.
Gay men are often allergic to any kind of conversation surrounding masculinity because they’ve been mocked by a class of macho men as “queer,” a slur-turned-term-of-endearment that now qualifies one for the left’s privilege points. True masculinity, however, extends safety for the victims. Those who vilified it never truly understood the concept.
Before Davidson’s column, I’m not sure I remember even thinking critically about manhood — perhaps during a conversation with my father in high school. But beyond that, these discussions seem to have been choked out by a culture eager to dismiss masculinity as universally toxic.
If you question Smith’s regression — the legitimacy of it, the integrity of it, and even the consequences of it — you’re a heretic to the woketopian ruling class that’s hellbent on dictating acceptable speech.
But it isn’t just Smith. There’s a deeper mentally disturbed current pulsing beneath the decline of healthy masculinity and femininity. Consider that nearly 60 percent of people who call themselves “non-binary” report having a mental health issue. And that’s despite both difficulties in diagnosing mental illnesses and the fact that gender dysphoria itself is a mental sickness included in the latest psychiatric manual of mental disorders, meaning the real percentage is far higher.
See for yourself. How is this not a mental illness? Why are we not allowed to call it that? And why on Earth is it unacceptable to ask questions about the twisted state of the sexes?
These people are obviously struggling with a pain that’s very real. Their so-called gender identities might be made up, but their pain undeniably exists. Contrary to parental blackmail by family therapists, data shows gender-confused people are even more likely to commit suicide if they move forward with some kind of transgender transition.
The intolerance of questions surrounding gender dysphoria is baked into the elimination of masculine virtues, which promises peace and coexistence — or the allure of a projected $5 billion surgical industry by the end of the decade. But we need to understand what in the world is going on with men, and we need to be able to ask these questions.
Men today are not working. Their suicide rates are rising as high as their testosterone levels are falling low: While men make up nearly half the population, they represent 80 percent of suicides, and testosterone levels have dropped by double digits since the 1980s.
Men’s low testosterone levels reflect a population that’s not eating right, not exercising right, and not acting on their underlying ambitions. They’re becoming apathetic pot smokers stuck in the pursuit of cheap dopamine hits through Netflix and porn. And these low “T” levels are threatening fertility, which is already on the decline, in the long term, while guaranteeing a generation of fat, lazy men with no hormonal motivation in the short term.
The death of masculinity — its public execution brought about by its supposed toxicity — is the existential crisis nobody’s talking about.
Note: this is the first post in the author’s new conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness.If you liked this post and the topics addressed, consider subscribinghere.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. 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.
Minnesota’s teaching licensure board will soon require all teachers to be card-carrying Marxists. The card will literally say “licensed teacher,” but recently approved revisions redefine state licensure in expressly Marxist terms: Academic knowledge is out, and power struggle among the classes is in. To be licensed in Minnesota starting in 2025, every teacher must not merely teach about, but personally advocate, the core tenets of critical race theory and transgender ideology.
The state’s insistence that every teacher positively affirm homosexual behaviors and transgendered identities understandably aggravates consciences among moral traditionalists, but the issues run deeper than the “culture war.” What is at stake is the nature of knowledge, the future of liberty, and the prospects for a sustainable social order. In a word: civilization.
A perfunctory hearing on Aug. 24, 2022, and the resulting order for implementation with slight revisions by a solitary administrative judge in December cemented the new regime. The revised Standards of Effective Practice require radical changes to teachers’ curriculum selection, classroom management style, and self-understanding of the teaching vocation. The education departments at colleges and universities also must document their fulfillment of the new standards or else have their program certifications rescinded by Minnesota’s Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB).
The new requirements require teachers to positively affirm extremist leftist positions about human nature and sexual practices in order to be allowed to teach in government schools.
Teachers will be required to choose “anti-racist” — i.e. critical race theory — instructional strategies for students. An administrative judge told the state to amend No. 4 here requiring teachers to expose children to sexual identities. It will likely still go into effect, with slightly different language.The new license requires teachers to affirm transgenderism.
The revisions represent only the latest attack against American heritage in Minnesota’s public schools. In 2013, the state education department successfully removed the four presidents featured on Mount Rushmore from social studies standards.
Susan B. Anthony, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan also got the ax that year, as did the Magna Carta. References to the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were relativized, as students were to be instructed that those documents do not contain universal principles of ordered liberty, but merely the opinion of one powerful group of 18th-century men.
A decade later, the vanguard has advanced again. The revised teacher licensing rules strike the following from the mathematics standards: “addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, whole numbers, fractions, decimals, and percentages.” They insert this for teachers of all subjects: “The teacher fosters an environment that ensures student identities such as race/ethnicity, national origin, language, sex and gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical/developmental/emotional ability, socioeconomic class, and religious beliefs are historically and socially contextualized, affirmed, and incorporated into a learning environment where students are empowered to learn and contribute as their whole selves.”
It no longer suffices simply to discuss the controversies of radical reform; teachers and students must also become advocates for change: “The teacher creates opportunities for students to learn about power, privilege, intersectionality, and systemic oppression in the context of various communities and empowers learners to be agents of social change to promote equity.” Minnesota’s Scandinavian ancestors must be turning over in their graves at this new smorgasbord of Marxist truffles.
The PELSB’s “Statement of Necessity and Reasonableness” for the licensure changes draws support from two states just as blue as Minnesota. From New York, PELSB gleans: “Inclusive curriculum and assessment … works toward dismantling systems of biases and inequities, and decentering dominant ideologies in education.” In Illinois, each teacher must internalize a Marxist mentalité: “The culturally responsive teacher and leader will explore their own intersecting identities, how they were developed, and how they impact daily experience of the world.”
Illinois has expressly abandoned what Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, called “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” In place of objective truth, “what is seen as ‘correct’ is most often based on our lived experiences.” As in New York, so also in Illinois — and soon in Minnesota — all teachers must practice what cultural Marxists preach: “Assess how their biases and perceptions affect their teaching practice and how they access tools to mitigate their own behavior (racism, sexism, homophobia, unearned privilege, Eurocentrism, etc.).”
But to whom? Neither the people nor their elected officials decided the matter. A solitary administrative judge, appointed by the governor, ordered the implementation of the radical licensure changes after merely recommending a few tweaks.
The labyrinth of administrative procedure affords limited opportunity for appeal, but one can hope that a teacher, a parent, or a teacher-preparation college will petition for declaratory relief. If nothing else, PELSB’s radical rewriting of human nature smacks of a state-imposed religion, in violation of the First Amendment’s no establishment clause, not to mention the dereliction of duty when schools jettison mainstream academic content in favor of extremist ideology.
If recourse to the courts should fail, another remedy remains, modeled for the free world in Norway in 1942. When the National Socialists ordered parents to enroll their children in indoctrination camps with just three weeks’ notice and required all school teachers to implement a Nazi curriculum, the people simply would not have it. Five out of every six teachers resigned.
A similar proportion of parents flooded the Norwegian education bureau with letters — literally, laundry baskets full of letters — registering their protests. Adolf Hitler’s henchmen were grossly outnumbered, and the Nazis’ outward control of state agencies never penetrated to the hearts and minds of the people. The fusion of Viking blood with Lutheran “here I stand” courage made otherwise docile Norwegians invincible. Whether the Minnesotans can muster similar resolve soon will become evident to all.
Children’s Wisconsin’s recent chaplain hires are full-fledged left-wing activists who twist religion to advance their preferred social Marxist policies.
Wisconsin’s premier children’s hospital has had its fair share of scandal, particularly with regard to religious liberty and leadership, but the bar just keeps getting lower: Children’s Wisconsin is now hiring trans activists as chaplains and “spiritual care interns.”
Children’s staff members were first notified of such new hires when fliers were posted around the inpatient units advertising, “Meet Your New Chaplain: Kate Newendorp.” The first tip-off to Newendorp’s beliefs about the sexes was featured prominently on the posters, with a proclamation of her pronouns as “she/her/hers” and those of her fiance, a female who goes by “they/he.”
“Working in a pediatric hospital is a dream come true!!” Newendorp is quoted on the flier. “I am so excited to be working alongside everyone and am pumped to be part of the team. Think of me as your friendly next-door neighbor!”
The poster is just your garden-variety job announcement, but a deeper dive shows that Newendorp’s social Marxist views aren’t confined to a push for preferred pronouns. The new chaplain is all-in for transgender surgeries, abortion, and a rejection of religious teaching when it cuts against her personal comfort.
Despite biblical Christian doctrine affirming the sanctity and humanity of life in the womb, the existence of only two distinct sexes, and the immorality of same-sex relations in both the Old and New Testaments, the new “chaplain” proudly rejects all of this.
“Love Jesus. Be gay. Get ordained,” she wrote on Facebook in June, with pictures of herself in rainbow garb. “What better way to celebrate Pride than being ordained?! Many thanks to my church and classis for being willing to stand for queer folks being included in ministry and for allowing me to follow God’s call.”
Several months later, on Oct. 17, 2022, after announcing her engagement to her female fiance who identifies as transgender, the Children’s Wisconsin “chaplain” spouted off about her church online. “Also, your casual reminder that my validity as an ordained minister is currently under review by my denomination because of the love I feel for my fiancé. Do better Church, because I’m not going anywhere. I was called,” she wrote.
Newendorp doesn’t just reject biblical relationships in her own life; she’s a full-fledged left-wing activist who twists religion to advance her preferred leftist policies. Her Twitter bio announces that she’s a “Chaplain desiring to shake things up” and says she’s “Daydreaming about … a time where God isn’t referred to with male pronouns.” On Facebook, she shared a blasphemous poem called “Jesus at the Gay Bar”:
But she’s also used her religion card to proclaim that loving your neighbor looks like “getting vaccinated and masking up” and voting for Democrats, and that “Abortion is a religious freedom.”
“People of all genders and sexualities have and need abortions. Abortion is healthcare,” Newendorp wrote with misinformation about maternal deaths. “I am an ordained minister who supports a person’s right to choose what is right for their life and their body. I am pastor [sic] who is pro-choice.”
In January, Newendorp started a GoFundMe “on behalf of Jennifer London” to help her fiance “Jensen” undergo a double mastectomy, known in the transgender-activist world by the euphemism “top surgery.”
Since moving to Wisconsin for her role at the children’s hospital, Newendorp appears to have become friendly with the other chaplains, posting pictures of herself going wedding dress shopping with fellow Children’s chaplain Ian Butts. This indicates Newendorp is not the only anti-Christian person installed in a religious role at the hospital to help families deal with life-and-death medical situations.
If Butts’ name sounds familiar, that’s because he was the chaplain who interrogated Children’s staff members who submitted religious exemption requests over the disastrous Covid shot mandate that left many hospitals dangerously understaffed. As part of the invasive vetting process, Butts grilled employees about their religious beliefs to determine whether their theology met his standards for being allowed their First Amendment rights and freedom to make their own medical decisions.
As I reported in these pages at the time, “The questions included the specifics of the employees’ personal religious convictions and their vaccination record, with Butts pressing on what he considered to be contradictions. Two particularly leading questions regarded the specifics of how the employees would keep their patients safe without being vaccinated, implying a moral implication of refusing a vaccine, as well as how they could square working for a hospital that mandated something so contrary to their personal convictions as a condition of employment.”
“We have already seen that Children’s holds little value for respecting deeply held religious beliefs, given their recent COVID Religious Waiver Committee. But this feels like a step too far. This feels like they have actively recruited activists into this field to further their progressive agenda,” one former Children’s Wisconsin employee told The Federalist of the trans activist chaplains. “I think this situation really calls into question who do we want guiding the spiritual development of our children — especially children who are stuck in a hospital, isolated, sometimes alone, and extremely vulnerable and easily impressionable.”
Children’s also recently posted a flier for a “Spiritual Care Intern” named Meg Trimm, who demanded to be referred to by the third-person plural pronouns “They” and “Them.” This chaplain intern was “an LGBTQ+ community educator and LGBTQ+ teen safe space facilitator” who believes “a professional chaplain’s job is not to convert anyone or preach religion, but to empower each person to find and use the hope and resilience systems they already have.”
Like Newendorp, Trimm rejects biblical teaching such as the concurrent depravity and creation in God’s image of people of all skin colors to instead espouse the most radical of left-wing political and theological views. Trimm has shared numerous TikToks of herself “deconstructing my white supremacy,” explaining that “gender is infinite,” proclaiming, “God is TRANSGENDER!!!” and saying, “God has a purpose for your life, and it might be fricken queer!”
“I am deeply concerned with this new infiltration of trans activists into our chaplain and faith-based services,” the former Children’s employee told The Federalist. “We have already witnessed the erosion and lost of public trust in fields of psychology, psychiatry, social work and general mental health counselors due to the rise of activists in these areas. Now parents have to worry about this as well?”
TRANSFORMING
Like other pediatric hospitals that have recently come under fire for mutilative transgender interventions, the “Gender Health Clinic” at Children’s Wisconsin advertises medical interventions and surgeries for children up to age 16, with no specified age the hospital deems too young. It advertises that its services include “top surgery” (meaning a mastectomy that mutilates a child’s healthy and developing breasts), wrong-sex hormones, and allegedly “reversible” puberty-blocking hormones, although that isn’t what the experts and “science” say.
While the National Health Service used to claim such gender-bending interventions were “reversible,” it has since backpedaled, admitting:
Little is known about the long-term side effects of hormone or puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria. … It’s also not known whether hormone blockers affect the development of the teenage brain or children’s bones. Side effects may also include hot flushes, fatigue and mood alterations. … [Gender-affirming] hormones cause some irreversible changes, such as: breast development (caused by taking oestrogen), breaking or deepening of the voice (caused by taking testosterone). Long-term cross-sex hormone treatment may cause temporary or even permanent infertility.
If health-care workers in the “Gender Health Clinic” at Children’s Wisconsin decide it’s “appropriate,” they prescribe puberty blockers to children at their first visit, even if they’ve never been evaluated by a mental health professional. And while the hospital says it doesn’t pump kids full of wrong-sex hormones on the first visit, it “can work to quickly start hormones at a follow-up clinic visit, usually within a few weeks.”
Furthermore, the pediatric hospital states on its “gender health history” form: “We offer gender-affirming Spiritual Support to all our patients.” Andy Brodzeller, an external communication director for Children’s, failed to explain what “gender affirming Spiritual Support” means despite being asked repeatedly.
“Our chaplains are trained to support and engage families of various faith and personal backgrounds in a health care setting,” Brodzeller said in response to a Federalist inquiry. “They only interact with patients if specifically requested by a family. Families are also always free to seek the services of their own personal faith leader. Regarding your question about parental involvement related to care for gender diverse kids, parents and guardians are essential to all care decisions. Clear, informed consent of all parents/guardians is required before proceeding with all treatments.”
But with trans activist “chaplains” like Newendorp and Trimm stacking the pediatric hospital’s spiritual support bench, and a promise from Children’s to “offer gender-affirming Spiritual Support to all our patients” (emphasis mine), people in the Children’s community are rightly concerned.
“We have many parents and families at Children’s who are deeply religious and hold traditional Judeo-Christian values. Will these new chaplains be able to serve the need of these families objectively?” the former Children’s employee added. “How will they properly support a grieving parent who is dealing with a child’s traumatic injury? How will they properly counsel a child who may be alone in the hospital due to a single parent working to make ends meet and maintain insurance?”
How indeed.
Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
Michigan voters will decide Tuesday whether children in that state can obtain puberty blockers at Planned Parenthood facilities without parental consent. Proposal 3 would also give Michigan children a constitutional right to be castrated or surgically sterilized — again, without the consent of a parent.
Parental rights have become a fiercely contested battleground. Historically, your right to determine what’s in the best interest of your child has gone without question. It’s the oldest, most fundamental liberty we know, enshrined in legal doctrine since 1690.
But too often today, ideology determines whether your parental rights will actually stand in court. If a parent opposes her child’s desire to pretend to be the opposite sex, courts increasingly treat that parent’s rights as expendable.The sexual confusion of children overshadows parents’ rights to remain in their children’s lives as a potent force.
In a courtroom down the hall, however, the rights of neglectful or drug-abusing parents are treated with kid gloves, under the theme of family preservation. Activist courts stand ready to protect your parental rights, but only when your narrative matches their own.
‘I’m God in this Case’
Less than a year ago, Abigail Shrier shocked readers with her story of a California judge who stripped a father of his parental rights because he showed insufficient support for performing irreversible medical procedures on his sex-confused son. These cases are popping up all around the country. Sexual ideology is becoming the governing factor in a child’s placement, trumping the will and the voice of a parent.In a state whose governor was elected on a parental rights platform, Virginia Del. Elizabeth Guzman brazenly introduced a bill that would charge a parent who fails to affirm a child’s “sexual orientation or gender identity” with a felony. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed legislation that makes his state a “refuge” for trans-identifying minors who seek irreversible medical procedures. Just make it to the Golden State … and there is nothing your objecting parents can do.
One case in the sleepy university town of Charlottesville, Virginia, provides some insight into how a parent can suddenly get framed as “the bad parent” in a custody battle, merely for questioning a child’s sexual confusion.
Sarah Schultz told me she spent more than a half-million dollars trying to retain joint custody of her 15-year-old daughter who first claimed she was bisexual and then began to question her sex. Schultz pled for a “wait and see” approach and for the right to have an influence in her daughter’s maturing adolescence. Despite Sarah’s ex-husband’s earlier fentanyl overdose, she says, a judge gave primary custody of the daughter to her dad, who permitted both bisexual and heterosexual sleepovers. In the past four years, Schultz has seen her daughter fewer than five times.
Schultz said the appointed guardian ad litem viewed her faith as a threat to her daughter’s emerging sexuality.“I’m God in this case,” Schultz recalled her daughter’s guardian ad litem saying. The court saw her daughter as a girl in an “authentic process to discover her identity,” Schultz explained, while the father was commendable because he was “allowing her sexuality to blossom.”
Courts often use the “safety of the child” as a guise to award custody to a parent who mirrors the left’s narrative. Note the irony here. How can you be a good parent unless you are willing to oppose something harmful your child thinks she wants at the time? A teenager sees hormones and irreversible surgeries as a mirage of liberation. A concerned parent sees what a disfigured body and the inability to have children will mean 10 years from now.
A Pernicious Double Standard
Treatment of parental rights in the world of foster care and adoption, meanwhile, is a vastly different story.
A mother can give birth to a baby who spends two months in the NICU, crying for endless hours as he detoxes from the heroin his mother ingested during pregnancy, and she or her mother can still take the baby home. Parental rights are treated as sacrosanct, even though most of the maltreatment of children actually occurs at the hands of parents or their paramours.
“Family preservation” is the holy grail courts and welfare agencies pursue, often at the expense of the actual safety of children. As Naomi Schaefer Riley explains in her book, “No Way To Treat A Child,” “child welfare workers and family-court judges … believe that foster care, to the extent that it should be used at all, is an endless holding pattern for a child while parents get their affairs in order.” Sadly, many never do.
In an effort to preserve parental rights, children languish in care for years. The common complaint in foster care is “the clock.” Though a child is legally eligible for adoption after roughly two years in care, drug-abusing parents can play out the clock, attend a few recovery meetings, fulfill a requirement or two on the reunification plan — and the clock starts over. Many children age out of the possibility of adoption because the court favors parental rights over children’s attachment needs.
The Use and Abuse of Parental Rights
Given the current capricious approach of many courts, the question to ask is: Just how safe are your parental rights? If the issues at hand are related to your child’s confusion about his sex, then your parental rights can be bargained away in court far too easily. But if the court frames those rights as a matter of “family preservation,” they are nearly carved in stone.
The contrast between how parental rights are viewed, depending on the left-wing bias of courts and state agencies, should disturb everyone. The right of conscientious parents to shape their child’s life is among the most cherished of all human freedoms. That right is increasingly threatened, as the militancy of transgender ideology invades the private realm of parent and child.
How safe are your parental rights then? Only as safe as the left wants them to be.
Paula Rinehart, LCSW, is a therapist in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the author of the book “Sex and the Soul of a Woman.” She writes about family and culture.
The Florida Board of Medicine has voted to ban sex change surgeries and hormone therapy for children under the age of 18 after hours of deliberation and testimony Friday. The guidelines, first released April 20, 2022, state that anyone under 18 cannot receive hormone therapy or puberty blockers. It also bans “gender reassignment” surgery for children and adolescents. The Florida Medical Board released the guidance in response to guidance from the US Department of Health and Human Services endorsed sex change procedures for teens.
The vote came after the board heard testimony from several individuals who had DE transitioned. One such individual, Chloe Cole, said she decided to transition after being “introduced to inappropriate content, and an echo chamber of far-Left ideology, such as that sex and gender are separate, women are inherently victims, men are inherently superior, and that dysphoric children need hormones and surgery in order to live.”
BREAKING: The Florida Board of Medicine has voted to ban sex change "treatments" for underage children.
“Few medical issues are more contentious than the question of medical treatments for minors who may or may not have gender dysphoria. Those children deserve the utmost compassion, which starts by treating them as individuals, not as enlistees in a cause,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, Chairman of Do No Harm, an organization dedicated to depoliticizing healthcare, told the Daily Caller. “Compassion also requires basing care on rigorous scientific inquiry, not on dubious, agenda-driven studies or the demands of activists.”
"Over 2 years post-op…my nipples leak fluid and they stain my clothes. I have no breasts. I want to be a mother some day and yet I can never naturally feed my future children. My breasts were beautiful and now they have been incinerated for nothing." – @ChoooColepic.twitter.com/M4toFQc0Wx
Other detransitioners took aim at puberty blockers, which some claim are a harmless method for teenagers to explore their gender. A study released earlier this month revealed that 98% of those who receive puberty blockers go on to receive sex change treatments such as surgery or hormone therapy.
Parents of transgender youth who supported sex change treatments for children also testified at the hearing.
Chaos erupted as board members announced an end to speaker testimony, and gave attendees an email to submit testimony into the public record. As board members filed out before returning to vote, protestors screamed “Let them speak! Let them speak!”
From coast to coast, transgender activists are working to push chemical castration and genital mutilation on minors at all costs. In September, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 107 into law, blocking officials from enforcing other states’ laws that hinder access to transgender medical procedures and drugs for minors.
Meanwhile, in Virginia, the Pride Liberation Project (PLP) is organizing resources to help confused minors whose parents are not supportive of their gender and/or sexual identity experimentation to run away from their homes to stay with a “queer-friendly” adult. The potential for predatory behavior with this initiative is alarming.
PLP leader, Aaryan Rawal, now a college student, does not seem to be concerned about the risks of sending confused children into strangers’ houses “within 1-2 days” of their separation from their families. He sent messages to PLP members, mostly high school and middle school students, that the organization could offer rides and money promptly.
As reported by Asra Nomani, on July 15, 2022, Rawal wrote on Discord, “We can pay for Ubers, Lyfts, and other passes if you need to leave immediately. … In the short term, we can provide a couple of hundred dollars … through Venmo or Zelle.” For the longer term, he offers more money. “We can also set up a dedicated ActBlue fundraising page for you and get allies to donate. In the past, this has led to thousands of dollars in donations. All of this money is yours.”
At best, PLP is helping children run away from home. But it seems there is a sinister drive behind this network. Children are among our society’s most vulnerable, and those confused and separated from their parents are ripe prey. It is suspicious that identity disagreements within families, notably during this era of the social contagion of gender dysphoria and confusion — particularly among middle schoolers, would ever justify removing children from their families and placing them with strangers. Would these same actors argue that we take away a 13-year-old conservative girl from her liberal parents who refuse to affirm her political identity and place her with a random identity-affirming adult male stranger?
This is illegal and absurd. Saying so is common sense, not bigotry, as members of groups like PLP and Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) Pride suggest on social media. These groups are manipulating the political landscape to obliterate parental rights and push transgenderism on children — even in elementary schools.
On its website, PLP boasts that it has advocated for the books “Gender Queer” and “Lawn Boy” to remain in public school libraries. Its members have promoted compelled speech (via mandatory pronouns). Multiple PLP members spoke at a July 2022 Fairfax County School Board meeting in favor of proposed changes to the Family Life Education (FLE) curriculum that include lessons on transgender transitioning as early as fourth grade and co-ed FLE instruction to make students who identify as transgender feel more comfortable.
Arguably not by coincidence, the students who spoke at the board meeting all carried the same message: “Queer” students feel frightened and depressed. The PLP speakers repeatedly cited 50 percent as the community’s depression rate and suggested that changes to the FLE curriculum would help them feel supported. Their messages were so consistent, in fact, it would not be surprising if someone else wrote them.
On Sept. 25, 2022, Rawal sent PLP members detailed talking points and provided media training for the student walkout that occurred later that month. The walkout was meant to object to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s efforts to preserve parental rights and roll back Ralph Northam’s heavily politicized “Model Transgender Policies.” Rawal encouraged students to say that these efforts would “hurt Queer students,” “erase [their] existence,” and cause depression and potentially suicide.
In Q&A forums with PLP walk-out participants, Rawal further told a student who was not permitted to hang flyers in the school to proceed. “My honest response is do it anyway. Admin won’t penalize over flyers distributed manually…” Rawal also offered reimbursements of up to $25 for walkout expenses. When he realized he needed megaphones for the walkout and nearby stores were sold out of them, he wrote “f—, let me dm rigby.” Notably, Robert Rigby, a retired teacher and co-chair of FCPS Pride appears to be helping to organize and support PLP initiatives as well.
Adults organizing groups such as PLP are providing resources to help children run away from home. These minors, who are not permitted by law to drink alcohol or smoke tobacco, could potentially travel to California — now a so-called “gender-affirming” sanctuary state — to obtain permanent and irreversible surgical procedures, and/or medication, without their parents’ consent.
These transgender ideology pushers are not simply accepting, they are aggressive in encouraging medical experimentation among children and keeping parents in the dark. Permanently scarring children behind a parent’s back is a particular kind of evil we will, hopefully, look back on in disbelief.
Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a mother, author, and member of the Independent Women’s Network.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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