Tag Archive for: LGBTQIE+

Queers for Palestine: An Unholy Alliance

Queers for Palestine. What an unlikely slogan. It makes my brain stop working. It’s a thought-terminating cliché along the lines of “Trans rights are human rights” or “Black Lives Matter.” At the heart of Christian mysticism lies a pathway to knowing God, and it is contained in contradictory or paradoxical speech. The “dazzling darkness” of Pseudo-Dionysius, who also talks about “knowing all by knowing nothing” (how is that possible?). Right there, in that spot, we can meet God, but let’s not confuse this with whatever it is the rainbow mob is doing linguistically. While they might feel as though they are part of a religious organisation, with their grievances and gripes and demands being their liturgy, and their rainbow flag their symbol of adoration, it is the opposite in content and character. It is more in line with a cult, and its members display all the signs of having been brainwashed.

Queers for Palestine turned up to support the Free Palestine brigade in London recently, and one blue-haired person was asked why she was there. Her answer: “We’re not free until we’re all free.” It’s catchy-sounding, but devoid of all meaning. She should have said, “We’re not free until those whom we selectively choose to use for our own cause are also free.” That, at least, would have been honest. She sagely continued: “We’re here because there are queers in Palestine.” The logic is that queers in Palestine need also to be freed from the atrocities that Israel is allegedly perpetrating on the citizens. The assumption is that if Israel simply stops what it’s doing, queers will go back to having a fantastic life under Hamas, Islam, and sharia. If I were she, I’d be demanding the release of all queer people in Palestine. I’d be viewing them along the lines of being in a hostage situation at the hands of Hamas. But even then, queers couldn’t simply raise their hands in the rubble and say “I’m queer, I’m here, see me, free me.” They’d be instantly killed or tortured. So the queers attach their grievances to those of the terrorists for whatever reasons they might have, but both parties’ hatred needs an outlet, and they’re not above or below using their own as human shields when they need to score a political point over someone.

Queering the Map is an online digital platform which allows queer users “to make anonymous geotagged posts.” Some of the posts read, “Pls know despite what the media says there are gay Palestinians. We are here, we are queer. Free Palestine.” Free it into what, you might ask. While another post reads, “I knew I was different from a young age… But society demands it remains hidden. I live elsewhere now… I cannot live a lie.” Two things apparently can be true at once — that gay Palestinians support living under sharia, but they also have to flee from a probable public honour killing.

Leftists try to blame the UK for criminalizing same-sex relations in Gaza due to the British Mandate Criminal Code Ordinance 1936, while ignoring Islamic laws and attitudes towards the act. Owen Jones was spouting this nonsense recently, until he was reminded that the mandate ended in 1948. Owen Jones is a mouthpiece for the LGBT+ mob. He’s nothing more than an agitator, and he will gleefully twist facts and deliberately leave out information in order to create an imaginary crisis, and in order to sensationalize a thing to fit his agenda. His argument is standing on quicksand if he’s reaching back almost 100 years to try and score a modern-day point. It was illegal to be publicly gay in Scotland as recently as 1980, but so what? Life progresses and laws change. Scotland now has the most progressive laws in all of the UK, albeit over-the-top, misogynistic, and bang out of order. If Islam is stuck in a rut, it’s not the West’s problem. If five million Scots can change their ways, so can 1.8 billion Muslims.

Why are gay groups being drawn to Islam? The truth is that LGBT+ movements are predatory and parasitic in nature, just as Islam is. Today, they are like sharks circling bloody waters whenever they see a perceived victim group that they can devour. They like to vampirically suck the life out of groups of people. It’s what sustains them: victims. Vampires make other vampires, and we see this with all the new additions to the rainbow flag as it changes every couple of years now to include each newly-made monster. Recent inclusions being brown stripes for POC (who were never actually excluded), the trans triangle, and a circle for intersex. Of course, further additions will be made ad nauseum. Even though they’re running out of room on the thing, we are told that “The placement of the new colours in an arrow shape is meant to convey the progress still needed… work is still needed in terms of POC and trans rights. This arrow design is meant to highlight that.” I’d bet they’d love nothing more than a Muslim/Islamic/Palestinian stripe or circle or arrow on that flag. How to go about getting it, though? Simple, turn up at the rallies and pretend to be an ally. It’s the gay equivalent of a dawah stall.

The pro-Palestine mob isn’t buying what the gays are selling, no matter how mightily they flirt and flutter their eyelashes at them. Gays are just going to have to learn that no means no. A skirmish broke out upon the sighting of a Pride flag at a recent protest. The flag was ripped down and trampled on. The only thing both groups have in common is that they both want special treatment under the law. Neither one of them are happy with equality. It’s a hate crime to criticise both groups these days. A man was recently arrested for criticising the number of Palestinian flags that had been put up in his street in East London. Meanwhile, in South London, a man was arrested for pushing over planters in a school’s gardening display. He was arrested and held in custody for causing alarm and distress: “Officers are treating this incident as a motivated hate crime attack on our LGBTQ+ communities.”

The truth of the matter is that the LGBT+ movement in the UK, and certainly the West, is a privileged class. There is nothing left to fight for, because they have rights that the majority of people don’t have. In Scotland, they can change their gender on a daily basis and enjoy the protections under the law afforded to whatever gender they are that day. To quote Captain James T. Kirk from Star Trek, they can boldly go to places where “no man has gone before”: into the women’s bathrooms and locker rooms. It is a criminal act to deliberately misgender someone. The war has been won for these groups and these people, but I put the blame on the organisations. They need to remain funded, and in order to receive money they need to create gripes on a regular basis. It has all culminated with men dominating women in sports. That’s what gay progress looks like in the West. It is the very worst of a religious cult.

White liberals are incredibly racist, we already know this. They have a tendency to view all non-white people as being invalids or basket cases who simply have no control over their lives or behaviour. Islam comes with a colour attached to it in their minds – brown – therefore, it is a group for marginalised people who need help. I find it all patronizing and very condescending. And they are doing their utmost to align themselves with it. I wonder what colour or stripe or shape they’ll find to represent Islam on their flag. It could simply be a ragged hole in the middle of it, to symbolize a bomb explosion? Can someone please tell them that Islam doesn’t want them, in spite of their best attempts at seduction?

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

Taxpayer-Funded Trans Procedures Lead Even Pioneers to Say Things Have ‘Gotten Out of Hand’

U.S. taxpayers funded life-altering transgender surgeries, despite that fact that one of the global pioneers in the field says “gender transition has gotten out of hand” and likened it to the “recovered memory” craze that hurt vulnerable patients and tore families apart during the 1980s.

The hospital that opened the nation’s first pediatric gender transition facility, Boston Children’s Hospital, received $1.4 million from the Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) of Massachusetts for inflicting “gender transition services” between January 2015 and May 2023. The hospital’s Center for Gender Surgery carried out 204 transgender surgeries between 2017 and 2020 — including 65 gender-conversion surgeries on minors. The controversial facility offers double-mastectomies to children as young as 15 and phalloplasty to girls at the age of 17.

Boston Children’s Hospital would not disclose whether state taxpayer funds paid for minors’ transgender surgeries, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation, which broke the story.

This is far from the only time politicians have compelled taxpayers to fund transgender procedures at the child-mutilating facility. Boston Children’s Hospital received a $3.3 million grant from the Biden administration’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) to build a website targeting young people in other states who identify as transgender, as well as to train the hospital’s staff. The hospital also took part in a five-year, NIH-funded study that monitored minors aged 12-20 who received cross-gender hormones; 240 of its 315 participants were underage. Two committed suicide, and 11 more contemplated ending their lives.

The negative outcomes trans-identifying youth suffer as a result of “gender-affirming care” matches the experience of Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, a Finnish psychiatrist who established a gender transition clinic for minors in 2011. She has since participated in the evaluation of 500 children dealing with gender dysphoria.

“Soon after our hospital began offering hormonal interventions for these patients, we began to see that the miracle we had been promised was not happening,” she writes in an exposé in The Free Press. “The young people we were treating were not thriving.” Even when “young people insisted their lives had improved and they were happier,” the evidence belied their self-assessment. “They were withdrawing from all social activities. They were not making friends. They were not going to school.” And her colleagues across the continent “were seeing the same things.”

These patients, and the detransitioners who followed, are the “kind of patient who wasn’t supposed to exist.”

In 2015, the children visiting her changed from young men who had always identified as female. Now, the overwhelming majority of her patients were young women suffering from Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD): “90 percent of our patients were girls, mainly 15 to 17 years old, and instead of being high-functioning, the vast majority presented with severe psychiatric conditions.”

“Some came from families with multiple psychosocial problems. Most of them had challenging early childhoods marked by developmental difficulties, such as extreme temper tantrums and social isolation,” she writes. “In adolescence they were lonely and withdrawn. Some were no longer in school, instead spending all their time alone in their room. They had depression and anxiety, some had eating disorders, many engaged in self-harm, a few had experienced psychotic episodes.” One of their patients was mute, and “more than a quarter of our patients were on the autism spectrum.”

An American whistleblower, Jamie Reed, said the same conditions held at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, where she said clinicians regularly ignored their patients’ panoply of other psychological and social conditions.

Most of the Dutch patients had never presented any gender dysphoria before coming to Dr. Kaltiala, who says ROGD had become the dominant patient profile for everyone working in the pediatric transgender field. The patients’ stories shared so many similarities, “We realized they were networking and exchanging information about how to talk to us.”

Although she authored a 2015 study questioning some aspects of the transgender-industry orthodoxy, she and her colleagues around the world felt pressured to keep their concerns private. “Even during the first few years of the clinic, gender medicine was becoming rapidly politicized,” Dr. Kaltiala writes. Activists in psychologists’ poses promised that young people would find “all their mental health problems would be alleviated by these interventions. Of course, there is no mechanism by which high doses of hormones resolve autism or any other underlying mental health condition.”

The condition holds true in the United States, she affirms, where the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry have refused to hear dissenting voices or read data that contradict their predetermined conclusions. Yet “one new study shows that nearly 30 percent of patients in the sample ceased filling their hormone prescription within four years.”

“Anyone, including physiciansresearchersacademics, and writers, who raised concerns about the growing power of gender activists, and about the effects of medically transitioning young people, were subjected to organized campaigns of vilification and threats to their careers,” she states. “We were being told to intervene in healthy, functioning bodies simply on the basis of a young person’s shifting feelings about gender,” she writes. “Identity achievement is the outcome of successful adolescent development, not its starting point.”

The doctor finds the transgender industry’s high-pressure sales tactics, in which they falsely claim a child will commit suicide unless parents allow the industry to begin transgender procedures, disreputable. Research, she notes, showing transgender-related “suicide is very rare. It is dishonest and extremely unethical to pressure parents into approving gender medicalization by exaggerating the risk of suicide.” The U.K.’s Tavistock Institute, which until recently carried out transgender procedures on minors, reported only four out of 15,032 patients had ended their lives. “The proportion of individual patients who died by suicide was 0.03%,” reported a 2022 study. Although these deaths are tragic, “[t]he fact that deaths were so rare should provide some reassurance” to parents.

Dr. Kaltiala likens “[w]hat is happening to dysphoric children” to the “recovered memory craze of the 1980s and ’90s. During that period, many troubled women came to believe false memories, often suggested to them by their therapists, of nonexistent sexual abuse by their fathers or other family members.” The psychologist-guided lies tore families apart, as children falsely believed their family meant them harm.

“[L]ike recovered memory, gender transition has gotten out of hand,” writes Dr. Kaltiala. “When medical professionals start saying they have one answer that applies everywhere, or that they have a cure for all of life’s pains, that should be a warning to us all that something has gone very wrong,” she concludes.

Americans caught up in the transgender debate welcome the skepticism of Dr. Kaltiala and others across Europe, where nations have progressively changed their protocols to protect children and adolescents from these experimental interventions.

“Gender dysphoria is far more invasive than any other diagnosis in the DSM,” Dr. Jennifer Bauwens, director of the Center for Family Studies at Family Research Council, told FRC President Tony Perkins earlier this month. “Not only are we diagnosing early with something that would be considered a lifelong enduring pattern, but we’re also attaching interventions that are really dangerous and life-altering while a person is still a child.”

“Despite the popular spin, even the leading advocates of medically transitioning youth concede there are substantial research gaps and a lack of knowledge concerning long-term outcomes,” states “The Trans Youth Phenomenon: Critiques & Hard Questions,” a publication co-written by Bauwens as a collaboration between Family Research Council and the Center for Urban Renewal and Education.

Nationally, the transgender industry carried out transgender surgeries on 3,678 minors between 2016 and 2019 nationwide, and “405 patients (11.0%) aged 12 to 18 years underwent genital surgery,” according to a report from the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Network Open. More than one in four (25.3%) of the 48,019 people who underwent transgender surgeries during that time paid the bill with taxpayer-funded Medicaid. After the Obama-Biden administration swelled the ranks of Americans eligible for Medicaid, surging “Medicaid spending is ‘crowding out’ spending on other major state programs, most notably education and transportation infrastructure,” reported the Mercatus Center.

Transgender activists are advocating for Ohio’s Issue 1, which would make it illegal for the state to “directly or indirectly” burden any “individual” right to make “reproductive decisions,” language broad enough to require taxpayer-funded abortion and transgender surgeries for minors without parental notification — a position favored by several of Issue 1’s authors/sponsors.

Dr. Kaltiala’s decision to oppose transgender procedures for minors grew out of the reason she got into psychiatry in the first place: “My patients’ adult lives are still ahead of them, so it can make a huge difference to someone’s future to help a young person who is on a destructive track to find a more favorable course.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Amid War, Naval Academy Seeks Another Gender and Sexuality Professor

In the Middle East, thousands of innocent civilians are losing their lives in the crossfire between Israel and the Hamas terrorist group. Since October 7, men, women, the elderly, children, and infants have become victims of war — and the fighting only continues. “This is very bad,” said Linda Robinson, a senior fellow for Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The risks for a wider war and for the region going back into full-scale war are very, very high.”

Women have been raped in the streets, babies are found decapitated, protests are breaking out globally, and the Naval Academy has decided to put their effort — not into lethal combat training — but gender and sexuality studies.

According to the Academy’s website, the school’s mission is to “develop Midshipmen morally, mentally and physically and to imbue them with the highest ideals of duty, honor and loyalty in order to graduate leaders who are dedicated to a career of naval service and … to assume the highest responsibilities of command, citizenship and government.” Apparently, the Navy has interpreted that to mean hiring gender and sexuality “experts” and featuring drag queens in recruitment videos. And it’s not just the naval Academy.

The U.S. Military Academy, considered among the most “prestigious universities in the nation,” has also incorporated gender and sexuality into Army officer education. West Point and the Air Force Academy even offer a minor in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Additionally, Nellis Air Force Base has developed a track record of hosting drag shows, regardless of opposition.

National Review contacted the Naval Academy for clarification on the purpose of the new position and whether it “would prepare graduates to fight the nation’s war,” but officials did not respond. But in 2021, shortly after West Point added critical race theory to their curriculum, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, denied that the armed forces were “going woke.” Rather, he stated it was a “complicated topic” he was “not going to address.”

However, Travis Weber, a Naval Academy graduate and vice president for Policy and Government Affairs at Family Research Council, did address it with The Washington Stand. “This job posting — while only one data point — is an indicator of where our nation’s military is focused. And it’s not good,” he said.

He insisted the U.S. should be focused on “fires burning around the world [such as] the Russia-Ukraine war, an emerging war involving Israel in the Middle East, Azerbaijan displacing the Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh in the blink of an eye without much notice from anyone, and the looming threat of China invading Taiwan.” But instead, the U.S. is “pouring our nation’s increasingly thinning economic resources into a tenure track faculty position at one of our nation’s top military institutions that is focused on ‘Gender and Sexuality Studies.’”

Lt. General (Ret.) William G. Boykin, FRC’s executive vice president, also shared his concern with TWS, stating that “the hiring of a gender and sexuality studies Professor for the Naval Academy is another example of how unaware this administration is in training and preparing young men and women for war and to be victorious.” He emphasized the Navy seems “oblivious” to what midshipmen really need.

Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at FRC, agreed, adding that ironically, the more gender studies increase, “the less people [seem to] understand … men and women.” She continued, “Whether in the field of education or military service, basic understanding about how bodies work and human nature itself should be as uncomplicated as possible.”

Experts say that not only is this topic being overcomplicated by the LGBT narrative, it is also having devastating consequences on recruitment. According to The Heritage Foundation, “[L]eaders from the Army, Navy, and Air Force all dutifully reported that they expected to miss their annual recruiting goal this year by thousands.” Despite adding new benefits and bonuses, recruitment rates continue to worsen. Woke “actions are a major contributor to the low enlistment in all our military services,” Boykin said.

As military institutions prioritize gender and sexuality education and recruitment suffers, “China is taking advantage of our distracted world to deport hundreds of North Korean defectors back to North Korea — where they will almost certainly be sent to forced labor camps,” Weber emphasized. He further noted that the West’s influence is on decline, and the East is seeking to “take its place.”

What this means, Weber continued, is “an unstable, multipolar world order, in which violent flare-ups are more likely.” He concluded, “This is a world that needs American leadership, not American naval gazing. The diversion of resources into areas like this one faculty opening portrays a distracted America, not an America focused on dealing with the challenges of its day. We need an adjustment of our focus if we are going to effectively lead into the years ahead.”

As Boykin stated plainly: “It is time for the Navy and all other services to wake up and start providing good leadership.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

VIDEO: The Unspoken Horrors of Gender Transition Surgery

Gender Transition Surgery: Dreams Turned to Nightmares.


STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • Children are increasingly lured into “gender-affirming” hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgeries, are never given appropriate informed consent, and they have no idea what they’re getting themselves into. Many adults even underestimate how difficult and painful it will be
  • All it takes for a young girl to start the gender transition process to become a boy is a letter of support from a therapist. Typically, the therapist will write a letter of support after just one or two visits. Next, she’ll be sent to an endocrinologist who, after a single visit, will prescribe her testosterone
  • Some gender transition centers don’t even require any kind of mental health assessment, and several Planned Parenthood clinics are apparently handing out hormone replacement therapy (HRT) prescriptions on the first visit
  • While some pro-trans advocates insist HRT is harmless and reversible once you quit taking the hormones, this simply isn’t true. The effects of testosterone on a girl can be both profound and permanent, and can be seen within a matter of months
  • The transgender movement is a stepping stone in the transhumanist agenda. Ultimately, the goal is to get rid of flesh and blood bodies altogether and have our existence either within a synthetic body or as disembodied avatar in cyberspace, or both. Turning humanity into misgendered people incapable of natural reproduction is merely a first step in that direction

In the video above, WhatsHerFace Entertainment dives into the “unspoken reality of transgender sexual reassignment surgery and all of the pain, regret and horrors it entails.”

Most clear-headed adults would realize that surgically and chemically altering your anatomy from male to female, or female to male, is a complex and painful process. The problem is that it’s typically not level-headed adults making the decision to undergo gender reassignment. It’s primarily children who are being pushed into it, and they have no idea what they’re getting themselves into. Many adults don’t even realize how difficult and painful it will be.

As reported by WhatsHerFace, all it takes for a young girl to start the gender transition process to become a boy is a letter of support from a therapist. Typically, the therapist will write a letter of support after just one or two visits. Next, she’ll be sent to an endocrinologist who, after a single visit, will prescribe her testosterone.

While that’s alarmingly lax enough, some gender transition centers have cut through even that tiny bit of red tape. Some don’t require any kind of mental health assessment, and a number of Planned Parenthood clinics are apparently handing out hormone replacement therapy (HRT) prescriptions on the first visit.

Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) Is Not Harmless

While some pro-trans advocates insist that HRT is harmless and completely reversible once you quit taking the hormones, this simply isn’t true.1 As reported by WhatsHerFace, the effects of testosterone on a girl can be both profound and permanent and can be seen within a matter of months. Effects of high-dose testosterone treatment include:

Voice deepening

Facial hair growth
Hair loss, receding hairline, balding Increased libido
Sexual dysfunction Increased aggression and unpredictable moods
Sterility Enlargement of clitoris
Vaginal atrophy

As noted by Cleveland Clinic,2 many of these changes persist even if you completely stop taking testosterone. Can a child or teenager fully comprehend what sterility might mean to them later in life? I don’t think so. I also don’t think they can comprehend how other physical and emotional changes might affect them, such as going bald.

Other types of hormone therapy include puberty blockers, which are given to children who have not yet entered puberty. These drugs delay the onset of sex characteristics associated with the gender you were assigned at birth.

What’s particularly shocking is that the adults steering them toward gender reassignment don’t make it a point to thoroughly inform them about the difficulties they might face. Overall, I don’t think children and teens are capable of making the decision to transition, and encouraging or facilitating it really ought to be illegal.

Double-Mastectomies Performed at 15

While you’re considered too immature to get a full, unrestricted driver’s license until you’re 18, and can’t drink alcohol until you’re 21, “gender-affirming” sex hormone therapy can begin as early as 14,3 girls who think they’re boys can get a double-mastectomy at the age of 15, and full sex reassignment surgery is available at age 17 or 18, depending on the procedure, although the World Professional Association for Transgender Health is advocating for surgeries as early as 15.4

The Boston Children’s Hospital requires you to be 17 to undergo vaginoplasty, where a boy’s penis, testicles and scrotum are removed and a vagina is created, and 18 to undergo phalloplasty, the surgical construction of a penis, or metoidioplasty, where testosterone is used to enlarge the clitoris, from which a small penis is then constructed. Prosthetic testicles are also added in both of those cases.

Understanding Female-to-Male Reassignment Surgery

When a biological woman decides to surgically become a man, she’ll undergo phalloplasty, which involves taking large sections of skin from her forearms and/or thigh to fashion a penis. As you can see from the images included in WhatsHerFace’s video, this will leave a very large unsightly scar on one or both forearms, and while the donation site heals, there’s always a risk of infection.

Since the donation site needs to be hairless, electrolysis must first be performed. If electrolysis fails and hair grows back in the donated skin, the trans male may struggle with painful hair growth inside his urethra for the rest of his life.

Trans men who are on testosterone also face gynecological challenges, especially vaginal dryness, and vaginal atrophy, which can be very painful. Pelvic pain and bacterial vaginosis are other commonly reported issues.5,6

Understanding Male-to-Female Reassignment Surgery

During vaginoplasty, which is where a biological male surgically transitions to female, the surgeon will use skin from the patient’s scrotum to create a vaginal canal. If additional skin grafts are needed, they’ll use skin from the sides of their abdomen.

Before the skin grafts are taken, he must undergo electrolysis on the chosen donor sites. However, electrolysis does not always permanently eliminate hair growth, especially not male hair growth, which tends to be more profuse, and if the hair grows back, the trans male can end up with hair growing in his vaginal canal.

Vaginoplasties aren’t always successful, and if they must be redone, a part of the patient’s colon will typically be used instead. A downside of this procedure, called colovaginoplasty, is an offensive discharge odor.

After vaginoplasty, the patient must then dilate the vagina on a daily basis. This basically entails stretching (dilating) the vagina using a lubricated dildo to prevent it from sealing shut. Your body basically views this new opening as a wound and will do what it can to heal it. Trans women must do this several times a day for the rest of their lives.

Dreams That Nightmares Are Made Of

Dilation is one of the challenges of male-to-female sex reassignment surgery (SRS) that most people underestimate. Here’s one testimony included in WhatsHerFace’s video.

“Three months ago, I started this ‘dream’ (nightmarish hell) that is SRS … Dilating is Hell, everything is sensitive or sore, my … leg movements are, while better than before, still pretty limited. I feel constant stinging and burning sensations pretty much around the clock in my crotch area.

This is probably the most suicidal I’ve ever been since before I actually transitioned. This ‘vaginal canal’ (which is actually a f***ing open wound) has given me nothing but grievances and Jesus f*** am I tired of it.

I’ve actually been considering asking my surgeon whether or not it’s possible to just close this pseudo-vaginal canal or just get rid of it all together. I wish somebody had told me even just a third of what a hellride this was going to be. But nobody did. And now I’m stuck with this nightmare.

I’m pretty much considering just stopping dilation. ‘The canal will shrink,’ so what? Maintaining it is pretty much keeping my whole … life prisoner of this thing. While I didn’t like what I had before, at all, it still allowed me freedom … For comparison, this shit is like going from parole straight into solitary confinement.”

Sure, you might think, but that’s just recovery. Eventually, all will be well. Maybe, maybe not. Here are the words of a trans female who is still struggling three years after her vaginoplasty.

“Suicidal thoughts. Three years post-op SRS and still having discharge and pain … I had SRS in 2016, August … and I’m experiencing discharge and pain again from my neovagina after it had gone away for two years. Orgasming is very difficult these days and when I do I feel less than half of what I used to feel down there.

I am normally a very strong person who doesn’t easily give up but over the last couple of weeks I find myself crying myself asleep almost every night. Wondering why I had to get this surgery.

Since the surgery I haven’t dated anyone and everyone I have been on a date with turned me down diplomatically when I came out and discussed that I have a neovagina. I’m not saying no one should get this surgery and I’m sure there are people who have amazing results but far too often I hear that people experience complications from SRS.

I find life very draining these days. I have to clean my vagina with isobetadine to keep smell away and to keep the discharge at bay. I have to dilate once a day still. I should have thought things more carefully through. I thought SRS was a wonderful end point to a difficult journey. It opened up a whole other can of worms.

I could have just had anal sex and left my genitals alone and maybe have the testicles removed. Doing something so taxing as having the tissues inverted turned out to be such a bad idea. I wish I could just have the vagina closed up at this point. I don’t see myself ever having sex again either way. I know I should be grateful for having had a surgery of 22,000 CAD paid for by the government. But I feel lied to. I feel so stupid.”

Parents Are Removed From the Equation

Consider those words, and then consider that pro-trans ideology is now being openly taught in kindergarten through high school across the U.S. Children are being brainwashed into thinking they can choose their own gender and that it’s as easy to switch genders as it is to switch clothes. It’s not.

Yet, the horrors of SRS are being so well hidden that neither parents nor their trans children understand what’s in store, both in the short and long term. While there are cases where everything goes right and the boy or girl finally feels “complete” after SRS,7 there seem to be far more cases where they end up even more miserable.

What’s worse, some states, like Washington, are considering laws that severely infringe on parent’s rights to be involved in their child’s decision to transition. For example, as reported by ZeroHedge:8

“April 12 [2023], House lawmakers debated Senate Bill 5599,9 which creates an exemption for the state that grants it the right to not be required to notify parents of minors who have left their homes because their parents wouldn’t let them pursue gender transition medical procedures …

Republican state Rep. Chris Corry said the bill ‘erodes parental rights in the state of Washington.’ ‘Essentially what the bill would do would be if a child left a parents’ home for certain medical care and went to a shelter or host family, that shelter or host family would not be required to notify the parents of their child’s whereabouts,’ Corry said.

This is obviously a fundamental violation of parental rights and something that’s deeply concerning for parents across Washington state.’ State Rep. Peter Abbarno, a Republican, said the crux of the debate over the bill was whether the state be permitted to ‘essentially hide where the child is.’

Most parents, Corry said, would ‘go to the ends of the earth to find their child’ if they disappeared after an argument. ‘And the fact that we have a bill that may become law that would say, ‘we’re not going to tell you,’ was really just a bridge too far for us,’ Corry said.

Corry told The Epoch Times that, under the bill, a disagreement between a child and parents over the child’s desire for a medical transition constitutes ‘abuse and neglect,’ only because the parent hasn’t ‘properly affirmed what the child wants.’

Corry said there are already laws that protect children from abuse and neglect in the state that require ‘solid and compelling reasons’ why children would need to be removed from their homes. ‘What’s frustrating is even in those cases, the parents still have a right to know where their kids are after they’ve been removed,’ Corry said. ‘In this case, parents would have no idea.’”

Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria: A Social Contagion

According to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, data from Western countries suggest gender dysphoria is now at 8% among children,10 compared to just a fraction of a percent among older adults.11

Kids who question their gender but aren’t good candidates for permanent transitioning may be as high as 1 in 5!12 In the U.S., research suggests 5% of 18- to 29-year-olds identify as trans, compared to 1.6% of 30- to 49-year-olds and only 0.3% of those 50 and older.13

How is this even possible? How is it that so many young people are suddenly gender confused? Social pressure appears to have a lot to do with it, and that includes pressure from adults, such as school teachers. But widespread trauma may also play a role.

According to a 2018 transgender identity study14 described in Psychology Today,15 “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD) “appears to be a novel condition that emerges from cohort and contagion effects and novel social pressures.”

As such, its etiology and epidemiology is distinct from conventional gender dysphoria described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Remarkably, 80% of the teens identifying as transgender were girls identifying as boys.

Not surprisingly for those of us who understand how the internet is being used to manipulate impressionable minds, 63.5% of parents reported that shortly before their child announced they were trans, they’d noticed a marked increase in social media consumption. In particular, parents had noticed their child was following popular YouTubers who discussed their transition.

Signs of Indoctrination

Among the many surprises discovered in that study, the investigator, Dr. Lisa Littman, a behavioral scientist at Brown University, found that one of the many beliefs espoused by these trans teens was that anyone who isn’t specifically transgendered is “evil,” including gays and lesbians. As reported by Psychology Today:16

“Parents further reported being derogatorily called ‘breeders’ by their children, or being routinely harassed by children who played ‘pronoun-police.’ The observation that they no longer recognized their child’s voice came up time and again in parental reports.

In turn, the eerie similarity between the youth’s discourse and trans-positive online content was repeatedly emphasized. Youth were described as ‘sounding scripted,’ ‘reading from a script,’ ‘wooden,’ ‘like a form letter,’ ‘verbatim,’ ‘word for word,’ or ‘practically copy and paste.’”

To me, the fact that trans teens sound like carbon-copies of each other is a sign of indoctrination. A script has been unleashed, and trans activists are repeating that script with the aim of indoctrinating its audience. We saw the same thing happen during COVID. Mainstream media repeated the script of the official COVID narrative, word for word, day in and day out. Repetition — that’s how you indoctrinate people.

Now, we also have the added pressures of corporations that view the trans agenda as a cash cow (although most who have gone that route are finding out the hard way that trans is still a tiny minority of their customer base, and the rest are not willing to encourage the fomentation of a mental health problem).

Even if corporate CEOs aren’t gung-ho about the trans agenda, many are lured in that direction because they want to optimize their corporate equality index (CEI).

Is Transgenderism a Maladapted Collective Stress Response?

That said, Littman hypothesized that ROGD may be a maladaptive coping mechanism for other underlying mental health issues or trauma. In essence, it may be a form of maladapted collective stress response. Psychology Today wrote:17

“It is clear from Littman’s study that the rise of rapid-onset gender dysphoria, which seems to predominantly involve natal females, points to a complex web of social pressures, changing cultural norms, and new modes of distress and coping that warrant further investigation. For parents, educators, and clinicians alike, caution is warranted in dealing with this growing phenomenon.”

Cui Bono?

So, who benefits from this maladaptive groupthink? Primarily, that would be hospitals, doctors and surgeons conducting gender reassignment surgeries, and, of course, Big Pharma. The cost for a complete sex change costs, on average, $132,000, but can run as high as $200,000 to $300,000 by the time everything is said and done.

Dr. Robert Malone18 recently calculated it would cost $102 billion to transition the current cohort of young adults (a total of 2.58 million kids, teens, and young adults between the ages of 10 and 24) who believe they’re trans. Right now, that’s an untapped market, and it’s quite clear the health care industry is chomping at the bit to get it going.

At present, insurance companies do not have to cover the cost of sex reassignment surgery, but that could soon change, as the Affordable Care Act website is actively encouraging trans people to sue for unlawful sex discrimination.19

What’s Behind the Trans Agenda?

In closing, it’s worth noting that many of the same people who attacked circumcision and fought against body shaming are now promoting transgenderism, which seems to be dehumanizing to the point of self-mutilation.

In the video above, self-proclaimed feminist and investigative journalist Jennifer Bilek discusses the forces behind the trans movement and “gender-affirming medical care” for children.

In short, it’s a stepping stone in the transhumanist agenda. Ultimately, the goal is to get rid of flesh and blood bodies altogether and have our existence either within a synthetic body or as disembodied avatar in cyberspace, or both.

Turning humanity into misgendered people incapable of natural reproduction is merely a first step in that direction. Next comes the melding of man with machine and artificial intelligence. Over time, the flesh and blood part of humans will be reduced while the synthetic parts will increase.

They want the younger generations to get comfortable with the transhumanist idea that gender is fluid and based on how you feel, rather than what you are, as well as the idea that you shouldn’t want to reproduce, because human reproduction will be outsourced to the tech industry.

As explained by Bilek, the trans ideology promotes the idea that you can choose your gender, even though that is a biological impossibility, because that’s a steppingstone to the grander ideology that you can exist without a body altogether, in cyberspace, where you can be whomever you want.

They want the younger generations to get comfortable with the idea that gender is fluid and based on how you feel, rather than what you are, as well as the idea that you shouldn’t want to reproduce, because human reproduction will be outsourced to the tech industry.

Over the past decade, Bilek notes, the trans argument has gone from “some people are born in the wrong body,” to simply advocating for the right to augment yourself in whatever way you see fit, to add or strip yourself of whatever appendages you don’t want. According to Bilek, it’s a fetish-based cult, and seemingly rational people are buying into it, not understanding what it’s all about.

I believe the transgender movement poses a severe threat to mental, emotional and physical health, and must be counteracted by level-headed discourse. How can anyone say they’re concerned about children’s health and welfare while simultaneously promoting irreversible surgeries that will pose lifelong risks to their health and render many of them sterile?

It’s one thing to change a child’s pronouns. It’s another to cut off their breasts and penises just because they say they feel at odds with their — for now — elected gender. The very idea that a child should be allowed to decide with such lifelong implications as mutilating their sex organs is incomprehensibly negligent.

And when you consider the hidden motive behind this movement, it reinforces the anti-human, anti-humane nature of it, because children, who are our future, are being physically and psychologically sacrificed to further an ideology that seeks to destroy the human species and turn it into something it’s not.

Sources and References:

EDITORS NOTE: This MERCOLA column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Injustice of Biden’s Equity Agenda

In a move that has critics crying “socialism,” the Biden administration created a new policy that will raise mortgage fees on low-risk borrowers so high-risk borrowers can pay less. The most affected group, those with credit scores between 720 and 759 who also have a downpayment of 15% -20%, would pay an additional $3,200 in fees.

Unlike other left-wing economic plans which transfer money from the wealthy to the poor, under this scheme, borrowers with good credit will pay more even if they have less money. In a sane world, this makes no sense. We understand that lending money comes with risk, and borrowers come with different risks. Someone who has paid their bills on time for the past 30 years presents less risk than a recent high school graduate. But we no longer live in a sane world, we live in a world led by those who want every group to experience the same outcome. They call it “equity.”

We’re very familiar with this dynamic when it comes to categories like race, sex, religion, and the suite of LGBTQ identity categories. Applicants to medical school are rewarded and punished based on their skin color as much as their competency, and male-dominated professions like computer science are seen as evidence of sexism, not evidence that women like different things.

The Biden administration’s new mortgage fee policy is just an extension of this logic as they attempt to “level the playing field” so those with bad credit will have the same outcome as those with good credit. What everyone other than the most zealous equity advocates immediately recognize, however, is that this playing field should not be leveled. We do not want to live in a world where responsible people are treated the same as irresponsible people. While equity demands groups be treated similarly, justice demands individuals be treated as individuals. This is why none of us would hire a convicted sex-offender to babysit our children.

We have a criminal justice system because we understand some individuals deserve to walk about freely in society, while others do not. While we should acknowledge the unfortunate ways race and wealth have been relevant in the criminal justice system, we should also acknowledge the entire purpose of the criminal justice system is to treat people justly, not equitably. If we had a criminal equity system instead, we would rotate people in and out of prisons based on their age, sex, or race — regardless of their criminal history — to ensure that no groups were over or under-represented in the prison population. An equity-based credit system is less harmful than an equity based criminal justice system would be, but it is just as unfair. So why do smart people propose it?

Modern sensibilities reject the idea that human nature is inherently sinful but acknowledge the world is broken. Since their starting assumption is that there’s nothing wrong with people, they blame the bad things people do on “systemic injustice.” The gospel tells us the systems will be fixed once hearts change, but modern progressivism tells us heart will change once the systems are fixed.

This is the reason Brandon Johnson, the recently elected Mayor of Chicago, came to the defense of hundreds of teenagers who destroyed property, beat bystanders, and got into gun fights with police in a recent Chicago riot. He said it was “not constructive to demonize youth who have been starved of opportunities.” If the problem is a lack of character, those kids need to take responsibility for what happened. If the problem is a lack of opportunity, everyone but the kids need to take responsibility for what happened.

Of course, there are things we can do to help each other. Life is a team sport best lived in community which means we each have power to help and harm each other. But when we misunderstand the source of our problems, we guarantee the solutions will be inadequate. The pursuit of equity discourages us from treating individuals based on the content of their character. Instead, it encourages us to see people primarily as members of a group and demands those groups be treated the same. So, we treat the guilty the same as the innocent and the capable just like we treat the less capable. And now we’re charging responsible people more for credit because it doesn’t feel right that one group should be treated differently than another.

It isn’t just or fair, but it is equitable.

AUTHOR

Joseph Backholm

Joseph Backholm is Senior Fellow for Biblical Worldview and Strategic Engagement at Family Research Council.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘The Only Thing That Should Be Dragging in the Navy Is an Anchor’: Congressman

Anheuser-Busch hasn’t exactly been teaching a master class on marketing after its poisonous partnership with Dylan Mulvaney. When sales crashed, CEO Michel Doukeris tried the “It wasn’t a campaign — it was just a can” excuse for Bud Light’s relationship with the trans influencer, but it was $6 billion too late. Now, the U.S. Navy seems to be floating the same alibi for its drag queen recruiting videos. “The program has concluded, and the Navy is evaluating it,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin claimed. Well, the evaluation from House and Senate Republicans is in, and if this doesn’t stop, “heads will roll.”

For the last two months, the Navy has defended the salacious posts of 2nd Class Petty Officer Joshua Kelly (who goes by stage name “Harpy Daniels”) against the criticism of leaders like Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), who asked how and why the branch chose a drag queen as one of its five “digital ambassadors.” “Do you believe TikTok videos of sailors dressed in and performing in drag is the best use of the Navy’s recruitment efforts?” he asked, before pointing out that Kelly is dressed in lingerie, underwear, or nothing with captions too grotesque and profane to repeat.

Lt. General (Ret.) William Boykin, who spent 36 years serving his country, openly seethed about Kelly’s posts. “I can’t even watch that,” he told Family Research Council Tony Perkins of Kelly’s videos, revolted. “I mean, I saw it earlier today on the computer, and I can’t watch. … They’re trying to add another 5,000 people to the Navy,” and this is the “kind of nonsense [they think is] going to help recruiting?”

Boykin wasn’t alone in his disgust. Rob O’Neill, the Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden, held nothing back on Twitter, fuming, “Alright. The U.S. Navy is now using an enlisted sailor Drag Queen as a recruiter. I’m done. China is going to destroy us. YOU GOT THIS NAVY. I can’t believe I fought for this bull—-.”

Yet officials defended Kelly’s involvement, insisting that his social media presence didn’t violate military policy since it wasn’t technically endorsed by the Navy. That’s interesting, House and Senate Republicans fired back, since the branch asked their ambassadors to use their accounts to attract new recruits.

“[The Navy said] they weren’t paying him,” Perkins, a Marine veteran, pointed out. “But when you’re in the military, all of your time belongs to the military. … And this is what he is — a ‘digital ambassador’ as a drag queen representing the Navy. I mean, think about what our enemies [are saying], how they responded. They’ve got to be laughing at this.”

The sick images caught the attention of more than a dozen senators, who sent a letter to Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro on May 3, demanding to know if the Navy approves of these sexually explicit performances. “Would the Navy enlist burlesque or exotic dancers to reach possible recruits? Such activity is not appropriate for promotion in a professional workplace or the United States military,” Republicans Ted Cruz (Texas), Tom Cotton (Ark.), Tommy Tuberville (Ala.), and 11 others insisted.

The controversy has been even more infuriating when you consider that the Biden administration was already under fire for hosting Drag Queen Story Hours on military bases. At a House hearing in March, Secretary Austin testified that the DOD does not “support or fund” drag shows. But, Banks argued, “If he was testifying honestly, then he has an obligation to discipline the officials who decided that sexually explicit content should be featured [here] in the Navy’s Digital Ambassador’s program. [This] divisive and woke insanity [is what’s] helped drive recruitment to a record low.”

Like Bud Light, which should be a cautionary tale on how to offend heartland consumers, the Navy is alienating the very patriots who’ve historically made up the military. Putting a man in women’s lingerie isn’t how you appeal to people with conservative values, the most likely pool of future soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

Congressman Mark Alford (R-Mo.) agreed. “I’ll tell you what … the word salad that you just heard from the DOD [defending Kelly’s role], that is standard for the Biden administration,” he said on Thursday’s “Washington Watch.” “What is happening here, I think, is an abomination. … This is not any way to recruit anyone into the military. The only thing that should be dragging in the Navy is an anchor.”

“When we have China on the march, Russia threatening nuclear activity, China launching warships almost on a weekly basis, and we’re focused on pronouns and drag queens,” Perkins shook his head, “something is seriously wrong.”

Worse, Alford pointed out, “only 9% of young people surveyed recently said they had any interest whatsoever in joining the military. … [W]e could possibly be at war with communist China in less than three to five years. We’ve got to rebuild our military. We’ve got to bring some sanity back to the Department of Defense.”

In his testimony, Austin said he would get back to the committee in “due time.” “I’m here to tell you, Secretary Austin, it better be quick,” Alford warned. “We have some serious answers that we need on these serious questions … about the wokeness that has infected our military. … We have got to put a stop to this … and someone’s head is going to roll on this. I don’t know who, but we cannot continue down this path where we are turning our military into [a] circus.”

And before someone accuses him or other conservatives of being “anti-gay” or “transphobic,” he reminded them, “If this were a woman doing burlesque in an oversexualized manner trying to recruit people into the military, it would be wrong as well. … This is not getting people passionate about America again. We need Normal Rockwell … not the ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show.’ And that’s what we’re living in.”

Kelly, meanwhile, was quite content to play the martyr. He blamed critics for creating “toxic environments and hate.” “You only want to support the military when it benefits you and doesn’t involve queer people. … Well, as a service member, a queen, and an open queer person, you don’t scare me and you won’t stop the LGBTQ+ community [from] thriving,” Kelley continued. “Haters only hate when we’re winning.”

But winning — as a nation — is exactly what Republicans are concerned about. “The situation … is so serious with China,” Alford warned. “They are getting ready to invade Taiwan; Russia [is] in this illegal war against Ukraine. What’s going on in the Sudan? We have serious problems in America, and we are asleep. … The big bad wolf is at the door. As I’ve said before, he is huffing and puffing. Our house right now is not made out of brick. And I’m worried that it’s going to be blown down.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

SEAL Who Helped Kill Bin Laden Fuming Over Navy’s Drag Queen Ambassador: ‘Can’t Believe I Fought Bor This Bullsh–t’

Thank you, hero. Everyone is so afraid to state the obvious.

The military has a huge recruiting and retention problem because they went woke. They’ve hit bottom. So why keep digging?

SEAL who helped kill bin Laden fumes over Navy’s drag queen ambassador: ‘Can’t believe I fought for this bullsh–t’

By: NY Post, May 4, 2023:

A decorated Navy SEAL veteran, who was a part of the mission that killed Osama bin Laden, has spoken out against the Navy’s new recruitment campaign.

Former US Navy SEAL Team Six member, Robert J. O’Neill, took to Twitter Wednesday morning to share his disapproval of the Navy’s hiring of an active-duty drag queen to help recruit “the most talented and diverse workforce” for the military branch.

“Alright. The US Navy is now using an enlisted sailor Drag Queen as a recruiter. I’m done. China is going to destroy us. YOU GOT THIS NAVY. I can’t believe I fought for this bulls-t,” O’Neill wrote to his 590,500 followers.

O’Neill’s comments were targeted at Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley, the first of five new “Digital Ambassadors” for a new program the Navy piloted from October to March.

Kelley, who identifies as non-binary and goes by the stage name Harpy Daniels, has shared their journey of being a non-binary, drag queen with the Navy through their Instagram and TikTok accounts.

“Thank you to the Navy for giving me this opportunity! I don’t speak for the Navy but simply sharing my experience in the Navy! Hooyah, and let’s go Slay!” Daniels said in a November post.

Kelley was an ambassador of a program “designed to explore the digital environment to reach a wide range of potential candidates” as the Navy battles “the most challenging recruiting environment it has faced since the start of the all-volunteer force,” a Navy spokesperson told Fox News.

O’Neill, who was self-credited with delivering the fatal blow to bin Laden during the May 2, 2011 raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, has published two books since leaving the military in 2014.

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘The Only Thing That Should Be Dragging in the Navy Is an Anchor’: Congressman

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The New Ugly Americans

The old cultural imperialism was supposedly greedy corporatism like Disneyland, McDonald’s, and Starbucks sprouting up worldwide to supplant local competitors.

But these businesses spread because they appealed to free-will consumer demand abroad. They were not imposed top down.

The U.S. presence in Afghanistan collapsed in August 2021 amid the greatest American military humiliation in modern history. A billion-dollar new embassy was abandoned. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of new infrastructure at the huge Bagram Airbase was dumped.

We still do not know how many billions of dollars of sophisticated new weapons were left to the Taliban and now are making their way through global terrorists’ marts.

Yet, in our skedaddle, the LGBTQ flag still flew high from our new Kabul embassy. A George Floyd mural was prominent on city streets.

And gender studies programs – to the tune of $787 million in American subsidies – were showcased at Kabul University, in one of the most conservative Islamic countries in the world.

Rainbow flags and Black Lives Matter banners have hung from our embassy in South Korea.

Such partisan cultural activism is a diplomatic first.

The woke Left has now weaponized the country’s diplomatic missions abroad to advance highly partisan and controversial agendas that can offend their hosts, and do not represent the majority of American voters at home.

American foreign policy toward other nations seems now to hinge on their positions on transgender people, LGBTQ promotion, abortion, climate change, and an array of woke issues from using multiple pronouns on passports to showcasing transgender ambassadors.

The Biden Administration in January 2022 stopped the EastMed pipeline. That joint effort of our allies Cyprus, Greece, and Israel sought to bring much needed clean-burning Mediterranean natural gas to southern Europe.

Apparently, our diplomats felt it violated our own New Green Deal orthodoxies. So we imperialists interfered to destroy a vital project of our closest allies.

The White House manifesto called the “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality” offers a blueprint for how to massage nations abroad to accept our values that are increasingly at odds with much of the world’s.

Do Americans really believe that embracing drag-queen shows at military bases, abortion to the moment of birth, transgender men competing in women’s sports, and the promised effort to ban the internal combustion engine are effective ways to ensure good relations with the United States?

No wonder the Biden Administration’s new cultural imperialism is proving disastrous for a variety of reasons.

One, these imperialistic and chauvinistic agendas are pushed abroad at the very time the respect for the U.S. military is at an all-time low. It was humiliated in Afghanistan. It is now unable to recruit sufficient qualified soldiers. Its stocks of critical weapons are depleted.

The Pentagon leadership of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, along with Joe Biden, do not radiate competence.

But they do exude woke pieties.

While we offend Middle East oil exporters and Central Europeans, China allies with Russia and Iran. India and Turkey triangulate away from the United States. Sanctimonious hectoring while appearing weak is a bad combination.

Two, these warped standards are incoherent. Is an abortion-on-demand, totalitarian China therefore an ally? How could we damn supposedly non-woke Saudi Arabia as we begged it to pump more of its non-green oil before the 2022 midterms?

Some of our most loyal allies are in Eastern Europe – Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania. These countries have experienced traumatic histories on the front lines against Islamic Ottoman expansionism, czarist and Soviet aggression, and German Nazi bullying and invasion.

They are democratic and pro-American. Yet they are now targeted by our woke imperialists because they remain steadfast as the most religious and traditional of our European allies.

Yet these nations would be more likely to dispatch credible forces for NATO’s defense than many of our left-wing, woke, and militarily less capable Western European nations.

Three, most of the 7.9 billion people in the world are not woke. They are aspiring to obtain a modicum of the luxury and affluence taken for granted in America.

The rest of the planet worries whether it will have enough food, energy, security, and shelter to live one more day. For most, the incessant, woke virtue-signaling from affluent Americans comes across as the whiny bullying of pampered, self-righteous – and increasingly neurotic – imperialists.

Four, traditionally the party that controls the State Department does not politically weaponize its embassies with wedge issues that have not won majority support among Americans.

Such abject politicalization rattles and alienates foreign nations. They do not want to be drawn into the American Left’s internal propaganda efforts that they know are bitterly controversial inside the United States.

How odd that those on the Left who in the past decried “American imperialism” are now proving the greatest imperialists of all.

AUTHOR

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.

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The Boy Who Knew Too Much for His School

Exposing trans madness in education doesn’t require advanced degrees, political influence, charisma, or even 18 years of life, as one plucky middle-schooler demonstrated. At the April 13 School Committee Meeting for Middleboro, Mass. Public Schools, 7th grader Liam Morrison, a student at Nichols Middle School, stepped up to the microphone for two minutes of public comment — and then reached up to turn it down towards his mouth. He then narrated for the school committee what might be the silliest reason any student has ever been sent home from school: wearing a shirt conveying factually accurate information.

“I never thought the shirt I wore to school on March 21 would lead me to speak with you today,” began the pint-sized culture warrior. He described how he was removed from his Tuesday gym class “to sit down with two adults for what turned out to be a very uncomfortable talk. I was told that people were complaining about the words on my shirt, that my shirt was making some students feel unsafe.”

“What did my shirt say? Five simple words: ‘There are only two genders,’ Morrison emphasized. “Nothing harmful. Nothing threatening. Just a statement I believe to be a fact.” And not only a fact, but a bedrock principle to many lessons Morrison would likely have encountered in both biology class and grammar class.

“Yes, words on a shirt made people feel ‘unsafe,’” repeated Morrison. If people did complain, they lacked the courage to tell Morrison to his face. In this instance, the accused was not accorded the right to face his accusers, making their very existence unverifiable. Morrison recalled, “Not one person, student, or staff, told me that they were bothered by what I was wearing. Actually, just the opposite. Several kids told me that they supported my actions and that they wanted one, too.”

“I was told that I would need to remove my shirt before I could return to class,” Morrison continued. “When I nicely told them that I didn’t want to do that, they called my father. Thankfully, my dad supported my decisions [and] came to pick me up.” In other words, because Morrison’s shirt proclaimed a fact of biology and language that he learned (or should have learned) in school, school personnel sent him home — which would hinder his ability to learn — to quarantine his knowledge from other students.

School personnel tried to justify their decision to Morrison, who said, “Their arguments were weak, in my opinion.” The Nichols Middle School dress code does not prohibit students from wearing clothing that displays a message — which is sometimes the case in a controversy of this nature — and school personnel did not object to Morrison’s shirt on that basis. Instead, they claimed that the shirt was disruptive and targeted a protected class.

The dress code does provide:

  • “Clothing that … inhibits learning is not allowed.”
  • “Clothing must not state, imply, or depict hate speech or imagery that target groups based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious affiliation, or any other classification.”

“I was told that this shirt was a disruption to learning,” said Morrison. But “no one got up and stormed out of class. No one burst into tears. I’m sure I would have noticed if they had. I experience disruptions to my learning every day. Kids acting out in class are a disruption, yet nothing is done. Why do the rules apply to one yet not another?” A healthy measure of common sense lies underneath the crew cut.

“I have been told that my shirt was ‘targeting a protected class,’” explained Morrison. But he had questions. “Who is this protected class? Are their feelings more important than my rights? I don’t complain when I see pride flags and diversity posters hung throughout the school. Do you know why? Because others have a right to their beliefs just as I do.” Here Morrison argues for the basic principle of free speech, that merely holding and stating a political opinion does not count as hate speech against anyone who disagrees.

It’s not the dress code itself that Morrison spoke out against, but the illegitimate, arbitrary, and unequal way school personnel enforced it against him for his disfavored political views.

Per the dress code policy, Morrison was asked to change. “If students wear something inappropriate to school, they will be asked to call their parent/guardian to request that more appropriate attire be brought to school.” Since he was unwilling, and his father supported his decision, he was sent home. Yet Morrison could face “disciplinary action” if he wears the shirt to school again.

Even while they were enforcing the dress code policy against Morrison, the school officials seemed reluctant to admit what they were doing. “They told me that I wasn’t in trouble, but it sure felt like I was,” said Morrison. “I feel like these adults were telling me that it wasn’t okay for me to have an opposing view.”

But Morrison responded, “I know that I have a right to wear the shirt with those five words. Even at 12 years old, I have my own political opinions, and I have a right to express those opinions, even at school. This right is called the First Amendment to the Constitution.”

In Lee v. Weisman (1992), the Supreme Court prohibited prayer at high school graduations because “adolescents are often susceptible to pressure from their peers towards conformity.” They reasoned, “What to most believers may seem nothing more than a reasonable request that the nonbeliever respect their religious practices, in a school context may appear to the nonbeliever or dissenter to be an attempt to employ the machinery of the State to enforce a religious orthodoxy.” Now, the logic of the opinion is working in reverse, as “the machinery of the State” enforces the anti-religious orthodoxy of transgender ideology on adolescents who are just as susceptible to outside pressure as they were 30 years ago (although Morrison stands out as a remarkable contradiction of this generalization).

Alas, this is the state of public education in America today. Pride flags and other ostentatious celebrations of sexual deviance go unchallenged. But if a single 12-year-old wears a shirt stating the biological and grammatical truth, “there are only two genders,” two adults will pull him out of class to berate him for “targeting a protected class.” Content to let classroom disruption slide most of the time, if any young person has the temerity to wear a truth-telling shirt to class, the school will disrupt his education to call him disruptive.

What other shirt messages might, for simply telling the truth, fall afoul of this ridiculous interpretation of the dress code? Here’s a few likely candidates: “2+2=4 is math, not white supremacy,” “Life begins at conception,” “Latinx is bad Spanish,” or “Jesus is the only way.”

“I learned a lot from this experience,” concluded Morrison. “I’ve learned that a lot of other students share my view. I’ve learned that adults don’t always do the right thing or make the right decisions. … Next time, it might not only be me. There might be more students that decide to speak out.” Education experts have determined to train students as activists, calculating that they can harness their convictions into a left-wing political agenda, but with just a few brave freethinkers like Morrison, teaching students to stand up for truth and right may just backfire.

Just about any young person would find it intimidating to stand up and speak before nine adults in a formal setting — not least one beginning to experience the awkward and uncomfortable physical changes of puberty. But Morrison was not deterred; after all, it’s his future education and free expression that he’s fighting for. His generation (and every other one) could use a few more courageous men willing to stand up for what’s right.

“I didn’t go to school that day to hurt feelings or cause trouble,” Morrison told the school committee. “My hope in being here tonight is to bring the school committee’s attention to this issue. I hope that you will speak up for the rest of us, so we can express ourselves without being pulled out of class.”

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

In a post-capitalist utopia, the family has been abolished

Is pregnancy really just an extreme sport with a high death rate?


According to the famous assessment of Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This fundamentally unfair situation, it might be said, goes against the key socialist tenet of spreading all social assets around equally – particularly misery.

One contemporary far left thinker who seems to have come from an unhappy home is Sophie Lewis, an Oxford-educated German-British academic, lecturer and writer currently employed part-time at The Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.

Ironically for someone based in the City of Brotherly Love, Lewis is an open hater of the traditional family unit, as the proudly provocative titles of her 2019 book Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family, and its 2022 sequel Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation rather give away. As MercatorNet said of Lewis’ first book at the time, “Full Surrogacy Now is a bracing read, with something to offend nearly everyone.”

The mother of all lies

Lewis’ big idea is “gestational communism”, or the abolition of “dyadic modes of doing family”. Traditional bonds of love between a child and its parents only train infants to believe in the capitalist notion of private property, which is what many parents “selfishly” see their children as being, rather than the common property of society at large, or the State.

“Human nature”, so-called, is nothing but a sick illusion. The (generally) automatic love of mother for child is not natural at all, argues Lewis, but an emotional phantom conjured by the current dominance of global capital. The family is nothing but an artificial capitalist brainwashing factory, Lewis explained in 2019, designed for “training us up to be workers, training us to be inhabitants of a binary-gendered and racially stratified system, training us not to be queer.”

Traditional families even caused racial genocide. Whilst “black motherhood was always queer” and collectivized, she says, “it was the invention of the ‘natural’ private family household that entrenched the disposability of black life in America.” How else could you explain the sinister fact that “black gestators are dying in maternity wards” at higher rates than their white peers today are?

Wait, “gestators”? What are they? Lewis really means “mothers”, a term now so passé in the world of contemporary Marxist gender-studies that she prefers not to use it – after all, men can have babies too these days, at least if “men” are defined purely verbally, and not biologically.

To abolish these manifold ills and so usher in an alleged utopia of “queerer, more comradely” forms of reproduction, surrogate gestators from Africa and Asia should henceforth be used to birth all white Western children, demands Lewis, or maybe one day even artificial biomechanical wombs, in a rapidly-developing process known as ectogenesis.

“No to biogenetic possessiveness” and “Let every pregnancy be for everyone” are two mottoes of Lewis’ which will surely soon pop up on angry placards outside maternity wards.

There’s one born every minute

Pregnancy itself is nothing but an “extreme sport” to Lewis or, more accurately, a form of unpaid work (do we not speak of gestators “going into labour”?) and one with an absolutely abysmal Health & Safety record. In a 2020 interview, Lewis explained how:

“The World Health Organization estimates that more than 300,000 people died from pregnancy-related causes in 2015 … I reject the notion that there’s some kind of ‘biological’ necessity for this kind of human carnage … What other workplace or industry would society accept, if it injured millions and killed 300,000 a year?”

If those particular pregnancy-related stats make Sophie blanch, just wait until she hears how many people die every year from the long-term effects of simply being born!

But there is an even wider political agenda at work here too. Breaking down the barriers between men and women, parents and children, families and society, will also help erase other barriers.

No believer in borders, Lewis dreams that, if white Western women begin to habitually use non-white African or Asian women as their hired foetus-carriers, then this will help erase the supposedly artificial divide existing between Canadians and Kenyans, or Belgians and Burmese, hopefully making the idea of the nation state itself collapse. Then, everyone of every gender, sexual orientation and nationality can end up living together in perfect interracial queer harmony in a global post-capitalist paradise of her own imagining.

Pregnant with meaning

But would this be the actual likely result of Lewis’ grand designs? In her new book Feminism Against Progress, the conservative-minded English feminist Mary Harrington argues reproductive developments like ectogenesis and mass surrogacy will in fact only benefit Lewis’ hated Big Capitalism even further.

For Harrington, “The universal solvents of freedom and equality can only do their work by liberating us from ‘embedded’ life in a web of given social relations,” like that once spoken of by George Eliot in Middlemarch: social relations like those of family, friends and organic local communities. And, once this web is successfully dissolved, we can then be exploited even further by big business.

If not only child-rearing becomes a kind of semi-communal activity, as nurseries and pre-schools already provide today, but also child-gestating, then what does this actually leave the “liberated” mothers who have farmed out their duties in this respect free to do with those newly unencumbered nine months of their lives? For most, it will set them “free” to do nothing other than keep on working in their pre-existing jobs – maybe even taking on a few extra hours, to pay the hired Eritrean mothers or robo-womb operators their necessary fees.

Lewis dreams of a future world in which work has been abolished. Yet if our future truly is one of Full Surrogacy Now, there will probably be more work for women than ever. At least today’s new mothers get a few months’ maternity leave; within Lewis’ Brave New World of gestational communism they won’t.

The Handmaid’s fairy tale

Would most ordinary mothers – sorry, “gestators” – really want this to happen? And would most children really want to be raised not in an ordinary family, as today, but within a gigantic, inescapable “classless commune” encompassing our entire globe (or the gullible Western bits of it, anyway)? I’d imagine not, but Lewis, who is herself happily childless, doesn’t seem to care. “It’s true: I am not thinking of children here,” Harrington cites her as airily admitting.

So who is she thinking of, then? Only of herself. Lewis aspires for her own personal friendship networks of radical far left “aspirationally universal queer love” to become the ideal mode of all our future living, a New Model Family queerly engineered to spawn a world of “beautiful mutants hell-bent on [social] regeneration, not self-replication” of the family-line, as today.

In other words, a world filled only with self-styled “beautiful mutants” just like her. Her childhood was terrible, and so should everyone else’s now be.

Home is where the hurt is

By her own account, Lewis’ childhood relationship with her father was dysfunctional, to say the least. When she told him she had been raped aged 13, he allegedly accused her of lying, saying rape was “good for the feminist CV”, and blaming her for one of her mother’s past suicide attempts.

Unsurprisingly, Sophie left home the first chance she got. More surprisingly, she later formed her own dyadic family unit herself, by getting married (to a woman). Yet, at their wedding, they did not exchange vows but what a credulously celebratory portrait in Vice magazine called “disavowals: of the institution of marriage, of the biological family, and the dysfunction that both can breed.”

However, when her own mother later lay dying in hospital, Lewis still attended “my closest bio-relative’s bedside” – but, as Vice explained, this didn’t make her into a hypocrite:

“Lewis didn’t find that looking after her sick mother contradicted her stance on the nuclear family. If we had achieved the ends of family abolition already, there would have been a vast [communist] network of people to care for her mother in those final months of her life, not just Lewis and her mother.”   

How can Lewis guarantee that? If you can choose your family, as Lewis ultimately advocates – she says infants produced by gestational communism should adopt and periodically drop parents, grandparents and siblings voluntarily as we do today with our friends – then what happens to those poor souls who nobody wants to adopt? Who will look after them in their hours of need?

Losing the lottery of life

The ultimate stated aim of Lewis’ pseudo-philosophy of “Gestational Justice” is to ensure that “the provision of basic physical and psychological needs is no longer dependent on a genetic lottery”, i.e. that of birth. Theoretically, this will break the logic of Tolstoy’s celebrated aphorism, ensuring that, rather than just some lucky people being born into happy families, one day everyone will be able to choose their way into one, the exact reverse of Sophie’s fate as a child.

But whilst there are innumerable sad cases like her own, far more people are already born into more-or-less happy families anyway, just like Tolstoy implied. Stripping these lucky lottery winners of their prize in the name of “equality” will not necessarily make everyone equally happy at all, but simply run the very real risk of making everyone equally unhappy instead.

Still, that’s socialism for you.

AUTHOR

Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His next, Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience… More by Steven Tucker.

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Patriotic Reboot Doesn’t Change Bud Light’s Sobering Outlook

It’s Public Relations 101. When you’re getting hammered by critics, distract. If you can’t change the narrative, try changing the subject. Unfortunately, that trick doesn’t always work, as the big cheeses at Anheuser-Busch are quickly learning. After the worst two weeks in the company’s 171-year history, CEO Brendan Whitworth did his best “Hey, look over here!” moment. But it, like their low-level decision to debase women and alienate core consumers, bombed.

Any other time, the iconic Clydesdales galloping across picturesque American landmarks would have been a slam dunk. Until recently, the patriotic shots of couples waving their flags or women pledging allegiance would’ve been considered “on brand” for any Budweiser ad. Now, customers see it for what it is: a non-apology apology from a company that thinks slapping the stars and stripes on a commercial will help people forget they made a mockery of women to sell beer.

Or not sell beer, as the case may be. “Steep” doesn’t begin to describe the cost of partnering with Dylan Mulvaney, Hollywood’s favorite dress-wearing son. Since plastering cans with his pitiful imitation of Audrey Hepburn, Anheuser-Busch has lost a whopping $6 billion in market capitalization — ironically turning the beer into the “out of touch” “brand in decline” that Bud’s millennial managers claimed they were avoiding.

Their refusal to read the room is forcing Whitworth to pivot, as even the GOP presidential candidates take turns making Bud Light the butt of every joke. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy seized the moment to introduce “Bud Right” koozies. “There are *two* genders,” the Strive Asset Management co-founder tweeted. “Men are men & women are women. Don’t apologize for the truth.”

Fellow 2024 hopeful and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) took aim with a killer parody of Bud Light’s “Real Men of Genuis” ad series of the early 2000s. In it, he shows a series of trans-identifying athletes like Lia Thomas with a stinging voiceover: “Once mediocre in the men’s division, now cream of the crop in the women’s. You couldn’t cut it with the boys, so you pushed women off the podium. Because without you, sports would be fair. Without you, women’s sports would be for, well, women.”

And instead of walking back the deal that has country musicians shooting cases of his beer and smashing cans on stage, Whitworth released a nothing burger statement about “never intend[ing] to be a part of a discussion that divides people. We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.” Ironically, that is something the company managed to accomplish, as a clear majority unite around the decision not to support the brand.

When Rasmussen asked Americans about the debacle this week, more than half (54%) said they supported boycotting Anheuser-Busch. Only 30% were opposed, and 16% were unsure. “…[I]t’s pretty clear they stepped in a hornets’ nest,” Rasmussen’s Mark Mitchell said.

Meanwhile, almost comically, Democrats set out to prove that a beer that shills for transgenderism is just fine with them. In what many are calling the “most cringe” photo op ever, Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), Mark Takanko (D-Calif.), Judy Chu (D-Calif.), and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) forced a picture where all of them are enjoying conveniently posed Bud Lights. As candids go, it was a bust. “How convenient that all of the labels are facing the camera,” The Daily Caller’s Kay Smythe jabbed. It’s also “so strange that no one is talking but everyone is smiling.” And “why is there literally no one else in the photo? Oh, because it’s staged, of course!” she mocked.

Of course, Democrats have been willing sycophants of this transgender absurdity since day one. Republicans, if they’re smart, will stay on course, leaning into the outrage of the American people. This idea that the GOP and groups like the National Republican Congressional Committee should back off their attacks, when the American people are with them, is ludicrous. So what if the company is a major donor? If April’s freefall is any indication, they won’t have much money to give.

As the GOP’s conquering hero of corporate activism urged, no conservative should be lifting a finger to help Bud Light. “I mean, honestly,” DeSantis said, “that’s like them rubbing our faces in it. And… [if] these companies that do this, if they never have any response, they’re just gonna keep doing it.” This is not a one-off, he argued. “[I]t’s part of a larger thing where corporate America is trying to change our country, trying to change policy, trying to change culture. You know, I’d rather be governed by ‘We the people’ than woke companies. So I think pushback is in order across the board.”

Family Research Council’s Meg Kilgannon agreed. On “Washington Watch” Monday, she insisted that the only way corporate America will quit “marching to the beat of the leftist drum” is if “we make it hard on their bottom line. And if we don’t continue this pressure, then [that will be] difficult.”

Anheuser-Busch’s latest ad ended by saying, “This is a story that’s bigger than beer.” The same could be said here. As FRC President Tony Perkins pointed out on “Washington Watch,” “…[C]orporate America has become intoxicated with this woke agenda. … It impacts the Anheuser-Busch Corporation and all the other corporations [watching] this happening. So they have to take note. … In this case, it would be good for people to fall off the Budweiser wagon.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Gaines Goes Toe-to-Toe with Dems on Biden’s Push to Erase Girls

“Why is it always women fighting against sex-based protections?” Riley Gaines wondered. “That will forever be beyond me.” The former All-American swimmer could only shake her head at the latest attack on girls’ sports by Congresswoman Katie Hobbs (D-Calif.), the latest high-profile Democrat to throw her sex overboard in the raging battle for transgenderism.

“It’s an extraordinary state of affairs,” “Fox Nation” host Piers Morgan said afterward, “when two middle-aged men, me and Bill Maher, were standing up vociferously for women’s rights to fairness and equality, and a congresswoman who wants to be a senator was incapable of doing that. And that, to me, exposed the fragility at the heart of this woke position on this whole transgender debate.”

Hobbs was a guest on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” when the conversation turned to Gaines’s push to save girls’ sports. The California Democrat announced that she disagreed with the former University of Kentucky athlete “strongly.” When Morgan pressed her about what Gaines had done or said that she disapproved of, Hobbs claimed Riley was “using things to kind of get likes and get clicks.” “That’s not what she’s doing,” Morgan fired back. “It’s not?” Hobbs asked incredulously.

The Brit insisted, “All I’ve seen her do is stand up for women’s rights to fairness and equality. She competed against [biological male] Lia Thomas, and it was obviously unfair.” Then “our sporting bodies should be dealing with it,” Hobbs argued, before claiming she respects Riley’s “free speech.”

Later, Morgan seemed appalled by the whole exchange, arguing on his home network, “It’s time that female politicians, in particular in America, Democrat politicians, stop this nonsense and stood up for women’s rights.”

As for Hobbs’s allegation that Riley was “speaking up for herself,” Gaines clarified, “I’m not speaking up for myself… I’m done playing sports. I’m not fighting for me. I’m actually supposed to be in dental school this year. But I’ve changed my life plans because I see what’s at stake if someone doesn’t fight for the present and next generation.”

Someone who’s obviously not fighting for present and future generations is President Joe Biden, who announced Monday that if Rep. Greg Steube’s (R-Fla.) girls’ sports bill makes it to his desk, he’d veto it. In the White House’s Statement of Administration Policy, the president’s team called the proposal “discriminatory.” Siding with the woke ideology that’s erasing women from fields, courts, and diamonds across America, the White House claimed, “Politicians should not dictate a one-size-fits-all requirement that forces coaches to remove kids from their teams.”

According to Family Research Council’s Meg Kilgannon, “one size fits all” is “a Biden administration specialty when it comes to the transgender agenda. They will sacrifice safety and fairness for women and girls to advance the cause of men/boys who think they are women/girls. This is a movement driven from the top down,” she told The Washington Stand, “and the Biden administration is doing its part to suppress opposition by threatening and bullying even Members of Congress.”

With a whopping 93 Republican co-sponsors, Steube is making it clear that Americans don’t share the Democrats’ extreme views. “This is an 80% issue,” the Florida congressman told “The Faulkner Focus.” And frankly, he said, “I think every American should know where their member of Congress sits on this issue.” Let’s not forget, Steube explained, “Title IX was created by Congress 50 years ago for women’s sports — to allow women to be able to compete with each other at collegiate levels and activities and sports. And this [would] completely [do] away with [that] … by allowing biological males to compete with women in women’s sports.”

And, as Steube reminded everyone, “The other piece of this, too, is having biological men that are identifying as women in girls’ bathrooms and girls’ locker rooms changing with them [and] all the things that come with that. The American people don’t support that.”

Neither, presumably, do a majority of the House, who will have an opportunity to vote on the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act later this week.

As for Gaines, she’ll continue to put her own safety at risk to stop an agenda that she calls “manipulative” and “violent.” “This whole movement,” she insisted, “it’s vengeful, it’s hateful. I’ve never seen a movement quite like this movement.” She should know after her April visit to San Francisco State University, a school she’s now suing after being attacked on campus and barricaded in a room after an angry mob chased her out of a discussion on Title IX and threatened her.

“I thought I knew what I was getting myself into when agreeing to speak at this university,” she wrote in a new op-ed, “but I was wrong. There was no way to prepare myself for what happened.”

“People always wonder why more women aren’t speaking up,” Gaines went on, “(especially the female athletes who have firsthand experience competing against a male). This is why,” she insists about her own horrifying experience.

Even so, Riley believes, “The protestors’ plan backfired on them. They intended to silence me, but they only gave me a larger platform. My social media following quadrupled, and the public support around the world to protect women’s sports and sex-based rights skyrocketed. The general public is now more eager to get involved in the fight than ever before.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Disney’s Obsession with ‘Woke Sexuality’ has Cost it Quarter of a Billion Dollars at the Box Office

Does Disney really believe that families enjoy LGBTQ+-affirmative lecturing in films?


Growing up, there was nothing more magical to me than the opening credits of a Disney movie — even if I’d seen the film a dozen times.

These days, however, Disney’s feature-length content is feeling less like a childhood dream and more like a noisy soap-box preacher.

It is not just cultural commentators pointing this out but Disney’s audiences, who have been voting against the company’s woke sermonising with their feet.

Between the Toy Story spinoff Lightyear and Disney’s latest offering Strange World, both released in 2022, and both promoting an LGBT agenda, the animation behemoth has lost almost a quarter of a billion dollars, according to entertainment news outlet Deadline Hollywood.

In fact, Strange World earned itself the title of the biggest box office flop of 2022, with production and marketing costs of US$320 million and total earnings of only $120 million, for a loss of around $200 million. Lightyear lost over $100 million and took out second place in the flop stakes.

Strange World tells the story of a family of explorers venturing through an uncharted land searching for a certain plant needed to save their society. Apparently necessary to this plot is one of the lead roles, 16-year-old Ethan, discussing his gay crush on a boy at school.

Lightyear depicts a real-life portrayal of the astronaut named Buzz who inspired the toy of Toy Story fame. Likewise, it was a story Disney was unable to tell without a lesbian kiss between two lead characters, in a scene that almost hit the cutting room floor until the state of Florida passed the Parental Rights in Education Bill and needed a woke lecture.

Sydney Morning Herald writer Garry Maddox found Strange World’s box office performance something of a head-scratcher. “For a certified bomb, the initial reviews for Strange World were not too bad,” he mused, seemingly unaware that movie reviewers inhabit the same woke echo chamber as the film producers they critique

Maddox even suggested that Strange World featuring “the first out gay teenager in a Disney animated film” might be a family drawcard. Only in passing does the SMH journalist acknowledge Disney’s gay wokery as a potential put-off — and then, only for “red-state audiences”.

I know this is complex, Garry, but what if parents of all political stripes want to enjoy a day out with their kids without having to discuss birds, bees and Queer Theory with their preschoolers?

Certainly, there was more to Strange World’s failures than its preachiness. Quoting Deadline Hollywood, Maddox noted that “critics found the fantasy pic to be clunky and incomprehensible, and the animation retro and stale”. Lacklustre marketing was also identified as contributing to the film’s performance.

But these factors don’t explain Disney’s comparable letdown with Lightyear. The common denominator between the two is the injection of themes that movie-going families have little interest in.

It’s not as though animated movies are going out of fashion. Universal Pictures took in $940 million at the worldwide box office last year for Minions: Rise of Gru, and close to $700 million in just the opening weeks of The Super Mario Bros Movie.

Both films, incidentally, are notably woke-free, a fact that has critics wringing their hands.

“Go woke, go broke” may not hold true in every situation. But when it comes to children’s films at the box office, those four words appear to be a fixed law of the universe.

And a law Disney ignores at its own peril.

AUTHOR

Kurt Mahlburg

Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg.

RELATED ARTICLE: Disney Announces ‘Pride Nite’ Amid Ongoing Battle With DeSantis

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘Theybies’: The Rise of ‘Gender-Creative’ Parenting [Video]

Activists abusing innocent childhood reading schemes to push gender ideology to infants make some parents feel queasy.


The recent controversial feature on parents raising gender-neutral “Theybies” broadcast on Channel Nine’s 60 Minutes documentary strand caused quite a stir. Ideologically motivated parents were seen declaring their belief in referring to their children purely via fashionable they/them pronouns, in the name of letting toddlers decide who they really are, rather than simply letting biology settle the matter for them, as is traditional.

“We’re not trying to eliminate gender,” protested one social scientist and “gender creative expert” wheeled out to justify the experiment. “We’re actually trying to show how limitless gender can be.” Critics may protest that children need limits, and that such child-rearing methods will simply make kids confused, but supporters may equally argue parents have the right to raise their own offspring how they personally feel fit.

The latter argument may have some merit: but what happens when these same people capture our institutions and try to raise other people’s children along these same bizarre intersex lines too, whether other kids’ parents like it or not?

‘They’ came from outer space

One common practice amongst such parents is giving their Theybies weird, non-identifiably male or female names, like Zoomer, Searyl, Zyler, Sparrow or various other things which sound like Pokémon. Another oddly-named gender-neutral infant is Tala, who lives in the English county of Hertfordshire, but at least Tala has an excuse for being so unusually christened – for Tala is an alien.

Unveiled by Hertfordshire County Council in 2022, Tala is a cute cartoon mascot intended to encourage small children to use local library services. Tala replaced the now vanished Bookstart Bear, a previous incumbent who was also happily genderless – but for completely innocent reasons. Wishing to appeal to boys and girls equally, previous librarians had quietly failed to address the hitherto irrelevant issue of Bookstart Bear’s genitalia, pragmatically referring to the beast in promotional literature simply by name, not pronouns, so as not to put one gender or the other off from borrowing books.

Tala is fundamentally different. Intended as a “vibrant community asset”, Tala’s very name is an appeal to the Great God Diversity, having various meanings in global languages like Arabic, Polynesian and Filipino. But Tala also has very definite pronouns – they/them ones, like a true Theybie. “We hope that families love Tala as much as we loved creating them!” said council representatives, thereby getting toddlers grammatically confused as soon as they so much as set foot inside a library building.

Learning an alien language

When stubborn parents of local Hebies and Shebies heard Tala referred to as “they” by library staff, they took to social media to complain about this “trans alien” in their midst, concerns later amplified by prominent British trans-sceptical feminist Maya Forstater. In response, the council denied Tala was transgender, calling the idea “grossly misleading and wildly inaccurate”. But their denial sounded disingenuous: “In the absence of a gender for this alien creature, we simply use gender-neutral language when talking about them to the public.”

Gender-neutral such language may be, but it is not politically neutral; promoting gender-neutral pronouns to babies helps entrench such concepts in the public mind, particularly that of the next generation.

Accordingly, the queer-friendly press jumped to Tala’s defence, with Pink News mocking Forstater’s “truly confounding obsession with the sex, gender and reproduction habits of a made-up library alien”. Hard-left website WorkersLiberty.org (inadvertently accurate slogan: “Reason in Revolt”) acted similarly, although it did take time to note approvingly that, as Tala wore gender-neutral dungarees and bobble hat, the tiny alien “sort of dresses like a queer university student” of lesbian tastes.

The basic implication was clear: local parents and TERFs like Forstater were just suspicious loons, seeing an imaginary agenda of leftists trying to queer their kids where none in fact existed. But were they really so paranoid?

The elephant in the schoolroom

Tala’s case is not without parallel when it comes to using kids’ books as a Trojan Horse (or, as below, Trojan Elephant) to proselytize LGBTQ+ themes to unknowing children. In 2019, Muslim parents in the UK rebelled against the imposition of the gay-friendly teaching-scheme “No Outsiders” in their primary schools. Partly created by a gay teacher named Andrew Moffat, who in 2014 had resigned from his post following parental complaints about him promoting homosexuality to his students, the scheme posed as a pro-tolerance, anti-bullying platform.

As such, liberal media commentators, like Alice Thomson of the London Timesmocked Muslim parents who questioned it as primitive, God-bothering fools, incredulously writing: “They even questioned books about Elmer the patchwork elephant because he is rainbow-colored and so might be teaching their children to be gay.”

Except, as a more honest analysis of the affair on UK Muslim website islam21c.com observed: “Invariably, when describing the “No Outsiders” … programs to the media, Mr Moffat will show the mildest of books, ones that include cute cartoon animals [like Elmer] not fitting into a group because they are a different colour or shape and how they overcome that … It will be stated that the program merely highlights the existence of diversity when it is really much more than that.”

Islam21c.com examined the actual pedagogic academic papers of “No Outsiders”, concluding their authors truly sought to destroy sexual normativity amongst primary-age students by “disrupting [the] heterosexual matrix”. Heterosexual parents were constantly “asserting their majority status” via “the casual and unrestrained use of pronouns”, the academics complained, or showing people photos of their (disappointingly non-gay) wives or husbands at the school gates, and these hideously straight trends had to be counteracted.

However, as Moffat had earlier found, many parents did not appreciate their kids being surreptitiously turned against their normative upbringings in this way. Therefore, as previously shown on MercatorNet, it was thought better to present such schemes as ones in which “homophobia and heteronormativity were challenged as cultural phenomena (like racism)” – i.e. to disingenuously disguise “No Outsiders” as an innocent anti-bullying reading resource, centred upon the theme of not persecuting those who look or act different from their schoolyard peers.

Enter Elmer the Elephant.

Fifty Shades of Grey

The best-selling Elmer books were born in 1968, created by British author David McKee, who was inspired to write them when his mixed-race daughter had racial abuse hurled at her in the street one day. Elmer is an elephant who, like McKee’s daughter in 1960s Britain, was a different colour than all the other animals around him – multi-hued like a patchwork quilt, not grey.

To blend in, Elmer paints himself grey too, using berry-juice. But when rain washes this off, his fellow elephants decide they prefer him this way after all. Accepting his differences, they paint themselves like rainbows too, something initially just an allegory for racial harmony: but which, viewed through woke eyes, has now become a metaphor for queering children instead.

In 2014, Elmer was celebrated by left-wing UK newspaper The Guardian as having “become an LGBT hero!”, with McKee obligingly observing how “I find it interesting that sometimes people write to me and refer to Elmer as a girl in the stories – as Elma.” Like Nelly gone wrong, the elephant had by now indeed packed away his trunk (the one previously hanging politely unseen and unmentioned between his legs) and said hello to the gender circus.

Pink elephants

By 2021, Elmer’s UK publishers Andersen Press had teamed up with gay rights charities to create “new [Gay] Pride assets” for use in schools, “with elephant characters in the colors of the Pride, Lesbian, Bi and Trans flags” for an educationally essential new nationwide brainwashing festival called “School Diversity Week”. Now, rather than simply discouraging racism, “Elmer celebrates everyone’s true colours”, even those of pansexual bigender two-year-olds.

Elmer has even been the subject of a 2011 US doctoral thesis, “Reading Queer Subtexts in Children’s Literature”, which concludes colourful Elmer “is a walking Gay Pride flag”. Apparently, the playful beast “is both gay in the sense that he is delightful and happy and in the sense that he is queer.” Furthermore, “the [hetero]normative assumptions in the text turn out to be false”, meaning Elmer “becomes such a perfect allegory for the closet in which many homosexual children exist.”

Accordingly, Rainbow Elmer’s books are today sold in gay bookshops and appear in LGBTQ+ curriculum guides for teachers. One such document, used in Scotland, takes a leaf from the Andrew Moffat playbook, pointing out that “Although nothing in the story references LGBT people directly, it can be used to start a longer conversation about diversity and difference, and LGBT people or families can be included in those discussions.”

So, when commentators like Alice Thomson smear Muslim parents as paranoid for suspecting their kids might secretly be being groomed to be gay by elephants, they are really just trying to put others off from voicing their (in fact wholly legitimate) concerns by discrediting anyone who speaks out as a delusional extremist nutcase, precisely same tactic used today with Tala the trans alien.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, there was a popular learn-to-read series of books used in British schools called “The Gay Way Reading Scheme“, whose cheerful slogan, “Learn to read the Gay Way!”, ensured they ultimately had to be pulped (their chief competitors, “Through the Rainbow“, benefitted only temporarily …). These days, it increasingly seems that learning to read “the Gay Way” is the only option our kids now have.

AUTHOR

Steven Tucker

Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His next, Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience… More by Steven Tucker.

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EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Marketing Geniuses At Budweiser Forgot One Cardinal Rule

‘This Bud may not be for you.’


Anheuser-Busch InBev is the largest beer maker in the world, producing six of the top 10 beer brands by volume, and enjoying sales of well over $1 billion a year.

Now, in a marketing debacle that will be studied and written about by MBA students for decades, Bud Light has cratered the company’s reputation.

Bud Light had been pure gold in the advertising industry since the 1980s, long before the Spuds McKenzie, the female bull terrier party animal mascot of the 1980s, and the hilarious “Real Men of Genius” ad campaign of the late 1990s became woven into popular culture. Bud Light brand building has been right up there with the NFL, arguably the most successful marketing organization on the planet.

But that was not good enough for Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid, the newly named vice president of Bud Light. The image of the company was just too “fratty,” she explained in a recent podcast, during which she insulted the customers that have sustained the brand for decades.

The beer’s new mascot would become a man all dolled up like a preteen girl: Dylan Mulvaney.

Heinerscheid believes she is on the cutting edge because the beer label had been in decline. On the “Make Yourself at Home” podcast she explained how she is on a mission to evolve the brand:

“So I have this super clear mandate. We need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand. And my, what I brought to that, was a belief in ‘OK, what does evolve and elevate mean?’ It means inclusivity. It means shifting the tone. It means having a campaign that’s truly inclusive and feels lighter and brighter and different and appeals to women and to men,” Heinerscheid said.

“And representation is … at the heart of evolution. You’ve gotta see people who will reflect you in the work. And we had this hangover. I mean Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor,” she explained.

And that, beer lovers, is how transgender activist Mulvaney came to be the new face of Bud Light. Mulvaney, a TikTok star and transgender personality who has done incredibly well in the famous-for-being-famous space, has brought his version of come-hither trans sexuality into the brand best known for a low-calorie, low-carb buzz, with notes of hops and malt.

The real marketing men and women of genius over at Budweiser forgot one thing: Don’t hate your customer.

When it launched Heinerscheid as its new VP during the Super Bowl, she explained to Forbes magazine that the 2023 Super Bowl ad, featuring people dancing as they are on a phone call hold, was the company’s new shift to showing real people, especially women.

“This campaign is meant to feel different, to be lighter and brighter, with a confidence and magnetism, and it’s really critical to depict real people and real places,” she told Forbes. “What I need to do to help this brand to evolve … this is my passion point.”

Heinerscheid told Forbes that Bud Light has been “everything to everyone, and as a result, we’ve not been (mindful) about where it shows up.”

Then she spoke to the importance of women. Her top strategic priority was to make sure that women were represented: “Female representation is a personal passion point of mine.”

By April 1, Heinerscheid decided that real people were not the market and female representation was not the priority.

Instead, a wholly manufactured TikTok personality, famous for skipping around a little girl’s bedroom like a pre-pubescent girl, is the real person that represents the brand.

Pro-tip: You’ll never be able to replace all the customers you lose at once with your new target market.

It appears Bud Light is targeting pre-teens, and Dylan Mulvaney does play-act the role of an underage girl. But that is a targeting blunder for another column.

If you’re one of the most successful brands in the history of marketing, and if you’re hating on your existing customer while you search for a better customer, maybe this Bud blunder is on you.

Real Men of Genius and Spuds McKenzie, the campaigns that built the brand, spoke to America with humor and storytelling.

Perhaps it is not just the customer that Bud Light has decided to hate. Perhaps the corporate geniuses, looking for that ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) preferential scoring for investors, have simply decided to hate Americans because they are not woke enough or trans enough for the “evolving” brand.

Good luck with that strategy, geniuses. As for Americans, this Bud may not be for you.

AUTHOR

SUZANNE DOWNING

Suzanne Downing is publisher of Must Read Alaska.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


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