Written by Carl R. Trueman

Last week, Chad Vegas, a good friend of mine and the Reformed Baptist pastor in Bakersfield, California emailed me as follows:

As you know, CA has mandated this [school transgender policy] for the whole state. I have served on the largest high school board in CA, and the nation, for 12 years. I basically lead that board. Our board voted to adopt the new law into policy. I voted against it. I was breaking the law for doing so. I could be personally sued and our attorney tells me the board insurance won’t cover me because I am breaking the law and I am a bigot. Anyway, I announced I would not seek reelection. The community came unhinged when I announced that. I remain the most popularly elected official in the history of our school board. Thousands of parents filled our board room in protest of the law. Thousands are pleading with me to reconsider and keep fighting. My elders are still considering what to have me do…. [T]he board and administration, and even some leaders in the liberal teacher’s union, are asking me to reconsider.

On Thursday, he announced that he would not seek re-election in a letter to his congregation.

There you have it: A popular, longstanding, and effective member of a school board has had to stand down—not because he does not enjoy the confidence of the community, but simply because he does not accept the latest demands that every knee must bow to whatever the political taste of the moment has decided is non-negotiable.

It reminded me of my review of John Inazu’s new book on confident pluralism and his response. Essentially, I argued that confident pluralism depended upon a balance of cultural and political power. As that balance no longer existed, pluralism was effectively dead. John responded that I was too pessimistic and that my own tone in my review was not entirely conducive to promoting pluralism.

Well, the fate of Chad Vegas in Bakersfield is a great example of precisely my point. He is a popular member of the schoolboard, perhaps the most popular. Even his liberal opponents acknowledge that and want him to stay. But he cannot. He has already broken the law by voting his conscience. He could be sued for that. And how many of those who want him to stay would be willing to stand shoulder to shoulder during a long, exhausting and punitively expensive legal action?

This cultural moment has been taking shape for some time. A few years ago my oldest son was running track for an Ivy League school. One of the team came out as a lesbian and it was decided that all athletes should wear a rainbow armband in support. My son did not want to comply but also did not wish to cause unnecessary offense to his friends and so he called me and asked what argument he should make against the idea. I told him to say that, as one of America’s greatest virtues was its freedom, he should tell his teammates that he absolutely respected their right to wear the armband in solidarity with their friend. They were free to do so and he rejoiced to live in a nation where they could do so. But by the same token, they should respect his right not to wear the armband in accordance with his personal religious convictions. That’s a good argument, I said, and I told him he should make it modestly and politely and then simply not wear the band without drawing any great attention to his act. But I also advised him that it would not be greeted with approval because the issue was not really about the freedom to be tolerant and diverse, whatever the rhetoric. It was about the intolerant political demand that all should be the same. Sure enough, he was decried as a bigot and homophobe.

Thus it is in modern America. To repeat myself: Confident pluralism assumes either a balance of power or a basic common decency between the various sides in any of the cultural debates. The balance and the decency no longer exist. Nor does it matter that there might be a democratic majority supporting the dissenter in whatever public-square conflict occurs. Power is not a function of numbers any more, if it ever was. It is a function of organization and of having one’s hands on the levers of cultural and legal power. Expect no quarter in the conflicts that are already upon us, however many of your neighbors may initially express sympathy with you.

The long Gramscian march of the activist bien pensants through the institutions is reaching its conclusion. It really is. And it is time to face that fact and abandon the myth that the world is run by people who respect difference and diversity, and that all we need to do is behave decently in order to win their respect and earn their favor. They do not think that way. They will never think that way. And they will crush those who do. By any means necessary.

Carl R. Trueman is Paul Woolley Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary.

This article was originally posted at FirstThings.com

“Sex-rejector”: Human who rejects his or her objective,
immutable biological sex

“Provert”: One who affirms and promotes perversity as good

Tacoma “trans” sideshow

Get your popcorn, pick a seat, and watch the circus sideshow that just took place in Tacoma, Washington, where a group seeking to find a negotiated settlement between women on one side of an absurdist cultural divide and sex-rejectors and proverts on the other. In this sideshow, proverts shriek obscenities at women who don’t want men in their showers and call their shrieking civil disobedience.

In between hurling epithets and obscenities at women who want nothing more than a modicum of privacy in which to engage in private activities, sex-rejectors and proverts scream “Transwomen are women.”

Actually, they’re not.

Are “transwomen” women?

“Transwomen” are men who want to be women and masquerade as women via wearing women’s clothing, jewelry, make-up, and/or hairstyles and having their bodies artificially altered. They are no more in reality women than 60-year-old women who wear the clothing and hairstyles of 25-year-olds and have their bodies artificially altered are in reality 25-year-old women. And it is no more hateful to say sex-rejecting men are not women than it is to say that a 5’7” white man is not a 6’5” Chinese woman—even if he really, really, really wants to be one. Reality exists, and affirming it is not hate speech.

As “progressives” have relentlessly averred, sex and “gender identity” are two wholly distinct phenomena. Sex is an objective, immutable, scientifically verifiable phenomenon, whereas “gender identity” refers to a person’s feelings about their sex. The vast majority of people accept their sex, and a minority wish they were the opposite sex. “Gender identity” is a rhetorical and social construction created to give existential heft to immaterial desire.

 “Gender,” sex, and safety

Gender:

Sex-rejectors and proverts claim their central concern is the safety of sex-rejectors. Male sex-rejectors rightly claim they are at risk if they go into men’s restrooms and locker rooms masquerading as women. Of course, in the service of their safety, they could choose not to masquerade as women. “Progressives” argue that clothing, hairstyles, jewelry, and makeup are arbitrary social conventions imposed oppressively on men and women starting at birth and based on their objective sex. If that’s the case, then there is no reason for men who wish they were women to adopt these oppressive, arbitrary, socially constructed conventions. In fact, by acquiescing to these conventions, don’t sex-rejectors merely reinforce the very stereotypes against which they rebel? In the service of safety, why not reject the arbitrary social conventions associated with the sex they wish they were?

Sex:

Leftists say that biological sex per se is meaningless. In their view, nothing necessarily derives from it. Modesty and the desire for privacy have no intrinsic connection to biological sex per se. There is no need to respect it even in private facilities. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said that those who believe that feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy are inextricably linked to biological sex per se are the equivalent of racists. In other words, those who believe that biological sex is imbued with meaning are ignorant bigots. If that’s the case, then why do sex-rejectors demand to use opposite-sex facilities? What’s the big deal about the sex of the persons with whom they shower? If—to them—physical embodiment as male or female is ultimately meaningless, and if—to them—all outward expressions of maleness and femaleness are arbitrary social conventions, then why can’t sex-rejectors use the private facilities that correspond to their sex, thereby respecting the feelings of those who believe biological sex per se has meaning?

If objective, immutable biological sex has no intrinsic meaning, and if the outward expressions of sex that all societies develop to recognize, reinforce, and celebrate sex differences (i.e., gender) are arbitrary, socially constructed and meaningless, then are fake breasts, vaginas, and penises meaningless constructions as well? And if they’re not meaningless, if they have meaning related in part to modesty and physical privacy, why should restroom-usage correspond to fake bodies as opposed to real bodies?

Moreover, if fake breasts, penises, and vaginas have no more intrinsic meaning than real breasts, vaginas, and penises, then why construct them? Why go through the pain and expense of removing and adding body parts? And why these particular body parts? What’s so special and meaningful about breasts, vaginas, and penises? Why not be creative and invent new decorative, non-functioning body parts? Why do sex-rejectors who believe that biological sex per se has no meaning and who believe that social conventions associated with sex are ultimately arbitrary, oppressively imposed social conventions feel the need to remain so narrowly embodied within the binary?

True “trans” goal

In addition to choosing not to masquerade as the opposite sex, sex-rejectors could also use family restrooms in stores and restaurants and shower at home rather than at health clubs in order to better protect their safety. That they reject all these options reveals what their real goal is. Their real goal is to remove all cultural signifiers of the existence and meaning of objective, immutable biological sex. This goal requires restructuring grammar, censoring speech, and eradicating sex-segregation everywhere. And it requires universal compliance with their draconian cultural edicts.

The exaltation of subjectivism and autonomy has brought us to this cultural precipice. Sex-rejectors believe subjective feelings and their autonomous will—not biology—determine sex. And sex-rejectors believe they alone have the right to decide the criterion that determines whether humans are entitled to physical privacy. They proclaim that physical privacy should be accorded to humans based not on their sex but on their feelings about their sex. Other humans demur.

When a lesbian panelist in the Tacoma sideshow says she doesn’t want to shower next to a swinging “d**k,” a provert commands her to “shower at home.” Why can’t those instructions be given to sex-rejectors who don’t want to shower with persons of their same sex? Why should the desire to be the opposite sex supersede sex in private areas?

Conclusion

The manifest contradictions that inhere the sex-rejecting movement reveal the truth that biological sex matters. Sex rejectors unwittingly testify to the profound importance and desirability of sex differences when they endure painful surgeries and sterility-causing cross-sex hormone-doping and refuse to use restrooms and showers with persons of their same sex. Societies provide sex-separated facilities in which private activities related to intimate bodily functions and undressing take place because biological sex per se matters.

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I have long said that the cultural tide will turn against sexual anarchy when its child victims grow up and tell their stories. In a culture that rejects reason and faith while concomitantly exalting subjective feelings, narratives carry immense power.

Eventually children who have been acquired by couples in inherently sterile homosexual unions will tell of their feelings of sadness at being intentionally deprived of a mother or father. Children of lesbians will expose the emotional and relationship instability in their homes. Children of homosexual men will share the pain of being raised in homes where promiscuity or sexual “non-monogamy” is accepted.

And one day, gender-dysphoric children will tell their tragic stories—children whose parents were persuaded that allowing their confused children to “transition” was not only the appropriate treatment protocol but also the only way to prevent their children’s suicides.

Children who were permitted to take chemicals to prevent puberty (and thus the formative social experiences that attend pubertal physical and emotional changes), who were permitted to take risky cross-sex hormones whose effects—including sterility—are permanent, and in some cases were permitted to have breasts amputated or testes excised will tell their stories.

Surely some will regret never knowing who they would have become if they had been permitted to develop in accordance with their objective nature. Some will regret never having had the social experiences that attend the sex they actually are. Some will regret not waiting to see if their gender- dysphoric feelings abated. Some will regret their sterility. And some will regret the health effects like venous thromboembolism, osteoporosis, or cancer that may result from a lifetime of hormone-doping.

Ironically, “progressives” who oppose trace amounts of hormones in the chicken they consume support the practice of cross-sex hormone-doping for minors for which there is little conclusive assurance of long-term safety. While leftists prefer their free-range chickens to be free of hormonal interference, they’re okay with mad scientists mutilating their bodies and pumping them up with risky chemicals.

The stories of two young women may be the harbingers of more sad revelations to come.

The first story is from Isaac Preiss, the only child of filmmaker Jeff Preiss and painter Rebecca Howe Quaytman, who appears in the Frontline documentary titled Growing Up Trans. Isaac, 19-years-old when the film was made, is objectively female and has followed the entire Dr. Moreau-esque protocol: She took puberty blockers, had a bilateral mastectomy, and continues to take testosterone.  Here are her tragic and insightful words:

I started realizing at around age 16, 17 what a huge, huge decision I had made, to embrace this masculine part of myself so deeply.  Going through an artificial puberty, I didn’t experience the sort of formative time, and I kind of mourn that…[W]e all know puberty is that sort of gross, slimy molding of everybody into a person,  and the way that I went through that was meticulously tested and controlled and dosed….[I]t’s been good, but I wonder what…role [natural puberty] has in a person’s conception of his or her gender. And I can never know that.

None of this is to say I made any…wrong decision or regret transitioning because it was really painful to be presenting as male and not be on testosterone and not have top surgery [i.e., bilateral mastectomy], and my mind was really cleared of that sort of pain after that….But it’s become really clear in recent years that any sort of big problems that I thought I would fix by transitioning weren’t really fixed.

I really don’t like to use the term regret, although it’s kind of hard to speak about how I feel about my gender without there being some element of regret or at least of fear…of what the implications of the choices that I made are. I’m putting a chemical into my body once a week….And there are very, very, very clear effects of that. And I’m assuming that there are also unclear effects. I mean, it is super easy as a kid to hear that these things are irreversible, and be like “Okay, I don’t care….I want it!,”…because you don’t think of time in the same way when you’ve only experienced a tiny, little sliver of it.

…I would like at some point to take a break at least from testosterone because I don’t like to imagine that the entirety of the time that I spend on this earth will be spent…separate from what my body actually is…I don’t really know what it is to be a man…in the body I was born in because I’ve only really been a man in the constructed body, which I enjoy and it’s comfortable, but also it’s not really my body.

How difficult it is to hear this young girl express what the adults in her life should have known about the inability of children to comprehend time and the implications of choosing irreversible chemical and surgical mutilation.

Preiss’s regrets are tepid in comparison to the regrets of Dr. Kathleen Levinstein, a professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan, Flint, who describes the suffering her gender-dysphoric daughter has endured as a result of the “treatment” she has received, including cross-sex hormones and a bilateral mastectomy one day after her 18^th birthday.

In a short interview, Dr. Levinstein describes the rarely discussed correlation between autism spectrum disorder and gender dysphoria. Perhaps this correlation is little discussed because it suggests that gender dysphoria is likely a disorder of the mind—not a chromosomal defect or a defect of the sexual anatomy.

Levinstein also shares the possibility that gender “therapists” might collude with body-mutilating Dr. Moreaus for ill-gotten financial gain.

And she sounds the alarm about the health risks of cross-sex hormones, about the dangers posed by the perverse organization Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), and about how the selfish, cultural ambitions of the “trans” community stand in the way of research, children’s health, and honest public dialogue:

My daughter, who is on the autism spectrum, as am I, is now 19 years old. She had felt (and told others) that she was a lesbian most of her life. When she was 16, she began watching a TV show called “Degrassi,” which featured an FtoM [female to male] character. After a few weeks, she announced that she was not actually a butch lesbian, as she had previously said, but was in fact trans. She started attending a local PFLAG meeting, where she met many trans people, including a number of FtoM trans teenagers who were raving about a certain “gender therapist.” Although the APA recommends a minimum of one year of “gender counseling” before surgery, this gender therapist (whom I consented to, before really understanding what I was doing) gave my daughter the go-ahead to have a bilateral mastectomy after only two sessions. This gender specialist never reviewed any of the Special Ed records or spoke to my daughter’s previous therapist, who had known her for a decade. And, crucially, she never asked my daughter, “Might you be a lesbian?”

The gender therapist (whom I believe has an unholy financial alliance with the surgeon) gave my daughter (then 18 and one day) the go-ahead for the $30,000 surgery (covered for all university employees and their families where I work). My daughter is now on testosterone (which she clearly is unable to evaluate the risks and consequences of).

…

She has been taken advantage of. Healthy organs were amputated. This is insurance fraud, poor clinical practice, a violation of APA standards, unethical and unjust. It is a crime not just against women, but particularly against disabled women. So many of these young women who are “transitioning” are also autistic.

…

You mention that your daughter previously considered herself a lesbian, and this changed when she started watching the TV program “Degrassi.” Was that the only thing that influenced her to claim a trans identity? Was there anything else?

Other than Degrassi, the PFLAG meetings–which are now the cult of trans–sealed her fate. There were no young lesbians there. In fact, there are very few young lesbians left–they are all transitioning….

She had a legal name change in Dec of 2014, a bilateral mastectomy in April 2015, and started testosterone in Sept 2015.  My daughter has severe Crohn’s Disease, and currently, she is having grave reactions to the testosterone. She has been hospitalized three times now for complications.

Many professionals, as well as some autistic people themselves, have written about the fact that young people on the ASD spectrum are often “gender nonconforming” and have a less stable sense of identity. Can you speak to this regarding your daughter?

I DO believe that there is an overlap with the autistic and transgender populations.  Some studies show a higher level of testosterone in autistic human beings. For males a high enough level of testosterone converts to estrogen. This may explain the large number of autistic people of both sexes claiming that they are transgender….

[A]nyone asking for critical thinking about these issues with autistics is accused of ableism and transphobia. This is often an effective silencing tactic. I have found no allies in the autism community. Instead, there is a vilification of anyone daring to ask questions about these issues, including the evidence of MtoF physical, sexual and psychological violence against women. Women who publicly question receive death threats, threats to rape us and our children, burn us to death with gasoline, decapitate us, and so on. This all coming from people who claim they are our “sisters.”

Given that your daughter was recently hospitalized for health issues related to her use of testosterone, have you found any medical professionals who are willing to speak up about this?

I have found no health professionals willing to go on the record against this. Everyone is afraid of professional suicide and threats of violence. I am standing alone.

My daughter’s latest hospitalization has been described by doctors as due to “absorption issues.” She now has a full beard but still has her period. The testosterone is wreaking true havoc on her system.

Autistic women (again, I am one) frequently have a difficult time, sensory-wise with their periods. But rather than attempting to help us with this difficulty, our problems get labeled “gender dysphoria” and the answer has become to remove our periods from us.

We will find out in 20 years the effects of testosterone on our young women. I am confident that it will not be a pretty picture.

Dr. Levinstein is wise to question the eagerness with which many in the medical communities advocate quack chemical and surgical interventions for gender-dysphoric minors. A 2015 Finnish study on gender-dysphoric adolescents reveals some surprising—and for “trans”-activists, inconvenient—results:

Of children with even severe gender dysphoria and cross-sex identification, about 85% do not develop a persistent transsexual identity in adolescence….

…

Adolescence is a period of identity formation….Identity is formed through diverse physical and psychological developments and in relation to other people and the social environment. An adolescent also faces fundamental identity challenges in the domains of religion, worldview, ethnicity, sexuality and the like. Identification with various groups is often passionate during adolescence, but the object of identification may also change, even several times. Adolescents are more suggestible and submit more readily to group pressure to gain acceptance. Adolescence is a period of maturation of social cognition, and a prerequisite for the maturation of social cognition is the maturation of the central nervous system that continues to the third decade of life. During puberty and adolescent development there may be some overlap between normative testing of sexuality and gender roles in the one end, and gender dysphoria [GD] as a disorder in the other end of the spectrum. This would implicate that GD in adults and in adolescence may not be the same issue in general. For these reasons it is more challenging to assess whether the gender identity of an adolescent is so firmly established that physical intervention is indicated than it is to assess this among adults.

In the majority of the applicants, gender dysphoria presented in the context of wider identity confusion, severe psychopathology and considerable challenges in the adolescent development. At this point it is not possible to predict how gender dysphoria in this group will develop: will gender dysphoria in these adolescents cease with the resolution of wider developmental problems, or perhaps consolidate later into transsexual identity, with the completion of the developmental tasks of adolescence.

…

Adolescents seeking sex reassignment [SR] represent a variety of developmental pathways differentiated by the timing of onset of gender dysphoria, psychopathology and developmental difficulties. It is important to be aware of the different groups, or developmental pathways, in gender dysphoric adolescents in order to be able to find appropriate treatment options. In the presence of severe psychopathology and developmental difficulties, medical SR treatments may not be currently advisable. Treatment guidelines need to be reviewed extended [sic] to appreciate the complex situations.

Perhaps this Finnish study will throw a monkey wrench into the barbaric works of leftists. Oh, who am I kidding. Leftists don’t really care about the welfare of minors. For them, everything is political, including children’s health.

Lake Forest, Illinois resident Dianne Casuto in a letter in the Chicago Tribune on Sunday criticized a previous commentary in which Elizabeth Edens expressed concern over the safety to women posed by female-impersonators being allowed in women’s restrooms. Cassuto wrote, “It is inconceivable to me why Edens would feel ‘unsafe’ in a restroom simply because a transsexual or transgender individual is present there as well.”

Let’s clean up the euphemistic language, eliminating the Newspeak and rewriting her sentence more clearly: “It is inconceivable to me why Edens would feel ‘unsafe’ in a restroom simply because a man is present there as well.”

If Casuto is unable to conceive of why women might be concerned for their safety when forced to share restrooms with men, she suffers from a serious imagination deficit.

Why she would place quotation marks around “unsafe” is baffling. “Progressives” feel “unsafe” if they see presidential candidates’ names written in disappearing chalk. They feel “unsafe” at the thought of voluntarily attending a talk by scholar Christina Hoff Sommers. They feel “unsafe” at the thought of a debate on abortion. They feel “unsafe” if Chick-fil-A is on their college campus. So, why are safety concerns about the presence of men in women’s restrooms “inconceivable”?

Leftists, recognizing the importance of language in cultural battles, insist that everyone use their dogma-drenched diction. Those “transgender individuals” about whom Casuto writes who are seeking to use women’s restrooms and locker rooms are actually men.

George Orwell warned about the abuse of language by cultural dictators, a warning that should teach us to resist social pressure to surrender to their imperious commands—while we can:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible….Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever….

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State Representative Greg Harris (D-Chicago) and his leftist accomplices, endlessly involved in trying to subvert truth and reality, have introduced the Birth Certificate Sex Designation bill (HB 6073) to make it easier for men and women who wish they were the opposite sex to obtain falsified birth certificates. Harris’ first chief co-sponsor was Kelly Cassidy (D-Chicago), both of whom are at the forefront of every legislative effort that serves the homosexual community of which they are part.

The absurdity and unscientific nature of the content of HB 6073 reveals the absurdity of the law it seeks to amend. This bill proposes to change a reference in the law from “sex change” to “change of sex designation.”

First, this change implicitly acknowledges the true fact that no one’s sex can change. Second, it demonstrates that birth certificates are being rendered meaningless. Birth certificates were intended as legal documents identifying objective birth facts. Gender-dysphoric men who were male at birth remain male. Gender-dysphoric women who were female at birth remain in perpetuity female. Gender-dysphoric men who were “designated” male at birth remain designated at birth male. Gender-dysphoric women who were “designated” female at birth remain designated at birth female. No amount or degree of legal or rhetorical chicanery can change what they were designated at birth. When liberals in Springfield figure out how to manipulate time, maybe this bill will make sense. Now it’s merely an exercise in nonsensical legislative legerdemain.

This bill changes the requirements for acquiring a new (and falsified) birth certificate. Currently, gender-dysphoric persons must present an “affidavit” from a “physician” confirming that the gender-dysphoric person has had “an operation” to try to conceal their actual sex. The proposed changes would nix the whole “affidavit” requirement, changing it to a bar far easier to climb over. If this bill passes, all that gender-dysphoric persons will need is a “declaration” from any “licensed medical or mental health professional who has treated or evaluated a person stating that the person has undergone treatment that is clinically appropriate for that individual for the purpose of gender transition, based on contemporary medical standards.”

And what kinds of treatments, inquiring minds might be asking, are included in the “clinically appropriate” toolbox for gender-dysphoric individuals? Will a gender-dysphoric person be required to have had surgery to tamper with their private parts? Nope. Will he (I am using the moribund universal “he”) be required to have received or currently be receiving cross-sex hormone treatments? Nope. Will he be required to be receiving psychological counseling for his gender-dysphoria? Nope. All that will be legally required in order to receive a de facto falsified birth certificate is a “declaration” from a licensed mental health professional who states that this person has received some treatment deemed appropriate by contemporary standards established by the dominant mental health organizations that are drenched in “progressive” socio-political dogma. That’s a bar so low and bendy that even a toddler could scramble over it.

Of course, not even surgical mutilation, hormone-blockers, cross-sex hormones, and cross-dressing can change a person’s sex at birth or in adulthood. And none of these anti-treatments (Treatments imply a disorder, and one’s sex is not a disorder) can change what these persons were designated at birth.

This is what our elected representatives waste their time and our taxes on: making it ever easier for gender-dysphoric persons to pretend they are the opposite sex.

Take ACTION:  Click HERE to contact your state representative to ask him/her to uphold births as accurate legal documents.

Ask them to vote NO to HB 6073.

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A couple of months ago, Deerfield High School (DHS) in Deerfield, Illinois quietly changed a multi-stall girls restroom to a co-ed restroom. Worse still the administration has not notified either parents or students. Rumors are circulating that the administration chose secrecy over transparency in order to avoid controversy.

This is not a single-occupancy restroom, nor is it a girls restroom restricted to actual girls and boys who wish they were girls. Rather, it is a co-ed restroom euphemistically called an “All Gender Restroom,” presumably to divert attention from the reality of what the administration has created. They have created a co-ed restroom that girls and boys may use together.

Of course, schools that allow only gender-dysphoric students to use multi-stall opposite-sex restrooms, have in reality created co-ed restrooms too. In reality, it makes no difference if the boy in the girls restroom dislikes his body and cross-dresses or likes his body and dresses normally. In both cases schools are creating de facto co-ed restrooms.

But DHS has gone a step further than most schools have yet dared to go in the steady march to obliterate respect for and recognition of the nature, meaning, and importance of objective, immutable sexual differentiation. DHS has skipped over the interim step of allowing only gender-dysphoric students to share restrooms with opposite-sex peers. No intermediate step for the “progressive” science-denying administration at DHS. All boys and girls may avail themselves of this co-ed restroom.

It should be noted that during the day this restroom is in a remote part of the high school and therefore a more convenient place for a sexual assault. This restroom, however, is located near the pool and gyms, so during public events like swim meets, basketball games, and pep rallies, it is easily available to any and all community members. A high school girl or a younger sister of a high school girl may be in a stall when a strange adult male enters.

A faculty member posed this question to an administrator about the brave new bathroom world in which restrooms and locker rooms are invaded by opposite-sex students: What would happen if a girl student said she didn’t want to share a restroom with a boy. The administrator said the school would make separate accommodations for the girl.

Our hapless neighbors in Alberta, Canada are willing to make similar accommodations for the properly ordered desires of girls who don’t want to shower and use restrooms with those whose sex they don’t share. In the “Guidelines for Best Practices: Creating Learning Environments That Respect Diverse Sexual Orientations, Gender Identities and Gender Expressions,” the Alberta government wrote that “A student who objects to sharing a washroom or change-room with a student who is trans or gender-diverse is offered an alternative facility.”

I told my millennial children (who happen to be DHS alumni) about these bizarre statements. Their first response was incredulity, and then they worked out the absurd implications of such fecklessness. First, one girl will object to using a locker room with a boy and will receive a special accommodation. Next, so many girls will express opposition to using locker rooms with actual boys that schools will have to create restrooms exclusively for actual girls, at which point gender-dysphoric boys will complain that they deeply desire to change and shower with girls, insisting on their “right” to use the new girls-only restroom. And then Leftists will step in to stop all this nonsense, claiming that students have no right to privacy based on objective, immutable biological sex.

Alternatively, parents and their representatives on school boards could insist steadfastly and passionately that restroom and locker room policies and practices recognize and respect immutable sex differences.

Right now Leftists are demanding that schools create de facto co-ed restrooms but will grudgingly permit schools to limit the commingling of sexes to gender-dysphoric students and will grudgingly allow schools to require gender-dysphoric students to use private stalls for excretory functions and changing clothes. But those are merely transitional accommodations.

The next step in their truly wicked effort to “eliminate the binary” will be to demand that gender-dysphoric students be allowed unrestricted access to restrooms, locker rooms, and showers, which is to say, no more requirements that gender-dysphoric students use private stalls for excretory functions, changing, and showering.

Then comes the coup de grace. Leftists will demand that all facilities be open to any sex, including those who are not gender-dysphoric. Once society has allowed objectively male persons unrestricted access to women’s private facilities, there will remain no rational justification for prohibiting non-gender-dysphoric males from using opposite-sex facilities.

Kind readers, if you think this is an absurd line of thinking, you have not been paying attention to how “LGBTQQIAP” activists have been using incrementalism successfully for the past 45 years. These are their pernicious goals, and they count on the ignorance and cowardice of Christians—including church leaders, many of whom refuse to lead. While conservatives cower, stubbornly ignoring warnings, “LBBTQQIAP” activists and their accomplices scurry onward, ten steps ahead and bold as brass.

Worldview Conference with Dr. Wayne Grudem
We are very excited about our second annual Worldview Conference featuring world-renowned theologian Dr. Wayne Grudem on Saturday, February 20, 2016 in Barrington.

Click HERE to register today.  Seating is limited!

In the morning sessions, Dr. Grudem will speak on how biblical values provide the only effective solution to world poverty and about the moral advantages of a free-market economic system. In the afternoon, Dr. Grudem will address why Christians—and especially pastors—should influence government for good as well as tackle the moral and spiritual issues in the 2016 election.

We look forward to this worldview-training and pray it will be a blessing to you.

Click HERE for a flyer.

The Leftist effort to sever objective immutable sex differences from both meaning and cultural recognition and to promote the fiction that one’s sex can change marches on. Within hours of the filing of the Pupil Physical Privacy Act (HB 4474) in Springfield, which would prohibit students in public schools from using restrooms and locker rooms designated for the opposite sex, Equality Illinois, an organization dedicated to the normalization of sexual perversion and confusion, flew into a paroxysm of deceit:.

HB4474…would stigmatize transgender and gender non-conforming youth by requiring them to use separate restrooms and locker rooms.

This bill is an attack on the well-being and dignity of transgender and gender non-conforming students. It says to them that they are not respected and valued in the very spaces where they should be safe and affirmed.

The only fair option is to ensure transgender students have access to the facilities that correspond to their gender identity.

Despite the demagogic rhetoric of Equality Illinois, policies and practices that acknowledge and respect objective, immutable, and important sex differences do not “stigmatize” or “attack the well-being” or “dignity” of gender-dysphoric students. Respect and valuation of humans does not require affirmation of all their feelings, beliefs, desires, or actions. In fact, sometimes respect and valuation of humans includes not affirming some of their feelings, beliefs, desires, or actions. Many would argue that allowing a boy or girl to deny the meaning and import of their sex through cross-dressing, rendering themselves sterile through the use of cross-sex hormones, and mutilating their healthy bodies is profoundly disrespectful—an egregious denial of their dignity.

The Left believes—sort of—that all reality is determined by the subjective feelings and desires of each individual. So a person’s maleness or femaleness is determined by their feelings not by their, well, maleness or femaleness.

But, it’s a horse of a different color, when other people “feel” that maleness and femaleness is inextricably linked to objective, immutable sex, or when they believe that it’s wrong to pretend people are the sex they are not, or that treating others with dignity requires affirming their wholeness. In such cases Leftists, who with alacrity and regularity violate the law of non-contradiction, claim their subjective feelings (and assumptions) should be considered immutable, absolute, objective truth—you know, unlike each person’s sex.

Certainly boys whom parents and schools foolishly permit to cross-dress at school are at risk for bullying in (and out) of restrooms and locker rooms that correspond to their actual sex, which is why the Pupil Privacy Act specifically allows schools to accommodate the disordered desires and behavior of gender-dysphoric students. The bill allows schools to provide single-occupancy facilities to gender-dysphoric students.

What government schools must never be permitted to do is affirm or espouse to students that compassion or respect for gender-dysphoric students requires society to pretend that their desire to be the opposite sex is more important than their actual sex. Government schools must never be permitted to allow students who don’t like their bodies to use opposite-sex restrooms or locker rooms. And government schools must never mandate that faculty, staff, or students lie by using opposite-sex pronouns. When administrators, teachers, and school board members no longer recognize something as fundamental as the immutable reality and meaning of sex differences, schools have lost the ethical right to teach. And people of faith must stop excusing, tolerating, and accommodating such ignorance and immorality.

To my knowledge, Equality Illinois has not explained why restrooms and locker rooms should correspond to students’ feelings about their sex rather than their actual sex. Equality Illinois has not explained why students who are gender dysphoric should not be compelled to use restrooms and locker rooms with those whose “gender identity” they don’t share while non-gender-dysphoric students (i.e., normal students) should be compelled to use restrooms and locker rooms with those whose sex they don’t share.

Conservatives need to be intellectually equipped to respond to the lies used to promote the utterly irrational and destructive effort of Leftists to redefine reality. Conservatives need to commit unwaveringly to speaking and acting in ways that comport with truth, including in even seemingly small things, because it is through acquiescence in seemingly small things that incrementalism changes culture. And they need to prepare to endure the persecution that is upon us.

Teachers in public schools: Tell your administrations that pronouns denote and correspond to objective biological sex, that you cannot lie, and that, therefore, you cannot refer to students by opposite-sex pronouns. Tell them too that you will not use newly coined pronouns (e.g., “zie,” “zim,” “zir”), because they embody false beliefs about sex.

Parents: Tell the teachers of your elementary and middle school-age children that under no circumstances are your children to be exposed to resources or activities that address gender dysphoria. Tell the teachers of your high school students that your children are not to be exposed to any resources or activities that address gender-dysphoria unless equal time is spent with resources that espouse dissenting views on the nature of gender dysphoria and the proper way to address it.

Parents: Teach your middle and high school students about gender dysphoria. Teach them about the immutability and goodness of objective, immutable sex differences. Teach them never to use opposite-sex pronouns when referring to gender-dysphoric persons.

People of faith: Ask your church, synagogue, or mosque leaders to teach on this issue.

Those who out of cowardice are predisposed to accommodation, know this, the Left does not seek merely the “right” of a few gender-dysphoric teens to use private stalls in restrooms and locker rooms. No siree, Leftists seek the “right” of any gender-dysphoric person of any age to have unrestricted access to any opposite-sex restroom, locker room, shower, or dressing room in any context. Leftists will not be satisfied until they have forced all society to treat gender-dysphoric persons as if they are in reality the sex they wish they were.

Leftists will oppose this common-sense bill to protect the privacy, dignity, and safety of students with the vigor, tenacity, demagoguery, and deceit with which they promote efforts to normalize deviance. Conservatives should support it with the same vigor and tenacity but without the demagoguery and deceit. Fortunately, we’ve got reality on our side.

Citizens of Illinois:  Take ACTION:  If your state representative is not yet a co-sponsor of HB 4474, click HERE to urge him or her to sign on.

Worldview Conference with Dr. Wayne Grudem

We are very excited about our second annual Worldview Conference featuring world-renowned theologian Dr. Wayne Grudem on Saturday, February 20, 2016 in Barrington.

Click HERE to register today.  Seating is limited!

In the morning sessions, Dr. Grudem will speak on how biblical values provide the only effective solution to world poverty and about the moral advantages of a free-market economic system. In the afternoon, Dr. Grudem will address why Christians—and especially pastors—should influence government for good as well as tackle the moral and spiritual issues in the 2016 election.

We look forward to this worldview-training and pray it will be a blessing to you.

Click HERE for a flyer.

Surprise, surprise, over the holidays, the anti-cultural coal mine emitted more noxious fumes. Unfortunately, people of faith continue to ignore the canary’s corpse.

Just before Christmas, New York City’s Commission on Human Rights released stunning speech code requirements regarding gender dysphoria that mandate that “employers, landlords, and business owners” lie or be fined up to $250,000.

The introduction to the spanking new “guidance” foreshadows oppressive things to come—everywhere:

 [T]he New York City Commission on Human Rights released new guidance that makes clear what constitutes gender identity and gender expression discrimination under the NYC Human Rights Law, making it one of the strongest in the nation in protecting the rights of transgender and gender non-conforming individuals. Although discrimination based on gender identity and expression has been illegal under the City’s law since 2002, previous guidelines never articulated the range of violations of the law. Today’s guidance provides bold and explicit examples of violations, sending a clear message to employers, landlords, business owners, and the general public what the City considers to be discrimination under the law. (emphasis added)

Lest IFI readers mistakenly think these strong, bold mandates have any connection to compassion or actual rights, here are just two of the violations that will result in hefty fines: 1. It is now a violation of anti-discrimination law to intentionally or repeatedly use correct pronouns rather than the pronouns gender-dysphoric people want others to use. 2. It is now a violation of anti-discrimination law to intentionally or repeatedly use correct titles, like Mr. for an actual man or Ms. for an actual woman.

Just as the unelected, non-lawmaking Office for Civil Rights unilaterally decided that the word “sex” in Title IX includes “gender identity,” the unelected, non-lawmaking NYC Commission on Human Rights unilaterally decided that grammatically correct pronoun-use now constitutes “discrimination.”

Ironically, in an anti-culture awash in obscene language—including in the materials recommended and taught by “teachers” in our middle and high schools—it’s correct pronoun-use that is banned.

With the usual “progressive” hubris and willingness to violate speech rights and religious liberty in their tyrannical quest for ideological submission to their fanciful assumptions about human nature, the NYC Human Rights Commission has decided that pronouns no longer correspond to objective biological sex and those who disagree must be punished. While well-respected theologian John Piper says Christians should not use opposite-sex pronouns when referring to gender-dysphoric persons, the NYC Commission commands them to do so or risk a $250,000 fine. The stakes are getting higher for the inevitable cataclysmic collision between religious liberty and sexual libertinism unmoored from morality and the common good.

The new “guidance” (Does guidance usually come accompanied by draconian punishments?) also requires that all restrooms, locker rooms, and single-sex facilities in “employment, public accommodations, and housing” be open to men who claim to be women. The “guidance” specifically mentions women’s shelters. Apparently, the feelings of men who wish they were women take precedence over the feelings of women and children who have been victimized by men. Lesbian Carmelyn Malalis, who Mayor Bill DeBlasio  appointed commissioner of the NYC Commission on Human Rights, should explain to abused women why it’s okay to allow a man in the shelter bed next to them as long as he dislikes his penis.

It’s interesting to note that the new “guidance” requires employers who provide prostate cancer-screening for actual men to provide it for men who pretend they’re women. How ironic that pretend-women are demanding to be treated in all situations as if they are in reality women—except when it comes to their healthcare. A recent editorial about prescription drug-testing in the Chicago Tribune inadvertently acknowledged the inconvenient truth that men cannot become women or vice versa:

“Every cell has a sex,” Dr. Janine Clayton, director of the NIH’s Office of Research on Women’s Health, told The New York Times. “Each cell is either male or female, and that genetic difference results in different biochemical processes within those cells.”

It is neither discriminatory nor hateful to recognize those differences in drug-testing, health-screening, or grammar.

George Orwell named the dangerous game that “trans-activists” are now playing “Newspeak.” With a surprisingly un-liberal and not so-surprisingly unholy vigor, trans-activists are engaging in precisely the kind of activity about which Orwell warned:

Newspeak was the official language of Oceania, and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of IngSoc, or English Socialism….

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all… a heretical thought…should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever….

[T]he special function of certain Newspeak words… was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them….

[W]ords which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them.

Why do “trans-activists” believe it’s wrong to continue using pronouns in the historical way in which they denote and correspond to objective biological sex? Because it hurts the feelings of body-rejecting men and women who need to have every cultural signifier that suggests the immutable, objective nature and meaning of physical embodiment erased in order to maintain their ontological masquerade. “Trans-activists” feel bad when they encounter actions that indicate a refusal to acquiesce to Leftist “identity” constructs.

But here’s the rub: The identity of orthodox Christians includes both opposition to lying (Ex. 20:16) and affirmation of the goodness and immutability of sexual differentiation (Gen. 5:2). Orthodox Christians “feel bad” when the state requires them to deny their identity in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17).

No one who is committed to truth and human flourishing should acquiesce to demands to refer to men as women and women as men. Though those who suffer from gender dysphoria may desire that everyone participate in their elaborate ruse, doing so is not, in reality, good for them.

The Left elevates subjective feelings over knowledge, wisdom, truth, and reality, arguing that compassion is determined solely by affirming the feelings of others. Well, that’s not precisely accurate. As usual, the Left does not apply their principles consistently. They don’t argue that society ought to affirm the subjective feelings and beliefs of everyone. Rather, diversity-lovin’ Leftists believe society must affirm—or pretend to affirm—only Leftist-approved feelings and beliefs.

If you think this fascist policy will remain limited to New York City or to employers, places of public accommodation, or housing, you’ve been living under a proverbial rock. Those who value libertinism will pound on the doors of churches, private schools and colleges, and radio stations demanding that everyone everywhere adopt the official language of the United States: Newspeak. So, make your commitment about language-use now, or you will yield to language-fascists later.

Worldview Conference with Dr. Wayne Grudem

We are very excited about our second annual Worldview Conference featuring world-renowned theologian Dr. Wayne Grudem on Saturday, February 20, 2016 in Barrington. Click HERE to register today!

In the morning sessions, Dr. Grudem will speak on how biblical values provide the only effective solution to world poverty and about the moral advantages of a free-market economic system. In the afternoon, Dr. Grudem will address why Christians—and especially pastors—should influence government for good as well as tackle the moral and spiritual issues in the 2016 election.

We look forward to this worldview-training and pray it will be a blessing to you.

Click HERE for a flyer.

District 200

It’s not just District 211, the largest high school district in Illinois, that’s allowing gender-dysphoric students to use opposite-sex facilities. Rumors are circulating that gender-dysphoric students, enabled by their deceived parents, are asking school districts all over Illinois for permission to use opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms. School administrations are accommodating these requests (or demands) in diverse ways and doing so without community input, without parental notification, and without establishing policy. One of those districts is District 200, a K-12 district in DuPage County that serves Wheaton, Warrenville, and portions of Carol Stream, West Chicago, and Winfield, which has multiple gender-dysphoric students, at least one of whom—an actual girl—is allowed to use a curtained changing area in the boys’ locker room. This information has been withheld from the public.

Dr. Robert Rammer, assistant superintendent for administrative services, likens restroom and locker room accommodations for gender-dysphoric students to accommodations made for students who have reading problems. He posits the ludicrous claim that if school districts do not share accommodations made for students with reading problems with parents of District 200 students, then there is no reason to share restroom and locker rooms accommodations for gender-dysphoric students with district parents. His comparison works only if no other student is affected in any way by the accommodations made for gender-dysphoric students. But all students are affected by such a practice because it embodies and teaches a number of assumptions about the nature of the relationship between physical embodiment and “gender,” and about how society ought to respond to gender-dsyphoria.

Rammer also stated that the district has no policy regarding gender-dysphoric students. The district’s response depends on the particulars of each case. So, what happens if or when a gender-dysphoric student and his parents demand, as the ACLU demanded for the boy in District 211, that he be permitted unfettered access to the girls’ restrooms and locker room? What will District 200 do, and are there any accommodations of which they think other parents are entitled to be apprised?

Rammer, like many administrators, believes that the presence of stalls in restrooms provides sufficient privacy to justify allowing gender-dysphoric students in opposite-sex restrooms. When asked, “If stalls provide sufficient privacy to justify allowing gender-dysphoric students in opposite sex restrooms, why not make all restrooms co-ed,” Rammer admitted he has no answer. He did, however, acknowledge that the presence of urinals in boys’ restrooms creates a problem that is not present in girls’ restrooms. I guess there remains a line—now measured in micrometers—over which administrators are not quite ready to cross.

Rammer’s acknowledgement about urinal’s constitutes a tacit admission that the District 200 gender-dysphoric girl is not in reality a boy and that physical embodiment (i.e., maleness and femaleness) matters.

Another issue that will eventually arise is the problem of district-wide mandated lying. As all educators know, or should know, pronouns denote and correspond to objective biological sex—not to desires about one’s sex. Therefore, using opposite-sex pronouns to refer to or discuss gender-dysphoric students constitutes not merely a misuse of grammar but lying. When asked if the district requires staff and faculty to use opposite-sex pronouns when referring to gender-dysphoric students, Rammer responded with a definitive “Yes.”

When asked if the administration would make accommodations for faculty members who have either religious objections or non-religious moral objections to lying, he said, “Why would any conscientious teacher want to harm students?” Wow. No discussion of what constitutes harm, no attempt at an argument. Rammer simply assumes that using correct pronouns constitutes harm.

Others, however, believe that facilitating a delusion or unhealthy, disordered desire constitutes harm. And many believe that government employees have no ethical, legal, or constitutional right to require subordinates to lie.

Rammer then posited another absurd comparison, suggesting that a refusal to call a student named “Robert” by the nickname “Bob” is analogous to refusing to refer to a girl as “he.” He believes it’s a sound analogy because in both cases, a student would “feel bad.” This illustrates the feckless thinking that permeates public schools. Many administrators and teachers falsely believe that the subjective feelings of students determine what constitutes harm or benefit. This is, indeed, the fallacious foundation of the toxic environment on college campuses. “Progressive” thinking holds that the subjective feelings of hearers determine the ethical legitimacy of speech—well, the subjective feelings of those groups certified “oppressed” by “progressives.”

Rammer further shared that no teacher has complained about the requirement to participate in a fiction (i.e., to lie). And as everyone knows, since public schools are bastions of free speech, diversity, and “safe spaces” for all, conservative teachers always speak truth to administrators. This is also the near-universal rhetorical ploy of school administrators to silence critics: “Well, by golly, yours is the first complaint I’ve heard.”

Sooner or later a Christian teacher will muster the courage to live with integrity no matter the cost. They will do what theologian John Piper has said Christians should do:

[I]f in the office where we worked, I was compelled to identify every so-called transgendered person by the pronoun they preferred in all of my emails, or conversations…or I would get disciplined…, at that point I would say to my superiors, I cannot treat he’s as she’s and she’s as he’s….I would be lying to call a he a “she.” I am not lying to call a male “Sally.” That is a culturally arbitrary weird fluke. But I am lying if I say about a true Jim who wants to be called Sally, “she.” And it would be contrary to my understanding of sexuality and I would start looking for another job.

Questions for school administrators

Below are questions that every taxpayer should ask their local school administrators, including the administrators of elementary and middle schools, and then they should hightail it to the next school board meeting to request that policy be written mandating that restrooms and locker rooms correspond to objective biological sex. The specificity of the questions is necessary in order to ensure that accurate information is obtained, to make explicit the assumptions embedded in Leftist restroom/locker room practices, and to prevent administrators from obfuscating:

1.) What are your policies and practices with regard to restroom and locker room-usage by gender-dysphoric students?

2.) Do you allow gender-dysphoric students to use multiple-stall, opposite-sex restrooms?

3.) Do you allow gender-dysphoric students to use opposite-sex locker rooms?

4.) If gender-dysphoric students are permitted to use locker rooms, do they have to walk through any area where opposite-sex students may be changing or showering?

5.) If you allow, for example, an objectively male, gender-dysphoric student to use the girls’ restrooms and locker room, on what basis would you prohibit objectively male, non-gender-dysphoric students from using them? If school policy prohibits discrimination based on “gender identity,” wouldn’t the district be violating policy by prohibiting non-gender-dysphoric students from using opposite-sex restrooms?

6.) If gender-dysphoric students shouldn’t have to use restrooms and locker rooms with those whose “gender identity” they don’t share, why should other students be forced to use facilities with those whose sex they don’t share?

7.) If restroom stalls and privacy changing areas are sufficient to force students to use facilities with those whose sex they don’t share, then why aren’t restroom stalls and privacy changing areas sufficient to force a gender-dysphoric student to use facilities with those whose “gender identity” they don’t share?

8.) If restroom stalls and privacy changing areas are sufficient to allow a male student in the girls’ facilities, then why aren’t stalls and privacy changing stations sufficient to allow all male students in the girls’ facilities?

9.) If restroom stalls are sufficient to allow a male student in the restroom, would you also allow all male staff and faculty in the women’s staff and faculty restrooms that are equipped with multiple stalls?

10.) Do you agree that many, perhaps most girls and women prefer not to urinate and defecate in a stall next to an unrelated male doing likewise? Do you find something unnatural or pathological about those feelings? Do you think such feelings deserve to be respected and honored through policy and practice?

11.) Do you think it’s possible that policies and practices that allow gender-dysphoric students to use opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms may be communicating to other boys and girls that their discomfort with sharing facilities with opposite-sex students are wrong, ignorant, bigoted, or lacking in compassion?

12.) Why should girls care whether the boy in the restroom likes his body or not?

13.) If you allow gender-dysphoric students to use opposite-sex restrooms and/or locker rooms, do you notify all parents and guardians that their sons or daughters may be using facilities with opposite-sex students?

14.) How long have you allowed gender-dysphoric students to use opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms?

15.) Do you require staff, faculty, and administrators to use opposite-sex pronouns when talking to or about gender-dysphoric students?

16.) Since pronouns denote and correspond to objective biological sex—not feelings about one’s sex—what if a staff member, teacher, or administrator views using opposite-sex pronouns for gender-dysphoric students as lying, and for moral and/or religious reasons object to lying or deception. Will you accommodate their objections to lying or deception?

17.) Many “trans-activists” argue that “gender identity” is not fixed. What will the school do when faced with a student whose gender identity is “bi-gender” or “genderfluid” and he/she demands to use whichever facilities correspond to his/her gender on any particular day or year?

18.) Liberal sex and gender researchers J. Michael Bailey at Northwestern and Dr. Eric Vilain at UCLA write that 80% of males—who constitute the majority of gender dysphorics—will accept their real sex by adulthood. They claim that “it looks like parental acquiescence leads to persistence.” In other words, if parents accommodate their children’s efforts to pretend to be the opposite sex, their children are more likely to persist in their rejection of their sex. Do you have concerns that by allowing gender-dysphoric students to use opposite-sex facilities, you may be increasing the likelihood that they will persist in their rejection of their sex?

Title IX specifically states that schools have the legal right to maintain separate restrooms, locker rooms, and showers for girls and boys. Further, case law confirms that right. Yet, school administrations are kowtowing to the Left. Evidence for that can be found both in school policies, school practices, and in the language administrators use. When parents and other community members talk to their local administrators, they should pay close attention to their rhetoric. If I were a betting woman, I would bet all my money that school administrators will use Leftist language, including “transgender” and opposite-sex pronouns for gender-dysphoric students.

Take ACTION:  Please email or call your local school administrators pronto. Let’s not be Johnny come-latelies to yet another culture battle. There is too much at stake for children—including gender-dysphoric children who are being harmed by schools that embrace the pernicious sexuality ideology of the Left.

Support IFI

Please consider supporting IFI’s ongoing work to educate, motivate and activate Illinois’ Christian community.  Your donation will help us stand strong in 2016!  To make a credit card donation over the phone, please call the IFI office at (708) 781-9328.  You can also send a gift to:

Illinois Family Institute
P.O. Box 88848
Carol Stream, Illinois 60188

Perhaps I owe an apology to District 211.

While District 211 is guilty of egregiously poor judgment in allowing gender-dysphoric students to use opposite-sex restrooms and in agreeing to allow a gender-dysphoric boy into the girls’ locker room to use private changing areas, perhaps the district was neither incompetent nor dishonest with regard to the statements they made about the agreement with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Perhaps it is the ACLU and the OCR that are incompetent, dishonest, or both. Untangling who’s inept or lying may require Solomonic discernment. All that’s certain at this point is that there’s a tempest raging between District 211 and the devilish OCR.

Superintendent Daniel Cates has issued an angry statement in which he accuses the OCR of negotiating in bad faith and of inaccurately portraying the requirements of the agreement. Further, he demanded a full public retraction, which the OCR has thus far refused to issue. Therefore, Cates has called for an emergency board meeting on Monday night to decide whether the district will pull out of the proposed agreement.

The district is outraged that the OCR publicly claimed that the district is in error in claiming that the boy must use the privacy changing areas, and that the OCR has said this agreement applies to all gender-dysphoric students. The ACLU posted this statement:

We also remain disturbed by the inaccurate, misleading and fundamentally troubling language used by the District, even as they adopt this agreement. For example, the District said last night that transgender students who are provided access to locker rooms consistent with their gender identity “will utilize a private changing station when changing clothes or showering” and will not be allowed unrestricted access to the locker room. This is not what the agreement with OCR provides. The agreement specifically says that “based on Student A’s representation that she will change in private changing stations in the girls’ locker rooms, the District agrees to provide Student A access to locker room facilities designated for female students at school.” Nowhere does the agreement require Student A to use a private area to dress and such a requirement would be blatantly discriminatory. [emphasis added]

Superintendent Cates issued this blistering response on the district website:

On the heels of what was an appropriate and balanced approach to resolving an important issue of access to our locker rooms by one transgender student, we are outraged by the mischaracterizations in the press by Catherine Lhamon of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), and her blatant disregard for the facts of the negotiated agreement.

The OCR appears to be stating to the media what they wish was in the agreement, rather than what was actually agreed upon by both OCR and the District 211 Board of Education – and this, after countless hours of listening, reviewing and careful consideration.

It is wrong, it is an act of bad faith, and our school district will not let it stand.

To be clear, what was agreed upon between District 211 and the OCR struck a critical balance for safeguarding the privacy of all students, recognizing the dignity of all students, and allowing all students to participate fully in our education programs.

The resolution agreement’s provisions on locker room access, approved by our School Board just 36 hours ago, apply ONLY to the student who lodged the complaint. It does not apply district-wide, nor set precedent for other school districts in the country. It gives this student access to the gender-identified locker room with this student’s stated assurance that privacy curtains will be used. And, if this student doesn’t comply, access will no longer be allowed. The agreement also removes the threat of the loss of federal funds and states that no violation of Title IX or discrimination by the District has occurred.

We communicated to the OCR that we expected a full retraction of their inaccurate portrayal of the agreement in the media. They refused. Failing that, we will convene an emergency board meeting to discuss taking action, including retraction of the agreement because the OCR acted in bad faith. Citizens have a right to expect more from a federal agency than smoke and mirrors.

The date, time, and location for the emergency Board of Education meeting will be posted on the District 211 website once it is established.

It is farcical to claim that allowing a boy in the girls’ locker room even to change in “private changing areas” is “appropriate” or “balanced,” but we have to give credit where credit is due: Steadfastly refusing to allow an objectively male student unfettered access to the girls’ locker room is a very good decision on the part of District 211.

All concerned community members should make it a priority to attend the Monday school board meeting and express their view that no students should be permitted access to opposite-sex restrooms or locker rooms. Restrooms and locker rooms should correspond to objective, scientifically-verifiable sex—not subjective feelings about sex.

Support IFI

Please consider supporting IFI’s ongoing work to educate, motivate and activate Illinois’ Christian community.  Your donation will help us stand strong in 2016!  To make a credit card donation over the phone, please call the IFI office at (708) 781-9328.  You can also send a gift to:

Illinois Family Institute
P.O. Box 88848
Carol Stream, Illinois 60188

(Gifts to IFI are tax-deductible.)

ACLU attorney John Knight who represents the gender-dysphoric boy in the lawsuit against District 211 has issued this statement about the agreement reached between the district and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR)—a clarification that should deeply trouble District 211 community members:

We also remain disturbed by the inaccurate, misleading and fundamentally troubling language used by the District, even as they adopt this agreement. For example, the District said last night that transgender students who are provided access to locker rooms consistent with their gender identity “will utilize a private changing station when changing clothes or showering” and will not be allowed unrestricted access to the locker room. This is not what the agreement with OCR provides. The agreement specifically says that “based on Student A’s representation that she will change in private changing stations in the girls’ locker rooms, the District agrees to provide Student A access to locker room facilities designated for female students at school.” Nowhere does the agreement require Student A to use a private area to dress and such a requirement would be blatantly discriminatory. [emphasis added]

According to the ACLU of Illinois, the Office for Civil Rights “clearly stated that our client, like all students, does not have to use a privacy curtain. She may choose to do so, but she is not required to use the privacy curtain under the settlement.”

To my non-attorney eyes, it appears that Knight and the OCR are correct. This is what the agreement actually states:

For the duration of Student A’s enrollment in the District:

1. based on Student A’s representation that she will change in private changing stations in the girls’ locker rooms, the District agrees to provide Student A access to locker room facilities designated for female students at school and to take steps to protect the privacy of its students by installing and maintaining sufficient privacy curtains (private changing stations) within the girls’ locker rooms to accommodate Student A and any students who wish to be assured of privacy while changing;

There is no requirement that the boy use the private changing stations.

Moreover, again according to the ACLU of Illinois, the OCR claims the agreement between District 211 and the OCR “applies to all students, not just our client,” which directly contradicts what the district is claiming in its Frequently Asked Questions:

Will this Resolution Agreement require specific locker room access for all transgender students in District 211?

No. The Resolution Agreement pertains to one student in District 211 — the student who filed the original complaint with the Office for Civil Rights.

Will this Resolution Agreement require specific locker room access for transgender students in all school districts throughout the state and nation?

No. The Resolution Agreement pertains to one student in District 211 and does not extend to other students in District 211 or to other school districts.

District 211 taxpayers should be troubled by either the incompetent lack of understanding by district leaders or their deception.

In another frequently asked question, the district admits that the school which the gender-dysphoric boy attends will not be identified and that no parents will be notified if a gender-dysphoric student will be using a locker room with their sons or daughters.

Hard science-denier John Knight also made this ludicrous and ironic statement:

[T]he District continues to demonstrate a wanton ignorance of the science of gender by persisting in drawing a false distinction between transgender persons’ gender and anatomy. Let me be clear. My client is a girl – full stop.

The District’s refusal to accept transgender students as girls and boys is extremely harmful for all students, but especially those who are transgender. We had hoped the District would embrace this moment as an opportunity to educate itself and its community about what it means to be transgender. Unfortunately, that has not happened.

Precisely what “science” proves that there exists no distinction between gender-dysphoric persons’ “gender and anatomy”? If there were no distinction between their “gender” and anatomy, then gender-dysphoric persons would not be lopping off breasts and penises, shaving down Adam’s apples, adding fake breasts, and taking puberty-blockers and dangerous cross-sex hormones.

Clearly there is a distinction between the gender-dysphoric boy’s anatomy/biology and his “gender” (i.e., his desire about his anatomy/biology). His objective, scientifically verifiable anatomy (and barring the presence of an intersex condition, his DNA) is male. He desires to be female. That, Mr. Knight, is a distinction.

No one is obligated to accept the a-scientific proposition that the descriptor “girl” refers to a psychological condition rather than a biological condition. Mr. Knight’s client is a boy—full stop.

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Against the wishes of the majority of community members who spoke at last night’s District 211 Board of Education meeting, the district capitulated to most of the Office for Civil Rights’ (OCR) demands with regard to the gender-rejecting boy who wants unfettered access to the girls’ locker room.

According to one attendee, approximately 80 percent of attendees who spoke opposed any capitulation to the leftist demands of the OCR, and yet within hours of the meeting’s conclusion, the agreement with the OCR had been posted on the school website, indicating that the “hearing” was merely for show. The Faustian bargain had already been struck and the school board held the charade of a hearing just to placate community members. Community members never really had a voice in the district’s momentous, ignorant, unjust, anti-science, anti-rationality, anti-sex decision.

The only small bit of good news is that the gender-rejecting boy at the center of the controversy still does not have unfettered access to the girls’ locker room. He may enter the locker room at will, but when changing clothes, must use private, curtained areas. Apparently any girls who wish not to be seen unclothed by him must use these areas also.

Now that a boy is allowed in the girls’ locker room, the district will provide what are essentially uber-tiny locker rooms within locker rooms.

Even locker rooms that exist solely to separate boys from girls can no longer separate boys from girls. Nothing, not even reality can stand in the way of feelings of sexuality anarchists.

In addition to forcing girls into privacy stalls if they don’t want to be in the presence of a boy while changing clothes in their own locker room, the district has caved to the almighty and highly politicized federal bureaucrats by agreeing to hire a consultant to make sure their capitulating efforts are sufficiently Leftist.

To ensure that the district’s efforts to pretend this boy is a girl are pleasing to Leftists, it must not only hire a consultant who is practiced at the art of deception but must also report back to the OCR begging for their approval and a forgiving kiss on the brown nose.

According to the agreement, the consultant must be an expert in “transgenderism” and “gendernonconformity,” which means the consultant must embrace Leftist assumptions about “gender identity.” Before the district may hire this consultant, it must be granted permission from the unelected, dictatorial, paternalists at the OCR.

You think my rhetoric is excessive? Well, chew on this excerpt from the agreement:

Reporting Requirement: Within 30 calendar days of the execution of this Agreement, the District will provide OCR with a written summary of the expert consultant it proposes to engage, including that individual’s application and resume and/or documentation concerning the individual’s previous position(s), employer(s) or professional affiliation(s).

The OCR has final approval of the Leftist consultant “nominee,” whose salary must be covered by the district.

Oh, but that’s not all, no that is not all.

Already, unbeknown to community members, the district has allowed gender-rejecting students to use opposite-sex restrooms, play on opposite-sex athletic teams, and change their names and sex on official school forms. This spanking new agreement forged in secret with no community input, however, also requires the following:

• When the district sponsors off-campus activities (e.g., prom), the district must work with the hosting facility to ensure that the gender-rejecting boy has access to opposite-sex facilities in the “least disruptive manner” for him. No mention about the degree of disruptiveness high school girls or the employees of the hosting facility must endure.

• The actual sex (or as Leftists and District 211 call it “assigned sex,” by which they must mean “assigned by DNA”) of the gender-rejecting boy on any school documents must be kept separate from his school records in order to better conceal reality and in order to better deceive others.

• If any other students request additional privacy, the school must make reasonable accommodations. So, if a girl—I mean an actual girl—is uncomfortable changing in one of the uber-tiny, makeshift, curtained “privacy” rooms with a boy changing in the uber-tiny “privacy” room beside her, the school must find another solution, and report all of this to the OCR. Of course, what high school girl is going to risk being called hateful by saying this whole mess makes her uncomfortable? The Left wins by humiliating people into submission.

• If the gender-rejecting boy desires a “support team,” well by golly, he gets an entire support team that must include “at a minimum” the boy, his parents, “an advocate or representative of the parents’ choice (if any), a medical professional of the parents’ choice (if any), and relevant District personnel familiar” with the boy. All details related to the composition of the team and content of the meetings must be reported to Big Brother.

• The district is required to create and submit for approval to Big Brother a new non-discrimination policy, and is required to submit “compliance reports” so that Big Brother can make sure the district is behaving in a sufficiently toady-like fashion.

• The district is required to provide a “detailed description of all gender-based discrimination or harassment complaints or incidents” that occur during the OCR’s “monitoring” period which extends to June 30, 2017.

The ACLU, who represents this tragically confused boy, the OCR, and every other Leftist organization promoting ignorant beliefs about sexuality are also guilty of exploiting children. Lying homosexualists put children on the frontlines of an ugly cultural war against truth and then blame those who speak truth when children are bloodied.

Every board member who voted for this agreement should be voted out come their next election, and the cowardly superintendent should be fired.

While those efforts are underway, parents should seriously consider alternative educational options for their children. Public schools are only going to get worse.

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In a stunning, counter-cultural op-ed appearing in the LA Times and Chicago Tribune, Dr. Eric Vilain, professor of pediatrics and human genetics at UCLA and director of the Center for Gender-Based Biology, and J. Michael Bailey, psychology professor at Northwestern University, warn lawmakers against banning “conversion” therapy for minors who experience gender dysphoria. They argue that attempts by lawmakers to ban “all therapists from helping families trying to alleviate children’s gender dysphoria would be premature, a triumph of ideology over science.”

Further, they take particular aim at President Barack Obama’s public support for “conversion” therapy bans, urging him to “set a better example by pausing at the limits of our knowledge and encouraging scientists to collect the data we need.” They warned that until such knowledge is available, “let’s be careful about telling the well-meaning parents of gender-dysphoric children what to do.”

If Illinois lawmakers—never known for humility about their own knowledge—truly care about children, they will heed the words of these scientists. Illinois state senators should vote “no” on the “conversion” therapy ban (HB 217).

Here is an extended excerpt from Vilain and Bailey’s compelling op-ed (emphasis added):

Since the age of 2, he has been a very different kind of boy. He enjoys wearing his mother’s shoes and his sister’s dresses. He likes to play with girls and hates playing with boys, who are too rough.

Now 5, he has told you that he wants to be a girl. In fact, he insists that he is a girl. Your son isn’t just feminine; he is unhappy being a boy. He has gender dysphoria.

You love him and you want him to be happy. But you’re worried. Some older kids have started to tease him, and some parents have expressed disapproval.

It seems you have two choices. You could insist that he is a boy and try to put an end to behaviors such as cross-dressing and saying that he is a girl. The alternative is to let him be a girl: grow long hair, choose a new name, dress as he (or “she”) pleases, and when it is time, obtain the necessary hormones and surgeries for a female body.

As scientists who study gender and sexuality.…[w]e do know a lot about such boys. This includes some important facts rarely mentioned in the discussion about how they should be raised. We suspect this is because those facts are inconvenient to the narratives that have come to predominate.

Perhaps the most influential account is that gender dysphoric children have the minds and brains of the other sex, adult transgenderism is inevitable, and early transition to the other sex is the only humane option.

But this narrative is clearly wrong in one respect. Gender dysphoric children have not usually become transgender adults. For example, the large majority of gender dysphoric boys studied so far have become young men content to remain male. More than 80% adjusted by adolescence.

Granted, the available research was conducted at a time when parents almost always encouraged their gender dysphoric children to accept their birth sex…

The little data we have indicate that parental acquiescence leads to persistence.

As more and more parents let their gender dysphoric boys live as girls, the percentage of persisters may increase dramatically.

But, again, we don’t yet know whether it’s better to encourage adjustment or persistence.

(We have focused on gender dysphoric boys because their parents have contacted us much more often than parents of similar girls. Moreover, many fewer gender dysphoric girls have been studied scientifically. The same basic facts appear to be true for both sexes, however.)

Let’s take a look at the likely life trajectories of two imagined gender dysphoric boys: David, whose parents insist he stay David, and Max, whose parents allow him to become a girl, changing his name to Maxine.

In the short run, David will experience more psychological pain than Maxine. Adjustment to being a boy necessarily means accepting that he can’t be a girl, something he desperately wants. Still, most gender dysphoric boys have managed the mental transition.

In the long run, Maxine will need serious medical interventions. In late childhood she will need hormones to block puberty; she will then take estrogen for the rest of her life. Eventually, she may want genital surgery. Although this surgery is usually satisfactory, side effects requiring additional surgery are not uncommon.

Each way has obvious advantages and disadvantages. We would prefer to save David the greater pain he will endure during childhood. And we would prefer to save Maxine the serious medical interventions and possible side effects.

…Some professionals who do [conversion therapy to help pre-adolescent children overcome gender dysphoria] have no moral issue with transgenderism but are trying to help children avoid later medical stress. That is a reasonable goal….

The Illinois House of Representatives passed Illinois’ “conversion” therapy ban last week in a shameful display of arrogance and cowardice that epitomizes why Americans hold their elected representatives in disdain.

First, acting as speaker of the house, state representative Lou Lang (D-Skokie)—you know, the 27-year veteran lawmaker whose pockets are lined with filthy lucre from the gaming and marijuana industries—abruptly closed floor debate and called HB 217 for a vote just seconds after the bill’s sponsor, lesbian Kelly Cassidy (D-Chicago), offered her appeal for the bill’s passage.

Second, the only Republican who even attempted to make a comment was Tom Morrison (R-Palatine) who was arrogantly ignored by Lou Lang despite several appeals.

Do Illinois “progressives” not feel even a twinge in their shrinking vestigial consciences that this dubious bill was passed in the House through such ethically icky tactics?

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send an email or a fax to your state senator. Urge him/her to vote against HB 217.  (If you have already sent an email to your state representative, please now send an email to your state senator.)

HB 217 was heard in the Senate Executive Committee last night.  As expected, the bill passed by a vote of  11-4, with Senator Mattie Hunter (D-Chicago) voting present.  Senators Christine Radogno (R-Lemont) and Chris Nybo (R-Hinsdale) voted in favor of this terrible bill.  It now moves to the Senate floor where a vote may come as early as Friday.  Please speak out TODAY!

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The Left believes minors should be able to access medical help in rejecting their unchosen, unwanted physical embodiment but then wants to prohibit minors from accessing medical help in rejecting their unchosen, unwanted same-sex attraction. So, how do “LGBTQIAAP” activists reconcile yet another of their incoherent propositions and ironies? They just make up some novel terms that embody queer (pun intended) ideas.

Every time the incoherence or fallaciousness of their arguments is exposed, they frantically invent a new theory and a new term to advance their irrational agenda. Just keep dangling dazzling neologisms in front of the public’s blurry eyes and they won’t notice the idiocy and perversion that is destroying the lives of children while serving the desires of adults.

For example, the Left invented the politically useful term “gender identity,” which is the sex with which one identifies and with which one is supposedly born. In this queer ontological universe “gender identity” has no intrinsic relation to physical embodiment. So, sometimes one’s “gender identity” accidentally aligns with physical embodiment, and sometimes it doesn’t. When people’s “gender identity” and physical embodiment align, they are deemed “cisgender”—yes, another novel rhetorical construction that embodies very queer ideas.

In a more rational, less cowardly culture, we would just say that “gender identity” denotes the disordered desire to be the opposite sex. We would call it gender confusion or Gender Identity Disorder or Gender Dysphoria. Oh, wait, we tried that, but it didn’t serve the desires and social and political goals of the gender confused among us.

So moving on, if your “gender identity” does not align with your objective biological sex, you are not cisgender or a ciswoman or a cisman, you are transgender, a trans-man (that is, an actual woman) or a trans-woman (that is, an actual man).  In this new queer vernacular I, for example, am a ciswoman. Bruce Jenner is trans-woman.

Now stay with me.

When Leftists argue that minors should be able to access medical help in rejecting their physical embodiment, they won’t state it exactly like that, because that would expose their hypocrisy and incoherence. Instead, they employ their novel terms to explain their queer ideology. They will say trans-minors are not seeking to change anything. They’re seeking to “align” their bodies with their inherent, immutable “gender identity,” which is either a trans-man (that is, an actual woman) or trans-woman (that is, an actual man). And when trans-people have healthy body parts amputated, they’re no longer having either “sex change surgery” or  “sex reassignment surgery.” They’re now having “gender confirmation surgery.” This new term diverts the public’s attention from the truth that no one can change his or her sex. And it serves to reinforce the belief that subjective feelings are the ultimate arbiter of reality. In the Gnostic world of trans-activism, healthy, objective, material bodies must submit.

Well, two can play this foolish game.

Oh, and just to forewarn you, there are two other novel terms embodying queer ideas peeking over the rainbow-hued horizon: GSM and GSRM. GSM means Gender and Sexual Minorities, and GSRM means Gender, Sexual and Romantic Minorities. The Left needed to invent these because they were being mocked for the silliness of LGBTQIAAP.  You gotta give it to the Left. They are a rhetorically nimble and imaginative bunch.

Right now, liberals in Springfield do not have the votes to pass HB 217–the anti-autonomy, anti-choice Reparative Therapy Prohibition Act–even though they control both houses of the legislature. The lack of support for this bill is something liberals and their water-carriers in the mainstream press don’t share with the public.

But “LGBTQIAAP” activists are working like trans-madmen to garner support for this bill. Illinoisans need to match and exceed their fervor and tenacity in order to retain the right of minors to access medical help in aligning their unchosen, unwanted sexual desires with their inherent, immutable “sexual orientation identities” or in constructing identities that do not affirm unchosen, unwanted same-sex attraction.

TAKE ACTION: CLICK HERE to contact your state representative and state senator urge them to protect the rights of minors to seek help for their unwanted attractions. Urge a “No” vote on HB 217 and SB 111.

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“Islam in America: A Christian Perspective”
with Dr. Erwin Lutzer

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