Harris Plays Coy on Child Gender Transitions, But Far-Left Groups Endorsing Child Sex Changes Have Her Back
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has avoided addressing whether she supports transgender surgeries for minors—a far-left position that most Americans do not support. Yet a number of LGBTQ groups that endorse attempted gender transition procedures for children are eagerly backing Harris and her running mate Tim Walz.
A few of these top LGBTQ groups are the American Civil Liberties Union, GLAAD, Advocates for Trans Equality, and the Human Rights Campaign. These organizations, which did not respond to requests for comment, warn against “anti-LGBTQ” legislation, citing fears that Republican politicians will protect children from transgender procedures, classroom discussions of gender and sexuality, and inappropriate drag performances.
Though Walz, as governor of Minnesota, signed an executive order establishing a “right” to trans hormones, puberty blockers, and surgeries, the Harris campaign has thus far refused to tell The Daily Signal whether it supports transgender surgeries for minors. The White House referred The Daily Signal to the Harris campaign on the matter.
It’s a question fraught with peril for a campaign closely tied to far-left groups, given the fact that most Americans do not support hormonal or surgical transgender interventions for kids.
The White House, which has previously embraced “medical care” for trans-identifying kids, appears to be aware of this. In early July, the White House flip-flopped on the topic, first telling news outlets that the Biden-Harris administration did not support transgender surgeries for children, before reaffirming support for irreversible procedures for minors after “intense pressure” from LGBTQ groups.
The flip-flopping followed reports that the top trans-identifying leader in the Department of Health and Human Services, Rachel Levine, successfully pressured the World Professional Association for Transgender Health to remove age requirements for minors to get irreversible transgender procedures.
Levine’s office has said that “early” transgender surgeries, hormone treatment, and affirmations are “crucial” for the health of kids and teens who identify as transgender, arguing that if these procedures are not made available to trans-identifying youth, they are at risk of self-harm or suicide.
Research has found that, contrary to those activists’ claims, so-called gender-affirming care increases the likelihood that youth will attempt suicide. According to one April study, “Gender-affirming surgery is significantly associated with elevated suicide-attempt risks, underlining the necessity for comprehensive post-procedure psychiatric support.”
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DEI must DIE
The bullet that whacked Donald Trump’s right ear was by no means the first shot in the hotting-up revolt against the current corporate/bureaucratic ‘woke’ fad of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion – the scheme, justified by George Floyd’s 2020 murder, that gives priority to disadvantage and ethnicity over merit. But Donald’s ear has given top-level added momentum to Elon Musk’s rallying battle cry: ‘DEI must DIE’, with Musk declaring that DEI’s supposed anti-discrimination initiatives are a form of discrimination and must end. This was part of Musk’s broad attack on political correctness and ‘woke’ culture that is now being partnered by increasing volumes of concentrated fire at DEI’s woke ally, ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) which denies the primacy of shareholder-owners of corporations in favour of ‘stakeholders’.
With leaders of this revolution among some of America’s previously supportive corporate heads, it is not only political conservatives now manning the barricades to oppose DEI’s assault on merit. And the campaign is not confined to America; the Diversity Council of Australia (DCA), the partly government-funded six-million-dollar ‘charity’ (claiming 1,300 members covering 20 per cent of the Australian workforce) that promotes DEI is concerned about the local consequences.
While Trump’s Republican party has long been a warrior against DEI (with many Republican states banning it in their administrations and the US House of Representatives disbanding its Office of Diversity and Inclusion), Donald’s ear has added a new dimension. When he regained his feet (if not his shoes) after falling to the ground, it was clearly established that the short female Secret Service agents were simply unable to provide adequate physical protection for a tall former (and potentially future) president; his head and upper torso remained a potential target. Then the revelation that this security blunder resulted from the Secret Service having imposed a 30-per-cent female requirement on its hiring criteria raised the inevitable backlash against this DEI dogma; the prime criterion should be suitability for the job, not sex, race or religion.
The campaign against DEI got its major boost in last year’s US Supreme Court majority ruling that the use of affirmative action in university admissions was unconstitutional. While not directly addressing corporate diversity programmes, the decision unleashed a wave of legal actions, including from former Trump adviser Stephen Miller. Consumer-facing companies such as Target, Kellanova (formerly Kellogg’s) and Starbucks were targeted, resulting in many US companies stepping back from DEI, while major corporations like Amazon and Nike have been cutting back on their DEI executives and others are ‘quietly quitting’.
The Financial Times has reported that accounting firm PwC dropped some of its diversity targets in the US and ended race-based eligibility criteria. Others, including pharma group Pfizer, opened up diversity fellowships to people of all races. It quoted Professor Yoshino at NYU School of Law, saying, ‘It used to be thought that DEI was above the law. But now the law has come crashing down on that entire enterprise, so we have to think of this as a newly regulated space’. This has generated fears from the Society for Human Resource Management, that this new legal landscape – combined with the continued need for companies to comply with laws preventing workplace discrimination – will prompt a retreat from efforts to foster workplace diversity.
Those fears are being realised. Just a couple of weeks before Donald’s ear highlighted DEI, what Forbes magazine described as a ‘firestorm of controversy’ broke out when Tennessee-based Tractor Supply Company, the nation’s largest rural lifestyle retailer, announced it was pulling back its ‘woke’ policies that it said were unpopular with its customers, after facing weeks of backlash on social media. The farm supply retail chain is eliminating all diversity, equity and inclusion roles and ditching its carbon emissions goals as it moves to sharpen focus on rural America priorities like animal welfare and veteran causes, and stop sponsoring Pride festivals and voting campaigns. Forbes, a continuing backer of DEI and critic of Tractor Supply’s actions, lamented that their withdrawal from the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, came just as ‘Pride Month festivities were dialling down’.
Just a few days after Trump’s ear, the groundswell against DEI received yet another boost when farm machinery giant Deere & Company publicly responded to customer criticism by backing away from its diversity policies. Citing a need to ‘prioritise internal policies that more closely align with our business strategy’, the maker of Deere tractors and other equipment said it would no longer take part in ‘social or cultural awareness’ events, and would audit company-mandated training materials ‘to ensure the absence of socially motivated messages’, leaving the company to ‘exclusively’ focus business resource groups for employees on professional development, mentoring and talent recruitment, ‘rather than race or sexual identity’.
Implications for Australia? DEI was never as dominant in Australia as in the US. Earlier this month, its leading supporters here were reported acknowledging that while a large number of Australian companies ‘are advanced in the DEI space and want to go further, some companies are reducing their investment’. They lamented the ‘backsliding, lip service and even a private backlash’ by sections of corporate Australia, with the rejection of the Voice referendum ‘causing some senior managers to tone down their support for diversity and other social issues’. The ‘politicisation and weaponisation’ of DEI in the US has led to a backlash that has ‘emboldened some Australian executives and leaders who didn’t really believe in DEI to begin with, and giving them a platform and more conviction to steer away from it’.
Nevertheless, this month the CEO of DCA, Lisa Annese, told the media that she remained ‘optimistic about the future of diversity and inclusion in Australia’, including the half-a-million dollar RISE (Realise. Inspire. Support. Energise) project fully funded by the Albanese government Office for Women. This is aimed at ‘implementing organisational change interventions that will help address systemic and organisational barriers for culturally and racially marginalised (CARM) women and to assist organisations in supporting women in middle management to reach senior leadership positions within their organisations. ‘We use the term CARM to refer to people who are not white’, says DCA, confirming its assistance is colour-based.
As its critics assert, efficiency, competitiveness and excellence are antithetical to the social engineering of DEI. In a competitive world, DEI must DIE.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/07/business-assassination-etc/
******************************************The Islamists want to silence music the way they have free speech
The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack on Friday at a festival in Germany that left three people dead and many more wounded. In a statement they said one of their ‘soldiers’ carried out the attack ‘as revenge against Muslims in Palestine and everywhere’.
As soon as news broke of Friday’s attack in the town of Solingen, fifteen miles east of Düsseldorf, seasoned observers of Islamist extremism knew who to blame.
Despite the risible posturing of western governments in recent years that far-right fanatics pose as great a threat to our way of life as Islamic extremists, the people aren’t fooled. It’s not the far-right who have murdered priests, police officers, schoolteachers, journalists and Jewish children. Nor have they targeted music venues which is clearly the new strategy of Islamist terrorists.
It began in 2015, when an Islamic State terror cell massacred 130 people at the Bataclan theatre in Paris, where they had gathered to watch a heavy metal band.
Two years later a suicide bomber killed 22 people, mostly youngsters, in Manchester as they danced to the American singer Ariana Grande.
In March this year, Islamic State gunmen murdered 137 people in Moscow as they attended a concert by the rock band Picnic. In the wake of that attack, some western journalists linked the targeting of Picnic to their support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Islamic State slaughtered 145 people in Moscow’s Crocus City Hall for the same reason they did in the Bataclan and for the same reason they planned to at a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna earlier this month.
Acting on information provided by foreign intelligence services, Austrian police arrested three young men described as ‘ISIS sympathisers’, who were preparing to launch a suicide attack during the concert.
Islamic extremists consider listening to music a sin. When the Islamic State established its caliphate in Iraq and Syria a decade ago it banned the sale and the playing of music. ‘Stringed instruments and songs are forbidden in Islam because they distract from the evocation of God and the Koran, and are a source of trouble and corruption for the heart,’ they said in a statement.
Claiming that music is illicit is also a means for Islamists to reinforce the ‘them’ and ‘us’ narrative in the west; in taking responsibility for the attack in Paris in November 2015, Islamic State described France as the ‘capital of prostitution and obscenity’.
Their strategy is working. In December last year an extensive survey about French Muslims and their relationship with religion and secularism found that 49 percent of Muslim pupils in French schools absented themselves from music lessons on religious grounds.
Claiming that music is illicit is also a means for Islamists to reinforce the ‘them’ and ‘us’ narrative in the west
What the Islamists hate (and fear) most is music from the mouths of young liberated women who are free to wear and say what they like. Taylor Swift, who has built a huge army of many millions of fans around the world – known as ‘Swifties’ – embodies this emancipation.
In an interview with Elle magazine in 2019, Swift said that the Manchester bombing two years earlier had left her ‘completely terrified to go on tour’. Not just for own safety, but the millions of fans attending her shows.
Austrian police may have averted a catastrophe this month but in a sense the Islamic State can still celebrate a victory; Swift’s three concerts in Vienna were cancelled so they silenced the music.
This is what the Islamists ultimately want, to rid or at least restrict music in Europe. They will be encouraged by the success they have had in restricting freedom of expression in the ten years since they murdered the staff of Charlie Hebdo. ‘Je suis Charlie’, cried Europe as one in the immediate aftermath, but who now has the courage to criticise Islam?
‘We have to live bravely in order to truly feel alive, and that means not being ruled by our greatest fears,’ said Swift in 2019.
The Islamists know that Europe is not a continent brimming with courage. Teachers, journalists and politicians now self-censor to avoid causing offence and endangering themselves. How long before musicians and music teachers pack away their instruments for good?
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Doctors quit British Medical Union over ‘woke’ transgender stance
Doctors are leaving the British Medical Association in revolt at its opposition to the Cass review, amid claims that the union has been taken over by an ideologically driven “vocal minority”.
Hundreds of members, including NHS clinical leaders and former presidents of medical royal colleges, have gone public with their “dismay” at BMA leaders for voting to reject the Cass review into the care of transgender children and reverse a ban on puberty blockers.
Some have resigned from the union after up to 50 years as members, and others said that the BMA’s “abysmal” leadership was “increasingly bonkers” and “ideologically captured”.
The rift began on July 31 when the BMA announced that it would lobby against the implementation of the Cass review, a four-year review which recommended an end to the practice of prescribing sex hormones to children with gender dysphoria on the NHS.
The rest of the medical establishment and the NHS have fully accepted and supported the review by Hilary Cass, a paediatrician, but the BMA has said that it will set up a group to “publicly critique” the review.
The union’s council, an elected policy-forming body of 69 members, was asked to vote on a motion rejecting the Cass review at a meeting described by critics as “secretive and opaque”. The motion passed, making it formal BMA policy, although the breakdown of votes has not been made available and the BMA’s membership base of 195,000 doctors was not consulted.
The motion was tabled at the BMA council by Tom Dolphin, a consultant anaesthetist in London, and Vassili Crispi, a junior doctor in Birmingham who has said that “rejecting the Cass review is one of many steps we need to take”.
It was backed by Emma Runswick, deputy chair of the BMA council, who is the ringleader of a left-wing and pro-strike coalition of junior doctors elected to the leadership body in 2022. Runswick has described the ban on puberty blockers as a “terrible decision” and repeated a debunked claim that it had led to more suicides.
Some other senior members of the BMA council were perplexed that they were being asked to vote on the issue at all and said that it did not reflect the views of the wider membership.
Jacky Davis, a consultant radiologist and member of the BMA council who opposed the motion, said: “The BMA council contains a vocal minority who have an anti-Cass agenda. They are driving policy in a direction that the membership have not been consulted on and do not agree with.
“This minority has voted to block the implementation of Cass, an evidence-based review which took four years to put together. They have no evidence for their opposition. The Cass review is not a matter for a trade union. It is not our business as a union to be doing a critique of the Cass review. It is a waste of time and resources.”
Davis said that the motion should have been debated at the BMA’s annual representative meeting in June, rather than being put straight to a vote at the council. “We are a membership organisation and members deserve to be consulted and to know what happens at council. At the moment there is no accountability and transparency about what has gone on,” she said.
Hilary Cass’s recommendations have been accepted by the rest of the medical profession. One member of the BMA council said that the minority who had voted to block implementation of the review had ”no evidence for their opposition”
The Cass review is the biggest ever carried out into the treatment of children struggling with their gender, with a team at the University of York reviewing data from 113,000 children. The BMA has argued that there are “weaknesses in the methodologies” used by Cass and that its recommendations are “unsubstantiated”.
More than 1,400 doctors, 900 of whom are BMA members, have signed an open letter calling for the BMA to drop its opposition to Cass. The letter criticises the union’s leaders for “going against the principles of evidence-based medicine and against ethical practice”. The letter has been signed by high-profile figures, including nearly 70 professors and 23 former or current presidents of medical royal colleges.
Comments left by signatories include dozens saying that they are resigning or considering resigning their membership. Many doctors criticised members of the council, with one calling for a “vote of no confidence in BMA leadership”, another saying that it was “an abysmal failure of leadership” and another commenting that “activists appear to have been allowed to take over”.
Professor Philip Banfield, chairman of the BMA council, said that a “task and finish” group set up to evaluate the Cass review would report on progress at the end of the year. He said: “The process necessitates debate, scrutiny and methodological rigour, and we will go to great lengths to ensure that the BMA task and finish group, taking on this important work, will utilise the expertise of the professional body that has been the cornerstone of the association since its inception in 1832.”
The BMA’s stance has had no impact on the NHS’s commitment to implement the recommendations of the Cass review, including only prescribing puberty blockers in clinical trials. The NHS said that it had “full confidence” in the Cass report.
A spokesman for the Cass review said: “The systematic reviews undertaken by the University of York, which underpin the review’s findings, are the largest and most comprehensive to date. They looked at 237 papers from 18 countries, providing information on a total of 113,269 children and adolescents.
“All of the University of York’s systematic review research papers were subject to peer review, a cornerstone of academic rigour and integrity to ensure that the methods, findings, and interpretation of the findings met the highest standards of quality, validity and impartiality.
“As stated in the final report, while open and constructive debate is needed about the findings of the review and its recommendations, everybody should remember the children and young people trying to live their lives and the families/carers and clinicians doing their best to support them. All should be treated with compassion and respect.”
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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