Biden said: "We will take Russia back to the 19th century"

Map of Russia in the 19th century:

https://vk.com/wall-201898594_9006

Biden actually said that Putin is trying to return Russia to the 19th century. I doubt that even Putin is that ambitious

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The White House pushes irreversible transgender therapies for children to appease the radicals, but parents are terrified by what gender ideology is doing to their daughters

Yesterday, White House Press Secretary accused Republican lawmakers of 'engaging in a disturbing, cynical trend of attacking vulnerable transgender kids,' and exploiting them.

'Instead of focusing on critical kitchen table issues like the economy, COVID, or addressing the country's mental health crisis,' she said, 'Republican lawmakers are currently debating legislation that, among many things, would target transgender youth with tactics that threaten to put pediatricians in prison if they provide medically necessary, life-saving care for the kids they serve.'

Life-saving care? Surely she must mean insulin or antibiotics?

No, she means 'gender affirming care' that devilish euphemism for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and experimental surgeries whose benefits are unproven, but whose risks—permanent sexual dysfunction, infertility, cardiac event and endometrial cancer are a few—ought to nudge any doctor toward soul searching.

As I've written many times, these treatments are often recklessly administered, of questionable benefit to children, and attended by forbidding risks.

For these reasons, in the last two years, national gender clinics in France, the UK, Sweden and Finland have all reevaluated or curtailed their use.

But as Psaki made clear, any legislator who tries to follow suit will face double-barreled legal opposition from the current Administration.

Psaki said, 'Legislators who are contemplating these discriminatory bills have been put on notice by the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services that laws and policies preventing care that health care professionals recommend for transgender minors may violate the Constitution and federal law. To be clear, every major medical association agrees that gender-affirming health care for transgender kids is a best practice and potentially life-saving.'

There is, in fact, no proof that 'affirmative care' improves the mental health of gender dysphoric youth long-term—much less that its interventions are 'life-saving.'

An outstanding recent paper in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy is only the latest to expose the poor empirical basis for these treatments with minors.

It's a must-read paper for any policy maker, parent, or psychologist grappling with this fraught question.

The authors state, as if with a sigh: 'The evidence underlying the practice of pediatric gender transition is widely recognized to be of very low quality.'

Activists often exaggerate the suicide risk to gender dysphoric minors—as well as the mental health efficacy of these treatments—in order to coerce parents into acceding to the interventions.

But as the authors point out: 'The 'transition or suicide' narrative falsely implies that transition will prevent suicides. [N]either hormones nor surgeries have been shown to reduce suicidality in the long-term.'

That the Biden administration would peddle an activist talking point with no solid factual basis signals how desperate it is to please the radical flank of its supporters.

That is too bad.

Leaders who mollycoddle the activists quietly corrupting nearly every institution of American life fool themselves that they are merely paying a tax.

They don't realize it's a ransom, and that those who demand it will never be satisfied until they have despoiled every American institution.

And much worse in this case: they encourage irreversible harm to children.

In an address chock-a-block with fictions, perhaps Psaki's most surprising was the notion that unlike the 'economy, COVID' and the 'country's mental health crisis,' the risks gender activists now pose to our children is not a 'kitchen table issue.'

It is - she means - the sort of thing that excites Twitter, not normal Americans.

In Psaki's worldview, then, Americans are not shaking their heads at their talented daughters, wondering if they ought to bother helping them train in a sport.

Nor does she think Americans are desperately worried about what radical teachers are pushing on their kids at school—from racial essentialism and division to phony gender science about their bodies and identities.

But in the real world, Americans are very, very worried about these things.

I've been privileged with a special window into their terror: an inbox full of thousands of desperate parents who write me daily of their teen daughters caught in the grips of a sudden transgender epiphany.

And Ms. Psaki, I can promise you this: given the widespread availability of medical gender treatments, on demand, without therapist oversight and often without requiring parental consent - that is not merely one of that family's concerns.

It is all that family is thinking about. Every minute of every day—dear God, how can I save my little girl from doing harm to herself?

America has essentially become an unlocked medicine cabinet for gender medicine seekers as young as 15.

As a result, any family with a kid who announces she is trans —whether encouraged by peers or social media or an activist educator, or accompanied by serious mental health co-morbidities—is hurled into crisis.

The only thing parents know for certain is that a quick medical transition will be encouraged by virtually every adult she encounters.

Far less certain is whether the family can do anything to stop it.

All across this country, loving parents now find their custody threatened whenever they greet their teen daughter's gender identity announcement with anything other than hosannas.

Teachers, social workers, and therapists are quick to call social services, on the grounds that anything other than immediate 'affirmation' of the new identity is child abuse.

Again, I am in touch with many parents in precisely these circumstances, now fighting to retain or regain access to their daughters.

Their only sin, in many cases?

Dropping their daughter off to a therapist who seemed nice.

Any of these parents would gladly pay a hundred bucks a gallon for unleaded gas to get their daughters to safety.

A mom whose teen daughter is suddenly clamoring for 'top surgery' would take her chances with COVID in a heartbeat.

Hell, she'd sign up for an unmasked tour of the Wuhan Institute for Virology—if she could only shield her children from the people who'd prefer to push gender ideology than doing their actual jobs (much less respect the curtilage of a family).

Parents will hold their noses and vote for any politician that gets this right.

When you threaten our children, it's amazing how little we care about Build Back Better.

Pity the politician who doubts that.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10700827/White-House-pushes-unproven-transgender-therapies-kids-Investigative-journalist-ABIGAIL-SHRIER.html

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LGBT Left Is Aggressor in Culture War

Last week, reporter Christopher Rufo released video footage of top Disney employees vowing to inject their radical LGBTQ agenda into children’s programming.

Disney producer Latoya Raveneau told an all-hands meeting that her team works to push a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” in programming aimed at kids and sought to add “queerness” to such content.

Disney corporate president Karey Burke announced that she was the mother of “one transgender child and one pansexual child” and that she would try to achieve a quota system whereby half of all Disney characters would be LGBTQ or people of color.

Disney diversity and inclusion manager Vivian Ware stated that Disney’s beloved theme parks would be eliminating any mention of “ladies and gentlemen” or “boys and girls.” This prompted a well-deserved firestorm for the Mouse House.

Disney has long been left-wing on social issues, but in the aftermath of ginned-up controversy surrounding Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, which protects small children from indoctrination on sexual orientation and gender identity, an angry coterie of employees pushed management to signal fealty even harder.

So Disney’s brass did, announcing that they opposed the Florida bill and then turning over the company to its most radical contingent.

And people reacted. #BoycottDisney began to trend on social media. We at The Daily Wire committed to spending $100 million to develop children’s content that would be safe for kids—content dedicated to traditional values, where parents wouldn’t have to worry about prescreening content for messages about nonbinary 5-year-olds.

The left—caught with its hand in the kiddie jar—immediately swiveled and accused the right of initiating this culture war. Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times lamented that she felt terrible for Raveneau, who, after all, was just “step(ping) up to defend the company’s queer friendliness, only to become a national object of right-wing fury and disgust,” and whose injection of LGBTQ propaganda into children’s content was “sweetly anodyne.”

CNN hosted Washington Post transgender columnist Charlotte Clymer, adding the chyron “LGBT COMMUNITY LATEST TO BE CAUGHT IN CULTURE WAR.” The takeaway, according to the social left, is that anyone who defends traditionalism in child-rearing—or anyone who simply doesn’t want children turned into targets of sexual propagandizing—is the true cultural aggressor.

This is a transparent lie. And it’s a lie that won’t redound to the benefit of those who seek radical change.

If they wish to pose the rubric of gay rights against parental rights, gay rights are likely to suffer. If they wish to suggest that LGBTQ freedom extends to teachers initiating children into sexual conversations without parental permission, parents are unlikely to go along for the ride.

For decades, the social left has made inroads by arguing that they simply want to be left alone. The right, by contrast, has argued that the left’s agenda is far broader, that the left demands cultural celebration of its sexual mores and that it will stop at nothing to remake society in order to achieve its narcissistic goals.

Disney’s latest foray into the culture wars proves that the right was correct, that the left’s stated agenda was a lie and that its “not-at-all-secret” agenda targeted the most vulnerable Americans.

Disney shows no signs of backing away from the extremism its all-hands meeting unmasked before the world. And other corporations are following Disney’s lead, pushing wild left advocacy instead of catering to the broadest possible market.

For too long, Americans have planted their heads firmly in the sand, hoping that the forces of the free market would militate against the cultural hijacking of corporate institutions. Instead, corporations built by entrepreneurs have been hijacked by woke employees and a feckless managerial class.

The blowback will be real, and it should be real. And if that means parents swearing off Mickey Mouse, increasingly they will.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/06/lgbt-left-is-aggressor-in-culture-wars

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Mississippi's mainstream abortion law

Jeff Jacoby

Sometime this spring, probably in late June, the US Supreme Court will hand down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, an appeal testing the constitutionality of Mississippi's 2018 law banning elective abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Upholding that ban would dramatically change America's abortion rules. In Roe v. Wade and subsequent cases, the high court established an unfettered right to abortion until a fetus is "potentially able to live outside the mother's womb," which doesn't occur until around weeks 22 or 23 of gestation. If Mississippi's law is upheld, viability would lose the constitutional significance with which Roe invested it. States would no longer have to wait until a pregnancy is past the halfway mark before they could disallow abortion on demand.

Ardent supporters of abortion rights are appalled by the thought that Roe might be curtailed. They have characterized Mississippi's 15-week ban as a calamity for women's freedom and autonomy. The measure has been labeled "radical" (by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi), "not reasonable or moderate" (The New Republic), "severe, extreme, and unconstitutional" (Catholics for Choice), and "a near-total ban on abortion" (National Abortion Federation).

But most Americans don't see it that way, and neither do most other countries.

According to a new Wall Street Journal poll, nearly half of US voters — 48 percent — support a ban on abortions after 15 weeks (with exemptions to protect the health of the mother), while only 43 percent are opposed. On the other hand, when respondents were asked about a law banning abortions after six weeks, just 42 percent were in favor, while 50 percent were opposed.

The Journal's findings are roughly in keeping with what years of survey data have consistently shown: On the whole, Americans want abortion to be legal early in pregnancy or when there is a medical emergency, but they are against an unlimited right to abortion once a fetus is further along.

Contrary to what many abortion rights advocates may believe, an abortion limit of 15 weeks does not amount to a "near-total ban." Indeed, it would not affect most abortions. The overwhelming majority of abortions in the United States — 93 percent, by the estimate of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — are performed within the first 13 weeks of pregnancy. If the high court sustains Mississippi's law, it may put a dent in the extremely permissive abortion regime that Roe authorized, but it won't make abortion in America rare or illegal.

It would, however, make America less of an outlier among its international peers.

The United States is one of only seven nations that permit elective abortion past 20 weeks of gestation until fetal viability. As Chief Justice John Roberts remarked during the Dobbs oral argument in December, "we share that standard with the People's Republic of China and North Korea." (The other four are Canada, Singapore, the Netherlands, and Vietnam).

Of the 198 countries whose abortion laws were analyzed in a 2014 study by the Lozier Institute and a 2017 report by the Guttmacher Institute, roughly two-thirds allow abortion for specified grounds. These vary widely, from the very restrictive — for example, in cases of rape or incest — to the broadly permissive, such as mental well-being or socioeconomic concerns. The remaining countries, about 60 in number, permit abortion for any reason, but only for a specified gestational period, which in most cases is 12 weeks.

Among the nations of Europe, 13 countries prohibit abortion on demand entirely and allow a pregnancy to be terminated only in "exceptional cases," according to the European Centre for Law and Justice, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Dobbs case. Of the remaining 34 countries where abortion can be accessed without having to give a reason, "eight states permit it only through the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, Estonia through 11 weeks, and a further 20 states through 12 weeks."

In short, the abortion laws of nearly every European country impose stricter gestational limits than the 15-week standard of the Mississippi law.

Obviously, the constitutionality of Mississippi's statute does not depend on the findings of opinion polls here at home or on how abortion is regulated abroad. But surely it is appropriate to note that Roe has made it impossible to enact gestational limits that reflect what the mainstream of Americans appear to support and that line up with what most of the Western world considers appropriate. A win for Mississippi wouldn't mean that the United States has lurched to an outlandish extreme in how it regulates abortion. It would mean that it no longer does so.

https://jeffjacoby.com/26142/mississippi-mainstream-abortion-law

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UK: ‘Biological males’ should not compete in women’s sports – Boris Johnson

“Biological males” should not compete in women’s sports, while women should have access to single-sex spaces in places such as hospitals and prisons, the Prime Minister has said.

Boris Johnson said it seems to him to be “sensible” that biological males should not be able to participate in women’s sporting events.

And, in what appeared to be a nod to controversial guidance issued by the equalities watchdog earlier this week, he said that women should have spaces in hospitals, prisons and changing rooms which are “dedicated to women”.

I don't think that biological males should be competing in female sporting events. And maybe that's a controversial thing... but it just seems to me to be sensible

Prime Minister Boris Johnson

During a visit to a hospital in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, he said: “I don’t think that biological males should be competing in female sporting events. And maybe that’s a controversial thing… but it just seems to me to be sensible.

“And I also happen to think that women should have spaces, whether it’s in hospitals or prisons or changing rooms or wherever, which are dedicated to women.

“That’s as far as my thinking has developed on this issue. If that puts me in conflict with some others, then we have got to work it all out.

“That doesn’t mean that I’m not immensely sympathetic to people who want to change gender, to transition.

“It’s vital that we give people the maximum possible love and support in making those decisions.

“But these are complex issues and I don’t think they can be solved with one swift, easy piece of legislation. It takes a lot of thought to get this right.”

Mr Johnson made the comments after being asked about the decision not to include transgender people in the Government’s proposed ban on conversion therapy.

The Government has faced fierce criticism over a series of U-turns last week on the promised legislation and whether transgender people would be protected by it.

https://au.news.yahoo.com/biological-males-not-compete-women-133319408.html

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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