507 private links
The Department of Education had previously sought a Title IX rule that would essentially make "gender identity" a protected class, making it illegal for states or local districts to stop boys who claim to be girls from competing against actual girls in athletics. On Friday, though, that attempt was finally dropped. //
OrneryCoot
8 hours ago
I think you hit the right of it when you stated that they didn't want to give Trump an obvious win when he gets in and would reverse the rule, Bonchie. They can see the writing on the wall, even when they didn't believe it until it was too big to ignore. I think that Trump's ad against Kamala with the pronouns in it made them wake up. I just hope they keep screaming about it so that we can continue to thrash them in suburbia, where parents don't want their teenage daughter showering in the locker room with an unstable dude who has unhealthy ideas about sexuality.
While lawyers in the Tennessee transgender care ban case were slugging it out in court last week, the UK was putting the finishing touches on a “holistic” approach to pediatric transgender care—one that has broad, bipartisan support and is grounded in mental health protocol rather than risky, unproven drugs.
On Wednesday, the left-leaning Labour government announced that puberty blockers for minors with gender dysphoria would be banned indefinitely across the UK, except for use in clinical trials.
The announcement follows an emergency ban that extended to private providers beginning in May 2024, after the landmark Cass Review on children’s gender care found there was insufficient evidence to show these drugs were safe. It was a temporary measure enacted by the then-Conservative government and later upheld against a challenge in court, as we reported here. //
In October, Cass told The Times she attributes the report’s ongoing success to broad, cross-party support that kept it from becoming “a political hostage to fortune.”
So far, Cass—now Baroness Cass of Barnet to us—seems to be right. The UK did what the US failed to do: take the politics out of children’s medicine.
‘[I]f they have specialties that we can use, especially if we want to maintain an all-volunteer force, we want to bring that talent into our services.’. //
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, previously endorsed allowing trans-identifying individuals to serve in the U.S. military, a position military specialists and reports have warned hampers the force’s overall readiness.
CrossedTheRubicon
3 hours ago
Would we even be arguing this issue if the narrative was whether to give anorexic children liposuction surgery they are asking for because they "felt fat"??
That is a jaw-dropping statement. Aspects of "gender-affirming care" range from sterilization through the use of drugs to outright mutilation with surgeries. There is no comparison between the physical and mental risks associated with those things and popping an aspirin. For a justice to make that comparison shows not only their supreme politicization of the issue but a level of disregard for children that strikes me as simply evil.
If you thought that was stupid, though, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson decided to enter the competition. //
How is banning medical treatments that don't treat children and instead permanently damage their bodies while setting them up for grave emotional harm short and long-term the same thing as banning interracial marriage? What an insulting and disgusting comparison to make. //
Leor Sapir
@LeorSapir
·
Follow
Ketanji Brown Jackson with a hypothetical that supposedly helps SG Prelogar show discrimination: a boy who identifies as a boy but takes puberty blockers because he wants to lower his voice (rather than change gender).
A good reminder that Justice Jackson is "not a biologist."
11:12 AM · Dec 4, 2024 //
The U.S. government readily admits that "gender-affirming care" does nothing to reduce suicide rates among "transgender" children, but claims it reduces the rate of "suicidality." So it supposedly lowers the risk of suicide but doesn't lower the actual number of suicides? I don't think I need to explain how little sense that makes. //
Ben Gnarson
an hour ago
We need to start being very clear on this point; if a child is being “transitioned” they don’t suffer from gender dysphoria, they are suffering from munchausen by proxy.
There is no Constitutional argument to be made for allowing activists to push these treatments on children. Nobody, oddly, is arguing before the Supreme Court that children should be allowed to get tattoos, buy booze or a firearm, join the military, sign a contract, or get married. Yes, they wink at the idea of parental consent in some places (not in others), but that doesn't count for much when parents are lied to and browbeaten into giving this consent. //
Stay away, especially, from other people's kids. There's a reason we call them "minors." There's a reason we don't allow them to make permanent, life-changing decisions. That should apply to this as to anything else. End of story.
It wasn't publicly revealed until July that Cassidy had been suing the Georgia Department of Corrections to receive a "sex change" operation as part of his "gender-affirming care" routine, which already includes taxpayer-funded hormone treatments. That's because the lawsuit he filed was under the name "Jane Doe." Yes, the guy with multiple forgery convictions is a man who wants to "become" a woman."
That's where things get even crazier. The same DOJ that charged Cassidy in April for trying to bomb the DOJ, filed an amicus brief in support of Cassidy's lawsuit to receive a taxpayer-funded "sex change" surgery" in January. So the DOJ was investigating Cassidy as a man (eventually charging him as one in court documents) while another sector of the DOJ was filing an amicus brief claiming Cassidy is a woman who should receive "gender-affirming care" in prison. You can't make this stuff up.
Now, Cassidy is set to receive the operation after the "Gender Dysphoria Committee" recommended it. //
In this case, the DOJ charged a man with federal crimes while the activists within the agency were fighting to treat him as a "woman" complete with a taxpayer-funded "sex change" surgery. Normal people see this type of stuff, and they are sick of it. They don't want to pay for "gender-affirming care" for violent criminals (or anyone for that matter).
This story is yet another reason why the DOJ needs a complete overhaul, and I don't just mean firing a few agency heads. The rank-and-file are just as guilty of perpetuating these woke policies. Hopefully, Pam Bondi understands what she's walking into and that she's ready to do what it takes.
Rusty
@Rusty_Weiss
·
Follow
@billmaher loses his cool trying to get @neiltyson to admit a basic fact - that men have an advantage over women in sports.
8:55 AM · Nov 24, 2024 //
It's unclear if Tyson was able to identify the truck that just ran him over. Maher isn't always right, but when it comes to extreme leftists pushing a woke, anti-women agenda, he definitely gets it.
Scientific American, by contrast, does not. //
Scientific American
@sciam
·
Follow
As the daughter of a cancer researcher, Kamala Harris would bring a lifelong familiarity with science to the presidency, experts say
scientificamerican.com
What a Kamala Harris Presidency Would Mean for Science
9:15 AM · Jul 26, 2024
HBO is doubling down on working with J.K. Rowling on the new Harry Potter series despite complaints of "transphobia" from the neon blue-haired, and mentally ill:
“We are proud to once again tell the story of Harry Potter — the heartwarming books that speak to power of friendship, resolve and acceptance,” the statement continued. “J.K. Rowling has a right to express her personal views. We will remain focused on the development of the new series, which will only benefit from her involvement.” //
WB told the permanently outraged to kick rocks.
That's not a good look if you're the authoritarian crowd who want to keep society under your thumb through guilt and suppression of ideas. This was the WB saying, "our ideas are going to actually be diverse, thanks."
And it truly goes to show something else that the left would rather you not figure out.
In order to defeat evil, you just have to endure as you refuse to move. We've seen constant reminders that when the left comes for you, the worst thing you can possibly do is apologize and back down, because this doesn't appease them. It just tells them you're easier to bully and that they can take their time in destroying you. //
Rowling, and indeed everyone who withstood the social pressure of the transgender movement at the height of its power, has won. While the infection is still here, it's clearly receding. Soon, it will be relegated to the fringes of society, where it belongs.
Under House rules, the Speaker has “general control” of facilities in the chamber, giving him the authority to issue the policy surrounding bathrooms.
“All single-sex facilities in the Capitol and House Office Buildings — such as restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms — are reserved for individuals of that biological sex,” Johnson said. “It is important to note that each Member office has its own private restroom, and unisex restrooms are available throughout the Capitol.”
“Women deserve women’s only spaces,” he added. //
Johnson’s ruling, which occurred on the “Transgender Day of Remembrance,” is sure to make liberals’ heads explode. But he is the Speaker, and the Speaker has spoken. //
etba_ss
40 minutes ago
This is good for Johnson. I'm glad to see him step up to the plate and actually lead, using the power he has been given.
The second part is what happens when it is violated. That has to be known and ready to act on it. The left will violate it to see if Johnson is serious or if he is just blowing smoke to keep his spot as Speaker. He better have a plan for action.
The punishment should be the same as what would happen to me if I did it. These men should be treated like any other men who invade these spaces.
OCASIO-CORTEZ: That's right, that's right, and listen, it's not even to deny the fact that these ads were effective in certain areas. What I think people are paying too much attention to is the first half of that ad, which says, that said, "Kamala Harris is for they/them." Everyone is focusing on that. They're not focusing on the second half of that ad where he said, "Donald Trump is for you."
OCASIO-CORTEZ: And Democrats very often, in their messaging, they speak in this, in terms and in concepts, and not in the second person. "I care about you," and political races are not about one candidate vs. another candidate. Too often, it gets pigeonholed like that. It is a race about who cares about you more.
Is it too cliche to use the term "cope" to describe the above? Because that's cope. The idea that those Trump ads were not effective because they accurately described the Democrat position on transgenderism is nonsense. Sure, there is some truth to the idea that the now-president-elect successfully convinced voters he cared about them, but the juxtaposition with Harris' views on transgenderism in those ads was the entire reason that argument worked. Would an ad simply saying "I care about you" have been as effective? Of course, not.
Democrats won't want to admit the obvious, though, because that would mean admitting their obsession with transgenderism is actually the problem. This isn't a messaging issue for them. Speaking in the "second person," as Ocasio-Cortez says, won't suddenly make boys playing girl's sports acceptable to most Americans. Nor will it make "gender-affirming care" for minors popular.
In other words, Democrats have a position issue. Until they change those positions, which will in turn change how they talk about them, they will continue to lose support among normal Americans. Ocasio-Cortez and others who want to gloss over that are doing their party no good. On the contrary, they are inadvertently telling us exactly why they lost.
Democrats are also starting to confront something uncomfortable: Those ads highlighting Harris’s past support for taxpayer-funded transgender prison surgeries? They were a killer. For proof, just look at the 538 chart tracking Harris’s favorable ratings, which were rising until October 1, when she was high on vibes, and then started to sink the very week Trump and his MAGA allies started putting serious money behind those trans ads, which were absolutely inescapable on TV and streaming in the closing weeks. “I talked to so many people in the barbershop who asked about that ad,” [Richmond Democrat Mayor Levar] Stoney told me. “I get that it can be difficult to talk about those issues, but there was room for the campaign to respond to them. Why didn’t they? Because once you don’t respond, people start to believe it’s true.”
The ad was true though, as we documented back in mid-September after the Trump/Harris debate, where Trump was widely mocked on Twitter by journos and Democrat movers and shakers alike who were incredulous over the claim and thought it made him look like a fruitcake. Amazingly, it was CNN of all places that first broke that story - just two days before the debate.
This study, which involved putting 95 children struggling with gender dysphoria on puberty blockers, was led by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a physician at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles who has long been involved in promoting experimental medical treatments for minors.
It would seem that the study, which followed the children for two years, didn’t have the results Olson-Kennedy was looking for.
“The leader of the long-running study said that the drugs did not improve mental health in children with gender distress and that the finding might be weaponized by opponents of the care,” states the article’s subhed.
That’s a major finding—and one that the public deserves to have access to.
After all, the argument for providing these experimental medical treatments for children is that they will help the children’s mental health. That was seen as a pro that for some outweighed the cons of puberty blockers, which pose health risks along with the unknowns about the long-term effects of delaying a young person’s development. //
But this data won’t be released because “the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states, one of which will soon be considered by the Supreme Court,” writes New York Times reporter Azeen Ghorayshi, summarizing Olson-Kennedy’s reasoning.
In other words, when it comes to how to medically treat children suffering from gender dysphoria, it’s not about the science. It’s about the ideology—and ensuring that ideology triumphs in American law and all states. //
At a bare minimum, we owe it to kids and their parents to give them the latest scientific data about these medical experimental treatment for gender dysphoria.
It’s a shame that the Left is prioritizing politics over science—and the rights of parents and children to make informed decisions.
Pop Crave @PopCrave
·
“Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison."
- Donald Trump on Kamala Harris during the presidential debate
9:50 PM · Sep 10, 2024
As Kamala Harris pivots to the political center in her campaign for president, a 2019 questionnaire from a leading civil rights organization spotlights her past support for left-wing causes such as taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained immigrants and federal prisoners. //
EJ @Ejmiller25
·
Even more crazy is that it's 100% undeniably true.
https://t.co/ssEw3wVEw0
JD Vance @JDVance
·
What's even crazier is that Kamala Harris actually did support giving illegal aliens transgender surgeries (paid for by taxpayers).
Marc Lamont Hill @marclamonthill
"She wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens who are in prison" is the WILDEST thing I've ever heard in any debate. EVER.
12:40 PM · Sep 11, 2024 //
Harris' positions are so ludicrous that not even her own supporters believe they're true. Perhaps that should cause a bit of introspection. It won't, but it should.
Libs of TikTok
@libsoftiktok
The full manifesto of the Nashville school sh**ter has been released by
@TheTNStar
.
“A terrible feeling to know I am nothing of the gender I was born of.”
“I am the most unhappy boy alive”
“I will be of no use of love for any girl if I don’t have what they need: Boy’s body/male gender."
We need to have a national conversation about the uptick in trans violence.
1:03 PM · Sep 3, 2024
Chud Dudley, Pureblood Misfit
@TrvthfvlTreason
“Cause I was born wrong!”
An ideology based on manipulating the mentally ill to hate themselves. As well as anyone who doesn’t agree with said self-hatred. Pure evil.
1:18 PM · Sep 3, 2024
Effective July 2025, teacher licensing rules passed last year in Minnesota under Democrat Gov. Tim Walz will ban practicing Christians, Jews, and Muslims from teaching in public schools. Walz is now the presidential running mate of current U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. His resume includes a stint as a high school social studies teacher who sponsored a student queer sex club in 1999.
Starting next July, Minnesota agencies controlled by Walz appointees will require teacher license applicants to affirm transgenderism and race Marxism. Without a teaching license, individuals cannot work in Minnesota public schools, nor in the private schools that require such licenses.
The latest version of the regulations requires teachers to “affirm” students’ “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” to receive a Minnesota teaching license:
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.
What’s more difficult to understand and accept is how all of this is the inevitable consequence of a liberal worldview that the GOP has already accepted, which means what we’re seeing this week at the DNC we will eventually see at the RNC.
I don’t just mean that the Trump campaign and the Republican Party have softened their opposition to abortion in the post-Dobbs era. It’s not merely that abortion was all but removed from the GOP platform and the party’s previous position in favor of federal abortion limits was abandoned. It’s that Trump and his Republican Party would like very much to stop talking about abortion altogether now, as if the matter is settled and we can move on to more important matters, like the border and inflation.
That’s the same attitude they have about gay marriage, which, like abortion once was, is supposed to be a settled debate, not up for discussion anymore. The choice to take these issues off the table, or try to, is usually framed as pragmatic. We want a big tent, Democrats are radical, Republicans can present their side as reasonable.
But it doesn’t work like that. There’s a reason the Democrats went from talking about how abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” in the 1990s to celebrating it with free abortions from the back of an RV in 2024. Once you cede the principle of the thing, once you accept the premise that it’s justifiable to kill the unborn under certain circumstances, the list of allowable circumstances will continuously expand.
This is of course true of any moral principle, which is why the left moved with alarming speed from arguing that gay marriage wouldn’t hurt or affect anyone to demanding that everyone actively endorse and celebrate it or face ruin. There is no limiting principle to the argument that consenting adults have a right to have their sexual arrangements officially recognized by the state. That’s why the rationale used in the gay marriage debates of the 2010s is exactly the rationale deployed today in the transgender debate, which will in turn eventually be successfully deployed on behalf of plural marriage, polyamory, and even pedophilia.
The point here is not to sow discord on the right or decry a big tent strategy for the GOP, but merely to point out that when you violate the moral principles on which a social order is based, you don’t get to say when enough is enough. The slippery slope does not cease to be slippery when you think you’ve had enough. You will go all the way down it.
Put another way, the time to say “no” was before the moral principle was violated, not after. Having accepted, for example, that abortion is morally licit in cases where the child is conceived through rape or incest, or that it should be allowed in the first trimester because that seems a reasonable compromise with the left, today’s Republican Party has lost the ability to object to abortion on any grounds whatsoever.
Either an unborn child is a human being, with the same right to life as an infant or a toddler, or it has no rights and can be killed with impunity. Compromising on this is incoherent. It is to admit defeat.
Leor Sapir, PhD, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute whose areas of research include pediatric gender medicine, shared that anywhere from 5,288 to 6,294 double mastectomies were performed on girls under age 18 between 2017 and 2023 — and that 50 to 179 of those girls were just 12 years old or younger. //
This was based on analysis of an "all-payer national insurance database," including patients who were previously diagnosed with gender dysphoria and had the treatment covered by insurance, Sapir wrote in an article revealing the findings.
The actual numbers could be higher, the Manhattan Institute claims, because researchers did not include patients who paid for the procedure themselves without submitting an insurance claim. //
Thousands — thousands — of children are subjected to invasive, irreversible surgeries. These girls will never be able to breastfeed a child; if they are also being subjected to hormone treatments, they may never be able to have children.
To call this medical malpractice is to indulge in a gross understatement. //
adults, presumably able to give informed consent. Children are not; that's why we don't allow them to sign contracts, buy booze or guns, get married, or join the military. And to see these numbers — thousands of young girls, surgically mutilated because of a social contagion that they would have grown out of, that should have been treated at most with therapy and counseling — this is nothing short of horrifying.
It’s not just young adults: The Free Press cites insurance-claim data indicating that about 12,000 youths under age 17 sought gender-related care at PP clinics between 2017 and 2023.
Meanwhile, ever-more Americans have rightly focused on the distressing trend of children being put on hormones or undergoing surgical procedures in a fruitless attempt to change their gender.
Parents’ rights groups are fighting on behalf of mothers and fathers who’ve been kept in the dark about their own children’s mental health.
Alliance Defending Freedom, for example, has seven active cases representing parents suing school districts that secretly transitioned their children behind their backs.
Under 17 - these are children. They can't buy a gun or a beer, they can't sign a contract, they can't get a tattoo, but Planned Parenthood is allowing them to take permanent, irreversible hormonal treatments. The schools are allowing them to keep the secret from these kids' parents.
This is unconscionable. //
The Cass Review has shown that it is harmful, and research in the Netherlands has shown that the great majority of these kids outgrow any feelings of gender dysphoria - making the practice of rushing them into treatment for which they are incapable of informed consent all the more egregious.
Friday’s drag-queen parody of Christ at the Paris Olympics opening shows yet again that people who hate Jesus just can’t escape His art, archetypes, created realities, or authority.
The exhibition replaced Christ in the iconic Leonardo Da Vinci painting with a queer activist who describes herself as “a fat, Jewish, queer lesbian” and his disciples with cross-dressing sex performers. It immediately prompted an international backlash that can’t benefit queer acceptance. Neither can the performance, which portrayed queer people as creepy sex maniacs.
The show also backfired symbolically. In their attempts to slime what they see as their enemies, queer activists reinforced things they’re trying to destroy. //
The most obvious demonstration of this is the derivative nature of the “art.” The best the queer Paris Olympics “artistic director” and sex performers could come up with is badly deforming others’ artistic triumphs. They didn’t think up their own world, symbols, and referents, they just sabotaged others’ then pretended what any three-year-old can do is brilliant. This doesn’t compete with or replace Christianity and its symbols, it reinforces them.
If one wanted an entire civilization to forget about Christ’s Last Supper, one would adopt the left’s usual strategy: the memoryhole. Indeed, that seems to be already happening for the Paris blasphemy show, with clips of this massive event oddly difficult to find online. //
The savvy thing for Christ-haters would have been to keep the Last Supper imagery in the cultural attic, with the dust bunnies, catechisms, and two-parent nuclear families. Instead following the sadistic urge to hate on their self-chosen enemies has millions searching “Last Supper” and learning about this keystone of faith. //
Biology is not bigotry, but desecrating Christianity’s sacred symbols at every turn certainly is. God has the last laugh, though, because even when people blaspheme, they reinforce what God says. It’s another clear indicator that Christianity is true and Jesus is God. He has created the frame that we all live inside, and even those who hate it cannot escape.