America's red wave of trans bans continues: Indiana and Idaho become latest Republican states to outlaw sex change surgeries and puberty blockers for children under-18
Indiana and Idaho have become the thirteenth and fourteenth states to ban puberty blockers and sex change surgery for under-18s.
Indiana Gov Eric Holcomb, a Republican, signed his state's ban — which also included hormone therapy — into law yesterday after it passed a vote in the Legislature.
The new law gives minors currently receiving transition care until the end of the year to stop doing so. Starting July 1, transgender youth under 18 will be prohibited from accessing hormone therapy, puberty blockers and surgeries in the state.
The move comes just a day after Idaho governor Brad Little made it a felony to offer any transgender care to minors, saying he was protecting minors from treatments that could do 'irreversible damage'.
They join a growing list of Republican states raising concerns over transgender care for minors, which can be irreversible. But opponents claim they violate children's human rights.
Medical providers maintain that some of the care now prohibited by the law, including hormone blockers are 'reversible treatments'. But supporters of the legislation argue that there is too little evidence on the long-term health consequences of the treatments.
There is no federal minimum age for providing trans youth with gender-affirming care including surgeries, hormone therapies, and pubery blockers. States have therefore set their own policies, resulting in a patchwork of laws across the US.
Upon signing the bill on Wednesday, Holcomb said: 'Permanent gender-changing surgeries with lifelong impacts and medically prescribed preparation for such a transition should occur as an adult, not as a minor.'
There are about 4,100 transgender children in Indiana and 2,100 in Idaho, according to the California-based Williams Institute.
Indiana's ban is set to come into force on July 1, with youths already on treatment required to stop receiving them by the end of the year. Some of the medications affected include gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) analogues, commonly known as puberty blockers, and estrogen supplements that lower the amount of testosterone the body makes.
BMJ editor warns children are being rushed into sex change surgery
Kamran Abbasi said in an editorial in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) that the approach by doctors in the US was 'not in line with the strength of the evidence'.
It also bans gender reassignment surgeries for minors, which hospital representatives in the state say they do not routinely carry out.
Medical guidelines generally do not recommend genital surgeries before a child turns 18.
Mr Holcomb said surgeries and treatments for gender reassignment should only be offered to people as adults.
Idaho's new law, signed by Gov Brad Little on Tuesday evening, goes into effect January 2024.
Mr Little said: 'In signing this bill, I recognize our society plays a role in protecting minors from surgeries or treatments that can irreversibly damage their healthy bodies.
'However, as policymakers, we should take great caution whenever we consider allowing the Government to interfere with loving parents and their decisions about what is best for their children.'
Gov Little's Idaho office said it had received nearly 20,000 calls and 11,500 messages from people who were in favor of the legislation as of Tuesday evening.
Last week the state also signed into law a bill that restricted transgender children's access to school bathrooms. The legislation bars students from using locker rooms, changing facilities, and bathrooms that don't match up with their sex assigned at birth.
Gov Little recently vetoed a bill that would allow parents to sue schools and libraries for $2,500 if they contain material deemed 'harmful to minors' — defined as material related to homosexuality or 'intimate sex acts'.
Idaho and, more recently Indiana, add to at least a dozen other states that have taken steps to ban or severely curtail access to transgender healthcare services.
In response to the Indiana law, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) - a liberal legal advocacy organization that specializes in cases pertaining to reproductive healthcare, voting rights, and discrimination - has filed a legal challenge.
The organization slammed the move as 'devastating' for transgender youth.
Ken Falk, ACLU legal director for Indiana, said: 'This law would be devastating to trans youth and their families, causing them serious injuries and forcing those who can to uproot their lives and leave the state to access the gender-affirming care they need.'
The case was brought on behalf of four transgender youths, a doctor and a health care clinic who allege that the law violates the 14th Amendment and Medicaid requirements.
The 47-page lawsuit also asks the court to find the law unconstitutional and asks for it to block the state from enforcing the measure.
At least 12 other states have enacted partial or total bans on transgender care for minors to date.
Utah, Arizona, South Dakota, Iowa, Tennessee, Mississippi and Florida all ban transgender care for minors.
Bans in Arkansas and Alabama have been blocked by the courts, while the one in West Virginia makes an exception allowing doctors to prescribe medical therapy if a teenager is considered at risk for self-harm or suicide.
Georgia's ban allows a limited exception to continue treatment for those who began receiving care prior to July 1, 2023
And in Texas, Republican Gov Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a directive in February 2022 designating most forms of transgender healthcare for youth as 'child abuse'. This amounted to a de facto ban that has impacted as many as 29,800 transgender youth.
Major US medical organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association have thrown their weight behind gender-affirming care for youths.
President Joe Biden has also signaled support, having met with trans TikTok activist Dylan Mulvaney. At the time, he applauded her 'days of girlhood' video series, which he had watched.
But the US is increasingly becoming an outlier when it comes to transgender care having imposed no federal age limit on treatments.
Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands and swathes of other European countries have taken a more cautious approach — imposing age limits for certain transgender treatments.
The editor of prestigious medical journal the BMJ has also warned that trans children in America are being rushed into sex change surgery 'without any psychological support'.
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Whence the Holy Grail?
If this continued hold on the popular imagination is not rooted in any genuine Christian doctrine or tradition, where does it come from? The answer is weird, and not wholly satisfactory for anyone wanting a simple, straightforward explanation.
In his essay, Reichert does a solid job of quickly explaining where Grail stories originate: namely, medieval France and England, with some pre-Christian Celtic mythological motifs sprinkled throughout. Twelfth- and 13th-century French tales called romances first start to talk about a Grail, and to introduce the figure of Joseph of Arimathea as a key figure, Reichert writes. Joseph of Arimathea is a bit player in the Christian Gospels as the man who takes Jesus’ body after his death and secures a burial site for it. But according to Reichert, 12th-century poet Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimathie seems to be among the first installments in the Grail extended universe, building out Joseph’s character, and positing that through him the chalice traveled West and ultimately settled in Britain. Python fans will be familiar with Joseph of Arimathea as the figure who may or may not have been dictating his last words on the wall of a cave, promising “he who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the Castle of Aaargh.”
The Pythons, it is clear from the Joseph of Arimathea name drop, knew their Grail lore. A gag like the line “She’s been setting light to our beacon, which, I just remembered, is grail-shaped,” assumes an additional layer of humor when you know that it isn’t at all clear what it would mean for something to be “grail-shaped.” The etymology of the word “grail” to mean cup is itself uncertain, and the earliest mentions of a grail in Arthurian lore describe it as a sort of jeweled, not especially intrinsically holy, serving dish carrying food, and not a cup. And the self-important Brits trying to retrieve the Grail (or at least look at it) from a remote castle of taunting French knights is in fact a rather literal representation of how these myths were handed down to us. Far from being quintessentially British, Arthur, his knights, and their quests, were initially French creations, perhaps inspired by legends brought over by Welsh emigres to Brittany, France, in the fifth and sixth centuries.
“Those guys were scholars,” said Brian Cogan, a Molloy College professor currently on sabbatical, and author of Everything I Ever Needed to Know About _____* I Learned from Monty Python. “Those guys were much better educated than we are, with just their Cambridge and Oxford basic degrees.”
I think we all need a quest. It’s a very good way of looking at life. What is our ambition? What are we doing?
Writing just before de Boron was Chrétien de Troyes, the French poet credited with inaugurating the literary Grail tradition with his unfinished (or is it?) work, Perceval ou Le cont du Graal. Throughout the 13th century, certain familiar characters from de Troyes were reimagined and recontextualized in subsequent tellings by other authors, the way superheroes in comic books are today. We all know Bruce Wayne lives at Wayne Manor with his butler Alfred after his parents were killed in front of him when he was a young boy. But fans may choose different continuities where Robin is not a young circus performer named Dick Grayson, but Batman’s son, Damian Wayne.
Medieval scholar Juliette Wood offers a concise summary in a 2002 article for the Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium. While noting “there is no simple line of influence,” the various Grail stories from de Troyes onward usually include the following elements in some form or other:
A mysterious vessel or object which sustains life and/or provides sustenance is guarded in a castle which is difficult to find. The owner of the castle is either lame or sick and often (but not always) the surrounding land is barren. The owner can only be restored if a knight finds the castle and, after seeing a mysterious procession, asks a certain question. If he fails, as the knight does, everything will remain as before and the search must begin again. After wanderings and adventures (many of which relate to events which the young hero failed to understand the first time), the knight returns and asks the question which cures the king and restores the land. The hero knight succeeds the wounded king (usually the Fisher King) as guardian of the castle and its contents.
The idea of a (Holy) Grail seems to have kicked off out of nowhere in the 13th century, spawning a variety of weird, eerie stories that involve unidentified disembodied hands extinguishing candles, mysterious chapels in the woods, and talking severed heads. They also often conclude with a lot of narrative loose ends. These mystifying stories with no readily apparent historical catalyst have created what scholars call “the Grail problem” of trying to determine just what the Grail is, and why. Wood describes a “proliferation of theories” as scholars through the years have tried to synthesize the complex nature of the various diverging Grail romances into a single coherent narrative.
According to Wood, our current understanding of the Grail comes to us through the Victorians, the result of an explosion of aesthetic and historical interest in the medieval era in Britain. The British reclaimed Arthur and his knights from the French, and solidified them as part of their national identity. At the same time, a host of ideas about the strange Grail stories began to develop. These ideas assumed the Grail romances contained information about “real or imagined philosophical systems” that could “transform individuals and society, but which threaten the establishment.”
Some contended the tales were Christianized adaptations of Celtic myth. Perhaps, went another line of thinking, they were a coded history of the Knights Templar, or the early days of the Holy Roman Empire? Since they all contain a coming-of-age component, others theorized that the Grail romances were descriptions of pagan initiation rituals that had survived as folklore.
It was the Victorians taking the whole thing too seriously that seems to have appealed to Monty Python’s sensibilities. “They realized how silly things are,” Cogan said. “All authority is essentially silly. All establishment figures are essentially silly, and there’s no particular reason to believe in political leaders.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/holy-grail-legend
*******************************************Fight Against Biden ‘Conservatives Need Not Apply’ Hiring Rule
The Biden administration is considering a regulation that would enable bureaucrats to screen out conservatives during the vetting process.
Forty-one people representing 35 organizations wrote a letter opposing the rule in a public comment exclusively provided first to The Daily Signal.
“This regulation twists proven hiring requirements into vague standards that easily slide into ideological capture and away from the actual task of vetting,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, who led the effort, told The Daily Signal in an exclusive statement. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation).
“Are you critical of affirmative action? Have you tweeted something negative about the vice president? Then you, too, could be barred from civil service, regardless of qualifications,” Roberts added. “In the Biden regime, the new rule could more simply be written as ‘conservatives need not apply.’”
The comment responds to amendments that the Office of Personnel Management—the federal government’s human resources department—proposed on Jan. 31 in the Federal Register. As Heritage senior legal fellow Hans von Spakovsky explained in The Daily Signal, OPM aims to amend the “personnel vetting investigative and adjudicative processes for determining suitability and fitness” for government employment (88 FR 6192).
The period for public comment on the “Suitability and Fitness Vetting” amendments ended this week.
The term “suitability and fitness” refers to an agency’s decision “that an individual does or does not have the required level of character and conduct necessary” to work in a federal agency. This assessment has more to do with a prospective employee’s character than any qualifications for the job.
The current regulation, 731.202(b)(7), disqualifies applicants for “knowing and willful engagement in acts or activities designed to overthrow the U.S. government,” a largely uncontested standard. The vast majority of Americans would agree that no one who seeks to overthrow the U.S. government should be allowed to work in that government.
Under Biden, however, the OPM aims to replace that standard with four more ambiguous standards. Under these rules, an applicant would be disqualified for:
Knowing engagement in acts or activities with the purpose of overthrowing federal, state, local, or tribal government.
Acts of force, violence, intimidation, or coercion with the purpose of denying others the free exercise of their rights under the U.S. Constitution or any state constitution.
Attempting to indoctrinate others or to incite them to action in furtherance of illegal acts.
Active membership or leadership in a group with knowledge of its unlawful aims, or participation in such a group with specific intent to further its unlawful aims.
“We are deeply concerned that this rule will encourage discriminatory hiring practices that have nothing to do with an applicant’s qualifications,” Roberts and the other signers write in the letter. “In addition, this rule would add unnecessary confusion and restrictions to the ability of agencies to hire.”
The signatories note that the first standard “is not dissimilar to the current standard,” but warn that “the other three proposed standards are so broad and vague that they would allow hiring managers to reject candidates solely on the grounds of being lawfully critical of government policy. This openly subjective factor in evaluating the ‘character’ and ‘fitness’ of job applicants risks abuse in any administration.”
“For example, opinions on abortion, the Second Amendment, or climate change, or membership in an association that actively works to change the law on such issues, whatever side of the political aisle they are, could be used by a hiring manager to unfairly reject an otherwise well-qualified, excellent employee for any number of federal agencies, even when their duties have no relevance to those issues,” the signatories warn.
“Likewise, agencies could reject anyone who questions the acts and behavior of government officials with no regard for individual competency,” they add. “Should a strong critique of the defense secretary threaten the eligibility of someone who wishes to serve in the Securities and Exchange Commission? In any administration, this sort of ideological discrimination is unwarranted and dangerous, and the terms used in the proposed change, ‘intimidate’ and ‘coerce,’ have become synonymous—wrongly so—in the eyes of some, with vigorous, active speech that seeks to change opinions and federal and state laws.”
Roberts and the other signers argue that “the nebulous nature of the proposed rule’s new standards is counterintuitive to an agency’s objective to evaluate the character and conduct of those seeking to enter civil service.”
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Caitlyn Jenner Backing Candidates Who Oppose Transgender Athletes in Women’s Sports and ‘Gender-Affirming’ Care for Minors
Arguably the best-known transgender person in the world, Caitlyn Jenner, is putting her celebrity behind a political action committee that will support candidates who oppose gender surgeries for minors and transgender women competing in women’s sports.
Ms. Jenner, who won a gold medal in the decathlon at the 1976 Olympics and became a household name starring in “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” launched her political action committee, Fairness First, this week. The PAC is described on its website as “non-partisan in nature,” though Ms. Jenner is a Republican and an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump.
“Our plan is simple,” the website says. “We will protect our children by rejecting radical gender ideology in our schools and in youth sports, from the top of the ballot to the bottom.”
Ms. Jenner, who transitioned to a female from a male in 2015, says she supports equal rights for transgender persons and runs an eponymous foundation that “promotes equality and combats discrimination” against transgender persons through grants. Yet her views on trans women in women’s sports and medical transitions for minors are unorthodox — even heretical — among most transgender activists and the left.
“No radical gender ideology! No boys in girls sports! No life altering surgeries for minors! That’s what Fairness First Pac is all about,” Ms. Jenner tweeted. She also rails against what she calls “the woke plague running rampant in this nation.”
Transgender rights activists aren’t happy. One respondent tweeted plastic surgery before-and-after photos of Ms. Jenner’s daughter, Kylie Kardashian, a beauty mogul who first enhanced her looks at age 15, with the tagline, “Life altering surgeries for minors.”
A blogger and transgender activist who works for the Transgender Law Center, Serena Daniari, tweeted, “As a trans person, when you first came out, I truly felt like you were going to be an advocate for us. Instead, you have gone on to spread lies and have thrown us under the bus constantly. You waited a lifetime to become your true self, why prevent others from doing the same?”
“The Radical Rainbow Mafia is becoming more militant by the day,” Ms. Jenner tweeted back in a long exchange with Ms. Daniari. “Not all trans people march in lockstep with their views. Diversity of thought is a good thing.”
Ms. Jenner first spoke up about her opposition to transgender women competing in women’s sports after a University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer, Lia Thomas, won a NCAA Division I women’s championship and broke records. Winning her races by body lengths and standing on the podium with shoulders wider than any competitor, Lia Thomas’s physical advantages from having gone through male puberty were hard to ignore, her critics say.
“We must protect women’s sports. At all costs. What Lia has done, beating biological women to win a Division I national championship, is anathema to what sports represents and the spirit of competition.” Ms. Jenner wrote in an op-ed. She called Ms. Thomas “one of the worst things to happen to the trans community.”
While Ms. Jenner’s opposition to transgender women competing in women’s sports runs counter to the views of the progressive left and transgender activists, it is in line with the majority of Americans. Nearly 60 percent of Americans think transgender women should not compete in women’s college and professional sports, according to a May 2022 Washington Post-University of Maryland poll. It finds that 68 percent of Americans say transgender women would have “a competitive advantage over other girls” in youth sports.
Lia Thomas is not the only transgender woman beating her female competition. Track, wrestling, and now golf are the latest sports to contend with this issue. This week, a transgender golfer, Breanna Gill, won the Australian Women’s Classic. Ms. Gill is now reportedly facing death threats — a testament to how virulent this debate has become.
The debate about transgender medical care for minors is even more heated, because the risks of getting it wrong are dire. The number of young people identifying as transgender has skyrocketed in recent years, leading to serious questions about how much psychological assessment and time is needed before prescribing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries. Several European countries have hit pause or are rehauling their procedures for medical transitions for minors.
Thirty states have passed or are considering legislation to restrict or ban gender-affirming care for minors, according to the Williams Institute. The issue is becoming a litmus test for politicians on both sides of the aisle.
Florida’s Board of Medicine and Board of Osteopathic Medicine, with Governor DeSantis’s blessing, both passed rules banning the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender surgeries for minors. President Trump released a video on his Truth Social platform in January vowing, if elected, to punish doctors who provide medical transitions to children. “Under my leadership, this madness will end,” Mr. Trump said.
Ms. Jenner isn’t the first celebrity to face backlash for coming out against the traditional leftist orthodoxy on transgender rights, but she is one of the most high-profile. The author of the “Harry Potter” books, J.K. Rowling, is often called a “TERF” — a trans exclusionary radical feminist — for her views on transgender issues.
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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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 
1 comment:
The rule just codifies what has already been a general practice. We need to decentralize the government.
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