Tag Archives: transgender movement

Parents Have The Last Word

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On Friday, The Conservative Review posted an article about a recent Chino Valley Unified School Board in southern California.

The article reports:

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond spoke at the meeting for the Chino Valley Unified School Board in an attempt to dissuade the members from voting for a policy requiring parents be informed about their children’s gender decisions.

When Thurmond tried to speak past the allotted time, he was berated by Chino Valley Unified Board President Sonja Shaw who accused him of trying to “pervert” children and said he had threatened the board.

Videos on social media showed police officers escorting Thurmond out of the meeting.

…The board went on to vote in favor of the policy securing parents’ rights, 4 to 1.

The article notes:

Shaw fired back and doubled down on her position.

“We’re going to safeguard parental rights,” she told KTLA-TV. “That is a constitutional right and we’re going to make sure that our parents at Chino Valley know they’re sending their kids here to be taught, not to be anything else.”

Officials in Temecula, another city in southern California, similarly rejected a social studies book that praised gay activist Harvey Milk after some school board members pointed out that he had admitted having a relationship with a 16-year-old male while in his thirties.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom lashed out at the board and called its members “radicalized zealots” and “extremists.”

Why are you considered an extremist if you want to know what is going on with your child? The move to discount parents is not new. In some states, a child under 18 can get an abortion without her parents’ knowledge, but cannot get her ears pierced or be given an aspirin in school. Parents have the right to know what is going on with their children. If a child is moving toward a life-changing event before they are of a responsible age, the parents need to know about it. One of the things that may actually save us from the abuses of the transgender movement is that many of the children who received ‘gender affirming care’ as children are now reaping the consequences as adults. Some of these now adults are suing the medical profession and the companies that supplied the drugs. If enough of these children collect damages for what was done to them, the transgender movement will diminish considerably.

The Culture War Comes Before The Political War

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Governments can make all of the laws they want, but if the laws are ignored, they are worthless. We can ban all sorts of harmful transgender indoctrination and medical procedures, but if the population does not support those bans, they will find a way around them. However, if the population sees the harm being done to children, the bans will be supported. That is the good news in the battle against the move to encourage sex changes among our children.

On Monday, Red State posted an article that included a few charts illustrating the status of the current culture war.

The article includes the following screenshots:

The article comments on the significance of the numbers:

It’s hard to overstate how incredibly rare it is to see a retreat like that from what has become left-wing orthodoxy. Usually, once something enters the culture, especially under the idea of “acceptance” and “tolerance,” it becomes so pervasive that you’re more likely to see Big Foot than see things go the other way. Yet, in this case, 69 percent of Americans say that transgender athletes should only be allowed to compete in leagues that match who they actually are (i.e. their biological sex).

Now, you might be saying it’s sad and disturbing that such a sizable minority still doesn’t agree with such a common sense position, but context is everything. 69 percent represents a rise of seven percent since 2021. Further, there’s been a four percent rise among the public since 2021 in the belief that it is morally wrong to “transition” one’s gender (a misnomer in itself).

In short, the pro-transgender ideological gambit that has engulfed the nation, specifically in the last two years since Joe Biden’s ascension to the White House, is backfiring. People are looking at what’s being pushed and deciding that it’s not only contrary to reality, but that it’s simply wrong. Children should be protected, not butchered by opportunistic doctors. Women’s spaces, including sports, should not be invaded by mentally ill men. And yes, transgender ideology as a whole, even for adults, should be thoroughly rejected.

The article concludes:

To summarize, this is why it’s foolhardy for anyone on the right to dismiss the culture wars as secondary. Yes, the economy is important. Yes, foreign policy matters. But if you lose the culture, you’ve left yourself nothing to preserve and improve. Keep up the good fight.

 

 

Some Mistakes Are Irreversible

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On Thursday, John Hinderaker posted an article at Power Line Blog wondering if anyone would ever be held accountable for the damage done by the transgender movement.

The article reports:

The “trans” fad has devastated the lives of many people, especially children. Will there ever be an accounting? In the U.K., there are signs of one: the National Health Service’s Tavistock gender identity clinic for children is being shut down.

The NHS is shutting down its gender identity clinic for children after a review found that it failed vulnerable under-18s.
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It will be replaced by regional centres at existing children’s hospitals offering more “holistic care” with “strong links to mental health services”.

Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) clinic has been accused of rushing children into life-altering treatment on puberty blockers.

The paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, who is leading a review of the service, issued a series of recommendations today for a radical overhaul of how the NHS treats young people who are questioning their gender identity.

She found that the Tavistock clinic was “not a safe or viable long-term option” and that other mental health issues were “overshadowed” when gender was raised by children referred to the clinic.

Basically, Tavistock was run according to a “trans” activist ideology, and therefore destroyed many lives.

Much of the treatment given to adolescents to help them transition to another sex is irreversible. There are also some serious side effects that can occur as a result of the treatment.

The article quotes an article at Liberty Unyielding:

Researchers have also found that puberty blockers stunted the height and impaired the bone mass density of children who wished to change gender. There is also evidence that puberty blockers have an adverse impact on cognitive functioning in children, with two studies finding that IQ may drop as a result of the medication. But perhaps most alarming, when a child takes puberty blockers at Tanner stage 2 (the first signs of puberty) and proceeds to cross-sex hormones, they will be sterilized (never able to have children) and never be able to achieve an orgasm.

Teenagers are not yet able to make wise decisions on many things–sex change included. The article at Liberty Unyielding includes examples of teenagers who regret being led down the path to sex-change medication and surgery through peer pressure and social media, but are limited in their options to undo the damage that has been done to their bodies.

The article at Power Line Blog concludes:

How has this horror show come to be? I confess to puzzlement. Generally the Left is not hard to figure out. Leftists want power and money, and if you examine their policies with this in mind, they pretty much always make sense. But today’s gender hysteria is hard to understand within that framework. Unless the “trans” fad is essentially nihilistic: maybe the point is to discredit thousands of years’ worth of civilization, to alienate millions from the most basic elements of our culture, and to create a large army of dysfunctional, mentally, physically and emotionally crippled people, so that self-reliance becomes a thing of the past and government control is seen as the only alternative.

 

This Is Happening In America

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On Tuesday, The City Journal posted an article about a recent event in Seattle, Washington.

This is the story:

Ahmed is a Pakistani immigrant, a faithful Muslim, and until recently, a financial consultant to Seattle’s high-tech sector. But when he reached me by phone in October 2020, he was just one more frightened father. Days earlier, he and his wife had checked their 16-year-old son into Seattle Children’s Hospital for credible threats of suicide. Now, Ahmed was worried that the white coats who had gently admitted his son to their care would refuse to return him.

“They sent an email to us, you know, ‘you should take your ‘daughter’ to the gender clinic,’” he told me.

At first, Ahmed (I have changed names in this essay to protect the identities of minor children) assumed there had been a mistake. He had dropped off a son, Syed, to the hospital, in a terrible state of distress. Now, the email he received from the mental health experts used a new name for that son and claimed he was Ahmed’s daughter. “They were trying to create a customer for their gender clinic . . . and they seemed to absolutely want to push us in that direction,” he said when I spoke to him again this May, recalling the horror of last October. “We had calls with counselors and therapists in the establishment, telling us how important it is for him to change his gender, because that’s the only way he’s going to be better out of this suicidal depressive state.”

The article goes on to explain the the child involved was autistic and during the Covid lockdowns had become fixated on the idea that he might be a girl.

The story continues:

But unlike some other parents I would later speak with, Ahmed’s cool head prevailed. Believing he might be walking into a trap, Ahmed reached out to both a lawyer and a psychiatrist friend he trusted. The psychiatrist gave him advice that he believes saved his son, saying, in Ahmed’s words: “You have to be very, very careful, because if you come across as just even a little bit anti-trans or anything, they’re going to call the Child Protective Services on you and take custody of your kid.” The lawyer told Ahmed the same: “What you want to do is agree with them and take your kid home. When the gender counselors advise you to ‘affirm,’ go along with it. Just say ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, okay, let’s take him home, and we’ll go to the gender clinic.’”

Ahmed assured Seattle Children’s Hospital that he would take his son to a gender clinic and commence his son’s transition. Instead, he collected his son, quit his job, and moved his family of four out of Washington.

Was Ahmed’s reaction extreme? When I first heard it, back in October 2020, I wondered whether he hadn’t overreacted. But as a growing number of parents began contacting me with similar stories, and I delved into the state laws of Washington, Oregon, and California, I came to a different conclusion. Taken individually, no single law in any state completely strips parents’ rights over the care and mental health treatment of their troubled minor teens. But pieced together, laws in California, Oregon, and Washington place troubled minor teens as young as 13 in the driver’s seat when it comes to their own mental health care—including “gender affirming” care—and renders parents powerless to stop them.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It includes other examples of parents’ rights being trampled to further the transgender movement. This is a degree of government child abuse we have not seen before. Parents need to be very aware of what is being pushed on their children, and parents need to fight it legally to save their children from irreversible decisions that they will very likely come to regret later.