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by DYLAN NOLAN
Public opinion has reoriented back toward reality after years of accommodating the ascendence of transgender ideology – yet those instrumental in advancing the trans movement have redoubled their efforts to quash critics via lawfare.
This ongoing campaign has elevated the importance of protecting children – and preserving parental rights.
South Carolina’s efforts to protect youth from barbaric sex change procedures via “Help Not Harm” legislation is laudable, but state lawmakers must take further action to ensure children aren’t exposed to caustic gender ideology in government-run schools without the consent of their parents.
Luckily, the tide of public opinion on this issue is shifting…
The Pew Research Center recently published an updated gender-ideology survey which reveled a growing number number of U.S. adults believe gender is determined by a person’s sex at birth. While the difference in opinion between Republicans and Democrats remains noteworthy, even Democrats – whose leaders have embraced the trans movement – have begun to swing back towards a traditional view of the relationship between sex and gender.
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This shift in public opinion was recently exemplified by William “Lia” Thomas – who challenged long-standing rules barring biological males from competing in women’s sports.
Thomas became a household name in 2022 after ascending from the No. 462 national ranking as a male swimmer to “winning” the NCAA woman’s swimming champion (finishing a cool seven seconds before any of his female competitors).
In addition to the inherent unfairness, Thomas’ competitors said they were uncomfortable sharing a locker room with a “6-foot-4 male.”
“Being in that space with a male, it’s like a bad car wreck,” female swimmer Riley Gaines in an interview with comedian Bill Maher. “We can’t unsee it.”
Gaines, who vocally opposed Thomas’ domination of the sport and invasion of women’s spaces, didn’t mince words in her assessment of Thomas’ true gender.
“I think trans woman is a subset of male,” she said. “I do not believe trans women are women.”
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RELATED | S.C. HOUSE BANS YOUTH SEX CHANGES
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The court of arbitrations of sport in Switzerland recently upheld a 2022 rule instituted by World Aquatics – the governing body for elite swimming competitions – which would limit male transgender participation in women’s competitions to those who stunted their puberty prior to developing male secondary sex traits.
The NCAA is implementing a plan to defer to the judgement of such governing bodies on a sport-by-sport basis. In the meantime, though, it faces a lawsuit alleging that allowing the participation of male transgenders in women’s sports – even if approved by other governing bodies – violates federal title IX law.
While this reversion to reality is heartening, it’s important to consider how society got to the point where a 6-foot-4 male was allowed to dominate women’s sports in the first place – while being allowed to change in the dressing rooms of the female swimmers he was dominating.
In my 2022 missive ‘Gender Affirming Care’ For Minors: Inside The Controversy, I posited that the U.S. supreme court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges – which legalized gay marriage across America -“refocused the efforts of the gay rights movement, which had by this time generated powerful lobbying and activist wings, to broader new goals.”
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RELATED | INSIDE THE ‘GENDER AFFIRMING CARE’ FOR MINORS CONTROVERSY
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These well-funded activists concerned themselves primarily with winning over one specific age bracket of the United States population… children.
They ensured national school librarian associations – which send out recommended book purchase lists to districts throughout the country – selected books promoting transgender ideology. They passed statutes in seven states requiring the inclusion of transgender ideology in school curriculum – and have been backed up by federal education officials who suggest all states teach gender ideology.
As founder of the Russian Communist party Vladimir Lenin famously said, “give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.”
Predictably, many people across the United States don’t want their children to be a part of this transformation, and have voted for elected officials who exercise their power to prevent the gender transition of youth.
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Texas, like South Carolina, outlawed gender transition procedures on minors.
This came about in 2022 after Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) publicly announced that in order to comply with long-standing child abuse laws, it would cease performing transgender procedures on minors, only to be caught secretly conducting the procedures on children as young as 11 in an exposé published in the City Journal by Christopher Rufo.
“If ‘gender-affirming care’ is truly the gold standard in medicine,” Rufo wrote “TCH should defend it openly, not perform it in secret.”
TCH nurse Vanessa Sivadge spoke with Rufo on the record about the procedures.
“We were harming these kids,” she said.
Sivadge alleged doctors “bulldozed” parents who objected to the procedures, instilling fear that “the hospital would call Child Protective Services if they dissented.”
The willingness of the medical industry to facilitate the performance of these secret procedures drove conservative states across the nation to pass explicit minor sex-change surgery bans.
No good deed goes unpunished, either, as Sivadge was soon a person of interest in a federal investigation being conducted in an attempt to identify the whistleblower. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) special agents Paul Nixon and David McBride visited Sivadges’ home.
“They promised they would make life difficult for me if I was trying to protect the leaker,” she said.
Sivadge said the agents informed her she was “not safe” at work “and claimed that someone at my workplace had given my name to the FBI.”
The federal agents eventually got their man, indicting 33-year-old general surgeon Dr. Eithan Haim, alleging he “obtained unauthorized individually identifiable health HIPAA protected information on pediatric patients” and “caused malicious harm to TCH, pediatric patients at TCH and its physicians by contacting a media contact.”
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Haim, who is raising money to take the case to trial, claimed innocence on his GiveSendGo page.
“Since no laws had been violated (no personally identifiable patient health information was disclosed), this was nothing more than a blatant attempt at political intimidation,” he said.
Haim said his legal team believes the case “is being driven by a highly ideological division within the Department of Health and Human Services that aims to silence whistleblowers who expose institutionalized medical corruption and the dangers of these hormone-based interventions for confused, adolescent children.”
Haim’s theory holds water. This has proven to be the year of the politicized prosecutor, and HHS has a historically rocky record of its employees taking high-paying jobs in the industries they were ostensibly “regulating” directly after their government “service.”
Keeping in mind that data collected between 2004 and 2020 show roughly a third of HHS administrators exiting into the healthcare industry, it’s easy to see how these actors might be incentivized to protect the sex transition industry when transgender patients are estimated to spend between $34,000 and $43,000 per year on medical expenses (not counting the roughly $100,000 your average patient spends up front.)
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But the weaponized-state’s heavy-handed moves to advance the transgender agenda are motivated by more than money. Transgenderism is, upon the admission of the movement’s founders, a spiritual movement.
Susan Stryker, a prominent queer academic who was on the vanguard of the transgender movement in the 1980’s, famously published an article titled My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix, which speaks about the true nature of transgenderism with a clarity rarely seen in other works.
“The transsexual body is an unnatural body,” Stryker wrote. “It is the product of medical science. It is a technological
construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born.”
“In these circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Stryker wrote, comparing Dr. Frankenstein to modern scientists pioneering new transgender procedures.
“The agenda that produced hormonal and surgical sex reassignment techniques is no less pretentious, and no more noble, than Frankenstein’s,” she continued. “Heroic doctors still endeavor to triumph over nature. The scientific discourse that produced sex reassignment techniques is inseparable from the pursuit of immortality through the perfection of the body, the fantasy of total mastery through the transcendence of an absolute limit, and the hubristic desire to create life itself.”
“I will say this as bluntly as I know how: I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster,” she wrote. “Just as the words ‘dyke,’ ‘fag,’ ‘queer,’ ‘slut,’ and “whore’ have been reclaimed, respectively, by lesbians and gay men, by anti-assimilationist sexual minorities, by women who pursue erotic pleasure, and by sex industry workers, words like ‘creature,’ ‘monster,’ and ‘unnatural’ need to be reclaimed by the transgendered.”
While Stryker embraced being an “unnatural monster,” most parents wouldn’t wish this fate on their worst enemy, let alone their own children – yet those filled with the “hubristic desire” for “total mastery through the transcendence of an absolute limit” are committed to subjecting others to their psychological whims.
Just last month the nation’s most populous state demonstrated this desire. California governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill prohibiting school districts from mandating that staff disclose a pupil’s decision to transition genders to his or her parents.
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The legislation was immediately panned by advocates for parental rights. Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk said he told Newsom “about a year ago that laws of this nature would force families and companies to leave California to protect their children.”
Musk wasn’t bluffing either. Following the enactment of the statute, he tweeted his intention to move one of his largest companies out of the state.
“Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas,” Musk wrote.
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Elon Musk says trans child was figuratively 'killed by the woke mind virus,' vows to destroy it: 'My son is dead'
— Camus (@newstart_2024) July 23, 2024
Musk said he wasn't informed that puberty blockers are 'actually just sterilization drugs' when he was 'tricked' into giving consent
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk… pic.twitter.com/8BgCWmcb6M
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As Americans we don’t agree on everything, which is one of the things that makes our country unique. The importance of the separation of church and state cannot be overstated in a nation with such idealogical diversity. Americans come from a broad spectrum of cultural backgrounds, from ultraconservative fundamentalist Muslims to gays who run around San Fransisco in their birthday suits every June – and the only way we can peacefully coexist is to agree not to force our religious values down each other’s throats (and certainly not down the throats of each other’s children).
Put another way, I respect your desire to teach your kid that they can become another gender. I might think you’re an idiot, but I think you have every right to be an idiot.
I respect your desire to require your daughter to wear a burqa, I wouldn’t impose the same restrictions on my daughter, but as Americans we’re all free to hold the metaphysical beliefs of our choice.
But we must be clear that adherence to modern gender ideology is as much of an act of faith as adherence to any traditional religion.
Believing you can transcend the limitations of your flesh and blood to become another gender is as much of an act of faith as believing you will experience life after death. The problem is gender zealots don’t see themselves in this light, they believe “the science” and facts are on their side and that all who oppose them must be defeated.
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So, knowing that their fallacious and insidious ideology will be chewed up and spit out by anyone with a fully developed brain, they seek to convert children.
This is why we must insist that a pride flag on a public school wall is as much of a religious statement as the ten commandments – neither have a place in an ostensibly religiously neutral government institution.
Unfortunately, the radicalized zealots pushing this new religion have demonstrated they’ll never voluntarily cede this ground. And even in ruby red states, these people make up a disturbingly large percentage of public school teachers.
This is why the actions of South Carolina elected officials to combat the subversive influence of these educators is laudable. The General Assembly must be praised for outlawing the performance of the most holy sacrament of this new religion (sex change operations) on children, attorney general Alan Wilson should be lauded for fighting to preserve Title IV’s protection of (actual) women and superintendent of education Ellen Weaver should be commended for ensuring that our school’s curriculum is age appropriate.
But the evidence is right before our eyes that these actions alone will not stop the “transing” of our kids without our consent.
The state’s largest public teacher’s association – the South Carolina Education Association (SCEA) – instructs members to “take action, and get involved with the movement” and features an article celebrating restoring pride flags to a Connecticut classroom after parents complained to school administrators.
“The parent believed the flags violated school policy: Nothing political in the classroom,” the article reads.
The article boasted that the teachers took a united stance against the removal of the flags, collectively bargaining and successfully petitioning district officials to return them to classrooms.
NEWS FLASH: The flags are political, but I’d argue they are closer to religious iconography than campaign materials, yet SCEA showed its extreme bias towards this one particular (and particularly psychologically destructive) worldview.
Once again, I don’t begrudge them for feeling this way in their personal lives – but South Carolina parents clearly can’t trust these people to keep their personal ideologies out of the classroom. This is why South Carolina legislators must pass a parental bill of rights – and do so this legislative session.
(Click to view)
A broad coalition of Republican House members have lined up behind various iterations (H. 3485, H. 3197, H. 4691) of parental rights legislation in the previous legislative session, but none of the bills made it farther than the chamber’s judiciary committee during the two-year legislative session.
The bills put into law that “the liberty of a parent to direct the upbringing, education, health care, and mental health of that parent’s child is a fundamental right” and establish that the state cannot abridge it “without demonstrating that the burden is required by a compelling governmental interest of the highest order.”
This means government entities are specifically required to defer to parents “to direct the moral or religious training of the child” – and that parents must “consent in writing to all physical and mental health care decisions for the child.”
The legislation also prevents teachers from “encourage(ing) or coerce(ing) a child to withhold information from the child’s parent” and prohibits school employees from withholding “information that is relevant to the physical, emotional or mental health of the child.”
Such good-faith tenants should have been codified into law decades ago, but it is abundantly clear that we now live in a radicalized world where we cannot count on the goodwill and common sense of state employees.
Parents, it is incumbent upon each of you to ensure that legislation protecting your rights is filed again in the upcoming legislative session. It is incumbent upon you to impress upon your House member and state senator that you will be supporting their primary election opponent if they do not actively participate in the passage of such legislation.
Do not let the General Assembly take another victory lap on increasing public teacher compensation before they guarantee that these taxpayer-paid teachers aren’t forcing their radical worldview on children – your children.
Implementing this framework will be inconvenient and uncomfortable for school administrators and municipalities, and they’ll gladly spend your tax dollars to pay lobbyists to remind legislators of this, so the existing parents organizations throughout the state need to be organized and vocal to prevent complacent legislators from allowing this bill to once again die in committee.
South Carolina’s children deserve better than to be brainwashed by radical activists – and it is ultimately up the their parents to ensure this doesn’t happen.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR …
(Via: Travis Bell)
Dylan Nolan is the director of special projects at FITSNews. He graduated from the Darla Moore school of business in 2021 with an accounting degree. Got a tip or story idea for Dylan? Email him here. You can also engage him socially @DNolan2000.
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12 comments
Just force your kids to be something you want them to be, something they aren’t. That’s the hallmark of a great parent, right?
Trans is a mental disorder. Parents have a responsibility to get their child help.
“Trans is a mental disorder. Parents have a responsibility to get their child help”
Read the book “Detrans”…unfortunately, the medical industry has proven in repeated cases to not help patients determine how other conditions (normal changes due to puberty, prior trauma, AUSTISM) may be causing real or perceived gender confusion.
There are countless stories of parents trying to get their children help, but doctors and therapists not taking the time to correctly understand and diagnose patients. The “would you rather have a dead daughter or live son” line is told to parents, even in children who are NOT suicidal, and there is not evidence that any of the ongoing, life-long procedures cure ANYTHING.
In turn, many “trans” children are influenced by trans-supportive communities online, where others who have NO knowledge of the person, tell them, “Oh yes, you are trans” and encourage them to follow that path. The children, unaware of normal development, then self-diagnose, tell a medical provider, “I think I am another sex” and the provider runs with that diagnosis. In some cases, if the provider does not, then he or she would be subject to censure from the hospital, medical board, etc.
It really is a cult…just read about the experiences of those who have “de-transitioned”. The “love” and “care” from online, medical providers, etc. completely vanishes when they de-transition. Medical care as they try to recover from cross-sex hormones and “Frankenstein” surgeries is almost non-existent.
It must be exhausting spending all your time obsessing over people who you’ll never meet private parts. To imagine that strangers whose genitals you obsess over have an agenda to get you. Very, very weird.
That MAGA diehards for you. Ver weird people who think about and do strange things. Remember one true thing about MAGA: every accusation is a confession.
Dylan projectith too much, me thinks.
Ignorant and uneducated
Is that picture of the blogger?
Looks like a girl, but she claims to be a ‘male’?
These MAGA weirdos are some confused people.
He looks like a fag. Maybe he should hook up with Lady G.
I’d be more concerned if my kids suddenly told me they were MAGA.
Thats means they are close minded, easily deceived, prone to drug use, have poor decision making skills, are bigoted /racist, liars who think Putin is a ‘good guy’. I could go on, but the thought of it is too depressing. It would mean I was a failure as a parent.
MAGA
How hard is it to understand that what your genitals are have no natural baring on how you should dress, act or look?
We made all of that stuff up. The concepts of ‘male’ and ‘female’ are strictly man made concepts. And like all man made concepts, they change over time.
The Harris/Walz campaign said it best, “Just mind your own damn business!” Trans people have zero effect on this writer’s life. It doesn’t appear they are married or have kids of their own, so why waste time getting all hysterical over strangers choices?
Just mind your own damn business, kid.
Gen 5:2.
“The Harris/Walz campaign said it best, “Just mind your own damn business!” Trans people have zero effect on this writer’s life.” – Walz set up a hotline for people NOT minding their own business to rat-out people living life instead of kneeling under his government’s state COVID restrictions – quite a hypocrite there.
Children cannot make legal decisions. That includes agreeing to surgery and cross-sex drugs that will affect them in ways that as children and teens, they cannot begin to understand.
Evidence shows the medical industry ignores comorbidities and throws objective analysis out the door when a patient suggests gender dysphoria. As one former “trans male” stated, she was not allowed liposuction as part of her transitioning, because she also had an eating disorder. She pointed out the irony of not being refused lipo due to one mental condition, but was pushed into gender reassignment surgery as a cure for the mental condition of gender dysphoria!
For anyone wanting a sympathetic view of children who’ve undergone gender dysphoria and the side effects of”treatment”, read the book, “Detrans”.
As far as “We made all of that stuff up. The concepts of ‘male’ and ‘female’ are strictly man made concepts. And like all man made concepts, they change over time.”, maybe you should look into something called “chromosomes.”