Monday, February 7, 2022
Current news and opinion from a Gender Critical perspective
This day in Herstory: Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder, born February 7, 1867 (died February 10, 1957) was an American writer, mostly known for the Little House on the Prairie series of children's books, published between 1932 and 1943, which were based on her childhood in a settler and pioneer family.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, the television series Little House on the Prairie was loosely based on the Little House books, and starred Melissa Gilbert as Laura and Michael Landon as her father, Charles Ingalls.
When she was two years old, Ingalls Wilder moved with her family from Wisconsin in 1869. After stopping in Rothville, Missouri, they settled in the Indian country of Kansas, near modern-day Independence, Kansas. Her younger sister, Carrie, was born in Independence in August 1870, not long before they moved again. According to Ingalls Wilder, her father Charles Ingalls had been told that the location would be open to white settlers, but when they arrived this was not the case. The Ingalls family had no legal right to occupy their homestead because it was on the Osage Indian reservation. They had just begun to farm when they heard rumors that settlers would be evicted, so they left in the spring of 1871. Although in her novel, Little House on the Prairie, and Pioneer Girl memoir, Ingalls Wilder portrayed their departure as being prompted by rumors of eviction, she also noted that her parents needed to recover their Wisconsin land because the buyer had not paid the mortgage. (more)
Child Custody's Gender Gauntlet
Courts Are Adopting Gender Ideology, Parents are Paying the Price
From The Truth Fairy (USA)
By Abigail Shrier
Feb 7, 2022
Before she decided to strip him of all custody over his son, Drew*—before determining that he would have no say in whether Drew began medical gender transition—California Superior Court Judge Joni Hiramoto asked Ted Hudacko this: “If your son [Drew] were medically psychotic and believed himself to be the Queen of England, would you love him?”
“Of course I would,” the senior software engineer at Apple replied, according to the court transcript. “I’d also try to get him help.”
“I understand that qualifier,” Judge Hiramoto replied. “But if it were—if you were told by [Drew’s] psychiatrist, psychologist that [Drew] was very fragile and that confronting him—or, I’m sorry, confronting them with the idea that they are not the Queen of England is very harmful to their mental health, could you go along and say, ‘OK, [Drew], you are the Queen of England and I love you; you are my child and I want you to do great and please continue to see your psychologist.’ Could you do that?”
“Yes,” Hudacko said. “That sounds like part of a process that might take some time, sure.”
“What process?” Judge Hiramoto said. “What is the thing that might take some time? Accepting the idea that [Drew] occupies an identity that you believe is not true?”
“The identity you just mentioned to me was the Queen of England,” Ted began. “I can tell him and I can affirm that to him, to reassuring him situationally; but objectively, he is not the Queen of England and that won’t change, and even the therapist in that case would know that.”
The then-54-year-old father of two teenage minor sons (Drew is the elder) felt that he was walking into a trap. For Ted, precision is not merely a requirement for his job but almost a constitutional necessity. His recall of every fact, date, and filing of the complicated court proceedings involving him and his ex-wife is astoundingly accurate—the sort of feat you might expect from a brilliant lawyer, not a distraught father battling the legal system alone for his son. … read full article
Why This Feminist Is Taking the University of Bristol to Court
From Quillette (Australia)
By Raquel Rosario Sanchez
Feb 6, 2022
Next week, I am taking my university to court. To my knowledge, it is the first time an academic institution has been forced, at trial, to justify why it prioritises trans rights over women’s rights. The other party in the case is the University of Bristol, which one might suppose to be an unlikely defendant given its distinction as the first higher-education establishment in England to have admitted women on an equal basis to men. Unfortunately, the university has more recently become known as a hotbed for anti-feminist militancy.
The university’s Victoria Rooms once served as ground zero for suffragettes in the city of Bristol, and in the larger southwest area of England surrounding it. Beginning in 1908, the Women’s Social and Political Union branch of the suffrage movement would host its meetings on campus. The University also hosted leading lights of the British feminist movement, such as Emmeline Pankhurst, her daughter Christabel Pankhurst, and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence.
All of this history will provide an ironic backdrop to next week’s legal proceedings, in which the university stands accused of sex discrimination and negligence for failing to protect a feminist scholar. I will argue that the University of Bristol has engineered a number of practices and policies that prioritise the demands of trans activists over women’s legal rights. This institution-wide pattern, I allege, includes a failure to properly investigate complaints of bullying, harassment, and intimidation committed by trans activists on campus, even while targeting feminists who defend sex-based rights, such as myself. … read full article
The Silence Of The Sacrificial Lambs
From Wings Over Scotland (Scotland)
By Dr. EM
Feb 7, 2022
Should disabled children be used as props to make men with sexual fetishes feel better? It doesn’t seem like a difficult question, does it?
The above quote is part of the heartfelt plea of a mother of a disabled daughter. We know that women and girls are vulnerable to male sexual violence, we know that men commit 98% of sex offences and we know that disabled children are three to four times more likely to experience abuse. … read full article
Report: Red State Public Schools Encourage Kids to Go Transgender Behind Their Parents’ Backs
A new report finds systemic racism, sexual obscenity, and anti-Americanism in U.S. public education, even in a deeply red state.
From The Federalist (USA)
By Joy Pullman
Feb 07, 2022
While Idaho is considered a refuge for people fleeing Democrat-controlled areas, a new report shows the state’s supermajority Republican legislature has not protected children from far-left politics in public schools, including state-sponsored racism and hiding transgender ideation from childrens’ parents.
Report authors Anna Miller and Dr. Scott Yenor note that the kind of extremist ideology affecting kids in blue and purple states is also metastasizing within small-town and rural public schools in locales that faithfully vote Republican.
“School administrators in Coeur d’Alene manipulated an 11-year-old girl into believing she was a boy and should undergo gender transition surgery,” Miller writes in a study overview in The American Mind. “The elementary school counselor had coached the young girl into believing she was transsexual and instructed her how to tell her parents about her new identity. According to a recorded phone call between the counselor and parent, the principal and other school officials had known about this and began calling the girl by a boy’s name while purposefully choosing not to inform the child’s parents.”
Coeur d’Alene has a population of approximately 54,000, according to census data. It’s in rural north Idaho, within commuting distance to Spokane, Washington. It’s a conservative lumber, manufacturing, and health-care town surrounded by mountains and lakes. People live there to enjoy the classic American way of life, but their public schools work to undermine that way of life with public resources, in the absence of effective oversight from elected officials.
Leftist morality that undermines the beliefs and desires of a majority of Idaho’s citizens is rampant throughout the Republican-run state’s education systems, says Miller and Yenor’s recently released report for the Idaho Freedom Foundation and Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life: “Things that were unthinkable five or 10 years ago now are everyday practices in public schools across America.” … read full article
Biden’s Latest Proposal Would Force Insurers to Pay for Gender “Transition”
From The Heritage Foundation (USA)
By Jay W. Richards and Jared Eckert
Feb 7, 2022
The U. S. Department of Health and Human Services proposed a rule that would add sexual orientation and gender identity language to the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
Views based on reasonable medical, moral, and religious beliefs and the best interests of the patient are nothing like invidious discrimination.
This new rule is clearly the result of gender ideology, not solid science and sound reason.
President Joe Biden has sought to inject gender ideology into our laws since his first day in office. He might prefer a massive bill like the Equality Act that elevates the categories of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to status of race and sex. But that effort has stalled in the Senate. So, for now, his administration is looking for ways to insert sexual orientation and gender identity concepts into existing law.
The latest? In January, the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services proposed a rule that would add sexual orientation and gender identity language to the 2010 Affordable Care Act. According to the department, these amendments will ensure that those who identify as LGBT receive “medically necessary” care. This includes “gender-affirming” surgeries and hormone “therapy.”
In fact, the department’s proposed rule circumvents the law and treats dubious treatments as essential health benefits in qualified health plans. This not only contradicts the best science and medicine, it’s a disaster for insurers, for medical providers, and, most of all, for those struggling with gender dysphoria.
Sex, Gender, and Discrimination
The rule has legal problems, but we shouldn’t allow that to distract us from the fact that it strikes at the heart of what it means to be human. To see this, it helps to keep a few definitions in mind.
First is “sex.” Human beings are a sexually dimorphic species. With the very rare exceptions (such as those resulting from disorders of sexual development, sometimes called “intersex”), everyone is clearly either male or female. This is biology. It’s also common sense—as revealed by the testimony of every culture in every time and place throughout history.
Many people also affirm the sexual binary of male and female on religious grounds. The book of Genesis, for instance, says that God created us “male and female.”
The next term is “gender,” which is best seen as the social and psychological correlate to sex—as sexologist Debra Soh has argued. “Male” and “female” connote sex. “Masculine” and “feminine” connote gender.
Then there’s “gender identity,” which comes from the lexicon of gender ideology. According to one popular definition, gender identity “refers to a person’s understanding and experience of their own gender.”
Note the circularity. Once untethered from biological sex, gender identity can mean almost anything. Hence the current taxonomy of 72 genders—subject, of course, to expansion.
This subtle shift in terms is critical. Behind “gender-affirming care” is the hope of aligning the recipient’s body with his or her gender identity. Such “care,” however, is at best cosmetic. It cannot achieve the impossible: to change someone’s sex with chemicals or scalpels.
The Department of Health and Human Services rule would, in effect, erase a key aspect of our humanity. That is, it would displace biological sex as a criterion for medical care with a fluid and illusory notion of gender identity. This, in turn, would also serve as precedent for further policy changes elsewhere in the administrative state. … read full article
Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis by Grace Lavery review — a tiresome, taboo-trashing trans memoir
The intention of this narcissistic book is to provoke — and it does. Reviewed by Sarah Ditum
From The Times (UK)
By Sarah Ditum
Feb 7, 2022
There are rules about this kind of thing. When you write about a trans person, there is to be no importunate “deadnaming” (that is, using the trans person’s pre-transition name). Do not suggest that trans people are “conforming to stereotypes” or “essentialising gender”, and never imply that some might be under the sway of a fetish. Gratuitous references to genitals should be absolutely avoided. How would you like it if people kept talking about your junk?
None of which, refreshingly, seems to hold any water with Grace Lavery in this trans memoir, Please Miss. Lavery, 38, was born in Birmingham, attended what she calls a “posh boys’ school” before going to Oxford, and is now a professor of English literature at Berkeley (specialities include critical theory and gender and sexuality studies). In 2018 she came out as trans, distinguishing herself even within the febrile atmosphere of the gender wars by her willingness to get into any and all social media dramas.
In keeping with that online persona, this is not a book that can be bothered with the niceties. Lavery gleefully throws around her birth name (it’s Joseph, or Jos for short). Her stories about the effects of synthetic oestrogen are straight out of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus: “Within twenty-four hours [of starting hormones] I had bought a large spider succulent, an oil diffuser and a phial of lemongrass essential oil (or ‘essentialist oil’, you would call it).” … read full article
Letter to a Young Feminist #1
This is what a veteran feminist wants to convey to her heirs.
From 4W (USA)
By Phyllis Chesler
Feb 7, 2022
Here I sit, head bent, writing you an intimate letter. I sense your presence, even though I don't know your name. I envision you as a young woman, possibly a young man, somewhere between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, but you may also be a decade older or younger than that. You may not yet be born.
You are either poor or rich; you are any or all the colors of the human rainbow, all shades of luck and character. You are my heir. This letter is your legacy: Without your conscious intervention, that legacy may again lie dormant for one hundred years. Or longer.
I imagine you are a person who wants to know why evil exists. People commit evil deeds because we, the good people, do not stop them. To quote Edmund Burke: "All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing." Ah, Burke, evil also triumphs when good women do nothing.
Men alone are not responsible for patriarchy; women are also their willing, even ardent, collaborators.
Yes, the world is different now than it was when I was your age. In only fifty years, a visionary feminism has managed to seriously challenge, if not transform, world consciousness. Some astronauts, army officers, ministers, prime ministers, and senators are women—there are women's studies programs too, and you can't open a newspaper without reading about some man on trial for rape or sexual harassment. But the truth is women are still far from free. We're not even within striking range.
Fundamentalist passions are threatening to destroy what feminists have accomplished. Three examples immediately come to mind. … read full article
What progressives get wrong about abortion
Even pregnancy is problematic for today's activists
From UnHerd (UK)
By Ann Furedi
Feb 7, 2022
Shortly after Hillary Clinton failed to become President, I attended a meeting of American abortion providers to discuss the problems they and their staff would face under Donald Trump. Already they struggled with protests and blockades outside clinics; death threats are not rhetoric but reality in some states where doctors wear bullet-proof vests to work and check their cars for explosives. The community of doctors that provide later abortions is small. I’m an infrequent visitor to the US, but even I was on hugging terms with Dr George Tiller before he was murdered for his work in 2009 — shot in the porch of his family church in Witchita.
As the mainly female group shared their despair at the new administration, the older grey-haired man sitting on my left — conservative suit, flamboyant tie — smiled quizzically, before calmly remarking in his Southern drawl: “Well then, I suppose I am the only one here who supports our new President?” He was.
I can’t reproduce my conversation with this doctor from Arizona as accurately as I wish. I wasn’t taking notes and his story did not seem as significant to me then as it does now. But this is the gist of it. … read full article
It's Wrong to Play the Pronoun Game
From Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT)
Feb 7, 2022
I’m a parent of a “trans identified” teen, so the pronoun dilemma is close to home for me. However, as a society, we cannot tackle this issue only when it impacts us personally —we need to band together as a society to say no to this toxic ideology, and saying no to pronouns is a critical part of this process.
Here’s why I don’t put pronouns in my email signature (and you shouldn’t either)…
Note: Since this essay was written, Colin Wright penned an excellent op-ed about this topic for the Wall Street Journal.
[Please send to schools and friends]
People who promote “using pronouns” claim “for a cisgender person, it costs you nothing.” They claim it normalizes the process of “transitioning” for someone else and somehow makes the environment “safer”.
It is true that this normalizes a process, but it’s not a process that should be normalized or taken lightly, especially for minor children. It makes the environment more dangerous. When people “use their pronouns” they have been duped into thinking that they are merely “supporting” people who are different from them. In fact, they are promoting an aggressive and triumphalist cult ideology, normalizing the abnormal, and gaslighting the easily influenced young, leading them down a path of irreparable harm.
At the height of the anorexia epidemic, adults did not announce our “allyship” by including our weight in our email signatures. Encouraging a social contagion makes it worse and it is worse still when trusted adult authorities endorse it. It hurts vulnerable young people like my daughter, who became trans-identified at school, where teachers kept us in the dark then disregarded our concerns. In the epidemic of Trans Ideology, misguided allyship puts kids on a path that leads to unnecessary medical procedures resulting in sterility and regret.
New religions never say they are a religion—what they say is that they have discovered The Truth. And, once the mind and heart are won over, adherents will do anything to their bodies in the name of the True Faith. This must stop. … read full article
