Tag Archive for: DangersOfTransgenderism

Lying to Ourselves

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Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

One of the peculiarities of our age is the ferocity with which intellectuals and politicians defend propositions that they do not—because they cannot—believe to be true, so outrageous are they, such violence do they do to the most obvious and evident truth. Agatha Christie (a far greater psychologist than Sigmund Freud), drew attention almost a century ago to the phenomenon when she had Dr. Sheppard, the protagonist and culprit of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd say, “It is odd how, when you have a secret belief of your own which you do not wish to acknowledge, the voicing of it by someone else will rouse you to a fury of denial. I burst immediately into indignant speech.”

Among the propositions defended with such suspect ferocity is that men can change straightforwardly and unambiguously into women, and vice versa. Now everyone accepts that they can change into something different from ordinary men and women, and can live as if they were of the opposite of their birth sex; moreover, there is no reason to abuse or otherwise maltreat them if they do, and kindness and human decency require that we do not humiliate them or make their lives more difficult than they are. But this is not at all the same as claiming that those who take hormones and have operations actually are the sex that they choose, or that it is right to enshrine untruth in law and thereby force people to assent to what they know to be false. That way totalitarianism lies.

To propound and defend ideas that you know are false is intellectually and morally frivolous, but it lacks the usual enjoyment that frivolity is supposed to supply. It is combined with earnestness but not with seriousness: one thinks of the Austrian saying under the Habsburgs, “the situation is catastrophic but not serious.”

An excellent example of the tendency to adopt ideas that are known to be false and yet are made the basis of policy is the Scottish government’s bill to reduce the legal obstacles to sex change. The bill proposed that adolescents from the age of sixteen could change their sex (for all legal purposes) without having to undergo any medical examination or treatment, and simply after completing three months of living as the sex that they desired to be.

Let us overlook the fact that “living as a woman” or “living as a man” implies that there is a binary distinction between male and female that is not merely a matter of social convention: no one, surely, could truly believe that after three months of role-playing, however successfully or gratifyingly to the person who role-plays, someone changes his or her sex. And this theory was put to a practical test very shortly after the passage of the bill (though it was vetoed by the British government). There was an understandable outcry in Scotland when violent sex offenders against women who claimed to be changing sex were sent to women’s prisons. The Scottish administration was forced to back-pedal, and the two were sent to men’s prisons instead.

How to explain that societies that prided themselves on having overthrown superstition and on basing themselves upon scientific enquiry nevertheless believed in the grossest absurdities?

Now according to the theory adopted by the government, these men were straightforwardly women because they identified as such. They were as female as Marilyn Monroe. Their motive for changing sex was beside the point: according to the theory, it was their self-identification that counted. And the fact that they had been violent towards women was also beside the point: a woman’s prison, after all, can be expected to house women who have been violent to women. If the administration genuinely believed the theory behind its own legislation, it would have stuck to its guns: the sex offenders who were men when they committed their offences were now women, and since women should be sent to women’s prisons, these two offenders should have been sent to women’s prisons, outcry or not.

If we try to look on this episode with the eye of a future social historian, on the assumption (by no means certain) that western societies will someday come to their senses and that their social historians will be at least moderately sensible, what will we hypothesise? How to explain that societies that prided themselves on having overthrown superstition and on basing themselves to an unprecedented extent upon scientific enquiry, and that had a higher percentage of educated people than ever before in human history, nevertheless believed in the grossest absurdities? What could have possessed them?

I think that social historians will find a clue in G. K. Chesterton’s book, Orthodoxy, though it was published more than a century before the phenomenon for which the explanation is sought, in 1908. Chesterton wrote:

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered … it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

Pity and compassion, formerly Christian virtues, are the virtues that run wild in the modern social liberal’s mind. Indeed, one might almost say that he has become addicted to them, for they are what give meaning and purpose to his life. He is ever on the lookout for new worlds not to conquer, but to pity. In his mind, pity and compassion require that he adopts without demur the point of view of the person he pities, for otherwise, he might upset him; he must not criticise, therefore. In short, if need be, he must lie, and he frequently ends up deceiving himself as well as others. And if he has power, he will turn lies into policy.

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This article was published by Law and Liberty and is reproduced with permission.

Busting Five Myths of Gender Ideology

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Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Scrutinizing the claims of gender ideology, it soon becomes apparent how incoherent they are. On the one hand, we’re told that men and women are the same — that the differences we observe in professional outcomes and sexual behavior are the result of sexist stereotyping. And yet, they are different; and men can really be women and women can really be men, by appropriating opposite-sex stereotypes.

For years, editors and journalists at the New York Times have been uninterested in skeptical views of transgenderism, dismissing them as bigotry. That’s beginning to change, as I write about in the forthcoming issue of the magazine. But whatever took them so long?

In 2018, when the Times was uncritically circulating transgender myths, we at National Review were battling the disinformation. And this is just one of many areas where NR has fought to be a voice of truth and reason. This week, and for this reason, we’re asking for our readers’ support — donations, of any amount — to help us continue this mission. Your contributions to these webathons, and of course your NRPlus subscriptions, help us do what we do.

Here are just some of the myths that we’ve busted so far.

MYTH 1: We All Have a ‘Gender Identity’

Gender-identity theory originated with clinical experiments in psychiatry and surgery in the latter half of the 20th century. Later, in the 1990s, this theory evolved into gender ideology under the influence of academic leftists. It entered the mainstream via the internet in the 2010s and, with the help of political activists and lobbyists, morphed into the modern transgender movement. In its current manifestation, gender-identity ideology holds that everyone has a “gender identity” — an inner sense of being male, female, or something else — which is distinct from sex and capable of overriding it.

In activist lingo, a person who accepts their anatomical sex is “cisgender” while a person who rejects their anatomical sex is “transgender.” Really, though, a person who rejects their anatomical sex (i.e., reality) is mentally disturbed — deserving of compassionate help — while a person who accepts their anatomical sex is not.

This is what Ray Blanchard, a sexologist, explained in 2019, during an interview with National Review. Blanchard considers “gender identity” to be an unhelpful concept for “normal people” since “cross-gender identity is a constant preoccupation with, and unhappiness about, the individual’s gender” and not, as activists claim, “a normal gender identity which has found itself lodged in the wrong body.”

MYTH 2: Puberty Blockers Are Safe and Fully Reversible

The website of Britain’s National Health Service, whose main gender youth clinic was closed earlier this year after an independent investigation confirmed concerns over patient safety, formerly read: “The effects of treatment with GnRH analogues [puberty blockers] are considered to be fully reversible, so treatment can usually be stopped at any time.”…..

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Continue reading this article at National Review.

Mom Explains What It Took to Rescue Daughter From Transgenderism

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Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minute

Erin Friday’s daughter was introduced to gender identity ideology in a comprehensive sex-ed class in seventh grade.

“The seed was planted after that class,” Friday says. “And in fact, all of her friends, there were five, sat in my front yard saying what their new labels were.”

Friday says she was “alarmed by the language that they were using, including ‘pansexual,’ which is not a term that 11-year-olds should know.”

The mother began looking into what her daughter was learning in school and was struck by the fact that other adults were not also questioning the teaching of gender ideology to middle schoolers.

When her daughter said she was “transgender,” Friday began taking decisive steps to rescue her from transgenderism. She took her daughter’s phone, put her in a new school, and tried her best to surround the preteen with the truth about who she was as a female. It was not easy, but Friday says, as a parent, “you have to be strong enough, your love for your child has to be strong enough, to take their vitriol.”

After about a year and a half, Friday’s daughter stopped claiming a transgender identity. Today, through the work of the parental support group Our Duty, Friday is helping other families navigate through gender identity ideology.

Friday joins the show today to share her story, and to explain how parents can protect their children from the harms of gender identity ideology.

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This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

Weekend Read: Soul Dysphoria [A Trans and GenZ Disaster]

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Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

Understanding the “trans” phenomenon means recognizing it’s about more than gender.

In 2013 the DSM-V, an authoritative diagnostic manual for therapists and clinicians published by the American Psychiatric Association, defined gender dysphoria as “the distress that may accompany the incongruence between one’s experienced or expressed gender and one’s assigned gender,” where “gender” refers not to one’s biology but to “the public (and usually legally recognized) lived role as boy or girl, man or woman.”

The psychologist John Money popularized this way of speaking in the mid-20th century—it is the lasting legacy of his highly disreputable career. The word “gender” draws a stark—some might say Platonic—dividing line between “sex,” meaning one’s biological characteristics as male or female, and “gender,” meaning the ways in which one behaves, feels, and is perceived. The runaway success of the philosopher Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in 1990 helped sunder these two ideas more starkly among the leftist intellectual class. Butler was wrestling with French poststructuralists like Michel de Foucault and post-Freudian feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, who had famously written that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Pushing Beauvoir’s idea further, Butler suggested that “sex does not cause gender, and gender cannot be understood to reflect or express sex.”

But then, still more radically, Butler proposed that sex too is an invented idea applied to the body, so that even the most basic facts of our physical selves are subject to transformation and reinterpretation: “gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or a ‘natural sex’ is produced.” Gender is a performance; binary sex is a social construct; our bodies are objects of hostile interpretations fabricated by the powerful. At the time these were explosive statements. Today, they are practically commonplace.

With this new vocabulary came new awareness of a painful split between body and soul. By all accounts, dysphoria is agony—a jagged perceived mismatch between flesh and spirit. In 2016, Buzzfeed asked gender dysphoric people to depict what it was like to feel as they did. Women drew their breasts as balls and chains shackled to their legs; men imagined unzipping their own skin and emerging, newly female, from their old unwanted exoskeleton. In children with gender dysphoria, puberty can be a time of acute distress when the maleness or femaleness of the body suddenly asserts itself in a dramatic way. The thoughts of gender dysphoric adolescents often turn to suicide, which is why many parents are willing to do anything—including irreversible surgery and hormonal intervention—to help alleviate the discomfort.

But it is telling to read in the DSM-V that gender dysphoria occurs in just 0.005 percent to 0.014 percent of natal males, and 0.002 percent to 0.003 percent of natal females. In 2013, those numbers were current. They are already wildly out of date. Girls, especially, are developing gender dysphoria at an alarming pace: between 2006 and 2016, the number of referrals to London’s Charing Cross “Gender Identity Clinic” nearly quadrupled. Between 2008 and 2015, another such clinic in Nottingham saw its referral numbers jump from 30 to 850. A Gallup report in 2020 found that 1.8 percent of Gen-Z kids in the United States (born between 1997 and 2002) identified as transgender. By 2021, it was up to 2.1 percent. A shocking uptick in gender dysphoria, especially among girls, has blown the DSM-V’s figures out of the water. We are simply more uncomfortable in our bodies than we were before.

Perhaps some of this is because gender dysphoric people are more comfortable sharing their feelings as it becomes commonplace, not to say required, to accept and validate transgender people in American culture and society. But it is just as likely, if not more so, that causation goes the other way: maybe boys and girls feel more uncomfortable about their bodies as they are increasingly taught by adults and peers to view their physical sex as something detachable from their gender. Brown University health researcher Lisa Littman caused enormous controversy when she surveyed 250 families with dysphoric children and observed that 80 percent of the kids were female. What Littman called “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” is a new phenomenon, a sudden self-identification as trans in girls who never showed signs of bodily discomfort before. Littman was attacked because her results suggested that our massive dysphoria epidemic might not be entirely spontaneous.

More and more public schools have adopted the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s “gender snowperson,” or other similar infographics✎ EditSign, to teach that sex, sexuality, and gender are unmoored from one another. But this kind of messaging goes beyond classrooms. One 2020 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found evidence that in areas where kids are exposed to more media coverage of transgender-related issues, gender therapy clinics receive more referrals. Kids increasingly shape their political beliefs and values (including their sense of gender identity) in conversation with one another in online forums. “Online engagement is not just isolated,” said Tumblr’s director of outreach Liba Rubenstein, “it really is attached to people’s offline identities.”

Typically, this kind of peer-to-peer discussion is represented as a victory for liberation and inclusion. But online life is not just allowing kids to vent their discomfort with their bodies: it’s also creating that discomfort where previously there was none. In this broader context the rise in transgender identification and gender dysphoria seems less like an authentic phenomenon in and of itself, and more like one symptom of an ancient conflict between body and soul, kicked into hyperdrive by the experience of internet life.

Abigail Shrier, a journalist who documents the rise of gender dysphoria in young girls in her book Irreversible Damage, interviewed one teenager whose anorexia morphed naturally into gender dysphoria as if the two sprang from the same source: “My goal went from diet pills to testosterone…. From fantasies about slicing off my thigh fat to slicing off my breasts. I bound them with duct tape. I couldn’t breathe. It made me panic, but I felt brave.” Buck Angel, a transsexual internet celebrity, speculated to Shrier about the association between widespread gender dysphoria and a disgust at the body more generally among teens, who are having less sex than previous generations and seem more comfortable in virtual than physical space. Shrier concludes that adolescent transgenderism “very often seems to be a sad cult of asexuality, like the hand-painted sign in an antique shop reading ‘Please Do Not Touch.’”

Persona Creata

Given the explosion of gender dysphoria among adolescent girls, this phase of the body crisis suggests a particular horror at the idea of womanhood. “Perhaps forever,” writes Shrier, “but at least since Shakespeare’s Viola arrived shipwrecked in Illyria and decided to pass herself off as a man, it has occurred to young women: it’s so much easier to be a boy.” The feminist injunction for women to “lean in”—to hunt out positions of power and dominance in traditionally male industries and pursuits—comes freighted with the implication that traditionally female pursuits are weak, contemptible, and dull. “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession,” sniffed Hillary Clinton, in a classic summation of this idea, during her husband Bill’s first presidential campaign.

Both implicitly and explicitly, our ruling classes express contempt for homemaking and motherhood. But this closes off the most primal path to resolving the body crisis. Women, by creating new life, bear witness to the possibility that body and soul can in fact be reconciled: in childbirth, human flesh becomes the medium of the divine. Poets have expressed this as the “eternal feminine,” the strangely luminous power of women like Dante’s Beatrice or Faust’s Margarete to act as physical conduits for the life-giving power of God. “Woman, eternal, beckons us on,” wrote Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the closing lines of his Faust. This is the meaning of the Virgin Mary’s consent to bring God into the world: her body will become the medium to deliver divine life, God made flesh.

Not that pregnancy and labor are some sort of cakewalk that we should regard with misty-eyed sentiment. Ever since Adam and Eve left Eden, creating life has also meant facing pain. The delicate challenge of growing from girl to woman involves coming to terms with the blood and the sorrow of what it means to have a body in a fallen world. Now, though, that hard task is made harder by the constant social implication that to be a mother is to be brainwashed and oppressed. Small wonder girls are fleeing womanhood, and small wonder this has intensified our sense that the human body is nothing more than a dead weight. Childbirth is not the only way to be fulfilled, nor the only way out of the body crisis. But if our bodies are not at least potentially a source of life as well as death, of blessing as well as discomfort, then they are simply a burden. Shucking off that burden means turning women into mere body parts that can be removed, reconfigured, or appropriated at will, reducing the female body to its functions and recasting women themselves as “menstruaters,” “chest feeders,” and “birthing people.”

Thus trans activism increasingly comes along with the implication that the body has no inherent integrity; that its meaning is entirely at the whim of its inhabitant. “Here’s the thing about chest surgery,” said Dr. Joanna Olson-Kennedy, a trans youth specialist and director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles: “If you want breasts at a later point in your life you can go and get them.” Reacting with alarm to Olson-Kennedy’s statement, British journalist Douglas Murray, asked: “Are people like blocks of Lego onto which new pieces can be stuck, taken off and replaced again at will?”

Not yet, but perhaps that is the longing upon which trans extremism plays. Increasingly the objective is to abolish the boundaries of the body altogether, to liberate the human spirit and let it mold the flesh as it chooses. This is what critic Mary Harrington calls “biolibertarianism”: the aspiration to remove bodily constraints, to turn our physical form into a set of customizable parts that can be interchanged or reshaped. Harrington notes an anonymous 2018 paper, Gender Acceleration, which argues that surgical transition from male to female “breaks [a] lucky few free from the horrid curse of being human.” A woman who goes by the handle “whorecress” expressed a very similar attitude in a video that went viral on TikTok: “I’m not body-positive,” she declared, “I’m not body-neutral. I’m body-negative. I wanna be vapor. Or like, a plume of blue smoke. Or mist. Or a rumor—I’d be a rumor… ’cause like, gender? Humiliating. An ache, a pain? Needing to sit down? Spatial awareness? The vulgarity…. Every day I wake up and I’m subject to the burden of embodiment. How dare I be a shape? Disgusting.”

Obviously this monologue was delivered with a certain irony. But like all successful humor, it articulated a real sentiment that the online audience connected with. Whorecress’s cri de coeur against embodiment featured on a Reddit discussion thread called r/voidpunk, which “is a subculture for those who often feel rejected or disconnected from humanity” and prefer to associate themselves with a more spectral or robotic form of life. r/voidpunk has 21,600 subscribers as of this writing, but the trend is much bigger than that: “transhumanism” is a growing movement among technologists, many of whom imagine a future where gene editing, virtual reality, and bionic enhancement render us free from the limitations of physical existence. This is the modern culmination of our extreme body crisis.

The connection between transgenderism and transhumanism is made explicit by transgender activist and scientist Martine Rothblatt. Rothblatt’s book, From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form, argues expressly that gender transition is just the beginning:

I am convinced that laws classifying people as either male or female, and laws prohibiting people’s freedom based on their genitals, will become as obsolete in the twenty-first century as the religious edicts of the Middle Ages seem absurd in America today…. Over the next few decades we will witness the uploading of human minds into software and computer systems, and the birth of brand new human minds as information technology. As we see our selves and our loved ones in these transhuman beings, and they make us laugh and cry, we will not hesitate long to recognize their humanity with citizenship and their common cause with us in a new common species, Persona creatus (the “created person”).

And so the most cutting-edge current expression of the body crisis is not the hormone injection but the digital avatar: pick and choose how you will move through imagined digital space. The movement that began with “gender neutral” pronouns has now produced an enormous constellation of totally invented identities, going far beyond ze and zer to include neologisms like “pupself” and “demonself,” for those who identify spiritually as animals or demons. What’s going on here is bigger than gender: we are dreaming not simply of making men into women, and vice versa, but making ourselves into anything, at a whim.

Desire and Happiness

“Gender? Humiliating.” Whorecress was on to something. “How dare I be a shape? Disgusting.” There is the body crisis in a nutshell.

And yet we can’t escape the body except at a great and terrible cost. Much like virtual reality and online life, transhumanism holds out glittering promises on which it is singularly ill-equipped to deliver. It’s not just that sex-change technology currently comes with gruesome risks and lifelong complications. Even if we imagine that rearranging or reconstructing body parts becomes painlessly easy, will it make us happy? What will “happy” even mean? Already Andrea Long Chu, a major transgender writer, has emphasized that happiness is not the point: “My new vagina won’t make me happy,” Chu wrote in the New York Times, “and it shouldn’t have to.” This is because “desire and happiness are independent agents.” Really? If our desires have no governing aim, such as happiness or virtue, what is the use of them—or us—at all? Surely we follow our desires because they point us toward something desirable—if not, we are just aimless hunks of flesh pulled randomly in all directions by wants that have no connection to goodness or joy. This total dissolution of purpose would be one of the real wages of transhumanism, were it ever to become reality.

If we become fully free from the constraints of physical form, if we even develop the technology to “feel” whatever we want, then we really will become nothing more than the chemistry sets that the crudest materialists imagine us to be: joy will be an electro-chemical occurrence, unrelated to any objective excellence or achievement. In our effort to liberate our spirits from our bodies, we will make our spirits and our very consciousness into the mere mechanical illusion that machinists already imagine it to be. Dissolve the boundaries of your body and you dissolve the boundaries of yourself. If you feel an instinctive disgust at this dystopian futuristic prospect, it is because you have a felt intuition of what we really are.

We can have compassion for gender dysphoric people without making them the central ideal of all our aspirations. Without a trace of malice toward them, we may observe that the measures they take to transform their bodies are not steps in a direction we find particularly attractive or healthy. Treating the body like an endlessly permeable and cumbersome appendage is just as degrading as ignoring it in favor of constant online entertainment, and for the same reasons. Both are means of seeking escape from our physical forms, and both promise liberation while actually leaving us sick, remorseful, and listless. We have indulged for too long in the vague fantasy that if these kinds of life are pushed to the extreme, they will suddenly become fulfilling—that if we just proceed down this path that is currently making us sick and miserable, we will eventually be happy and free. This, as always, is a dubious proposition.

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This article was published by The American Mind and is reproduced with permission.

Study Finds 4.5x Higher Psychiatric Illness Rate for Transgenders

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Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

The medical journal Transgender Health recently published a study that revealed transgenders are 4.5 times more likely to have psychiatric illnesses. Of course, the journal tried to claim this is because of discrimination and all that nonsense, but the reality is that it is extremely difficult to be in business or the public square and be anti-transgenderism. The government, the education system, big corporations, Big Tech, Hollywood, the arts, sports, even some churches—practically every major sector of society constantly praises and pushes LGBTQ ideology. And yet “transgenders” continue to have serious mental health issues. It wouldn’t be because “transgenders” act in unnatural ways and mutilate their own bodies to try and be someone they are not biologically, would it?

Not at all, according to Transgender Health, which obviously has no vested interest in promoting transgenderism despite the evidence, right? In fact, the journal decided kids should transition to “transgender” at even younger ages (the transgender surgery industry is estimated to be worth $5 billion by 2030, so there’s a clear financial incentive). That way young people can hate their bodies and regret double mastectomies at even younger ages. Even the New York Times recently published an in-depth piece admitting that puberty blockers can have severe long-term effects on kids, including their bones and brains.

“[PJ Media] In the least surprising clinical conclusion in world history, research published in the medical journal Transgender Health revealed the sizable mental health disparity between transgender and cisgender subjects:

‘We performed a cross-sectional analysis of the prevalence of psychiatric diagnoses among transgender patients in clinical care using an all-payer electronic health record database. Of 10,270 transgender patients identified, 58% (n=5940) had at least one psychiatric diagnosis compared with 13.6% (n=7,311,780) in the control patient population (p<0.0005). Transgender patients had a statistically significant increase in prevalence for all psychiatric diagnoses queried, with major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder being the most common diagnoses’…

The researchers found ‘increased rates of bipolar disorder, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and substance use disorders’ in the transgender population, among other negative disparities like schizoaffective disorder, panic disorder, and agoraphobia.

The study examined the records of 53,449,400 patients, so it was a huge sample size.”

Don’t expect the party of “Science” to stop pushing transgenderism in light of the evidence, though.

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This article was published by Pro Deo et Libertate and is reproduced with permission.

Court Permanently Blocks Biden Administration’s Transgender Mandate

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Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

A federal appeals court has permanently blocked the Biden administration’s bid to force doctors and insurers to perform or pay for gender-transition procedures even if they object on grounds of conscience and medical judgment, with the court basing its decision on constitutional protections of religious freedom.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit issued a unanimous ruling (pdf) on Dec. 9 blocking the controversial U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) transgender mandate.

Issued in 2016, the mandate interpreted the Affordable Care Act in a way that required doctors to perform gender-transition procedures on any patient, including children, even if the doctor was convinced the procedure could harm the patient.

Controversial Mandate

The mandate also required the vast majority of private insurance companies and many employers to cover the costs of gender-transition therapy or face penalties.

The HHS’s own panel of medical experts acknowledged that gender-transition procedures can be harmful and in many cases not medically justified, with HHS determining that Medicare and Medicaid shouldn’t be forced to cover such procedures.

Research has shown that gender-transition procedures carry significant risk for children, including loss of bone density, heart disease, and cancer.

‘Do No Harm’

Religious organizations and states sued to block the mandate, with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the North Dakota Attorney General’s office representing some of the groups.

“The federal government has no business forcing doctors to violate their consciences or perform controversial procedures that could permanently harm their patients,” Luke Goodrich, vice president and senior counsel at Becket, said in a statement.

“This is a common-sense ruling that protects patients, aligns with best medical practice, and ensures doctors can follow their Hippocratic Oath to ‘do no harm.’”

Becket filed the lawsuit in 2016 on behalf of a coalition of Catholic hospitals, a Catholic university, and Catholic nuns who run health clinics for the poor.

A federal district court blocked the mandate from taking effect, leading the Biden administration to appeal the case to the 8th Circuit, which in its Dec. 8 ruling concluded that the lower court “correctly held that ‘intrusion upon the Catholic Plaintiff’s exercise of religion’” justified a permanent injunction…..

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Continue reading this article at The Epoch Times.

CHILDREN: Majority of Americans Believe Transgender Movement Has Gone Too Far

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Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minute

A new poll finds 75 percent of likely American voters believe the transgender movement has gone too far by encouraging underage minors to use drugs and surgery to transition to the opposite sex.

The survey, co-sponsored by Colorado-based Summit Ministries – which embraces a Christian worldview – and national polling firm McLaughlin & Associates, also finds 69 percent of voters who have an opinion on the issue believe the rise in transgenderism among teens is the result of influence to question their gender by social media and other cultural forces.

The poll of 1,000 likely general election voters across the country was conducted October 12-17, and has an accuracy of +/- 3.1 percent at a 95 percent confidence interval.

“What is your opinion on why transgenderism is rising amongst underage minors?” respondents were asked. “Underage minors feel free to question their gender without judgement, OR, Underage minors are being influenced to question their gender due to social media and other cultural influences.”

Among the 860 participants who answered this question, 69 percent said underage minors are being influenced to question their gender, while 31 percent said they feel free to question their gender without judgment.

“Do you believe the transgender movement has gone too far by encouraging underage minors to use drugs and surgery to transition to the opposite sex?” participants were asked.

Among the 858 respondents who answered this question, 75 percent answered “yes,” while 24 percent said, “no.”….

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Continue reading at The Star News Network.

Transgender Activists Manipulate Parents With Suicide Threats

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Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

“Do you want a dead daughter or a live son?”

This question, which is really a threat, is the central tenet of the campaign selling gender ideology to parents.

Parents are often told that they are putting their gender-nonconforming child at risk of suicide if they don’t medically “transition” him or her to appear as the opposite sex or at least treat their child as the sex he or she chooses. The child then internalizes this information and believes that suicide is an inevitable outcome without transition, as opposed to an unhealthy response to internal distress.

The pernicious assumption behind this horrific question is that parents do not have the best interest of their children at heart and that the “experts” know better. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Parents who are not caught up in this social contagion know that children who threaten suicide are not born in the wrong body and that a risky regimen of puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries won’t bring children the peace and joy they desperately crave. A child who threatens suicide requires love, kindness, and therapy to address underlying struggles, not sterilization. 

The children captivated by gender ideology often have underlying conditions, including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or autism spectrum disorder, which are associated with lagging social skills, obsessive rumination, depression, and anxiety. 

Both research studies and the stories shared by a growing number of those who have detransitioned reveal a tendency to self-harm and suffer from eating disorders. Life has been hard for these highly sensitive and emotionally intense young people, and they’re understandably seeking relief.

These vulnerable children, often girls, deserve their parents’ involvement as they struggle through puberty, and they need their parents’ emotional and financial support until they make it safely to adulthood.

At its horribly rotten core, the culture created by the question “Do you want a dead daughter or a live son?” intentionally drives a painful wedge between parents and children unless parents consent without question to immediate social and medical transition. Parents who would do anything to keep their children safe are shoved aside by arrogant and callous school staff, doctors, and therapists.

Rather than assuring children that no one is born in the “wrong” body, schools and many doctors and therapists choose to parrot activist slogans instead.

Children are told that doctors guess the gender when a child is born and sometimes get it wrong; that if they don’t feel like they fit into regressive stereotypes about males and females, they must be transgender; that a “safe space” is one that affirms fleeting feelings rather than biological reality; and that anyone who doesn’t immediately and fully embrace their new transgender identity hates them and wants to “erase” them. Most perniciously, children receive a steady drumbeat of messages focused on suicide and death.

These slogans are used like a giant switch that turns off critical thinking and forbids even gentle questioning. They are repeated over and over in colorful children’s picture books; at GSA (gender sexuality clubs) meetings; and in-classroom lesson materials created by organizations like Queer Kids, Gender Spectrum, Advocates for Youth, and, of course, Planned Parenthood, an organization that profits from this ideology by doling out cross-sex hormones at clinics across the country.

These slogans are also baked into local and state transgender policies adopted—often quietly or even without a formal vote—by school boards. 

Misguided advocates for so-called transition procedures may be familiar with the suicide-centered activist slogans that populate their social media feed and the materials distributed by the many professional associations captured by this ideology, but they definitely haven’t done the research to familiarize themselves with the irreversible damage that so many young people experience after transitioning to appear as the opposite sex.

That damage can include, according to a list compiled at The Federalist, “loss of bone density, increased risk of blood clots, premature brain aging and increased aggression, reduced capacity for sexual pleasure, future infertility, and increased risk of heart disease.”

Activists and misguided school staff, as well as an alarming number of doctors and counselors who have carelessly embraced the gender gospel, must stop making vulnerable students’ lives harder.

A recent analysis by Jay Greene of The Heritage Foundation found that “existing literature on this topic suffers from a series of weaknesses that prevent researchers from being able to draw credible causal conclusions about a relationship between medical interventions and suicide.” (The Daily Signal is the news and analysis site of The Heritage Foundation.)

I participated in a recent event discussing Greene’s conclusion that it is possible that “increasing minors’ access to cross-sex interventions is associated with a significant increase in the adolescent suicide rate.” The findings suggest that the “gender-affirming” policies and standards of care put in place in the name of protecting children from suicide must be reevaluated. 

It’s time to stop cruelly manipulating children with cult-like slogans. It’s time to stop driving a wedge between parents and their vulnerable children.

Our society must support parents, protect children, and keep families intact by turning away from propaganda centered around suicide threats. We must end secretive and destructive policies that harm children and instead pass laws that affirm that parents have primary responsibility for their children’s education and health.

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This article was published by the Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

In Movie, Matt Walsh Reveals How Gender Ideology Mutilates Kids

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The left doesn’t want you to know some consequences of what it calls gender-affirming care, commentator Matt Walsh says of his film “What Is a Woman?”

 

What is a woman? Seems like a pretty simple question. But in today’s America, the left thinks females aren’t the only ones who count as women anymore. Stories abound of biological males not only invading women’s private spaces such as bathrooms and locker rooms but dominating in women’s sports.

All of this comes with the support of radical leftists and activists in medicine.

Worse, those medical doctors aren’t just focused on treating adults. Transgender ideologues have targeted children.

Matt Walsh, author, podcast host, and filmmaker with The Daily Wire, has released a documentary film titled “What Is a Woman?” that he hopes will expose the worst aspects of gender ideology.

“You feel like you’re staring into the pit of hell, honestly. I mean, you’re looking at pure evil when you consider what they’re doing to these kids, and they know what they’re doing,” Walsh says. “They have to know what they’re doing because they’re the doctors and they know what it entails. They know that this stuff is obviously irreversible and they also know that kids can’t actually consent to any of this stuff.”

Walsh adds:

Kids don’t know what they’re doing. They’re not looking five, 10 years into the future. I mean, even before you get to surgery and that’s horrific enough, you’ve got the drugs, the hormone drugs, the so-called puberty blockers, and those drugs among other consequences, they also have the effect of sterilizing kids.

Walsh joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss his film and what gender activists are doing to kids, and offer solutions on how to escape this post-truth environment.

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This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

I Just Got Back from a Trip

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To Saturn. I was there for six years. Boy, have things changed. I am not talking about Joe Biden being President which is shocking enough. I am referring to the fact that the hottest issue in America is not even climate change. It is people changing gender, what gender you are, how you refer to yourself, and teaching children about their gender identity. Wow, things sure changed while I was gone.

When I left, the country was just adjusting to the Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage. Many people were delighted and the issue of being gay was now a thing of the past. From 1969 to 2015, not even 50 years, Gays went from The Stonewall Riots to being fully accepted. People didn’t care anymore whether someone was gay except for the odd person behind the tree. I had not cared for a long time as certified by the fact my Best Man at my wedding in 1986 was and is gay.

When I left for Saturn, the entire issue was settled. I returned to a massive uproar. I knew the Sparks song All You Ever Think About is Sex, but I figured it was obscure, now it had taken over the nation.

The groups supporting gay rights and gay marriage did not want to say, “we won, we are done.” So, they found a new cause – Transgenders. Thus, these activists are still in business and raising more money than ever. I asked many others if they ever thought there would be so much focus on such a small group of people, and they just looked at me in amazement that this has happened.

The problem is if you are not on board with people changing their gender, you are branded a bigot. Most people do not care if someone wants to change genders, they just do not want to hear about it and they do not want to pay for it.

A fracas broke out about males becoming females and participating in either high school or college sports. When anyone questioned the right to do so, they were branded a bigot. Here is something I noticed when I returned – not one of the people who were against former males participating in women’s sports had ever argued against former females participating in male sports. Why is that? If they only argued one way because they said it was unfair to the female athletes to compete against former males, can you really brand them a bigot? Doesn’t that provide validation that they are not arguing against Transgenders but instead arguing for fairness in sports competition?

Discussion about gender has become all the rage. What you call yourself is now a thing. When I left people referred to each other as men or women, he or she, her or him. Now there is a laundry list of names you can call yourself. There are new terms like “cisgender.” Who makes this stuff up? Don’t they have real jobs? And all the pronouns. And stating what you want (preferred) to be called. I was referred to a professor at U.C. Berkeley who is the sister of a childhood friend. I went on her Wiki page which stated her preferred pronoun was “They.” I read her bio and was deeply confused by the references made every time “They” was used. It reminded me of when people used to use the royal “We.” Our response looking at the person was always “What, do you have a mouse in your pocket?”

Boy, have things changed. It seems it is now mandatory to teach children about gender identity even as early as kindergarten. We used to focus young children on other matters like getting an education and learning how to read. One state decided that teachers may not discuss the matter with kids 5-8 years old and World War III broke out. I saw a video of three grown women skipping down a hallway arm-in-arm saying “Gay, Gay, Gay.” What has happened folks? Do six-year-olds need to hear this stuff? Will it not just confuse them? Can’t they just be kids? They will have plenty of time to deal with these matters and choose their preferred pronouns. In the end, isn’t that the role of their parents to discuss this with their children?

Then I saw a video of a teacher saying that because of this law he could not share the weekend activities he had with his gay partner with his students. I do not have a perfect memory, but I searched back in it and could not think of an instance where a teacher conveyed anything about their personal life to me. Not even when I was president of the School of Business at San Diego State and spent hours and hours with professors and the Dean. Certainly, my third-grade teacher never discussed even going to see the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra with George Szell or the Indians or Browns. It just did not happen, and I cannot see a reason it should. My, have things changed.

Yes, coming back from Saturn was shocking. Not only was all this going on, but the Chicago Cubs had won a World Series. Now we know the world has totally been turned upside down.