Tuesday, August 16, 2022
"What an incredible night," the Mayor said. "The Port Townsend community showed up in huge and beautiful fashion to say that hate has no place here. Trans and cis-allies alike spoke love & support..."
This day in Herstory: Madonna Louise Ciccone, born August 16, 1958, is an American singer, songwriter, and actress. Referred to as the "Queen of Pop", Madonna is noted for her continual reinvention and versatility in music production, songwriting, and visual presentation. She has pushed the boundaries of artistic expression in mainstream music, while maintaining control over every aspect of her career. Her works, which incorporate social, political, sexual, and religious themes, have generated both controversy and critical acclaim. A prominent cultural figure in the 20th and 21st centuries, Madonna remains one of the most "well-documented figures of the modern age", with many scholarly reviews and literature works on her, as well as an academic subdiscipline devoted to her named Madonna studies. (more)
Today, GC News departs from our normal goal to not include multiple articles covering the same story. Instead, today we include several on the protest in Port Townsend yesterday. Full disclosure: that’s partly because Port Townsend is located in the US Pacific Northwest, where the editors live. So, this protest struck close to home not only metaphorically, but also geographically. But more importantly, it provides a clear window into the worrisome misogynist tactics embraced by trans-rights activists today. Over 200 men screamed abuse at about 35 women, many in their senior years (at least one is 80), for daring to say that men can’t be women. These bullies acted more like white supremacists than anyone who truly cares about social justice. They acted in the name of “Pride.” But they should not be proud of themselves. They should be deeply ashamed. - Ed.
US - Senior Women Heckled During Rally For Single-Sex Locker Rooms at Community Pool
From Reduxx (Canada)
By Anna Slatz
August 16, 2022
A peaceful demonstration held by women’s rights activists in support of an 80-year-old woman banned from her local pool was interrupted by aggressive trans activists who heckled the women as they spoke and attempted to destroy their equipment.
The demonstration took place yesterday evening in the small community of Port Townsend, Washington, a city with less than 10,000 residents that has become a hub for debate on women’s single-sex spaces after an 80-year-old model citizen was banned from the community’s pool after expressing concerns about a male in the women’s changing room. … read full article
US - Women Seeking Civil Rights Stand Up to Mob Hatred and Intimidation in Port Townsend
From Port Townsend Free Press (USA)
By Jim Scarantino
August 16, 2022
An angry white crowd screaming at a Black woman pleading for civil rights. Threatening her. Intimidating her. Senior women linking arms to protect a rape survivor trying to speak. A lesbian being shouted down by a mostly male mob decked out in Pride colors. A man with an AR-15 imposed over a Trans flag on his ball cap, the impression of a handgun in his left cargo pants pocket, hiding behind sunglasses and a mask that made identification difficult.
This was the face of rage and hate Port Townsend showed to women who asked for equal rights, to have their spaces respected, to be able to go to the bathroom and showers in pubic facilities and not suffer PTSD flashbacks from memories of being raped and assaulted because there is an adult male human being where they once could feel safe. … read full article
US - Transgender activists heckle and intimidate woman, 80, who was banned from her local YMCA for demanding trans worker 'with a penis' leave women's locker room
Julie Jaman, 80, has been a regular for 35 years at the Mountain View pool in the City of Port Townsend, Washington state - but has now been banned
She was made aware of the trans worker, Clementine Adams, being in the changing room while she was taking a shower after taking a dip
While addressing people who supported her, Jaman was heckled by trans activists who ripped down her suffragette flags
The senior could be seen looking scared as she asked 'are we gonna get beaten up?' and begged someone to call the police
During the incident last week Jaman said she 'heard a man's voice' and confronted the woman about whether or not she 'had a penis'
Police were called and took details of the incident in order to file a report Pool bosses say Jaman was barred due to several incidents, not just this one
From Daily Mail (UK)
By EMMA JAMES
August 16, 2022
An elderly woman who was banned from a YMCA pool after she demanded a transgender employee leave the women’s locker room has been heckled by activists as she described her experience.
Julie Jaman had been a regular at the Mountain View pool in the City of Port Townsend in Washington when she spotted the worker in the changing room while she was showering.
The 80-year-old was giving a speech about her experience when angry trans protestors ripped down suffragette flag that she was speaking in front of, before chanting loudly over her. … read full article
US - Police intervene after trans activists block protest in support of 80-year-old grandmother banned from Washington pool
"This is what happens when women try to speak up for our sex-based rights," said event organizer Amy Sousa.
From The Post Millennial (Canada)
By Hannah Nightingale
August 16, 2022
On Monday evening, members of the public gathered outside the Port Townsend, Washington City Hall to voice their concerns in regards to the city’s response in the case of an 80-year-old grandmother who was banned from the local YMCA pool for expressing her discomfort with having a transgender woman in the changing room as she and children were using the facilities, and were met with trans rights activist protestors who tried to disrupt the event before being ushered away by officers. …
In response to the protest, the mayor doubled down on his support for trans access to women's changing rooms over women's rights to private spaces.
"What an incredible night," he said. "The Port Townsend community showed up in huge and beautiful fashion to say that hate has no place here. Trans and cis-allies alike spoke love & support, and the only TERF speaker was from out of town. Tonight reminded me why Port Townsend is home." ... read full article
US - Leftists raise THOUSANDS for biological male who watched little girls change clothes in YMCA women's locker room
"Hi, my name is Clementine. I’m a college student, and I plan on majoring in Elementary Education! Being trans isn’t about changing, it’s about living my truth."
From The Post Millennial (USA)
By Hannah Nightingale
August 16, 2022
Following the banning of an 80-year-old woman from her local YMCA for expressing discomfort in sharing the locker room with a biological male who identifies as a woman who had been escorting young girls in a day camp to the restroom where they undressed, YMCA worker Clementine Adams has seen an explosion in donations to a GoFundMe set up to cover Adams’ transition surgery expenses.
The fundraiser, which has gathered $14,571 of $25,000, was started in February by Adams to cover "two important surgeries [Adams] wanted."
These surgeries are vaginoplasty, which constructs a vaginal canal from existing tissue in the area, and feminizing laringoplasty, which changes the length of vocal cords in an effort to give the patient a higher pitched voice. … read full article
US - What the F Is Going On
Theories of social contagion and beyond
From BROADVIEW with Lisa Selin Davis (USA)
By Lisa Selin Davis
August 16, 2022
When I first started speaking out over a year ago—that is, when I first steeled myself to try to tell a much more complicated story in the mainstream media about kids with gender dysphoria or identifying as trans—I avoided the terms social contagion and rapid-onset gender dysphoria. …
It’s not that I wasn’t skeptical of what I’d been writing about trans kids for major media outlets, or curious about the exponential rise in kids with gender dysphoria appearing suddenly around 2015. It’s that it felt like we had all silently entered into an agreement that we were going to pretend things were different than they seemed. I was a powerless freelancer, trying to push back gently but stay in the good graces of those who employed me. … read full article
US - Stop telling girls they should be boys
From Washington Examiner (USA)
By Debra Soh
August 15, 2022
It was announced last week that the Tavistock gender clinic in the United Kingdom is being sued by 1,000 families for medical negligence. The lawsuit alleges that the clinic misdiagnosed children and was reckless in prescribing puberty blockers in treating gender dysphoria. As well, research from the clinic published last year found that pubertal suppression was associated with lower bone mass, as well as little improvement in psychological functioning. ... read full article
US - The Transgender Movement Rediscovers Gender Roles
One doctor argues that children engaging in ‘opposite gender’ activities is proof of their identity. This flies in the face of what feminists have told us for decades.
From National Review (USA)
By Nate Hochman
August 15, 2022
May 2021 video on child gender transitions from the Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) that has been making the rounds in conservative Internet circles is a particularly stark example of how the benign-sounding language of medical expertise — “adolescents” who are “coming to the realization that they might be trans or gender diverse” can now be “treated,” BCH’s Dr. Jeremi Carswell informs viewers — can mask an ideology with serious consequences for gender-confused youth. But it’s also an unwitting testament to the contradictions sewn into that ideology, which often go unchallenged amid the zealous enforcement of trans orthodoxy in medical circles. … read full article
US - California gender clinic treats patients as young as 2-years-old
Mental health director Diane Ehrensaft said that at UCSF they "see children as young as two and as old as 25." Ehrensaft describes her own child as "gender creative."
From The Post Millennial (USA)
By Christina Buttons
August 16, 2022
The University of San Francisco Benioff Children's Hospital's Child and Adolescent Gender Center (UCSF) is offering treatments through its transgender health center to children as young as two. Speaking on a promotional video to potential patients and their families, mental health director Diane Ehrensaft said that they "see children as young as two and as old as 25." Ehrensaft describes her own child as "gender creative."
"We support children and their families through their social, medical, and/or surgical transition," says UCSF's Child and Adolescent Gender Center (CAGC) website. … read full article
US - ‘Advocate Rather Than a Scientist’: The Compromised Research of Child Gender-Transition Doctor Jack Turban
From National Review (USA)
By Caroline Downey
August 16, 2022
Dr. Jack Turban found his research niche in the treatment of pediatric gender-identity disorders nearly a decade ago and quickly rose through the ranks of the discipline. In a prestigious fellowship at Stanford Medical Center following a residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, he focused on child and adolescent psychiatry with an emphasis on transgender youth, or facilitating sex change through surgical, medical, and social interventions. … read full article
US - On ‘Gender’ the AAP Has Chosen Ideology Over Science
The AAP no longer views itself as a professional organization of physicians and gatekeeper of medical knowledge, but as an agent of radical social reform.
From Reality’s Last Stand (USA)
By Leor Sapir
August 16, 2022
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has come under intense scrutiny of late after members and scholars exposed the organization’s politicized inner workings and the lack of standards at its flagship journal, Pediatrics. AAP leadership must also be feeling the heat as European countries begin to restrict the use of hormones to treat teenagers in distress over their bodies and as families in the U.K. look to sue the Tavistock clinic for fast-tracking their children to cross-sex hormones. … read full article
US - Trans Totalitarianism: Time For Moral Panic
People have been propagandized out of having a healthy reaction to a moral horror -- the colonization of children's minds and bodies -- overtaking our society
From The American Conservative (USA)
By Rod Dreher
August 16, 2022
The phrase "moral panic" refers to a fear-driven mass overreaction to a phenomenon that is either false or minor. Witch hunts are the usual manifestation of a moral panic. There are no witches (well, technically not true, at least these days, but the witches didn't poison the well), so to freak out and persecute women because they might be a witch is a classic example of moral panic. The Satanic abuse craze of the 1990s is another. Again: a "moral panic" ensues when there is a mass freakout over something that doesn't exist, or is extremely minor and in no way justifies the size and intensity of the reaction. … read full article
US - Biden’s new Title IX rules deputize teachers to override parents on gender identity
From New York Post (USA)
By Kaylee McGhee White
August 15, 2022
Team Biden’s proposed new Title IX regulations make it clear: They’re coming for your children.
The administration ostensibly drafted the rules to protect gay and transgender students from bullying and harassment, but they do nothing of the sort. In reality, President Biden is handing teachers a weapon to subvert parental prerogatives.
Title IX is a simple statute that outlaws “sex discrimination” in education. It says nothing about “gender” or “gender identity.” But the Biden administration wants to put its own spin on the law and redefine “sex” to include these categories. … read full article
US - We Have A Major Problem With Potemkin Science
Our shared understanding of the world is melting into goo
From Singal-Minded (USA)
By Jesse Singal
August 16, 2022
A “Potemkin village” refers to a situation in which someone constructs an illusion to impress someone else. In the original story, this served a political purpose. …
Potemkin science operates similarly: You look at something that appears to be evidence for a claim and you say, “Ah yes, there is some evidence for this claim.” Then you retweet it. … read full article
UK - ‘Children were being sterilised but no one could speak out’
Helen Joyce on how the silencing of the trans debate has caused immense harm to children.
From Spiked (UK)
By Helen Joyce
August 16, 2022
The fall of the UK’s Tavistock clinic, the NHS’s specialist gender-identity clinic for young people, is a watershed moment. The Tavistock had long been accused of putting transgender ideology above the health and wellbeing of children. According to whistleblowers, campaigners and former patients, vulnerable children were being put on an irreversible medical pathway to changing their gender, involving puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones and, in some cases, surgery. And all this after just a few sessions. Clinicians, it was often alleged, saw it as their role to simply ‘affirm’ children’s chosen gender. For years, these criticisms were dismissed as ‘transphobia’ and those speaking out were shouted down. … read full article
Australia - Early diagnosis
Six doctors quick to detect the risks of youth gender medicine
From Gender Clinic News (Australia)
By Bernard Lane
August 16, 2022
There were doctors who saw the risks early on.
In October 2019, The Australian reported the start of a landmark legal campaign against the U.K. Tavistock gender clinic. Back then, who would have predicted that the Tavistock, the world’s biggest youth gender clinic, would be shut down?
The month before the Tavistock litigation campaign began, a handful of Australian doctors came together to support Dr John Whitehall, a professor of paediatrics, who was urging an independent public inquiry into children’s hospital gender clinics across Australia’s states. … read full article
Australia - The True Colours of the Rainbow Flag
From Quadrant Online (Australia)
By Declan Mansfield
August 16, 2022
In 2015, before Ireland was due to vote and change its constitution to legalise gay marriage, a friend asked my opinion. I said vote ‘yes’. My reasoning was simple: what consenting adults do is nobody’s business. I asked a question: what negative impact would gay marriage have on the lives of heterosexual people?
I still hold unambiguously to my first argument. I believe gay marriage is good, because I believe in freedom of the individual. But as to my second point, that it would make no difference to our lives, I was completely wrong. … read full article
That city council meeting really made me feel ill. I couldn't watch it until the end. They were all so smug and sure of themselves in their rainbow attire--inside the literal bubble of the council chambers while female elders standing up for women's rights and dignity were treated to such vitriol outside the doors. It's such terrible misogyny and ageism too. It's so hard for me to understand how they cannot see the pattern. On a brighter note--I love that photo of Madonna! Love her or hate her, she is a powerful woman and a trail blazer as an artist. Personally, I love some of her music. She is almost exactly my age, born in 1958 but a month later than me: we are the generation that was able to step into the opportunities created for us by 2nd wave feminists like Julie Jamal.
"Trans and cis-allies alike spoke love & support"
Sounds like the Ministry of Love in Orwell's 1984 ...