Thank you, Mr. President, for moving to make male and female great again

In the last few years, biological girls have seen their rights violated in school bathrooms and in sports. National confusion has ensued ever since the previous administration decided to reinterpret Title IX’s sex anti-discrimination clause to include self-proclaimed “gender identity.”

That may soon come to an end under the Trump administration.

The Department of Health and Human Services has drafted a memo that would reverse the Obama administration’s action and return the legal definition of “sex” under Title IX civil rights law to what its authors meant: sex rooted in unchanging biological reality. According to The New York Times, the memo was drafted last spring and has been circulating ever since.

Title IX bans sex discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, meaning schools have to abide by the government’s interpretation of Title IX or risk losing federal funds.

When the Obama administration announced it was including “gender identity” under the word “sex,” many schools felt they had to treat gender identity as the standard for determining access to bathrooms, sports teams, etc. The result was headlines like “Transgender Athletes Dominate High School Women’s Sports.”

The memo spells out the proposed definition of “sex” as applied to federal statutes as “a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth.” The proposed definition won’t include a “select a gender” option, as was offered under the Obama administration.

This is simply a return to reality. Sex is an immutable biological reality, while gender identity is a social construct that can change over time. The two terms are not interchangeable. The authors of Title IX meant biological sex, not gender identity.

The Obama administration’s conflation of the two was not just legally problematic—it also pushed transgender ideology further into the mainstream. That’s regrettable, because transgender ideology has real and harmful effects on people who are suffering and need help.

When individuals try to live out life in an ideology that has no basis in biological fact, the consequences are stark.

I know, because I lived the trans life for eight years.

I have received hundreds of regret letters from trans people who now realize—too late—that gender-pretending is damaging. Regretters have called gender change “the biggest mistake of my life.” The late transgender movie actress Alexis Arquette called her gender transition “bulls***” because no one can really change their gender.

So many have written me personally about the unhappy consequences of imitating the opposite gender for so many years, telling of lives needlessly torn apart and thoughts of suicide. I put those emails into a book, “Trans Life Survivors,” which shows the human toll caused by encouraging distressed people to undergo permanent surgeries and take powerful hormones without considering other causes and treatments.

This past weekend, I opened my email as I do each morning and found another message from a person who had ignored biology and went head-first into trans ideology. Now, this person wants out:

I am now 40 years old, post op male to female transgender person. And to put it simply, very miserable in life now. I have followed you on YouTube … and totally agree with your theories! I am at my wits’ end with life and what I have done to myself. It’s an inspiration to see and read about what I would call “survivors!”

Many trans folks, after years of “living the life,” now want to detransition. Many report to me that they were sexually abused, raped, or molested at a young age—in one case, as a toddler.

Teenage girls are flocking to gender change as an escape. One 15-year-old girl, who the gender experts diagnosed with gender dysphoria, explained to her mother that she wanted to “erase my past” because she was sexually abused by her dad.

In another case, a young 14-year-old girl confessed that “I used being trans to try and escape being scared about being small and weak. I thought that if I presented myself as a man I’d be safer.”

Another girl’s mother wrote that her daughter was raped at age 19 and desperately “is trying to remove any connection to her being female visually or sexually.”

This is the kind of suffering that has driven many to change genders. As a society, we need to honestly consider: Is changing genders an effective long-term treatment for past sexual abuse and feelings of insecurity?

Obviously not.

Billy, another trans life survivor, had been sexually abused at age 11 during a summer swimming camp by his diving coach. Billy explained to me that after the abuse, he hated his genitalia and wanted to become a female. Abuse can do that.

Billy, like so many abused as children, was diagnosed by the “gender specialist” with gender dysphoria and given cross-sex hormones and reassignment surgery. He lived fully as a transgender female until regret set in.

Now he has detransitioned back to male and is married—a true trans life survivor who prefers to live a biologically authentic life.

Trans ideology ruined the life of another friend, born male and now living as a trans female. After being diagnosed with gender dysphoria, his excellent employment allowed him financially to transition from male to female. But sex change regret has set in, and now he wants to detransition.

This nice-looking, tall, slender, intelligent transgender person is another who had been sexually abused as a child.

Too many people tell me that even when they establish a history of sexual abuse and communicate that to the gender therapist, the therapist disregards it. If a client wants to change their gender, the therapist will affirm them without reservation and help them down that path.

As a former trans person, and as someone who daily receives stories of physical and emotional devastation wrought by trans ideology, I look forward to a federal definition of sex as being rooted in immutable biology, without the option of being self-selected.

The science is absolutely clear. Sex doesn’t change over time, even with hormones and surgery—and that’s a good thing.

SOURCE






“Fake news” doesn't even begin to describe it. British media maligning Tommy Robinson

On Friday, the British judiciary lifted reporting restrictions on the three trials of a total of twenty “Asian” men at Leeds County Court, allowing the media to inform the public that the men were sentenced to a total of 221 years in prison for the rapes of fifteen young girls in the West Yorkshire town of Huddersfield. It was the second of these trials that Tommy Robinson was reporting about online on May 25 when he was arrested outside the Leeds courthouse, rushed through a brief trial conducted by Judge Geoffrey Marson, sentenced to thirteen months behind bars, and immediately confined in Hull Prison.

On June 13, he was transferred to Onley Prison, which has a higher Muslim population than the institution in Leeds and was thus more dangerous; exactly who ordered this transfer, which seems utterly unjustified except as a malicious attempt to expose Robinson to harm, remains unknown. Through the summer, Tommy's supporters held rallies around Britain, accusing their nation's establishment of having illegitimately imprisoned Tommy in order to shut down a major critic of the official appeasement of Islam; meanwhile, the mainstream media and political and cultural elite insisted in unison that Tommy's trial had been completely on the up-and-up and that he'd gotten precisely what he deserved.

That line of argument, however, was completely discredited on August 1, when Lord Burnett, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, and two other judges issued a ruling that could scarcely have been more severe in its knockdown of Marson's treatment of Tommy. Writing that the whole thing had been a “muddle,” from the nature of the charges to the justification for the verdict, the judges reversed Tommy's conviction, freed him on bail, and ordered a new hearing. That hearing is scheduled for tomorrow, October 23.

Did Lord Burnett's decision chasten Tommy's critics? Not a chance. On Friday, once the reporting restrictions were lifted on those grooming trials, the major media in Britain dutifully provided accounts of the verdicts. There was certainly a lot to report: three trials, several months, fifteen victims, twenty defendants, a mountain of stomach-turning testimony.

But the focus of the British media wasn't on any of this – it was on Tommy. Since he'd played a leading role in drawing attention to the existence of Muslim rape gangs in Britain – a fact that local governments, police departments, social-services agencies, and the mainstream media had kept shamefully, pusillanimously silent about for decades – they might have taken the occasion to apologize for having hounded him so cruelly and to thank him for the courage he'd exhibited and they hadn't. Instead, they stayed true to form.

In the Guardian, Josh Halliday dwelt on the rulings of Judge Marson. “It was during the second trial in May when the case was jeopardised by the actions of Tommy Robinson, the founder of the English Defence League,” wrote Halliday. “Within five hours of recording the video, Robinson was summoned before the judge, Geoffrey Marson QC, and summarily sentenced to 13 months imprisonment for contempt of court.....

Jailing him after the Leeds video, Judge Marson told him his actions could have caused the trial to be re-run, costing 'hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds.'” Halliday accorded only the briefest and most elliptical of mentions to the sensational August 1 ruling by Lord Burnett and colleagues: “Robinson...was released from HMP Onley in Rugby on 1 August after successfully challenging the Leeds contempt of court ruling.” There was nothing whatsoever in Halliday's article to indicate that Marson's statements, which Halliday quoted as if they were gospel, had in fact been completely discredited by Lord Burnett's higher court.

In good British-media fashion, Halliday also took care to note that some of the supporters who showed up outside the Old Bailey at the time of Tommy's previous court appearance had carried flags of “the far-right group Generation Identity.” Anyone watching a video of that gathering could tell you that any Generation Identity flags were vastly outnumbered by Union Jacks.

In the Daily Mail, Tim Stickings read from the same song sheet as Halliday, citing at length, again as if it were gospel, the B.S. served up by Marson in defense of his kangaroo trial. Tommy, Stickings contended, had “jeopardiz[ed]” the rape trial “with an illegal Facebook video.” Stickings's reference to Tommy's August 1 release took this form: “He was jailed and later released on a technicality....The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Burnett, said the judge at Leeds Crown Court was wrong to deal with Robinson as quickly as he did.” One cannot easily conceive of a more outrageously dishonest way to refer to Lord Burnett's ruling, which, again, comprehensively shredded Marson's conduct of the May proceedings.

Stickings was also careful to remind readers that “Robinson is a convicted fraudster who has also served time for assault and drugs offences.” Tommy has written in his autobiography about the Orwellian way in which British authorities scoured his finances in search of something, anything, however minor, for which they could prosecute him. In addition, Stickings referred to Tommy's courageous public activities not as activism or journalism but, dismissively, as “antics.”

In the Independent, Lizzie Dearden toed the same line. She, too, quoted Marson as if his ruling hadn't been nullified. She, too, maintained that the grooming trials “were almost derailed by Tommy Robinson.” She also spent several paragraphs asserting that the rape gangs had had nothing to do with religion or cultural background.

Reports in other British media followed the same formula. It was as if they'd all been dictated, word for word, from on high. Rarely have the words “fake news” been more apropos.

“Is this a new low or what?” I wrote on Saturday in an e-mail to a British contact. “Yes,” she replied, “I do think this is a new low. They are all reporting on the Leeds trial even though it was thrown out, as if the findings there can be relied upon. All one needs to do is to repeat things often enough and people will believe them.”

My contact, who has carefully studied the May 25 broadcast that landed Tommy behind bars, also pointed out that, just over five minutes into that livestream, Tommy asks his camera operator “Should we stay live?” and then asks a nearby police officer where he can stand while broadcasting. Hence, contrary to the media's party line, “the police knew he was not only recording, but live recording, and let him carry on for another 70 minutes before arresting him. So, if he was jeopardising the trial, why didn’t they stop him earlier?” Good question. Indeed, or at least so it seems to me, dispositive.

In a Saturday YouTube video, Tommy commented on the reports by Halliday, Stickings, Dearden, and others, noting that while the British government's severe restrictions on courtroom reporting are supposedly meant to ensure a fair trial (even though such rules are virtually unheard of in the U.S. and most other Western countries), the real effect of these edicts is to reduce coverage of grooming-gang trials to a single news cycle – and the impact of that, in turn, is to minimize public awareness of and outrage over what cannot be described as anything other than an Islamic rape epidemic.

(Just imagine if there had been a news blackout on, say the O.J. Simpson murder trial, with news media prohibited from printing or speaking a word about it until the day the verdict came in.)

The mainstream British news media may sometimes chafe at these reporting restrictions, but they don't protest too much, because, their politics being what they are, they don't really want to dwell on the topic of Muslim rape. God forbid that these trials might serve as an educational tool, finally opening British eyes, all these years after 9/11, to the dark reality of Islam's teachings about the sexual rights of male believers, the punishment for female immodesty, and the proper social position of infidels.

Responding in his YouTube video to the universal charge that he had jeopardized the trial, Tommy quoted court documents that explicitly state the contrary. “What I said [in the May 25 online video report] was already in the public domain,” Tommy stated, making a point that's been well established ever since his arrest, but that the British media have brazenly chosen to lie about. Tommy also had a few choice words for Lizzie Dearden, the above-mentioned Independent hack who flatly denies the Islamic roots of the grooming gangs. “In the court transcripts for my trial,” he noted, “Lizzie Dearden...is named as breaching two reporting restrictions for the same case the same weekend.” But she got away with it, while he didn't – for reasons that need hardly be spelled out.

SOURCE






New York Moves to Silence Dissent

The political battle has now become a fight for the very freedom of speech for conservatives.    

Lost in the bustle of the midterm elections has been a very disturbing escalation of New York’s war against those who dissent from left-wing policies. We’ve covered Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his abuse of financial regulations to target the National Rifle Association in the wake of the Parkland shooting. Cuomo’s totalitarianism has drawn belated opposition from the long-silent ACLU, but Fox News reports that other states are starting to employ the Cuomo playbook.

Well, things in New York have gotten worse, not better. The state is suing ExxonMobil for “misleading investors” about the possible risks from climate change. At least that’s what New York’s attorney general is saying in legal documents. In reality, the suit was filed because ExxonMobil isn’t going along with the preferred environmental policies of the current powers-that-be in the Empire State.

This isn’t Cuomo’s first such rodeo involving the use of government to find a back-door restriction on our rights. The Patriot Post team has warned about the use of RICO as a political weapon in the debate over environmental policy in the past.

In the latter years of Bill Clinton’s administration, he supported using an avalanche of civil litigation to compel gun manufacturers to accept policies that had been rejected by lawmakers at the federal and state level — or face bankruptcy.

Back in 2016, we asked, “How do conservatives expect to mount a comeback when even making the argument becomes illegal?” Well, that question has changed — largely because candidate Donald Trump became President Donald Trump. But the fundamental question we posed back then not only remains, it has expanded into a host of such questions.

Can conservatism survive if even making the conservative argument is criminalized? For that matter, can conservative groups compete in the market in the face of Chokepoint 2.0, which could cut them off from financial services? What if conservatives are excluded from law school or medical school? Can conservatives hope to win elections if Silicon Valley muzzles their arguments?

As outlandish as they may seem, those questions are very real. And these actions by New York, which Andrew Cuomo has sought to export to other states, are an abuse of power on par with the Democrats’ “John Doe” investigations in Wisconsin and Barack Obama’s weaponization of the IRS and other federal agencies against the Tea Party.

In essence, the stakes have increased. This is not merely a fight about policy, such as an argument about marginal tax rates or health care. It is now nothing less than a fight for freedom of speech for conservatives.

SOURCE






Sydney Anglicans ban valorization of homosexuals

The Sydney Anglican clergy are just about the last of the real Anglicans.  Most of the rest are just dressup queens

The Sydney Anglican Diocese has provoked controversy by proposing a policy to ensure that all church property is used in ways consistent with Anglican church teaching.

The proposal vetoed activities such as same-sex marriage receptions, meditative yoga, and indigenous smoking ceremonies, and was intended to extend to some 900 church properties. Parts of the policy — those concerned with smoking ceremonies — were withdrawn following protests from indigenous leaders and school principals. But many were still angry at what the church had proposed.

Religious doctrines often seem bizarre to those who do not belong to the faith community. It can be hard, for example, to see what problem believers have with yoga or hosting wedding receptions.

The Sydney Anglican policy emerged from specific Christian beliefs about salvation, the human person, human sexuality, and freedom. To those who share these beliefs, the policy might well make sense. To those who don’t, the whole exercise can — and did — seem bizarre, and simply another example of the irrelevance of religion to mainstream everyday Australian life.

After a fortnight when religious schools have been accused of wanting to expel gay students and church landlords accused of wanting to do the same to gay tenants, religious freedom is still a hot topic. And the reason is that one of the features of being a citizen in an open and free society is having to figure out how to live with those whose worldviews and beliefs are far removed from our own.

Even if we think they are wrong and that their practices are offensive, we must be sure to allow religious people and communities the freedom to interpret the world and the universe as they see fit. And we must also afford them the freedom to order their affairs — including their property use — in ways that align with those beliefs, as long as they do nothing illegal or harmful to others.

Of course, if we don’t like it — and often there is a lot not to like — we are free to criticise it because we live in a society that tolerates freedom of speech and the frank exchange of opinions. But criticising a church for attempting to implement a policy that could have a substantial impact on non-church people is one thing; it is quite another to tell it how to deal with its own property.

SOURCE 

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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