Monday, February 14, 2022
Current news and opinion from a Gender Critical perspective
This day in Herstory: The League of Women Voters was founded in the United States on February 14, 1920.
The League of Women Voters (LWV) is a nonprofit organization in the United States that was formed to help women take a larger role in public affairs after they won the right to vote. It was founded in 1920 to support the new women suffrage rights and was a merger of National Council of Women Voters, founded by Emma Smith DeVoe, and National American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Carrie Chapman Catt, approximately six months before the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution gave women the right to vote. (more)
Utah proposes panel to decide when transgender athletes play
From AP News (USA)
By Sam Metz
Feb 14, 2022
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Utah lawmakers advanced a proposal Monday to create a commission of political appointees to make decisions about transgender student-athletes participating in youth sports — diving into a heated debate that has taken place in dozens of Republican-led statehouses.
The idea is the latest attempt by Utah Republicans to add state oversight to youth sports and follows stalled efforts to pass an outright ban. Fights over bans in other statehouses have become touchstones for the broader LGBTQ rights movement, sparking legal battles and outcry.
Utah’s proposed “School Activity Eligibility Commission” would create criteria and evaluate transgender student-athletes’ physical characteristics and how they compare to “baseline ranges” for their age and gender. … read full article
UK Green Party to Suspend Members Who Sign Women’s Declaration
Motion by Green Party calls Gender Critical feminists "extremists funded by the far-right."
From 4W (USA)
By Andreia Nobre
Feb 14, 2022
Ani Stafford-Townsend, co-chair of Green Party Women in England and Wales, sent a “late” motion to the party’s conference, proposing that members who sign the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, by the Women’s Declaration International (WDI) be suspended or even expelled from the party. The motion is said to have been presented for the upcoming Green Party Spring Conference, set to happen on March 4-6 2022.
The motion states:
“The Green Party accepts that the ‘Gender Critical’ movements in most UK political parties have been infiltrated by hard-line extremists, who advocate for the wholesale removal of virtually all trans rights as currently enshrined in the Equality Act 2010, and routinely share platforms with those who advocate for extremist positions such as the mass sterilization of trans people. These extremists have also been linked with attacks on women’s abortion rights, misinformation designed to provoke hatred towards trans people, and have benefited from funding from the far-right.”
… read full article (and support 4W on Patreon)
Woke ideology emboldens the West’s enemies, says Oliver Dowden
Party chairman urges Britons to focus on what unites them
From The Times (UK)
By Matt Dathan
Feb 15, 2022
The growing obsession with “woke” issues is emboldening Russia, China and other enemies of the West, the Conservative Party chairman has claimed.
Oliver Dowden criticised left-wing parties’ fixation on issues that “divide us rather than what unites us” in a speech yesterday to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, in Washington DC.
He said “obsessing over pronouns” and attempts to “decolonise” the school curriculum were examples of issues that were distracting from efforts to stand up for democracy. “Woke” ideology was now everywhere, he said, while addressing “cancel culture” that has included the toppling of statues of historical figures associated with colonialism and slavery and the silencing of figures such as JK Rowling over their views on transgender people. … read full article
The One Way Street
Resources Needed for Desisters and Detransitioners in Schools
From Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT) (USA)
Feb. 14, 2022
My son decided he was “trans” 2 years ago. But since that time, he’s changed his mind. He now knows he’s male and has stopped talking about gender. He is now concentrating on his next journey—college. But there’s a problem: how does he walk back from the trans identification after socially transitioning in school?
He is still in high school. When he announced he was “trans”, he was celebrated. Turns out, trans is a one way door. You are celebrated as “trans”, but it feels humiliating to take it back once that phase of your life is over, and you want to move on to something new. Violet in The Incredibles could just put her hair back and don some preppy clothes — and voila, she's transformed from a sullen emo kid to a popular, preppy, confident kid who gets the guy! That doesn’t work with trans. You can’t just cut your hair and change your name back and boom! you’re not trans anymore. That is, sadly, not how social transition works. So, my son continues to use his girl name and to wears his hair long. Maybe he feels he has no choice. Maybe he’s afraid to let anyone besides his parents know that he has accepted his body and is no longer “special” the way the school and his peers clearly wanted him to be.
… read full article (and subscribe to PITT - free!)
Senate ad slams transgender athletes ‘pretending to be women’
Criticizing collegiate swimmer Lia Thomas, Missouri GOP Rep. Vicky Hartzler says she “won’t look away while woke liberals destroy women’s sports.”
From Politico (USA)
By NATALIE ALLISON
Feb 13, 2022
A new ad in the Missouri Republican Senate primary criticizes the collegiate swimmer at the center of a debate over policies for transgender athletes, marking the first time the lightning-rod issue has appeared in a Senate campaign spot.
Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.), one of several contenders vying to replace retiring GOP Sen. Roy Blunt, is out with a new ad slamming Lia Thomas, a transgender swimmer on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s team. Thomas, who previously swam three seasons on the university’s men’s team, has come in first in multiple women’s events in recent months and is poised to compete in the upcoming Ivy League and NCAA championships.
“Meet William Thomas, ranked No. 462 in men’s swimming,” Hartzler says in the ad. “Meet Lia Thomas, ranked No. 1 in women’s swimming. Only one problem — it’s the same person.” … read full article
Schools & Children: Caught in the Transgender Industry's Web
From Advocates Protecting Children (USA)
Feb 14, 2022
As transgender activists like Planned Parenthood, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, GLSEN, Gender Spectrum, and others push more and more radical sexualization indoctrination on younger and younger children, it’s imperative that parents and other decision-makers about children’s education understand what is happening to their children at school.
SCHOOLS
Schools are ground-zero for the explosive phenomenon of transgender identification among children, and are central to a deeply enmeshed and interconnected network referred to as the transgender industry. What may have begun via universities’ gender studies programs[ii], and academia’s theoretical philosophizing about whether sex is real or a social construct, has now taken root in the public school, from pre-kindergarten through high school graduation. The transgender industry is preying upon children out of unfettered greed, and for political gain. Let’s take a look at how this industry has woven its web around our children at school. … read full article
Danger: semantic engineers at work
The institutionalisation of gender-neutral language is designed to change how we think, feel and act
From The Critic (UK)
By Frank Furedi
February 2022
The invention of new speech codes and the censoring of “outdated” words is no longer confined to the university. Departments of state, public sector organisations, corporations and cultural institutions are all complicit in the re-engineering of the English language.
Whereas once upon a time campus radicals were in the forefront of challenging traditional language usage, today sections of the cultural and political establishment are playing a pivotal role in the promotion of semantic engineering. The media has become so habituated to the practice of semantic engineering that Buckingham Palace’s official recognition of the vocabulary of transgender identity politics (preferred pronouns) in its New Year Honours list scarcely registered.
Freedom of expression is trumped by the necessity of avoiding an impression of prejudice
Semantic engineering aims to change public language to transform prevailing cultural attitudes and norms. It offers its practitioners control over language and serves as a source of cultural power. This point was recognised decades ago by the culture warriors, who gained institutional authority though imposing politically correct speech codes on campuses. Today, this approach is widely practiced by state institutions. … read full article