Looking over a list of Christian conferences coming up in 2023 I ran across one that states it is for: “LGBTQ+ Christians who have committed to celibacy as a personal call in their spiritual journeys.”

Here are some of the bios of the speakers:

“(Speaker A) identifies as cis/gay/queer and is the mom of a grown son from a 25-year mixed-orientation marriage.”

“(Speaker B, He/Him) is passionate about the intersection of faith, sexuality, and… facilitates conversations among Christian sexual and gender minorities.”

“(Rev. Speaker C, she/her) is…an outspoken advocate for youth ministry and social justice, (she/her) has worked as a youth leader, Children, Youth and Family Pastor, (has used) theatrical and improvisational elements in services but also to respond to God as a worship light and (has been)…a drag king, and occasional amateur DJ.”

“(Speaker D) was raised in a Christian home that was heavily involved in addiction recovery ministries. While leading in a large evangelical campus fellowship her first two years of college, (she) had a crisis of faith and ultimately joined a new group specifically created for Queer people of faith on campus. Attending (this same conference) in 2019 was a huge turning point for her, where she felt able to fully embrace her identity. She has gone through a long period of deconstructing her faith and continues to ponder the liberating potential of faith. She frames Jesus as her earliest example of what a revolutionary can look like.”

It goes on.

Where the Battle Fiercely Rages

This issue reminds me of the following quote:

“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christianity.  Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides is mere flight and disgrace to him, if he flinches at that one point.” — A follower of Martin Luther, 2 April 1526, quoted in Chronicles of the Schönberg-Cotta Family (New York, 1865), page 321.

The front-line of the battle in Evangelicalism today is that of sexual ethics: Marriage, divorce, remarriage, fornication, adultery, pornography, abortion, same-sex attraction, “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” “gender fluidity,” “non-binary,” “non-conforming,” transgender, and of course, the entire alphabet soup of titles and “preferred gender pronouns.”

In 2014, the liberal Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) published an article promoting the acceptance of “gay” as a category for Christians but offering the suggestion of celibacy for those who are not “married.” The United Methodist Church (UMC) also led with this path.

Christian colleges and university are also impacted by this movement. For instance, Calvin University (a school in Grand Rapids, MI that is connected to the Dutch Reformed tradition) has (in 2022) denounced premarital sex and defined marriage as between a man and a woman, however it still allows a support group for LGBTQ students on campus. In the 2020-21 academic year, the school allowed a bisexual student to be elected as student body president.

Matthew Vines, a self-identified “gay” man, and a Presbyterian authored the popular book God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships. Vines promotes celibacy outside of marriage but believes “gay Christians” have a theological case for same-sex marriage.

He has helped to shift the nature of the dialogue on this issue among Evangelicals. He says, “It’s a subtle but significant shift. (People are now) saying, ‘There’s nothing wrong with being gay in and of itself,’ and that is a big change.”

Moving the Goalpost

It is believed by many activists that the way to normalize all LGBTQIA+ issues is to take the path of least resistance with Evangelicals. If you claim to be celibate or “non-practicing,” then everyone drops their guard and chills out. Pragmatically, their theory seems to work. This approach has been repeatedly attempted in the more conservative Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) denomination, who so far has withstood the acceptance of those into positions of leadership who self-identify as “gay Christian,” “homosexual Christian,” or even “same-sex attracted Christian.” Even some Southern Baptists are moving in this direction. Some of their top seminary faculty have spoken at conferences that affirm the acceptance of “identity” as long as the individuals are non-practicing.

The Law of Identity

Many LGBTQIA+ advocates claim Jesus never taught on the matter, and they infer from this that He must have approved of such ideas. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Jesus said, regarding sexuality:

“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So, they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matt. 19:4-6, ESV).

The first law of formal logic is “The Law of Identity.” This very basic law asserts that “whatever a thing is, it is.” This kind of thesis also presents a “Classical Negation.” If something is true, the opposite is false (the Law of Non-Contradiction), and truth cannot in this sense be both true AND false (the Law of the Excluded Middle). So, when Jesus says there are two sexual categories of humans (male and female) in the original creation, He is describing a Universal Elimination all other possibilities.

A New Identity

One of the churches the Apostle Paul founded in the middle of the first century had many of the same sexual problems that exist in America today. Rather than teaching them to see themselves as “Christian swindlers” “Christian adulterers,” or such, Paul emphasized their rebirth and new identity in Christ.

“Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:9-11, ESV, emphasis added).

Paul encouraged them to identify their past sins and struggles but to look forward, not back. You will never overcome a sin or habit that you believe you ARE. If something defines your very existence, you will never move past it because it controls you. You may be a male or female who struggles with same-sex attraction (or illicit heterosexual attraction), but rather than defining yourself by a temptation, you should not only abstain from sin, but pursue righteousness instead.

“We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin” (Rom. 6:6).

This issue of identity is not just a side issue. It is the dam that holds back the floodgates of immorality in the Church. If you ARE something other than God says He made you to be, that makes Him out to be a liar. That makes humans, not God, the arbiters and definers of sexuality. The original argument in the garden from that serpent was, “Hath God REALLY said?” That is the enemy’s same approach today. God did not make anyone “gay” or “transgender.” He made them male and female. Sin has made them all these other things by which they self-identify. The solution is the same one the Church has been preaching for 2,000 years: The gospel of Jesus Christ that forgives sin and changes sinners.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is a man for such a time as this. He has a titanium spine, a precisely tuned moral compass, and an intellect that makes him a worthy foe of leftist sophists and dissemblers in the legacy media. His tenacious willingness to challenge destructive ideas through word and deed terrifies and enrages leftists who fear he may one day be president of the United States. Their response to truth and courage is—as usual—lies and epithets.

The latest act of DeSantis to cause conniptions among the brittle leftist masses was his signing a bill into law to protect the parental rights of children, focusing primarily on ages 5-9. This is the summary of the “Parental Rights in Education” law that leftists have deceitfully renamed the “Don’t Say Gay” law:

Requires district school boards to adopt procedures that comport with certain provisions of law for notifying student’s parent of specified information; requires such procedures to reinforce fundamental right of parents to make decisions regarding upbringing & control of their children; prohibits school district from adopting procedures or student support forms that prohibit school district personnel from notifying parent about specified information or that encourage student to withhold from parent such information; prohibits school district personnel from discouraging or prohibiting parental notification & involvement in critical decisions affecting student’s mental, emotional, or physical well-being; [and] prohibits classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in certain grade levels [K-3].

This new law is intended to stop or prevent leftist activists/re-educators from interfering in the relationship between parents and their children.

In addition to prohibiting classroom discussions of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” in kindergarten through third grade, the law also prohibits age or developmentally inappropriate discussions of those topics in older grades. This section of the law really enrages the worker bees who want to use their publicly subsidized jobs to gather the minds of other people’s children into the regressive hive mind. Leftists are buzzing cacophonously because in Florida they will no longer be free to colonize the minds of young children.

The Walt Disney Company released a statement condemning the law and declaring war on all Floridians whose elected representatives passed it, saying,

Our goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts, and we remain committed to supporting the national and state organizations working to achieve that. 

So, Disney—purveyor of “entertainment” for young children—wants to ensure the indoctrination of young children in government schools.

If huge corporations with bulging bank accounts can repeal duly enacted state laws, are we any longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people?

Ryan Thoreson writing for the leftist Human Rights Watch bemoans the requirement that in grades 4-12, discussions of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” must be “age appropriate.” He ironically complains,

[The law] does not specify what would be considered age-appropriate, or who decides.

This complaint is ironic in that leftists continually assert that every piece of deviant and obscene material to which they expose children is “age” and “developmentally appropriate.” And they rarely if ever specify what would be considered age-appropriate and who decides.

As I have urged for over a decade, parents should be asking those questions and demanding specificity in the answers. If schools say an external organization established the criteria used to determine age and developmental- appropriateness, parents should ask for the name of the organization. Parents should find out whether the organization has an ideological bias or if its members are evenly balanced between “progressive” and conservative views. And parents should demand to know what the specific criteria are.

If an in-district committee was formed to establish criteria for determining appropriateness of material, parents should ask who specifically formed it and how was it formed? What are the names of the members? Is the committee evenly balanced between “progressive” and conservative members? What are the specific criteria used to determine the appropriateness of material?

Thoreson, like countless other sexual deviance advocates, frets that school staff will no longer be free to keep secrets from parents:

It would significantly limit the ability of counselors and teachers to be a confidential resource for students, including LGBT students who may not feel safe or comfortable asking questions about sexual orientation or gender identity to family members. 

It is astonishing that any faculty members or administrators ever arrogated to themselves the right to keep secrets from parents.

Take a look at the contrast between “progressive” and conservative beliefs pertaining to sexuality. You decide which set of beliefs are taught and promoted in public schools and which are banned:

• Leftists believe there is no child too young to expose to ontological and moral beliefs about “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” and that public school teachers should do the exposing. Conservatives believe that children ages 5-9 are too young to expose to complex ideas about homosexuality and gender dysphoria and that parents—not teachers—should be addressing these issues or not with their own young children.

• Leftists think conservative views make people “unsafe,” by which they mean uncomfortable. Conservatives think leftist beliefs lead to suffering.

• Leftists believe that homosexuality is analogous to race, while never identifying any points of correspondence between homoerotic desire per se and race/skin color per se. In contrast, conservatives believe homosexuality is analogous to other phenomena constituted by disordered erotic desires and volitional acts, like close-kin “love,” polyamory, and zoophilia.

• Leftists believe that homoerotic acts are as morally acceptable as heterosexual acts. Conservatives believe homoerotic acts are intrinsically immoral.

• Leftists believe any numerical and sexual configuration of parental relationships are equally respectable and equally good for children. Conservatives believe that homosexual (and poly) family structures harm children and society.

• Leftists believe the desire to be the opposite sex is a good and properly ordered desire and that chemically and surgically altering one’s body to appear to be the opposite sex are ethically justifiable acts. Conservatives believe such desires are disordered and that such acts are exercises in futility that deny reality and jeopardize physical, emotional, and mental health.

• Leftists believe that if there is a mismatch between one’s thoughts/desires about one’s maleness or femaleness and one’s healthy properly functioning body, the error is in the body. Conservatives believe the error is in the mind.

Leftists are not angry that discussions of homoeroticism and gender dysphoria can no longer take place in K-3 classrooms in Florida. Leftists have long supported censorship of conservative views of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” in the classroom.

Rather, devotees of diversity, equity, and inclusion are angry that their assumptions about “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” can no longer be promoted in early elementary school.

Leftists defend their de facto censorship of conservative views of homoerotic acts and cross-sex identification by claiming that such views are signs of conservative hatred of persons. But the belief that conservatives hate those who identify as “LGBTQ” is a leftist, socially constructed and imposed belief. Most people are fully capable of loving those who hold different beliefs and who live in accordance with those beliefs. Most people do that every day. It is leftists who hate those who hold different beliefs and make life choices consistent with those beliefs.

What conservatives hate is leftists using government schools to impose their beliefs on the children of conservatives. Governor DeSantis and Florida lawmakers hope to stop the scourge of leftists using schools and taxpayer funds to ideologically groom other people’s children.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/DeSantis-Leads.mp3

Once upon a time, I held a naïve hope that public education could be pried loose from the grimy grip of self-righteous, presumptuous, intolerant, diversity-loathing, idea-banning, illiberal bullying leftists fluent in Newspeak. That was then. This is now.

Now I know that is not possible—at least not in time to educate properly children who are currently in school or soon-to-be in school. There are good signs that a movement is afoot to challenge the MAN—who now is a homosexual, drag queen who uses the pronouns fae, faer, faers, and faerself.

A few communities are battling to replace their partisan/activist school boards. There is growing vocal opposition to the promotion of critical race theory-derived assumptions, gender theory, and obscene material. And a few state legislatures are banning cross-dressing boys from participation in girls’ sports.

While these are significant developments, even if successful, they are but a pea shot into an ossified, systemically biased, massive infrastructure composed of leftist controlled school administrations, school boards, state boards of education, state legislatures and ancillary leftist controlled organizations like teachers’ unions; the American Library Association; the Modern Language Association; the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, the Illinois “Safe” Schools Alliance, and all the organizations that profit from selling their racist “anti-racism” and pro-homosexual, pro-“trans”-cultic snake oil to public schools—all in the purported service of “safety” and “inclusion.”

Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that in recent years, Illinois’ ideologically non-diverse General Assembly has passed several laws requiring taxpayer-funded schools to preach leftist assumptions about “gender” and sexuality starting in kindergarten and to indoctrinate faculty with those same assumptions through “professional development.”

Here are articles about three bills that passed requiring leftist indoctrination in public schools:

Leftist Public School Indoctrination Bill Moving Forward in Springfield

Another K-12 School Indoctrination Bill Coming Through the Illinois Sewage Pipeline

Leftist State Board of Ed and Lawmakers Collude to Indoctrinate Illinois Students

It’s not just Illinois, the Land of Illiberalism that’s corrupting public education. What’s taking place just over the border in Wisconsin illustrates the presumptuousness of public servants in indoctrination camps that self-identify as “schools.”

Last month, Empower Wisconsin exposed a bit of what an Eu Clair Area School District (ECASD) in Eu Claire, Wisconsin imposed on all staff and faculty during their Feb. 25, 2022 “Equity Professional Development” on “Safe Spaces.” (Is there any word more abused by leftists than “safety”?) A slide presentation included this galling statement:

Remember, parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities. That knowledge must be earned.

Who put leftists in charge of what parents are entitled to know about their own children? Who gave leftists the moral authority to conclude that parents must earn the right to know their children’s “identities”?

That claim is brazen and presumptuous. For those who have worked in public schools or studied closely what’s been taking place incrementally over the past three decades, such a claim is not, however, surprising. And it’s widely shared by leftists in schools across the country.

The Federalist reported that Superintendent Michael Johnson justified this violation of parental trust by saying he wants to create an “equitable, safe and inclusive” place “for all students.” Further, Johnson said,

Our staff often find themselves in positions of trust with our students. The staff development presentation shared extensive data and information to assist our staff members in our ongoing efforts to create a safe and supportive learning environment for all students. … The ECASD prides itself on being a school district that makes all students feel welcome and safe in our schools.

Does being in a position of trust require staff members to affirm all identities? Does it require concealment of all identities or just the ones staff members have concluded are good, healthy, and morally acceptable?

If staff members found themselves in positions of trust with students who identified as zoophiles, sibling lovers, or polyamorists, would parents have to earn the right to that information?

Are Johnson et al. concerned about cultivating the trust of parents or about making all parents feel welcome and included?

Johnson asserted that “the staff training focused on data showing students who identify as non-heterosexual have a higher incidence rate of mental health issues than heterosexual students.” Did Johnson and his buddies look at long term health risks from “transitioning”?

Did they examine material suggesting that gender dysphoria—like depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation—may be a symptom of some other underlying condition or caused by trauma?

Did Johnson and his propaganda collaborators look at the data and information regarding detransitioning?

Have Johnson and his ideological compeers researched deeply the issue of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria—a social contagion that is resulting in explosive growth in the number of adolescent girls suddenly deciding they’re boys—a heretofore nonexistent phenomenon?

Every organization leftists cite to justify their efforts to promote their views of “gender” and sexuality in schools are controlled by leftists. And every statistic and tidbit of “information” leftists cite to justify their efforts is arguable. But no debate is permitted by ideological tyrants who presume their subjective assumptions are inarguable objective facts.

I will conclude with this call from philosopher, theologian, and Princeton law professor Robert P. George a year ago–a call that’s even more urgent today:

If you have kids in public schools in New Jersey or a state that has similar laws mandating the indoctrination of children in public schools on matters of sexuality, and if you do not believe in the “Woke” ideology into which your kids are being indoctrinated, I urge you in the strongest possible terms to get your children out of those schools. The indoctrination literally begins in Kindergarten and First Grade.

The state-run schools in New Jersey and elsewhere now reflect the adoption by the State of an established religion. It is not a traditional religion, and it is not theistic, but it is a religion nonetheless–a system of ideas embodying a particular view of human nature, the human good, human dignity, and what is most important (“sacred”). The public schools are as “religious” today as they were at the beginning when they reflected the Protestant Christianity that was dominant when public education began in the U.S. in the 1830s. The difference is that Protestant Christianity has been replaced by secular progressive ideology.

If secular progressive ideology is not your family’s religion, your kids don’t belong in schools dedicated to promoting it–and to indoctrinating children in it. Your kids should be brought up in your own faith. Allowing them to be educated in a set of dogmas that are antithetical to your own beliefs simply makes no sense.

Get them out.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/If-You-Care-About-Children-and-Americas-Future-Keep-Your-Kids-Out-of-Public-Schools.mp3

To be clear from the outset of this article, when I refer to the evil of “trans”-cultism, I am referring to its beliefs and practices—not to people suffering from gender dysphoria or confused by the cultural lies they encounter daily.

Everyone is harmed by “trans”-cultic beliefs and practices—girls, women, boys, and men. Those in bondage to the cult and those outside of the cult are harmed. Adults in bondage to confusion and sexual fetishes are eradicating all sex-segregated private spaces; undermining First Amendment protections of assembly, speech, and religious free exercise; corrupting every cultural institution, including education, medicine, religion, sports, and the arts; putting girls and women at risk of assault by men who pretend to be “trans”; and sowing confusion among children, teens, and young adults.

As with all forms of evil, the most vulnerable—those least able to protect themselves—suffer most. The “trans”-cult allied with a host of profiteers, including semi-celebrity butchers who self-identify as doctors, are experimenting on the bodies of children and young adults with ghastly, barbaric results. No one should avert their gaze from the evidence of this butchery.

Surgeons like Florida’s Dr. Giancarlo McEvenue make big bucks using their skills to disfigure confused, suffering young women, like this young woman:

Here’s the shameless, narcissist Dr. McEvenue gleefully posing for photos with the ghastly evidence of his crime:

For young women, these surgical snake-oil profiteers lop off healthy breasts; remove vaginas, uteruses, and ovaries. They fashion fake penises—also called “phalloplasty”—out of skin peeled off the forearms, thighs, or backs of young women, which leaves permanent sizable scars. These “neo-penises” will never function sexually without mechanical aids.

“Trans”-positive Genderkit UK includes this warning:

Phalloplasty is a complex surgical procedure with significant risks that you must understand before it is carried out. Phalloplasty usually causes significant scarring due to skin grafting (usually on the lower arm). Complications are also common in this operation, particularly problems with urinating which may require surgical correction, including urethral strictures and fistulae (urethra closing up so you cannot urinate). 

These Mengelian butchers castrate young men, using scrotums to create fake vulvas, and scooping the inside tissue out of penises which they turn inside out to create fake vaginas through a new opening they dig out between rectums and urethras. Male bodies will forever view these openings as the wounds they are and try to close them up, so men must manually open them through the weekly insertion of silicone dilators.

Surgeons have another option for the creation of a fake vagina. They can go in through the abdomen and pull some of the abdominal lining down through the new hole they have excavated between rectum and urethra, thereby creating a fake vagina with intestinal lining.

Oh, but they’re not done. As it turns out, men’s and women’s bodies are very different. So, surgeons remodel men’s chests, chins, Adam’s apples, vocal cords, foreheads, and facial orbital bones in a quest to create believable flesh and bone costumes that can deceive women whose private spaces they hope to invade and even potential romantic partners.

In days gone by, these mutilating surgeries were called “sex change” surgeries, but then “trans”-cultists were forced to acknowledge that a person’s sex can never change. So, like all propagandists, they reached deep into their magic sophistry hat and pulled out “gender confirmation” surgery.

But now there’s a new problem. “Trans”-cultists have been claiming that “gender” is wholly distinct from biological sex. In Transtopia, “gender” is the aggregate of arbitrary socially constructed and imposed roles, conventions, behaviors, and expectations associated with males or females. So, how can surgeons confirm “gender”? Does lopping off healthy, properly functioning body parts confirm arbitrary, socially constructed and imposed conventions? And if those conventions are arbitrary, socially constructed and oppressively imposed, why would surgeons want to confirm such oppression?

Perhaps by “gender confirmation,” our ontological tricksters mean “gender identity confirmation.” “Gender identity” is the rhetorical cloak thrown over the disordered subjective desire to be or delusional belief that one is the sex one is not—disordered desires or delusional beliefs often shaped by external forces, like trauma and social media. No matter the cause, should surgeons use mutilating surgeries as a treatment for disordered desires or delusional beliefs?

Those with a condition called Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) experience incongruity between their subjective, internal sense of themselves as amputees and their objectively whole bodies. Some even engage in self-harm to rid themselves of the body part they detest. In a Healthline article on BIID, well-known bioethicist Arthur Caplan says,

“I think doctors and psychologists cannot set up to maim somebody or harm them. You’ve got to try to get them to treatment, I don’t care whether they appear competent or not,” he said.

A doctor who carried out a theoretically unnecessary amputation in order to prevent his or her patient from doing it themselves with potentially fatal results would fall outside of the widely accepted scope of medically ethical practice, Caplan said.

“There are a lot of conditions like anorexia where there’s a core of people who just don’t respond [to treatment],” he said “You don’t give up, you keep trying. That’s all you can do. You don’t indulge it.”

And yet an entire lucrative “trans” industrial complex has emerged composed of all sorts of morally deficient collaborators to indulge the disordered desires of cross-sex identifying persons.

Surgeons, endocrinologists, pharmaceutical companies that sell puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones, hospitals with “gender” clinics, academicians who research and promote “trans”-cultic beliefs and practices, counselors, diversity and inclusion “educators,” and entrepreneurs who make accessories to enable girls and boys to conceal their sexual anatomy all profit handsomely from “trans”-cultism and, therefore, are incentivized to keep bodily confusion and  despair alive.

It is unlikely that this “trans” scourge will end soon. Not only are countless men and women profiting from harming young people, but sexual deviants with billions of dollars are promoting the “trans” movement. As they pursue their unholy quest to “trans”-form America, their venomous tentacles reach deeply into medicine, academia, and politics.

Organizations like the Tawani Foundation founded by “Jennifer” Pritzker—a man who pretends to be a woman—the Arcus Foundation founded by homosexual Jon Stryker; and the Gill Foundation, founded by homosexual Tim Gill are using their buckets of ducats to promote the morally disordered and intellectually incoherent “trans” ideology.

The “LGBTQ” activist organization, the Human Rights Campaign, estimates that there are now over 50 clinical “care” programs in the United States for “gender-expansive children and adolescents.” Young women and men who can’t afford disfiguring surgeries can apply for grants or beg for money via GoFundMe. There is no shortage of people who will pay to disfigure others in the service of an alchemical superstition.

And some say Satan isn’t real🙄.

Every conservative and every theologically orthodox Christian must come to grips with “trans”-cultism. It is an evil in our midst that is harming everyone, and many Christians are failing to respond as Christ-followers should. Reasons for that failure are confusion, cowardice, and lack of information. Many Christians do not know enough to grasp fully how evil and destructive the “trans”-cult is. I hope this article may in some small way contribute to the awakening that must happen.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Butchering-Bodies-of-Suffering-Young-People.mp3

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The radical “Equality” Act—the pet project of sex-eradicationists (also known as “trans”-cultists)—is now in the U.S. Senate. The act would force the federal government to treat the nonsensical notion that spirit humans can be “trapped” in the wrong material bodies as if those disordered feelings constitute a reality equivalent to biological sex and one about which no one may make judgments. In other words, the Equality Act would enshrine in federal law a Gnostic superstition.

In addition, when the purported rights of cross-sex impersonators clash with First Amendment protection of the free exercise of religion, the Equality Act says cross-sex impersonation wins. Buh-bye Christian colleges whose students get federal aid. Buh-bye Christian adoption agencies that partner with the government. Buh-bye religious liberty. It was nice knowing you these past glorious 230 years.

If passed, “trans”-cultists will be well over halfway to their goal of eradicating all public recognition of biological sex. There are many reasons we have arrived at this insane, reality-denying, wrong-side-of-history moment, including the fact that citizens are not demanding their elected leaders dialogue on and debate the sandy foundation on which the “trans” cult is built. In the hope that sane people on the political right and left will start demanding such conversations, here is a list of questions that every lawmaker, school administrator, and school board member should have to answer:

1.) If sex and “gender” are two wholly different and unrelated things, with sex being an immutable objective phenomenon and “gender” being a subjective, internal, and sometimes fluid phenomenon, why should restrooms, locker rooms, shelters, prisons, nursing home rooms, and semi-private hospital rooms correspond to “gender identity” as opposed to biological sex which is both objective and stable?

2.) Why is it legitimate for girls to oppose sharing restrooms and locker rooms with objectively male peers who accept their sex (what the left calls “cisgender” boys) but not legitimate for girls to oppose sharing restrooms and locker rooms with objectively male peers who reject their sex? Why should a boy’s subjective feelings about his objective sex affect girls’ feelings or beliefs about undressing or going to the bathroom in front of or near him?

3.) Either biological sex has meaning relative to feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy when undressing or engaging in intimate personal acts, or it has no meaning relative to modesty and privacy. If biological sex has no meaning relative to modesty and privacy, why do we have any sex-segregated restrooms or locker rooms anywhere? Why not make all of them co-ed for everyone? If, however, the desire of humans to be segregated from unrelated persons of the opposite sex when undressing, showering, or going to the bathroom is natural, understandable, reasonable, and good, why should some opposite-sex persons be allowed to violate those spaces just because they don’t like their sex?

4.) If cross-sex identifying students should not be required to use restrooms and locker rooms with those whose “gender identity” they don’t share, why should other students be required to use facilities with those whose sex they don’t share? Why should gender-dysphoric boys (or men) be able to use restrooms with only women, but actual biological females are prohibited from being able to use restrooms with only women?

5,) If anatomy is irrelevant to both “gender identity” and privacy, should boys who identify as girls be allowed to shower with objectively female peers or undress in open areas of girls’ locker rooms? If not, why not? If it’s unjustly discriminatory to prohibit gender-dysphoric boys from using girls’ locker rooms—as leftists claim it is–then is it unjustly discriminatory to prohibit gender-dysphoric boys from showering with girls or changing out in the open in girls’ locker rooms as some schools do?

6.) Female teachers and coaches are allowed in girls’ restrooms and locker rooms. Should objectively male teachers and coaches who “identify” as female be allowed in girls’ restrooms and locker rooms as well? If not, why not?

7.) Will school administrations allow those who identify as gender-fluid to choose daily which restrooms and locker rooms they will use? If not, why not?

8.) Should other subjective, internal feelings be reflected in policy and practice? For example, should those who identify as amputees (i.e., those with Body Integrity Identity Disorder) be allowed to use wheelchairs and handicapped parking spots at school? Should they be allowed to leave class early to have more time to get from one class to another?

9.) Is it unnatural or pathological for girls or boys to object to engaging in excretory functions in a stall next to an unrelated person of the opposite sex doing likewise? If not, should schools respect and honor those feelings through policy that prohibits co-ed restrooms?

10.) Those who identify as “trans” claim their biological sex as revealed in anatomy is unrelated and irrelevant to their “gender identity” (which is a subjective, internal feeling) and that anatomy doesn’t matter when it comes to restrooms, changing areas, and showers. They further claim they want to use restrooms with only those whose “gender identity” they share. So, why do boys who identify as girls demand to use girls’ restrooms and locker rooms? How do they know the males using the boys’ restrooms do not “identify” as girls, and how can they be sure that the females using the girls’ restrooms do “identify” as girls? Is it possible that boys who identify as girls are basing their restroom/locker room choices on biological sex (i.e., the female sex) as revealed in anatomy? If so, why are they permitted to do so but objectively female students are not?

11.) If it’s not hateful for gender-dysphoric biological boys to say they want to share private facilities with only biological females, why is it hateful for biological females to say they want to share restrooms and locker rooms with only biological females?

12.) Why is it hateful to believe that locker rooms and restrooms should correspond to one’s objective sex but loving to believe they should correspond to subjective feelings about one’s sex?

13.) Do children and adults have an inalienable and intrinsic right not to share restrooms and locker rooms with persons of the opposite sex?

14.) If restroom stalls and separate changing areas provide sufficient privacy to allow students to use facilities with those whose sex they don’t share, then why don’t restroom stalls and separate changing areas provide sufficient privacy for a gender-dysphoric student to share facilities with those whose “gender identity” they (presumably) don’t share but whose sex they do share?

15.) Leftists argue that the word “sex” in Title VII of the Civil Rights of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 actually includes “gender identity,” thereby prohibiting discrimination based on “gender identity” in restrooms and locker rooms. If gender-dysphoric boys or men are permitted in girls’ or women’s restrooms and locker rooms based on this reinterpretation, on what basis could other boys or men be prohibited from using women’s restrooms? “Cisgender” boys or men couldn’t be prohibited from using girls’ or women’s restrooms based on their male sex because other objectively male persons (i.e., those who are male but “identify” as women) would already have been allowed in. And wouldn’t prohibiting “cisgender” boys or men from using women’s restrooms based on their “identification” as males constitute discrimination based on “gender identity”?

16.) Leftists argue that separate restrooms and locker rooms for boys and girls are equivalent to separate drinking fountains for blacks and whites. Others would counter that while there are no substantive ontological differences between whites and blacks and that there are no differences that bear on drinking water at fountains, there are substantive differences between men and women. In fact, even homosexuals acknowledge that men and women are fundamentally and significantly different when they say they are romantically and erotically attracted to only persons of their same sex. Further, conservatives argue that the differences between men and women bear directly on the use of spaces in which private activities related to physical embodiment are engaged in. It is these important differences related to physical embodiment as male or female that account for the very existence of separate restrooms, locker rooms, shelters, and semi-private hospital rooms for men and women everywhere. If, however, separate restrooms and locker rooms for men and women are akin to separate drinking fountains for blacks and white as Leftists claim they are, are Leftists in favor of banning them everywhere?

17.) If separate restrooms and locker rooms for gender-dysphoric boys and girls are equivalent to separate restrooms and locker rooms for blacks and whites—as former Attorney General Loretta Lynch once claimed—then why aren’t separate restrooms and locker rooms for “cisgender” boys and girls equivalent to racism? Why aren’t separate restrooms and locker rooms for gender-dysphoric boys and “cisboys” equivalent to racism?

18.) When sex-segregation abolitionists accuse parents who oppose co-ed restrooms and locker rooms of being hateful, intolerant, bigoted, ignorant, heartless bullies, do they also smear children who object to sharing restrooms and locker rooms with peers of the opposite sex?

19.) Do school administrators, teachers, and community members think that Muslims and Orthodox Jews who don’t want their daughters sharing restrooms and locker rooms with objectively male students (or vice versa) are ignorant, bigoted, hateful, and unjustly discriminatory?

20.) Pronouns denote and correspond to objective biological sex—not subjective, internal feelings about one’s sex. So, if staff members, teachers, administrators, or students view the use of opposite-sex pronouns to refer to gender-dysphoric students as lying and for ethical, and/or religious reasons they object to lying, should schools accommodate their objections? Or, should schools—which are arms of the government—compel employees to lie?

21.) Liberal sex and gender researchers Michael Bailey at Northwestern University and Dr. Eric Vilain at UCLA write that 80% of gender-dysphoric boys—and most gender-dysphoric persons are male—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. Are schools that allow gender-dysphoric minors to use opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms complicit in helping students persist in their rejection of their sex?

22.) If there is a mismatch between a person’s sex and his feelings about his sex, how can “progressives” be certain that the error resides in the healthy body rather than the mind? If a person has normal, unambiguous, healthy, fully functioning male anatomy but desires to be—or believes he is—female, might this not be an error or disorder of his mind?

23.) If a man “identifies” as “bi-gender” and has appended faux-breasts to his chest while retaining his penis and testes, as many cross-sex identifiers do, should he be to walk about unclothed in women’s locker rooms?

24.) Progressives routinely ask opponents of co-ed restrooms and locker rooms whether single-sex restrooms and locker rooms will require “genitalia police” to determine whether those seeking ingress are in reality the sex that corresponds to the spaces they seek to use. Well, will co-ed restrooms and locker rooms require “gender-identity” police to determine whether those seeking ingress are either the sex that corresponds to the spaces they seek to use or have proof that they have been diagnosed as gender-dysphoric? If not, how will we know if the persons seeking access to women’s restrooms are gender-dysphoric men masquerading as women or are male predators masquerading as gender-dysphoric men?

25.) Some argue that men masquerading as women have been successfully using women’s private spaces for years without women knowing and hence no harm, no foul. This suggests that if women’s privacy is invaded by men but they—the women—are unaware of the invasion, no harm has been done. By that logic, if voyeurs (not to be confused with men who “identify” as women) are able to secretly view women without women’s knowledge, have women been harmed or not?

26.) What is “gender identity”? If it’s defined as subjective, internal feelings about one’s sex, or one’s maleness or femaleness, on what basis do “trans”-identifying children determine their “gender identity”? Do they base their belief that they are the sex they aren’t or their desire to be the sex they aren’t on sex stereotypes, like which toys they play with? If so, is it “arbitrary, socially imposed” sex stereotypes that determine maleness or femaleness, or do biology and anatomy determine maleness or femaleness?

27.) When law enforcement agencies collect and disseminate information on crime, should crimes committed by biological men who pretend to be women be recorded as acts committed by men or by women?

28.) Should government contracts allocated for women business-owners be awarded to biological women only or also to biological men who “identify” as women?

29.) How will biomedical research into health issues that affect primarily women or primarily men be affected when the recognition of sexual differentiation is prohibited?

My hope is that these questions might help jumpstart a spirited conversation and perhaps help eradicate the pernicious and absurd “trans” ideology.

Take ACTION:  Click HERE to send a message to our U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth to urge them to oppose the federal Equality Act (H.R. 5) which seeks to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include protections for an individual’s perceived sex, “sexual orientation,” or “gender identity.”

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How far gone is Illinois? And by “gone,” I mean arrogantly and divisively leftist.

Well, despite statewide and even nationwide condemnation of the proposed “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards,”  the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules (JCAR) failed to stop the controversial standards.

In a vote delayed by one day, JCAR voted 6-5 along partisan lines to, in effect, approve these standards, which will infuse the assumptions of Critical Race Theory/ identity politics/BLM into 1. all teacher-training programs, 2. all Professional Education Licensing (PEL), and 3. indirectly into all public school classrooms.

Not even yesterday’s plea from the left-leaning Chicago Tribune Editorial Board to JCAR not to pass these controversial standards—standards that the editorial board described as politicized—was sufficient to stop the Democrats in JCAR from further exploiting government schools for leftist propaganda purposes.

Ideological diversity—already a rare commodity in government schools—will be now be further diminished in favor of promoting arguable leftist beliefs about identity, “systems of oppression,” “sex and gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, racism, sexism, homophobia, unearned privilege,” and “Eurocentrism.”

The standards were created by a committee hand-picked by the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE), which is controlled by leftists. While having the effect of law, these standards constitute an amendment to existing school code, so they did not have to go through the normal lawmaking process, which would involve more transparency, floor debates in Springfield, and every Illinois lawmaker publicly voting.

In the wake of nationwide criticism of the “woke” standards, the ISBE issued a statement with this chuckle-worthy, chuckleheaded claim:

The standards were developed by a diverse group of educators from around the state.

Just curious, how many in this “diverse group of educators” are critics of Critical Race Theory and BLM, or find fault with the ideas of Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehesi Coates, and Robin DiAngelo?

The ISBE’s statement also said the following:

The Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards apply to teacher preparation programs, not to K-12 school curricula. ISBE also will offer optional professional development on the standards to current educators. Educators and school districts maintain local control over what professional development they choose.

This is a transparent effort to mollify and silence critics of the infusion of leftist beliefs on race, American history, homosexuality, and “trans”-cultism into curricula. But “deplorables” are not stupid. We all know that “teacher preparation” is intended to and will shape both professional development and curricula.

As a result of the widespread condemnation of the leftist-created standards, the ISBE begrudgingly tossed an insignificant sop in the direction of Illinoisans who oppose the divisive politicization of education. Nervous ISBE leftists changed the word “progressive” to “inclusive.” For example, here is an original pre-condemnation sentence from the standards:

The culturally responsive teacher and leader will … Embrace and encourage progressive viewpoints and perspectives that leverage asset thinking toward traditionally marginalized populations.

Here is the worthless, one-word, post-condemnation change ISBE wokesters threw to Illinois serfs:

The culturally responsive teacher and leader will … Embrace and encourage inclusive viewpoints and perspectives that leverage asset thinking toward traditionally marginalized populations.

As I wrote last week, the unelected wokesters on the ISBE committee that created these radical standards think Illinois conservatives are stupid. They think we don’t realize that their definition of “inclusive” excludes conservative viewpoints.

They also think conservatives won’t notice the inclusion of the adverb “traditionally,” which necessarily excludes contemporary marginalized populations, like the theologically orthodox Christian population, which is today excluded, hated, and cancelled.

This is what’s called a distinction without a difference—a distinction intended to dupe the deplorables.

In another document, the ISBE makes another chuckle-worthy, eye-roller of a statement about the effects of these new ideological diktats:

The standards will help combat the teacher shortage. They will help educators become better teachers and experience higher job satisfaction, which makes them more likely to stay in the profession.

No acknowledgment of the teachers who will leave the profession or of those future teachers who will no longer consider teaching in Illinois because they know that Illinois schools are places of oppression that require ideological submission.

Here are just a few of the controversial ideas that Illinois will now force teacher-training programs and professional licensure to impose on all future “teachers, school support personnel” and administrators. Please note, that “identities” include homosexuality, cross-sex impersonation, and “gender fluidity”:

• Value the notion that … there is not one “correct” way of doing or understanding something.

• “Assess how their own biases and perceptions affect their teaching practice and how they access tools to mitigate their own racist, sexist, homophobic, Eurocentric behavior or unearned privilege.”

• Be aware of the effects of power and privilege and the need for social advocacy and social action to better empower diverse students and communities.

• Encourage and affirm the personal experiences … students share in the classroom.

• Consistently solicit students’ input on the curriculum.

• Co-create, with students, the collective expectations and agreements regarding the physical space and social-emotional culture of the classroom.

• Create a risk-taking space that promotes student activism and advocacy.

• Invite family and community members to teach about topics that are culturally specific and aligned to the classroom curriculum or content area.

• Intentionally embrace student identities and prioritize representation in the curriculum.

• Implement and integrate the wide spectrum and fluidity of identities in the curriculum.

• Ensure text selections reflect students’ classroom, community, and family culture.

• Ensure teacher and students co-create content to include a counternarrative to dominant culture.

• Promote robust discussion with the intent of raising consciousness that reflects modern society and the ways in which cultures and communities intersect.

• Consider a broader modality of student assessments [i.e., grades and testing], such as … “social justice work.”

In my mind’s eye, I see more Illinois families planning their exit from public schools and more families planning their exit from this politically “woke,” intellectually slumbering, and morally vacuous state.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Illinois-Passes-Controversial-Leftist-Teacher-Training-Mandate.mp3

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One of the most effective ways that Marxists advance their agenda is to change how we talk about things.   When clever rewordings replace the truth, it’s easier to fool people.

For example, the Washington Post this past week said a transgender plaintiff “was designated female at birth, but identifies as male.”

In the blink of an eye, a biological fact – that someone was born a girl – is brushed aside and replaced with a term that implies that male or female sex is assigned, not a natural phenomenon.

In fact, the idea that your sex is “assigned at birth” is an increasingly common description. It validates the Gnostic-based insanity that one’s sex has nothing to do with physiology, just what goes on in people’s heads.  By this reasoning, birth records can be altered to distort reality, which is a way to lie officially.  And to force others to do so as well.

Gavin Grimm, who is now 21, sued the Gloucester County, Virginia school district in 2015 to force them to allow her to use boys’ facilities.  Two years later, the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court but was set aside when President Donald Trump overturned a Barack Obama gender identity school mandate.

But last Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled 2 to 1 that the school board had violated Grimm’s 14th Amendment right against sex discrimination. The high school had offered a gender-neutral bathroom, but the plaintiff’s attorneys rejected that solution, as did the two Obama appointees who sided with Grimm. A George H.W. Bush appointee dissented.

They drew from the bizarre Bostock opinion in June written by, of all people, Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, which expanded the definition of “sex” in the Civil Right Act of 1964 to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”  Just like that, the Court put every institution in America that won’t kneel to the LGBTQ gods in jeopardy of ruinous lawsuits or even governmental sanctions.

Given the Court’s reasoning, how could any sex-based distinctions, predicated on real and important differences between the sexes, be maintained? Sports teams? Locker rooms? Bathrooms at any business of any size? Private schools?

The transgender movement, for all its caring rhetoric, is not really about eliciting compassion for sexually confused people – something we should embrace. It’s part of the Marxist Left’s campaign to overhaul society and force people to lie.

Anyone not toeing the line, which keeps changing, is “canceled.”  That means being censored, fired, shut out of promotions or jobs, and de-platformed on social media.

Over the years, the Left has peppered our discourse with advocacy-filled descriptions. “Choice” long ago replaced abortion, “gay” replaced homosexuality, and “hater” and “racist” became all-purpose descriptors for anyone dissenting from the Left’s worldview. Erasing biology is just more of the same.

Sometimes, the ideologically-driven changes are more subtle. Journalists now capitalize racial terms, as in Black people and White people. The adjectives, which describe merely one important aspect of the human race, instead become the whole. No more thinking about people just as fellow human beings created in the image of God. Race must be first and foremost in everyone’s minds.

Herded into identity groups, we’re more easily divided and manipulated. Regardless of the impressive racial progress that America has achieved since eradicating slavery and Jim Crow, the media are utterly obsessed with race as the only aspect of humanity worth talking about.

But if America’s “systemic racism” is the main driver of the riots that have raged for the last three months, why are mobs beheading or defacing statues of Jesus and Mary and black heroes like Frederick Douglass or Arthur Ashe, burning churches and Bibles, and looting stores in Chicago’s Magnificent Mile?

There’s method to this madness. Racism is an excuse to pour gasoline on a larger cause – that of taking down America as we know it and replacing it with a socialist utopia. The founders of Black Lives Matter, after all, admit to being “trained Marxists.”

During the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s (which is still with us), activists began forcing journalists and medical professionals to use the term “living with HIV,” as a way to de-stigmatize the disease. You could get kicked out of a medical conference for talking about “AIDS infections” or the “AIDS disease.” They’d not hesitate to beat the drums for “living with covid” if they thought it would advance their cause.

Language is a formidable instrument for human progress when used properly.  But, all too often it can be abused, destroying souls, families, or even entire societies.

The most profound and positive use of language in history was when Jesus offered Himself to everyone on Earth, saying, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life,” and when the Gospel writer John referred to Him as simply The Word.

Amid the current chaos, we need to work hard to preserve America. And, we need to pray that the Marxist-inspired madness and abuse of language will crack up, a victim of its own hostility to truth.

This article was originally published at Townhall.com. You can follow Robert Knight on Twitter @RobertKnight17 and his website is roberthknight.com.

Despite a lack of evidence proving the safety and efficacy of chemical and surgical interventions and social “transitioning” for those who experience gender dysphoria, “progressives” plow forward mutilating the healthy bodies and manipulating the psychology of children who feel they are or wish they were the sex they are not.

The science-denying, incoherent “trans” ideology affects all of society. The end game for “trans” activists and others in cultic thrall to this superstition is not access for a few boys and girls or men and women to opposite-sex private spaces and sports. The end game is the eradication of all public recognition of sex differences everywhere for everyone. Think about what that means:

• It means children will be raised under the delusion that their anatomy signifies nothing. All that matters is “gender identity.” It means society will tell them that no one—not doctors, parents, or anyone else—knows if they’re male or female.

• It means putting at risk the psychological welfare of students, particularly younger students and those already struggling with other issues, including autism; depression; anxiety; body dysmorphia; eating disorders; OCD; and the effects of molestation, family dysfunction, and bullying. Introducing the “trans” ideology, which teaches the disordered nonsense that a boy can be a girl or vice versa, to at-risk children will confuse and disturb them and will provide a distorted lens through which they may misinterpret their experiences.

• It means that we must all pretend that humans with congenital penises and fake breasts sashaying through our women’s locker rooms in the altogether are women. (Many who identify as “trans” don’t believe surgery is necessary to pass as the opposite sex, which is why you’ll hear terms like “chestfeeding men” or claims like “women can have penises.”)

• It means that at public pools, beaches, and parks, our children will see topless women who pretend to be men but opt to keep their breasts.

• It means that men’s roommates in semi-private hospital rooms may be biological women. And it means women who seek sanctuary from abusive boyfriends and husbands in shelters may be forced to share rooms or private facilities with biological men.

• It means many of us will lose jobs if we refuse to refer to colleagues by incorrect pronouns, which is to say, if we refuse to lie.

• It means that our taxes will continue to subsidize the indoctrination of children with the “trans” ideology through government schools

• And it means the sterilization and mutilation of the healthy bodies of children.

Since the “trans” ideology is metastasizing throughout the sinews of American life—including our schools—all stakeholders must understand the “trans” orthodoxy better. In previous articles, I provided questions that anyone who affirms the “trans” ideology should be asked.[1] In this article, I provide information of which many are unaware, that may be useful to anyone opposing co-ed private spaces in schools, and that should make society reevaluate the barbaric path we’re treading:

• At birth, doctors identify the sex of babies. They do not assign them a “gender.” A person’s sex can never change. Biological sex is not a disorder, illness, deficiency, shortcoming, or error. Scientists and other medical professionals have recognized that biological sex is a neutral, objective, and immutable fact of human nature. Likewise, puberty is neither a disease nor a disorder.

• There is no conclusive, research-based evidence proving that if there is incongruence between one’s objective, immutable, biological sex (and its attendant healthy, normally functioning anatomy and physiology) and one’s subjective, internal sense of being male or female that the problem resides in the body rather than the mind.

• The article “Hormone Therapy for the Treatment of Gender Dysphoria” in the May 19, 2014 issue of the highly respected Hayes Directory reports that the use of hormones and surgery to treat gender dysphoria in adults is based on “very low quality of evidence” and that the use of hormones and surgery to treat gender dysphoria in children and adolescents has no evidence base.[2]

• There are health risks and complications attendant to the use of puberty-suppressing drugs. Boys whose puberty is suppressed will have micro-penises which present surgical problems if they should one day seek vaginoplasty (i.e., there isn’t enough skin to turn into “vaginas,” so more complicated and risky procedures must be used). The health risks of the off-label use of puberty-blockers for the treatment of gender-dysphoria include the arrest of bone growth, decrease in bone density, the “prevention of sex-steroid-dependent organization and maturation of the adolescent brain, and the inhibition of fertility by preventing the development of gonadal tissue and mature gametes for the duration of treatment.”

• “There is an obvious self-fulfilling nature to encouraging a young boy with GD to socially impersonate a girl and then institute pubertal suppression. Given the well-established phenomenon of neuroplasticity, the repeated behavior of impersonating a girl alters the structure and function of the boy’s brain in some way—potentially in a way that will make identity alignment with his biologic sex less likely. This, together with the suppression of puberty that prevents further endogenous masculinization of his brain, causes him to remain a gender non-conforming prepubertal boy disguised as a prepubertal girl.”[3]

• Some of the effects of the off-label use of cross-sex hormones are permanent and long-term risks are unknown:

– Sterility and voice changes are permanent for both men and women.

–An interagency statement published by the World Health Organization states that “sterilization should only be provided with the full, free and informed consent of the individual” and that “sterilization refers not just to interventions where the intention is to limit fertility… but also to situations where loss of fertility is a secondary outcome…. Sterilization without full, free and informed consent has been variously described by international, regional and national human rights bodies as an involuntary, coercive and/or forced practice, and as a violation of fundamental human rights, including the right to health, the right to information, the right to privacy.”[4] Since parents or guardians must provide consent for hormonal interventions, and since parents are not being made aware of the experimental nature of the off-label use of hormones for the treatment of gender dysphoria, or of the fact that most children with gender dysphoria outgrow it by late adolescence if otherwise supported through natural puberty, parents and guardians are unable to provide fully informed.

–For biologically healthy men who take estrogen to treat their subjective, internal feelings about their sex, there is an “increased risk of liver disease, increased risk of blood clots (risk of death or permanent damage), increased risk of diabetes and of headaches/migraines, heart disease, increased risk of gallstones, and increased risk of noncancerous tumour of the pituitary gland.”[5] Breast tissue growth in men who take estrogen is permanent.

–For biologically healthy women who take testosterone to treat their subjective, internal feelings about their sex, there is an increased risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and possibly of breast cancer, ovarian cancer, or uterine cancer. Taking testosterone can have a “destabilizing effect” on “bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, and schizophrenia.”[6] “Male”-pattern baldness and body and facial hair growth in women who take testosterone are permanent.

• Surgery (e.g., mastectomy, orchiectomy [i.e., castration]) is irreversible.

• Men who choose penile inversion vaginoplasty are castrated and their penises inverted to fashion a fake vagina (aka “neo-vagina”). For the rest of their lives, surgeons recommend that they use vaginal dilators once a week. Since the skin of fake vaginas is not vaginal tissue, men must also douche 2-3 times per week for the rest of their lives.

• Some men are unable to have inversion vaginoplasty. For example, because 18-year-old boy and reality TV star Jazz Jennings, who was recently castrated, started puberty blockers so young, his penis was the size of a prepubertal boy’s penis, and, therefore, too small to provide enough skin for a fake vagina. In these cases, skin from the colon or small bowel is used:

This technique… is naturally self-lubricating…. Since the secretion is digestive there is a risk of malodor and frequent secretions, and secretions are constant rather than only with arousal. Wearing panty liners or pads may be necessary for the long term. Bacterial overgrowth (diversion colitis) is common and may present with a greenish discharge…. The bowel lining is also not as durable as skin. Use of intestinal tissue also places the vagina at risk of diseases of the bowel including inflammatory bowel disease, arterio-venous malformations (AVM) or neoplasms [i.e., abnormal growths].[7]

• The Christian Medical and Dental Association “believes that prescribing hormonal treatments to children or adolescents to disrupt normal sexual development for the purpose of gender reassignment is ethically impermissible, whether requested by the child or the parent.”[8]

• The Catholic Medical Association (CMA) “urges health care professionals to adhere to genetic science and sexual complementarity over ideology in the treatment of gender dysphoria (GD) in children. This includes especially avoiding puberty suppression and the use of cross-sex hormones in children with GD. One’s sex is not a social construct, but an unchangeable biological reality.”[9]

• Neuroscientist, professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of The Teenage Brain, Dr. Frances Jensen, explains that,

Teenagers do have frontal lobes, which are the seat of our executive, adult-like functioning like impulse control, judgment and empathy. But the frontal lobes haven’t been connected with fast-acting connections yet…. But there is another part of the brain that is fully active in adolescents, and that’s the limbic system. And that is the seat of risk, reward, impulsivity, sexual behavior and emotion. So they are built to be novelty-seeking at this point in their lives. Their frontal lobe isn’t able to say, “That’s a bad idea, don’t do that.” That’s not happening to the extent it will in adulthood.

• The oft-cited suicide rate of 41% for those who identify as “trans” is based on an erroneous understanding of a study by the Williams Institute—an understanding that ignores the acknowledged and serious limitations of the study.[10] There is no evidence that surgery or chemical disruption of normal, natural and healthy development or processes reduces the incidence of suicide.[11] J. Michael Bailey, Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, and Dr. Raymond Blanchard, former psychologist in the Adult Gender Identity Clinic of Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) from 1980–1995 and the Head of CAMH’s Clinical Sexology Services from 1995–2010, have written the following[12]:

–Children (most commonly, adolescents) who threaten to commit suicide rarely do so, although they are more likely to kill themselves than children who do not threaten suicide.

–Mental health problems, including suicide, are associated with some forms of gender dysphoria. But suicide is rare even among gender dysphoric persons.

–There is no persuasive evidence that gender transition reduces gender dysphoric children’s likelihood of killing themselves.

–The idea that mental health problems–including suicidality–are caused by gender dysphoria rather than the other way around (i.e., mental health and personality issues cause a vulnerability to experience gender dysphoria) is currently popular and politically correct. It is, however, unproven and as likely to be false as true.

• There is no phenomenon of women trapped in men’s bodies or vice versa, or of men having women’s brains or vice versa. Science has not proven that the brains of transgender individuals are “wired differently” than others with the same biological sex. In other words, there is no conclusive evidence of a “female brain” being contained in a male body or vice versa.[13] In fact, it is impossible for an opposite-sexed brain to be “trapped” in the wrong body. Every brain cell of a male fetus has a Y chromosome; female fetal brains do not. This makes their brains intrinsically different. Additionally, at 8 weeks gestation, male fetuses have every cell of their body—including every brain cell—bathed by a testosterone surge secreted by their testes. Female fetuses lack testes; none of their cells—including their brain cells—experience this endogenous testosterone surge.

• “[C]urrent studies on associations between brain structure and transgender identity are small, methodologically limited, inconclusive, and sometimes Even if they were more methodologically reliable, they would be insufficient to demonstrate that brain structure is a cause, rather than an effect, of the gender-identity behavior. They would likewise lack predictive power, the real challenge for any theory in science.”[14]

• Desistance is “the tendency for gender dysphoria to resolve itself as a child gets older and older.”[15] The best research to date suggests that without social or medical “transition” most (60[16]-90%[17]) gender-dysphoric children will come to accept their biological sex after passing naturally through puberty. [18] While “12- 27% of ‘gender variant’ children persist in gender dysphoria; that percentage rises to 40% amongst those who visit gender clinics.” Research shows that persistence rates rise significantly among those who are given puberty-blockers and “gender-affirmative psychotherapy,” thus suggesting that such interventions lead minors “to commit more strongly to sex reassignment than they might have if they had received a different diagnosis or a different course of treatment.”[19]

• Detransitioning is the process by which someone who has been identifying as the opposite sex, presenting himself or herself as the opposite sex, taking cross-sex hormones, and possibly had surgery rejects his or her “trans” identity and accepts his or her objective, immutable biological sex. The American College of Pediatricians confirms what “detransitioners” assert: There are many possible post-natal, environmental causes for gender dysphoria: Family and peer relationships, one’s school and neighborhood, the experience of any form of abuse, media exposure, chronic illness, war, and natural disasters are all examples of environmental factors that impact an individual’s emotional, social, and psychological development.[20]

• “Mounting evidence over the last decade points to increased rates of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and autism traits among children and adults with gender dysphoria…. It is possible that some of the psychological characteristics common in children with ASD—including cognitive deficits, tendencies toward obsessive preoccupations, or difficulties learning from other people—complicate the formation of gender identity.”[21] A study published in May 2018 “further confirmed a possible association between ASD and the wish to be of the opposite gender by establishing increased endorsement of this wish in adolescents and adults with ASD compared to the general population controls.”[22]

• J. Michael Bailey and Dr. Raymond Blanchard explain the phenomenon of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD):

The typical case of ROGD involves an adolescent or young adult female whose social world outside the family glorifies transgender phenomena and exaggerates their prevalence. Furthermore, it likely includes a heavy dose of internet involvement. The adolescent female acquires the conviction that she is transgender. (Not uncommonly, others in her peer group acquire the same conviction.) These peer groups encouraged each other to believe that all unhappiness, anxiety, and life problems are likely due to their being transgender, and that gender transition is the only solution. Subsequently, there may be a rush towards gender transition…. We believe that ROGD is a socially contagious phenomenon in which a young person–typically a natal female–comes to believe that she has a condition that she does not have. ROGD is not about discovering gender dysphoria that was there all along; rather, it is about falsely coming to believe that one’s problems have been due to gender dysphoria previously hidden (from the self and others). Let us be clear: People with ROGD do have a kind of gender dysphoria, but it is gender dysphoria due to persuasion of those especially vulnerable to a false idea.[23]

• Brown University Researcher Dr. Lisa Littman conducted a survey of parents whose children developed Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. Littman writes,

In recent years, a number of parents have been reporting in online discussion groups… that their adolescent and young adult (AYA) children, who have had no histories of childhood gender identity issues, experienced a rapid onset of gender dysphoria. Parents have described clusters of gender dysphoria outbreaks occurring in pre-existing friend groups with multiple or even all members of a friend group becoming gender dysphoric and transgender-identified in a pattern that seems statistically unlikely based on previous research. Parents describe a process of immersion in social media, such as “binge-watching” Youtube transition videos and excessive use of Tumblr, immediately preceding their child becoming gender dysphoric. These descriptions… raise the question of whether social influences may be contributing to or even driving these occurrences of gender dysphoria in some populations of adolescents and young adults…. The worsening of mental well-being and parent-child relationships and behaviors that isolate teens from their parents, families, non-transgender friends and mainstream sources of information are particularly concerning. More research is needed to better understand rapid-onset gender dysphoria, its implications, and scope.”[24]

• The number of children “being referred for transitioning treatment” in England has increased 4,400% for girls and 1,250% for boys, which has resulted in calls from members of Parliament for an investigation.[25]

• Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) shares several features with gender dysphoria. BIID is a condition in which “Sufferers… experience a mismatch between their physically healthy body and the body with which they identify. They identify as disabled. They often desire a specific amputation to achieve the disabled body they want.”[26] As with some cases of gender dysphoria, scientists say there is evidence for neurological involvement as a cause of the experience of BIID,[27] and yet physicians largely oppose elective amputations of healthy anatomical parts:

According to the principle of nonmaleficence physicians must not perform amputations without a medical indication because amputations bear great risks and often have severe consequences besides the disability…. for example, infections [or] thromboses.  Even though some physicians perform harmful surgeries as breast enlargement surgeries, this cannot justify surgeries that are even more harmful. Even if amputations would be a possible therapy for BIID, they would be risky experimental therapies that could be justified only if they promised lifesaving or the cure of severe diseases and if an alternative therapy would not be available. At least the first condition is not fulfilled in the case of BIID, and probably the second is not fulfilled either. Above all, an amputation causes an irreversible damage that could not be healed, even if the patient’s body image would be restored spontaneously or through a new therapy…. But since all psychiatrists who have investigated BIID patients found that the amputation desire is either obsessive or based on a monothematic delusion, and since neurological studies support the hypothesis of a brain disorder (which is also supported by the most influential advocates of elective amputations), elective amputations have to be regarded as severe bodily injuries of patients.[28]

• The American College of Pediatricians, “a national medical association of licensed physicians and healthcare professionals who specialize in the care of infants, children, and adolescents” and that split from the American Academy of Pediatrics because of its politicization of the practice of medicine, describes puberty-suppression, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries variously referred to as sex-change, sex reassignment, gender reassignment and gender confirmation surgeries as child abuse.”

• Lisa Simons, pediatrician at Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, stated in a PBS Frontline documentary that “‘The bottom line is we don’t really know how sex hormones impact any adolescent’s brain development….’ What’s lacking, she said, are specific studies that look at the neurocognitive effects of puberty blockers.” [29]

• Kenneth Zucker, one of the world’s leading authorities on gender dysphoria, states that,

Identity is a process. It is complicated. It takes a long period of time… to know who a child really is…. There are different pathways that can lead to gender dysphoria…. It’s an intellectual and clinical mistake to think that there’s one single cause that explains all gender dysphoria…. Just because little kids say something doesn’t necessarily mean that you accept it, or that it’s true, or that it’s in the best interest of the child…. Little kids can present with extreme gender dysphoria, but that doesn’t mean they’re all going to grow up to continue to have gender dysphoria.[30]

• Eric Vilain, a geneticist at UCLA who specializes in sexual development and sex differences in the brain, says the studies on twins are mixed and that, on the whole, “there is no evidence of a biological influence on transsexualism yet.”[31]

• Sheila Jeffreys, lesbian feminist scholar, warns against the “transgendering” of children: “Those who do not conform to correct gender stereotypes are being sterilized and they’re being sterilized as children.”[32]

• Heather Brunskell-Evans, social theorist, philosopher, and Senior Research Fellow at King’s College, London, UK, and Michele Moore, Professor of Inclusive Education and Editor-in-Chief of the world-leading journal Disability & Society, critique the “transgender” ideology:

[O]ur central contention is that transgender children don’t exist. Although we argue that ‘the transgender child’ is a fabrication, we do not disavow that some children and adolescents experience gender dysphoria and that concerned and loving parents will do anything to alleviate their children’s distress. It is because of children’s bodily discomfort that we argue it is important families and support services are informed by appropriate models for understanding gender. Our analysis of transgenderism demonstrates it is a new phenomenon, since dissatisfaction with assigned gender takes different forms in different historical contexts. The ‘transgender child’ is a relatively new historical figure, brought into being by a coalition of pressure groups, political activists and knowledge makers…. Bizarrely, in transgender theory, biology is said to be a social construct but gender is regarded as an inherent property located ‘somewhere’ in the brain or soul or other undefined area of the body. We reverse these propositions with the concept that it is gender, not biology, which is a social construct. From our theoretical perspective, the sexed body is material and biological, and gender is the externally imposed set of norms that prescribe and proscribe desirable behaviours for children. Our objection to transgenderism is that it confines children to traditional views about gender.[33]

• Stephanie Davies-Arias, writer, communication skills expert, and pediatric transition critic, writes that “changing your sex to match your ‘gender identity’ reinforces the very stereotypes which [transgender] organisations claim to be challenging… as, in increasing numbers, boys who love princess culture become ‘girls’ and short-haired football-loving girls become ‘boys’. Promoted as a ‘progressive’ social justice movement based on ‘accepting difference’, transgender ideology in fact takes that difference and stamps it out. It says that the sexist stereotypes of ‘gender’ are the true distinction between boys and girls and biological sex is an illusion.”[34]

• Increasing numbers of young men and women experience “sex-change regret” and are “detransitioning.” Unfortunately, some effects of “medical transitions” are irreversible. A BBC documentary includes “Luke,” a young biological woman who regrets taking cross-sex hormones and having a double mastectomy at age 20 shares her experience:

The assumption from the outset was that if I said I was transgender, then I must be. Nobody, at any point, questioned my motives. The only cure for this would be hormones and surgery…. I became very self-conscious of my body. I was developing breasts and periods which, for me, felt like there was an alien crawling out of the inside of my body.  I became very depressed. I thought the only explanation for my gender dysphoria must be that I was actually a man. I was struggling with self-harm and had attempted suicide on a number of occasions and was very much told by the community that if you don’t transition, you will self-harm and you will kill yourself. I became convinced that my options were transition or die. I didn’t understand that the degree of disconnect from and hatred of my body could be considered a mental health problem…. The darkest moment was when I realized that I had actually looked normal for a girl. That I had actually been slim and pretty. That my body hadn’t been grotesque the way I thought it was. Now, as a result of having transitioned, I will always have a female body that is freakish. I will always have a flat chest and a beard and there’s nothing I can do about that…. Nobody wants to question the received knowledge that transition is the only option because nobody wants to be the one person that puts their head up and says “hang on, I don’t think this is all right”.… If I was talking to a gender-dysphoric girl who hated her body the way I hated mine, I would tell her to get out into the mud, to climb trees, to find ways of inhabiting her body on her terms.[35]

• While the American Academy of Pediatrics has formally endorsed chemical and surgical interventions and social “transitioning” for children and teens who wish they were the sex they are not, no one knows exactly how many of the 67,000 academy members agree with this position since only about 55 members created and voted on it. [36]

It is unconscionable for anyone who cares about children and the future of America to remain ignorant of and silent on this issue.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Surprising-Stuff.mp3

Footnotes:

[1] https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/homosexuality/questions-restrooms-locker-rooms-leftists-must-answer/

[2] http://www.hayesinc.com/hayes/htareports/directory/sex-reassignment-surgery-for-the-treatment-of-gender-dysphoria/. Accessed 3.24.16.

[3] http://www.jpands.or g/vol21no2/cretella.pdf

[4] http://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/media_asset/201405_sterilization_en.pdf

[5] https://apps.carleton.edu/campus/gsc/assets/hormones_MTF.pdf

[6] https://apps.carleton.edu/campus/gsc/assets/hormones_FTM.pdf

[7] http://transhealth.ucsf.edu/trans?page=guidelines-vaginoplasty

[8] https://www.cmda.org/resources/publication/transgender-identification-ethics-statement

[9] http://www.cathmed.org/assets/files/Gender_Dysphoria_Treatment_of_Minors.pdf

[10] http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/AFSP-Williams-Suicide-Report-Final.pdf

[11] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3043071/

[12] https://4thwavenow.com/2017/09/08/suicide-or-transition-the-only-options-for-gender-dysphoric-kids/comment-page-1/

[13] L Mayer, P McHugh, “Part Three: Gender Identity,” The New Atlantis, https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/part-three-gender-identity-sexuality-and-gender

[14] https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/part-three-gender-identity-sexuality-and-gender

[15] https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/whats-missing-from-the-conversation-about-transgender-kids.html

[16] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18981931

[17] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18194003

[18] http://www.sexologytoday.org/2016/01/do-trans-kids-stay-trans-when-they-grow_99.html

[19] https://www.thenewatlantis.com/docLib/20170619_TNA52HruzMayerMcHugh.pdf

[20] https://www.acpeds.org/the-college-speaks/position-statements/gender-dysphoria-in-children

[21] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zhanavrangalova/2017/11/15/growing-evidence-for-a-link-between-gender-dysphoria-and-autism-spectrum-disorders/#26953173153e

[22] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-018-1218-3

[23] https://4thwavenow.com/2017/12/07/gender-dysphoria-is-not-one-thing/

[24] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0202330

[25] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/09/16/minister-orders-inquiry-4000-per-cent-rise-children-wanting/

[26] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/body-integrity-identity-disorder-the-condition-where-sufferers-want-to-be-disabled-a6680306.html

[27] http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2009/03/27/voluntary-amputation-extra-phantom-limbs/

[28]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15265160802588194 

[29] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/when-transgender-kids-transition-medical-risks-are-both-known-and-unknown/

[30] https://vimeo.com/247163584

[31] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/11/a-boys-life/307059/

[32] https://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/sheila-jeffreys-the-mccarthyism-of-transgender-and-the-sterilization-of-transgender-children/

[33] http://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/64273

[34] http://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/64273

[35] https://vimeo.com/247163584 

[36] https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/homosexuality/55-members-of-american-academy-of-pediatrics-devise-destructive-trans-policy/ 

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A hundred major corporations, ranging from Target to American Airlines to Best Buy, have signed on to an LGBTQ activist coalition supporting the “Equality Act,” which would federalize homosexuality and transgenderism as “civil rights” categories in the law.

The homosexual-bisexual-transgender lobby group Human Rights Campaign (HRC) says the bill, HR 2282, is about “letting Americans live their lives without fear of discrimination,” but pro-family organizations counter that the “Inequality Act” (as Family Research Council calls it) would expressly undermine people’s religious freedom to act against homosexuality and extreme gender confusion (transgenderism), e.g., by declining to participate in same-sex “marriages.”

The sweeping legislation, introduced by openly homosexual U.S. Rep. David Cicilline, D-Rhode Island, has 194 Democratic co-sponsors and two Republican co-sponsors. With little action on the bill likely in a GOP-dominated Congress, HRC is taking its campaign for HR 2282 to the corporate world, where its institutional influence and power greatly exceeds that of social conservatives.

HR 2282, as described by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), “amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity among the prohibited categories of discrimination or segregation in places of public accommodation.”

The bill prohibits employers with 15 or more employees from “discriminating based on sexual orientation or gender identity, subject to the same exceptions and conditions that currently apply to unlawful employment practices based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin,” according to CRS.

The bill’s far-reaching impact would greatly expand the potential for lawsuits against private individuals who choose not to affirm behaviors they regard as immoral before God. Already, using state and local “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” laws, LGBTQ activists and their allies have made life difficult for people opposing “gay marriage” and “proud” homosexuality and transsexualism — from wedding cake makers and wedding photographers to t-shirt makers and even bar owners.

The CRS summary of HR 2282 states:

“The bill expands the categories of public accommodations to include places or establishments that provide:

— exhibitions, recreation, exercise, amusement, gatherings, or displays;

— goods, services, or programs, including a store, a shopping center, an online retailer or service provider, a salon, a bank, a gas station, a food bank, a service or care center, a shelter, a travel agency, a funeral parlor, or a health care, accounting, or legal service; or

— transportation services.”

Noting the expanded definition of “public accommodation” under the proposed legislation, FRC states: “Thus, if the Inequality Act passes, attorneys will likely be required to represent homosexuals in dissolving their same-sex ‘marriages,’ Christian schools will likely be required to offer transgendered students the bathroom of their choice, and Christian homeless shelters will likely be required to accommodate same-sex couples.”

According to the CRS, HR 2282 defines “gender identity” as “gender-related identity, appearance, mannerisms, or characteristics, regardless of the individual’s designated sex at birth.” The bill states that the Department of Justice (DOJ) “may bring a civil action if it receives a complaint from an individual” who claims to be “denied equal utilization of a public facility … (other than public schools or colleges) on account of sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”

Thus, under HR 2282, a “male-to-female” “transgender” activist could sue an amusement park if it refused to let him, as a biological male, enter the public women’s restrooms (since amusement parks would be covered under the Act as “public accommodations”).

HRC quotes Dow Chemical employee Cory Valente in defense of the “Equality Act”: “No one should be fired, evicted from their home, or denied services because of who they are. Supporting inclusion and equality is the right thing to do – for business and for society.”

But FRC states that by expressly stripping away the protections of federal “Religious Freedom Restoration Act”–designed to protect citizens’ conscience rights–the pro-LGBTQ “Inequality Act” “would force people to affirm homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and transgenderism, despite their religious objections in various situations, including the provision of public accommodations.”

“This is the antithesis of religious freedom,” the pro-family group asserts.

HRC’s rigged rating system pressures corporations

HRC has employed to great effect its skewed “Corporate Equality Index” “scorecard” system to pressure corporations to ratchet up their pro-homosexual and pro-“transgender” policies. Under the ratings system, companies get points for giving money to pro-LGBTQ activities but they potentially lose 25 points if they do anything that HRC considers to be a “large-scale official or public anti-LGBT blemish” (see page 8 here).

Thus, even neutral corporate giving policies — say, if a company’s executives wanted to avoid taking sides by financially supporting both pro-LGBT groups and organizations like the American Family Association — would be boxed out for any corporation seeking a perfect HRC “Equality Index” score.

And under the HRC’s self-serving “Index,” companies must comply with an ever-expanding list of pro-LGBTQ demands to continue receiving a “100 percent” ranking.

The strategy has been immensely successful for HRC, with even once-conservative corporations like Walmart joining its “100 percent” club — which includes paying for “transgender” employees “sex-reassignment surgeries” through company health insurance plans. Walmart now finances “gay pride” events like the annual New York City “pride parade.”

HRC reports the following 100 major corporations as members of its “Coalition for the Equality Act”:

Abercrombie & Fitch Co.

Accenture

Adobe Systems Inc.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

Airbnb Inc.

Alcoa Inc.

Amazon.com Inc.

American Airlines

American Eagle Outfitters

American Express Global Business Travel

Apple Inc.

Arconic

Ascena Retail Group Inc.

Automatic Data Processing Inc.

Bain & Co. Inc.

Bank of America

Best Buy Co. Inc.

Biogen

Boehringer Ingelheim USA Corp.

Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.

Boston Scientific Corp.

Broadridge Financial Solutions Inc.

Brown-Forman Corp.

CA Technologies Inc.

Caesars Entertainment Corp.

Capital One Financial Corp.

Cardinal Health Inc.

Cargill Inc.

Chevron Corp.

Choice Hotels International Inc.

Cisco Systems Inc.;

The Coca-Cola Co.

Corning Inc.

Cox Enterprises Inc.

CVS Health Corp.

Darden Restaurants Inc.

Delhaize America Inc.

Diageo North America

The Dow Chemical Co.

Dropbox Inc.

E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Co. (DuPont)

eBay Inc.

EMC Corp.

Facebook Inc.

Gap Inc.

General Electric Co.

General Mills Inc.

Google Inc.

HERE North America LLC

The Hershey Company

Hewlett Packard Enterprises

Hilton Inc.

HP Inc.; HSN Inc.

Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP

Hyatt Hotels Corp.

IBM Corp.

Intel Corp.

InterContinental Hotels Group Americas

Johnson & Johnson

JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Kaiser Permanente; Kellogg Co.

Kenneth Cole Productions

Levi Strauss & Co.; Macy’s Inc.

Marriott International Inc.

MasterCard Inc.; Microsoft Corp.

Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams

Monsanto Co.

Moody’s Corp.

Nationwide

Navigant Consulting Inc.

Nike Inc.

Northrop Grumman Corp.

Office Depot Inc.

Oracle Corp.

Orbitz Worldwide Inc.

Paul Hastings LLP

PepsiCo Inc.

Procter & Gamble Co.

Pure Storage Inc.

Qualcomm Inc.

Replacements Ltd.

S&P Global Inc.

Salesforce

SAP America Inc.

Sodexo Inc.

Symantec Corp.

Synchrony Financial

T-Mobile USA Inc.

Target Corp.

Tech Data Corp.

TIAA

Twitter Inc.

Uber Technologies Inc

Under Armour Inc

Unilever

Warby Parker

WeddingWire Inc.

Whirlpool Corporation

Williams-Sonoma Inc.

Xerox Corp.

This article was originally published at LifeSiteNews.com

Last time we introduced transgenderism, the next letter on the LGB…T march into the new world. There is way too much to cover in just one more post but I’ll do my best. If you’re like me, you’re pretty tired of this topic after the past couple of years.

We left off with the first paragraph from the transgender Wikipedia page — here are the third and fourth paragraphs:

The degree to which individuals feel genuine, authentic, and comfortable within their external appearance and accept their genuine identity has been called transgender congruence. Many transgender people experience gender dysphoria, and some seek medical treatments such as hormone replacement therapy, sex reassignment surgery, or psychotherapy. Not all transgender people desire these treatments, and some cannot undergo them for financial or medical reasons.

Most transgender people face discrimination at and in access to work, public accommodations, and healthcare. They are not legally protected from discrimination in many places.

Later on the page under the heading LGBT Community our Wikipedia friends provide some helpful information:

The concepts of gender identity and transgender identity differ from that of sexual orientation. Sexual orientation describes an individual’s enduring physical, romantic, emotional, or spiritual attraction to another person, while gender identity is one’s personal sense of being a man or a woman.

Got that? Here is Matt Barber:

[T]here remains a larger question still. If a person’s “actual sex” needn’t be rooted in biological reality, then why should anything be rooted in biological reality? […] As long as we’re tinkering with scientific and moral truth, why stop at a person’s biologically determined and fixed sex? Why stop at “gender identity”?

I’ll wager that next year Reuters scores a 150 percent on HRC’s “equality index” if it offers a category for “species identity.” If “a person’s innate, deeply felt psychological identification” is all that matters, then who is Reuters — who are any of us — to discriminate if an employee wants to get in touch with his inner horse and run the Kentucky Derby?

For that matter, what about “racial identity?” Again, why the intolerant and arbitrary “gender-identity” narrow-mindedness? Roseanne Barr is a short, obnoxious white woman today, but who’s to say that tomorrow she won’t develop an “innate, deeply felt psychological identification” as a seven-foot black man? Watch out, NBA.

Three years ago at American Thinker, Chad Felix Greene penned the article, “Transphobia: A Reasonable Response?” In it, he summed up some important recent history:

The DSM – 5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in 2013 changed the condition from Gender Identity Disorder to Gender Dysphoria. This was celebrated by the LGBT (the “T” is for Transgender) community as a victory for equality.

The goal was to “remove the ‘stigma’ associated with having a mental illness.” Greene quotes one supporter of the change: “A right-winger can’t go out and say all trans people are mentally ill…”

Green weighs in:

Regardless of the opinion if Transgenderism is a mental illness, a biological error, a personal choice or an emotional and psychological imperative we are free to embrace or dismiss the concept. By demanding that all people accept gender expression as relative to the presenter, we are stigmatizing natural impulses. It is wrong to demand that a person be labeled as a bigot for not viewing another person as that person demands to be viewed. In the end liberals do not create a more tolerant and open world, they merely create new and irrational categories of people to discriminate against. Appreciating the personal journey of an individual changing their gender is equally as tolerant as disapproving of the fluid manipulation of gender in the first place.

It might seem as if we are jumping back and forth between topics — but we’re not — they’re all “identities,” and thus all related.

Up next: Why the Term “Sexual Orientation” is Nonsense.

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“Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe topful
Of direst cruelty!”
—Lady Macbeth

By the fall of 2017, kindergartners in Washington State will be taught to “understand the range of gender roles, identity, and expression across cultures.”1 For those unclear about what precisely will be taught, the kindergarten curriculum developers provide a helpful glossary that includes a definition of “gender”:

Gender: A social construct based on emotional, behavioral, and cultural characteristics attached to a person’s assigned biological sex. A person’s social and/or legal status as male or female.

• Gender expression. The way someone outwardly expresses their gender, whether consciously or unconsciously.

• Gender identity. Someone’s inner sense of their gender (see Transgender).

• Gender roles. Social expectations about how people should act, think, or feel based on their assigned biological sex.

Kindergarten now marks the starting point for government indoctrination of children into the brave, new, sexless, science-denying orthodoxy of the “transgender” movement, the end result of which is not a more compassionate society, but a society in which there is no public recognition of, or respect for, sexual differentiation.

In early May 2016, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) joined the ranks of the foolish by issuing guidelines pertaining to gender-dysphoric students in K–12 schools. Students who wish they were the opposite sex may now use opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms, and on school-sponsored overnight trips, they may room with opposite-sex students.

These guidelines also apply to “gender non-binary” students who don’t “identify” as either male or female and to “questioning” students who aren’t yet sure which sex they would like to be. In other words, these students may make their restroom, locker room, and hotel room selections in accordance with their unstable sexual confusion.

In an effort to facilitate student confusion, the CPS “guidelines” mandate the use of Newspeak by faculty and staff, requiring them to lie by using opposite-sex pronouns when referring to gender-dysphoric students.

Exploitation of Title IX

One week later, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Education (ED) issued an almost identical edict, except theirs came with a threat of the loss of federal funds for non-compliance with what they euphemistically describe as “significant guidance.”

Elementary, middle, and high schools all around the country have been accommodating requests (or demands) from parents to have their gender-dysphoric children granted access to restrooms, locker rooms, and athletic teams that correspond to the sex these children wish they were rather than the sex they actually are. In a case in Illinois, a male student sued his district for the right to unrestricted access even to the girls’ locker room, which includes showers. Often school administrations are accommodating these requests without informing the parents of students whose privacy is being invaded.

The DOJ and the ED, through the intrusive Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which is an unelected collective of bureaucrats, have proclaimed that henceforth, in the section of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 that prohibits discrimination based on “sex,” the word “sex” includes “gender identity” and “gender expression.” Further, sex-segregated restrooms constitute discrimination based on “sex,” meaning that schools have no legal right to maintain separate restrooms for boys and girls.

There are multiple problems with this creative argument, the first of which is that the word “sex” in Title IX means sex.

Second, progressives themselves relentlessly assert that sex and “gender identity” are wholly distinct.

Third, Title IX specifically states the following: “A recipient [of federal funds] may provide separate toilet, locker room, and shower facilities on the basis of sex, but such facilities provided for students of one sex shall be comparable to such facilities provided for students of the other sex.“2

Fourth, neither the DOJ nor the ED has lawmaking authority, so neither can change the definition of the word “sex” in Title IX.

Exploitation of Title VII

But the Barack Obama administration had still more government power to wield illicitly in its quest to eradicate sex-segregation. Like the ED, the DOJ under Attorney General Loretta Lynch has declared that the word “sex” in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 includes “gender identity” and “gender expression.” The abuse of Title VII is far more dangerous than that of Title IX because it has broader applicability.

Whereas Title IX applies only to schools, Title VII applies to every business in the private sector with over 14 employees, to every government entity, and to every religious organization, including religious schools of every grade level from elementary through college.It even applies to churches, which are exempt only from the prohibition of religious discrimination. Churches and other religious institutions are not exempt from the ban on “sex” discrimination.

So if the Obama administration’s redefinition of the word “sex” to include “gender identity” prevails, even churches couldn’t prohibit gender-dysphoric persons from using opposite-sex restrooms. The decree—it can’t veraciously be called a law—would mandate that gender-dysphoric guests at church weddings or attendees of concerts and athletic events at Christian colleges be allowed in opposite-sex restrooms.

Since men are permitted to go shirtless on beaches, at pools, in public parks, in high-school swim classes, and on swim teams, there would be no legal warrant for prohibiting women who “identify” as men but forgo bilateral mastectomies from going shirtless as well.

Sex Segregation versus Racial Segregation

Progressives, who never tire of exploiting race as an analogue for sexual deviance, compare racially segregated restrooms to sex-segregated restrooms, again misconstruing the issues. Racially segregated restrooms were unjustifiable because they were based on the false belief that people of different races are ontologically different. Sex-segregated restrooms are justifiable because they are based on the true belief that men and women are different—a true belief that even homosexuals implicitly acknowledge when they say they are attracted only to persons of their own sex.

When announcing the DOJ’s lawsuit against North Carolina following that state’s passage of a law prohibiting de-sexed, co-ed restrooms, Attorney General Lynch said, “It was not so very long ago that states, including North Carolina, had signs above restrooms, water fountains and on public accommodations keeping people out based upon a distinction without a difference.”

If there is no more difference between men and women than there is between blacks and whites—as Lynch clearly implies—then how is it justifiable to maintain single-sex restrooms or showers anywhere? Why not allow men and women and boys and girls to share the same restrooms, locker rooms, showers, shelters, and hospital rooms just as blacks and whites do?

Lynch also suggested that the unwillingness of women to share restrooms with gender-dysphoric men is evidence of fear, disrespect, misunderstanding, closed-mindedness, unfairness, lack of compassion, unjust regressive discrimination, and the denial of equality. If that’s the case, then how would she characterize the unwillingness of gender-dysphoric men to share restrooms with non-gender-dysphoric men? If separate restrooms for men and women are analogous to separate restrooms for blacks and whites, then aren’t separate restrooms for gender-dysphoric men and normal men also analogous to separate restrooms for blacks and whites?

Justifying Deception

The left uses the little-known history of some cross-dressing men successfully deceiving women in restrooms as a perverse ethical justification for allowing men in women’s restrooms. The argument goes something like this: Since gender-dysphoric men in especially convincing disguises have successfully deceived and violated the privacy of women who don’t want to share restrooms with men, let’s just openly allow gender-dysphoric men to continue to invade women’s privacy.

That’s analogous to arguing that since some peeping Toms successfully spy on women through windows without being found out, there’s no harm done, so no foul. Or, since some husbands commit adultery without their wives ever finding out—again, no harm, no foul.

Others believe, however, that the deception per se is harmful. The use of ever-more-elaborate disguises—including chemically and surgically facilitated ones—by gender-dysphoric men to conceal their sex from women who don’t want to use restrooms with objectively male persons is comparable to peepers using ever-more-sophisticated technology to peep.

Questions for Progressives

There are still more critical questions that should be posed to anyone who supports de facto co-ed everything, questions that will expose the incoherence of the subversive un-sexing of America:

1. Why should gender-dysphoric men and women be allowed to dictate that restrooms, showers, locker rooms, shelters, and hospital rooms no longer correspond to objective, immutable sex?

2. Why should gender-dysphoric men be able to dictate that they get to use restrooms with only women, but actual women are prohibited from saying they should get to use restrooms with only women?

3. If stalls provide sufficient privacy to separate gender-dysphoric men from women in restrooms, and curtains provide sufficient privacy to separate gender-dysphoric men from women in changing areas, why don’t stalls and curtains provide sufficient privacy to separate gender-dysphoric men from other men in men’s restrooms and changing areas?

4. If there is a mismatch between a person’s sex and his feelings about his sex, how can progressives be certain that the error resides in the body rather than the mind? If a person has XY chromosomes that have commanded his brain to produce and release male hormones to which his body is able to respond, thereby developing normal, unambiguous, healthy, fully functioning male anatomy, he is clearly male. If he nevertheless desires to be—or insists that he is—female, might this not be an error of his mind?

5. If a man “identifies” as “bi-gender” and has appended faux-breasts to his torso while retaining his penis, should he be permitted to decide at will which locker room he uses in the altogether?

6. Those who suffer from gender dysphoria claim that their DNA and the genitalia it shapes are wholly unrelated and irrelevant to “gender” and “gender identity,” and that genitalia shouldn’t matter when it comes to restrooms, changing areas, and showers. They further claim they want to use restrooms with only those whose “gender identity” they share. So, why do gender-dysphoric men demand to use women’s restrooms? How do they know that the males using the men’s restrooms do not “identify” as women, and how can they be sure that the females using the women’s restrooms do “identify” as women? Is it possible that gender-dysphoric men are basing their restroom choices on genitalia? If so, why are they permitted to do so, but actual women are not?

7. Leftists claim that people who don’t want to share restrooms, changing areas, showers, shelters, and hospital rooms with persons of the opposite sex are hateful. If it’s hateful for women to say they want to share these facilities only with other women, why isn’t it hateful for gender-dysphoric men to say they want to share them only with women?

8. Progressives routinely mock opponents of co-ed restrooms, asking whether historical restroom practices that require restroom-usage to correspond to sex will also require “genitalia police” to determine whether restroom-users are in reality the sex that corresponds to the restrooms they seek to use. Well, in the mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up progressive world, will there be “gender-identity” police demanding proof that all restroom-users are either the sex that corresponds to the restrooms they seek to use or have proof that they have been diagnosed as gender-dysphoric? If not, how will women know if their fellow restroom-users are actual women, or gender-dysphoric men masquerading as women, or male predators masquerading as gender-dysphoric men?

9. If the views of Obama and Lynch prevail and gender-dysphoric men are permitted in women’s restrooms, on what basis could all other men be prohibited from using women’s restrooms? Normal men couldn’t be prohibited from using women’s restrooms based on their male sex because men would already have been allowed in. And normal men couldn’t be prohibited from using women’s restrooms based on their “identification” as males because that would constitute discrimination based on “gender identity,” which Obama and Lynch argue violates Title IX and Title VII.

The Final Chapter

The editorial board of the Charlotte Observer opined that “the thought of male genitalia in girls’ locker rooms—and vice versa—might be distressing to some. But the battle for equality has always been in part about overcoming discomfort.”3 This comment reveals what many Americans don’t realize: identifying as the opposite sex does not require or necessarily include any surgery, cross-sex hormone-doping, or even cross-dressing; the mere assertion of one’s “gender identity” is sufficient.

Of course, none of those actions can efface the truth of sex; all they can do is mask it. But Americans should disabuse themselves of the rationalization that sharing a shower with Caitlyn Jenner might not be so bad as long as his testicles have been given the heave-ho and his pesky penis has been tucked inside.

And this brings us to the final chapter in the dystopian cultural narrative the left is writing: the end of sex-segregation everywhere. The elimination of the binary. No more public recognition of or respect for objective maleness and femaleness. “LGBTQQAP” activists and their ideological allies seek to create a solipsistic, make-believe world in which nothing outside the self is recognized as real or meaningful. Objective, immutable, biological sex, which is the source of feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy, will become a hoary relic of the past. Even language will be co-opted to serve an ontological and epistemic lie.

A compassionate society helps those who suffer from disordered thoughts and emotions. It does not affirm confusion or facilitate fiction. This most profound distortion of reality and morality must be resisted. •

1. Washington State Health and Physical Education Standards (March 2016), 32
2. 34 C.F.R. Part 106, Subpart D, §106.33: www2.ed.gov/policy/rights/reg/ocr/edlite-34cfr106.html.
3. “Taking the fear out of bathrooms,” The Charlotte Observer (May 13, 2016): charlotteobserver.com/opinion/editorials/article77475147.html.

The kind of draconian restrictions of speech and religious rights that corrupt Canadian governance are  arriving bit by corroded bit on America’s church steps sooner than many expected and in, of all places,  Iowa. Make no mistake though, this is coming to every state.

Iowa, like many other states, has a law banning discrimination based on, among other conditions, “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” in places of public accommodation. To be clear, the rhetorical contrivance “sexual orientation” really means “subjective homoerotic attraction and volitional homoerotic acts,”* and the rhetorical contrivance “gender identity” really means “the subjective desire to be the opposite sex or no sex,” both of which are ontological impossibilities.

Iowa also has a Civil Rights Commission that has issued “guidance” on how the state law and corresponding city codes affect churches. It states that the anti-discrimination law—including its provisions regarding homoerotic feelings and sex-rejection—does, in fact, apply to churches. Fortunately, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of the Fort Des Moines Church of Christ to prevent the civil rights commission and Iowa attorney general “from forcing Fort Des Moines to use its facility in a way that violates its religious beliefs about human sexuality.”

Here are some of the tricksy ways the Iowa Civil Rights Commission seeks to violate the civil rights of Christians.

Place of public accommodation

The Iowa law banning discrimination based on “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” applies to  places of public accommodation, from which historically churches have been exempt. But inventive (or cunning) Iowa public servants have found a way around that pesky obstacle to their absolutist cultural ambitions. The commissioners write that if any place that is “distinctly private by its nature….offers some services, facilities, or goods to the general public, it will be treated as a public accommodation for those services,” and, of course, church services are open and offered to the general public. By that very act of opening church services to all, churches—in the opinion of the Iowa Civil Rights Commission—become subject to Iowa’s anti-discrimination law and vulnerable to lawsuits for non-compliance.

Churches and their “bona fide religious purposes”

The commission explains that “Iowa law provides that these protections do not apply to religious institutions with respect to any religion-based qualifications when such qualifications are related to a bona fide religious purpose. Where qualifications are not related to a bona fide religious purpose, churches are still subject to the law’s provisions.”

Many Christians will be scratching their heads at those statements in that virtually everything that takes place within churches has a bona fide religious purpose or, more precisely, is informed by religious belief. Since neither the law nor the commission’s interpretation of the law defines a “bona fide religious purpose,” I will take a stab at the definition: To the commission, a “bona fide religious purpose” is a religious purpose so narrow in its scope and application that no secularist can hear or see it.

For those still baffled by the commission’s gaseous emanations, the commission provides two specific examples of church activities that because of their public nature are unrelated to a “bona fide religious purpose” and, therefore, “subject to the law’s provisions”: “a child care facility operated at a church or a church service open to the public.”

Bodily sex and physical privacy

The commission warns that churches that offer services open to the public must allow sex-rejecting men and women to use opposite-sex restrooms or risk lawsuits. According to the commission, the law and city codes require that “ndividuals [be] permitted to access… [restrooms, locker rooms, and living facilities] in accordance with their gender identity, rather than their assigned sex at birth, without being… questioned.”

ADF charges that the commission is  engaging in viewpoint discrimination: “The Act and City Code permit churches and others to distribute and disseminate religious statements that support or condone policies permitting access to restrooms and showers based on one’s gender identity, but punish religious statements that support or condone access to restrooms and showers based solely on one’s biological sex.”

Big Brother is stomping across the Iowa cornfields belching that church restrooms should no longer correspond to objective, immutable biological sex, but henceforth should correspond to the strange, subjective feelings of those who believe sex per se has no intrinsic meaning. Such a moral claim, however, is based on prior assumptions about the meaning of sex, modesty, and privacy—assumptions that contradict Scripture.

Harassment

According to the commission, “illegal harassment” could include “repeated remarks of a demeaning nature…demeaning…stories…and intentional use of names and pronouns inconsistent with a person’s presented gender.” Would the story of Sodom and Gomorrah be a demeaning story? Could a pastor’s exposition of Leviticus 18:22 or 20: 13, or Romans 1: 26-27, or 1 Corinthians 6:9 be construed as “remarks of a demeaning nature”? If a pastor uses the man formerly known as Bruce Jenner as an illustration in a sermon and refers to him by the grammatically correct male pronoun because Jenner remains to this day male, could the pastor be fined or jailed?

Let that sink in for a moment: The government is intruding into sacred space to force Christians to lie in violation of their religious convictions. Astonishing. The government has passed a law that bans “demeaning remarks” and compels lying thus violating First Amendment speech and religious protections. The left has long sought to scrub the public square of religion, but now the poisonous tentacles of “progressivism” are slinking into even our sanctuaries.

Churches may be exempt from Iowa’s anti-discrimination law when it comes to hiring a pastor—which means churches may discriminate based on a candidate’s embrace of a homosexual or “trans” identity—but if, in a church service open to the public, pastors preach sermons based on theologically orthodox beliefs about homosexuality or if churches require that restroom-usage corresponds to objective sex, churches risk lawsuits. Leftists will no longer allow religious purposes to remain unmolested by anti-biblical, Caesarist policies even within church buildings unless those buildings are hermetically sealed off from the public.

It appears that states are careening down the greased up slope at the bottom of which they’ll find Dystopia watched over by the gimlet eyes of debauched Big Brother.

*No one is discriminated against based on their heterosexuality because objectively all humans are heterosexual. Their bodies are designed for hetero-sex and they reproduce heterosexually. The term “sexual orientation” in law actually refers only to subjective homoerotic feelings and volitional homoerotic acts, which means the legal door is open to add other conditions constituted by subjective feelings and volitional acts to anti-discrimination laws and policies.

Is it true that the push for “transgender rights” is simply a compassionate effort to protect a tiny, vulnerable portion of society? Is it an innocent, well-meaning effort that will not adversely affect other Americans? The answer to these questions is decidedly No. While we should be compassionate to those who struggle with gender identity issues, we should beware of the push for “transgender rights.”

To be sure, we already have reason to be concerned about the normalizing of transgender identity in our society, from the almost satirical choice of Bruce Jenner to be Glamor magazine’s Woman of the Year to shocking stories like this one, reported by family activist Linda Harvey:

A 17-year-old Chicago girl recently had healthy breasts amputated because she read about the possibility of becoming ‘transgendered’ and decided this was the answer to her depression and suicidal tendencies — and her parents said, ‘Well, OK.’ So Emily is now called ‘Emmett’ and has just begun hormone therapy to (supposedly) become a male.

Yet there is far more at stake than public perceptions about gender identity and the health and well-being of teenagers who amputate healthy body parts.

We’re talking about downright dangerous legislation that even affects our children in their schools. Under the guise of LGBT non-discrimination bills, an aggressive agenda is being advanced across the country, one that protects LGBT “rights” at the expense of the rights of other citizens, foremost of which are our religious rights.

Thankfully, many American Christians have recognized the very real, gay-activist threat to these freedoms of speech, conscience and religion. But when it comes to transgender issues, most are not as aware of the real issues involved.

One obvious concern is the impact on our privacy, specifically, in public bathrooms and locker rooms. If LGBT activists have their way, public bathrooms and locker rooms would be rendered gender neutral, leading to obvious chaos, confusion and possible danger.

As a woman, would you want to use a gender neutral bathroom? As a father, would you want to send your daughter into one? How about you as a woman having to get undressed in the fitness center’s locker room next to a biological male who identifies as a female? (This is not hypothetical; see here.)

How about that biological male getting undressed in the locker room next to your wife, sir?

Transgender activists want to be able to use the bathroom and locker room of their perceived gender identity, no matter how uncomfortable it would make anyone else, thereby imposing the struggles of less than 1 percent of the population on the other 99 percent.

And, while I do not believe that a man who truly believes he is a woman is going into the bathroom in order to check out the ladies — or worse — I’m quite sure that heterosexual predators have taken advantage of these situations to pose as transgender women in order to have access to unsuspecting women. As reported October 8, the “University of Toronto Dumps Transgender Bathrooms after Peeping Incidents.”

Yes, “The University is temporarily changing its policy on gender-neutral bathrooms after two separate incidents of ‘voyeurism’ were reported on campus September 15 and 19. Male students within the University’s Whitney Hall student residence were caught holding their cellphones over female students’ shower stalls and filming them as they showered.”

What kind of madness is this?

It is the madness of the gender-neutral bathroom craze, a direct result of transgender activism. More seriously still, younger children are being negatively impacted, without parental knowledge or consent. As reported by MassResistance on February 19, 2013, “The ‘transgender agenda’ onslaught is now hitting Massachusetts schoolchildren with full force. What you are about to read is nothing short of madness. But it is happening.”

These charges are then outlined in disturbing detail, with direct citations from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s Gender Identity document, including:

• There is a difference between a child’s “assigned sex at birth” and his or her “gender-related identity.”
• All schools must include “gender identity” in policies, handbooks and written materials.
• “A student who says she is a girl and wishes to be regarded that way throughout the school day and throughout every, or almost every, other area of her life, should be respected and treated like a girl. So too with a student who says he is a boy and wishes to be regarded that way throughout the school day and throughout every, or almost every, other area of his life. Such a student should be respected and treated like a boy.”
• Parents can be excluded from the process of a student changing his or her gender identity if the student so desires, meaning that if Jane decides to become Joe at school while hiding this from her parents, she can do so, provided she has a letter from a “parent, health care provider, school staff member familiar with the student (a teacher, guidance counselor or school psychologist, among others), or other family members or friends” verifying that she wants to be treated as a boy.
• The concept of “gender”/biological sex will be removed from all school life.
• There will be mandatory transgender diversity training for children and school staff.
• There will be no tolerance for other students’ discomfort with transgenderism.

As Brian Camenker of MassResistance said to the school board when these changes were being announced, this is “complete lunacy.” But it could well be coming to a school near you if transgender activists succeed.

You have been forewarned.

This article was originally posted at the Stream.org.

And if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone tied around his neck. –Mark 9:42 

There are numerous problems affecting public education, problems so serious that many families are choosing either to homeschool their children or send them to private schools—options which very few families are able to implement or afford.

The most serious problems affecting public education emerge from the stranglehold that disciples of the “teaching for social justice” movement and the related social and political movement to normalize homosexual practice and Gender Identity Disorder (GID) have on academia.

These subversive ideologies, fallaciously promoted as fact, infect public education at all levels, and contribute to the undermining of biblical truth, the natural family, and love of America.

The efforts to promote these partisan political theories and the simultaneous censorship of conservative resources reveal the hypocrisy of the commitments of public educators to diversity, critical thinking, and intellectual inquiry.

Problems: Homosexuality and Gender Identity Disorder

The problem of the presence of homosexuality-affirming resources is underestimated by far too many parents and other taxpayers. If we do not muster the courage to oppose these resources with the same conviction, vigor, and tenacity that radical activist ideologues use to promote them, we become complicit in the loss of First Amendment speech and religious liberties that will soon follow. Our continued silence will bequeath to our children and grandchildren even greater oppression than we experience today—oppression, that is, for those students who are not deceived by the specious arguments to which they are relentlessly exposed.

The ubiquitous propaganda from activist public educators, and organizations such as Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, the National Education Association, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s educational division’s, “Teaching Tolerance”, and the American Library Association compel Illinois Family Institute to spend a considerable amount of time addressing the problem of pro-homosexual advocacy in public education.

Students are exposed to “progressive” views of homosexuality and GID (euphemistically referred to as “gender identity”) and cross-dressing (euphemistically referred to as “gender expression”) in many school contexts. The resources and activities to which students are exposed implicitly or explicitly espouse unproven, non-factual, subjective liberal assumptions on the nature and morality of homosexuality and GID. Some of the numerous contexts in which students are exposed to these ideas include: English, social studies, foreign language, theater/drama, and health/sex ed classes; assemblies; anti-bullying programs, and teacher advocacy in the classroom setting.

In addition, extracurricular clubs such as gay-straight alliances and political action clubs (e.g. AWARE) organize activities in support of the Day of Silence, make announcements, hold fundraisers, and put up posters that promote the normalization of homosexuality during the school day.

The kinds of resources that activist teachers use in their efforts to use public education to change the moral and political views of other people’s children include newspaper and magazine articles, essays, plays (both read and performed), novels, picture books, films, guest speakers, and games.

To make matters worse, public educators engage in pervasive censorship of all resources that espouse conservative views of homosexual practice and GID. In so doing, they undermine the legitimacy of public education and transform education into indoctrination by routinely violating school commitments to diversity, critical thinking, and intellectual inquiry.

Parents should be especially wary of anti-bullying activities, programs, resources, or curricula, no matter where they emerge. “Anti-bullying” resources and policies are the Trojan Horses for secreting affirmative ideas about homosexuality and GID into public schools, including elementary schools.

Teaching for “Social Justice”

The second serious problem in public schools is commonly referred to as “teaching for social justice,” which shares some of the philosophical features of “Critical Theory,” “Critical Education Theory,“ Critical Pedagogy,” “Critical Race Theory,” and, within theological circles, “Black Liberation Theology.”

In the broadest of outlines, “teaching for social justice” is essentially repackaged socialism with its focus on economic redistribution. Social justice theory emphasizes redistribution of wealth and values uniformity of economic and social position over liberty. Social justice advocates seek to use the force of government to establish economic uniformity.

Its other dominant features pertain to race, gender, class, homosexuality, “gender identity” and “gender expression.” Social justice theory encourages people to view the world through the divisive lens of identity politics that demarcates groups according to which group constitutes the “oppressors” and which the “oppressed.” Those who are identified as the “oppressors” need not have committed any acts of actual persecution or oppression, nor feel any sense of superiority toward or dislike of the supposed “oppressed” class. The theory illogically promotes the idea that “institutional racism,” as opposed to actual acts of mistreatment of individuals by other individuals, is the cause of differing lots in life. Social justice theorists cultivate the racist, sexist, heterophobic stereotype that whites, males, and heterosexuals are automatically oppressors.

Former Marxist David Horowitz warns that,

“Today the gravest threat to American public education comes from educators who would use the classroom to indoctrinate students from kindergarten through the 12th grade in radical ideology and political agendas.

Much of this indoctrination takes place under the banner of “social justice,” which is a short-hand for opposition to American traditions of individual justice and free market economics. Proponents of social justice teaching argue that American society is an inherently “oppressive” society that is “systemically” racist, “sexist” and “classist” and thus discriminates institutionally against women, non-whites, working Americans and the poor…. In recent years teaching for social justice has become a powerful movement in American schools of education…”

Some of the influential Critical Theorists are Paulo Freire, Maxine Greene, William (Bill) Ayers, Peter McLaren, Bell Hooks, Henry Giroux, Jonathan Kozol, Lisa Delpit, Peggy McIntosh, Herbert Kohl, James Banks, Cornel West, and Howard Zinn.

Solutions:

The solution begins with us—with a spiritual transformation. Our own self-indulgence—indulging our laziness and fear—has resulted in vulnerable, impressionable young children being exposed to positive views about the sins of homosexuality and cross-dressing. Our passivity has allowed those who hold distorted views of America to cultivate anti-American sentiments in our nation’s children.

Everyone who remains silent in the face of this unconscionable educational travesty bears some measure of guilt.

Character Changes:

We must start with the willful cultivation of those character traits required for the task at hand: courage, boldness, perseverance, and a willingness to endure persecution.

Scripture teaches that “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matt. 5: 10, 11). Despite this clear teaching of Christ, many Christians retreat from even the mildest manifestations of persecution.

Informed Minds:

• Taxpayers need to research the authors whose writing students are reading, and research the organizations that are publishing materials used in class and professional development activities.
• Taxpayers need to request and study the content of professional development opportunities that school districts provide to teachers at taxpayer expense (e.g. Late Arrival and Institute Day activities, conferences, seminars, and summer workshops).
• Taxpayers need to be able to refute the deceptive secular arguments used to normalize homosexuality. To that end, churches should offer classes or workshops that educate their members. If church leaders are themselves ill-equipped, we need to urge them to invite guest speakers to teach such workshops.

Policy Changes:

• Taxpayers should urge their schools to create policy that requires teachers who present resources that address controversial issues to spend equal time on and present equivalent resources from all perspectives. So, if an English teacher assigns The Laramie Project, he should be required to also assign essays, commentaries, or journal articles written by conservative scholars on the issue of homosexuality.
• Taxpayers should urge their schools to create policy that prohibits ideological litmus tests in hiring. Some school districts are attempting to ensure ideological uniformity among faculty and administrators via the interview process for new hires.
• Taxpayers should urge their schools to create policy that requires “opt-in” options for highly controversial resources, including any that address homosexuality or Gender Identity Disorder.
• Taxpayers should urge their schools to create policy that requires ideological balance in the content of professional development opportunities. For example, if a district offers an Institute Day workshop on “teaching for social justice,” they should be required to offer a workshop in which teachers read and analyze criticism of “teaching for social justice.”
• Taxpayers should oppose the inclusion of the terms “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” and “gender expression” in anti-discrimination and/or anti-bullying policies.

Community Awareness:

• Taxpayers should attend school board meetings, and make statements to, ask questions of, and run for election to school boards.
• Taxpayers should write letters to their local newspapers when a curricular or policy problem is discovered.
• Christians need to urge their church leaders to be involved in the schools in the communities in which they live.
• As citizens, they have both a right and an obligation to participate in shaping a godly community, and they have an obligation to set examples for the men and women whom they lead.

Specific Suggestions for Parents:

• Notify K-8 teachers that under no circumstance is your child to be exposed to any resources or activities that mention homosexuality or Gender Identity Disorder. Ask them to agree in writing to your expectation, and if they won’t, ask for a change of teachers.
• Notify high school teachers that your child is not to be exposed to resources that address homosexuality or Gender Identity Disorder unless equal time is spent studying resources that articulate conservative views on the subject.
• Call your children out of school on the Day of Silence if your school is permitting children to remain silent during class.
• Homeschool high school kids for health class.

Homosexuality-Affirming Resources

Books taught in many schools:

The Laramie Project by Moises Kaufman

Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes by Tony Kushner

Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Misfits by James Howe

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Rainbow Boys, Rainbow High, Rainbow Road, The God Box, all by Alex Sanchez

It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health by Robie H. Harris

Additional books are listed at:

http://www.safeschoolscoalition.org/RG-books_elementary.html

http://www.safeschoolscoalition.org/RG-books_secondary.html

http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/booklink/K-6.html

http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/booklink/7-12.html

http://rainbowlist.wordpress.com/rl-2008/

http://rainbowlist.wordpress.com/rl-2009/

http://rainbowlist.wordpress.com/rl-2010/

Films:

Films recommended by the Safe Schools Coalition: http://www.safeschoolscoalition.org/RG-videos.html

Film recommended by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s educational division’s, “Teaching Tolerance”: Bullied: A Student, a School and a Case that Made History.

We need to insist that our public schools fulfill their commitments to honor diversity, to challenge assumptions and beliefs, to pursue intellectual inquiry, and to cultivate critical thinking skills.

If educators define “safety” as making kids feel comfortable, as many schools do, then they must censor resources that make any students uncomfortable, rather than censoring only those that make homosexual students uncomfortable.

If, on the other hand, schools oppose censorship, then they must not censor the writing of scholars who articulate conservative views of homosexuality and Gender Identity Disorder or those who criticize “social justice” theory.

All concerned taxpayers should be involved in the effort to effect change in public schools. Our taxes are paying the salaries of educators and are used to purchase materials that disseminate destructive ideas to children. We must assume responsibility for the ways in which our money is spent.

Concern for both the temporal and eternal lives of children—for their hearts, and minds, and bodies—should compel us to work tirelessly for truth.

We must remember that the children in public schools today will very shortly be our culture-makers. If we care about the future health of America, we should participate in the effort to restore a proper understanding of the role of public educators and the scope of public education.

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Written by Thaddeus Baklinski, LifeSiteNews.com

A prominent Toronto psychiatrist has severely criticized the assumptions underlying what has been dubbed by critics as the Canadian federal government’s “bathroom bill,” that is, Bill C-279, a private member’s bill that would afford special protection to so-called “transgender” men and women.

Dr. Joseph Berger has issued a statement saying that from a medical and scientific perspective there is no such thing as a “transgendered” person, and that terms such as “gender expression” and “gender identity” used in the bill are at the very least ambiguous, and are more an emotional appeal than a statement of scientific fact.

Berger, who is a consulting psychiatrist in Toronto and whose list of credentials establishes him as an expert in the field of mental illness, stated that people who identify themselves as “transgendered” are psychotic or simply unhappy, and pointed out that hormone therapy and surgery are not appropriate treatments for psychosis or unhappiness.

“From a scientific perspective, let me clarify what ‘transgendered’ actually means,” Dr. Berger said, adding, “I am speaking now about the scientific perspective – and not any political lobbying position that may be proposed by any group, medical or non-medical.”

“‘Transgendered’ are people who claim that they really are or wish to be people of the sex opposite to which they were born, or to which their chromosomal configuration attests,” Dr. Berger stated.

“Some times, some of these people have claimed that they are ‘a woman trapped in a man’s body’ or alternatively ‘a man trapped in a woman’s body’.”

“The medical treatment of delusions, psychosis or emotional happiness is not surgery,” Dr. Berger stated.

“On the other hand,” Dr. Berger continued, “if these people are asked to clarify exactly what they believe, that is to say do they truly believe whichever of those above propositions applies to them and they say ‘no’, then they know that such a proposition is not true, but that they ‘feel’ it, then what we are talking about scientifically, is just unhappiness, and that unhappiness is being accompanied by a wish – that leads some people into taking hormones that predominate in the other sex, and even having cosmetic surgery designed to make them ‘appear’ as if they are a person of the opposite sex.”

He explained that cosmetic surgery will not change the chromosomes of a human being in that it will not make a man become a woman, capable of menstruating, ovulating, and having children, nor will it make a woman into a man, capable of generating sperm that can unite with an egg or ovum from a woman and fertilize that egg to produce a human child.

Moreover, Dr. Berger stated that the arguments put forward by those advocating for special rights for gender confused people have no scientific value and are subjective and emotional appeals with no objective scientific basis.

“I have read the brief put forward by those advocating special rights, and I find nothing of scientific value in it,” Dr. Berger said in his statement. “Words and phrases, such as ‘the inner space,’ are used that have no objective scientific basis.”

“These are the scientific facts,” Dr. Berger said. “There seems to me to be no medical or scientific reason to grant any special rights or considerations to people who are unhappy with the sex they were born into, or to people who wish to dress in the clothes of the opposite sex.”

“The so-called ‘confusion’ about their sexuality that a teenager or adult has is purely psychological. As a psychiatrist, I see no reason for people who identify themselves in these ways to have any rights or privileges different from everyone else in Canada,” he concluded.

REAL Women of Canada asked Dr. Berger for a statement on the issues surrounding Bill C-279 after the organization appeared before the review committee hearings on the bill.

Gwen Landolt of REAL Women told LifeSiteNews that after being initially refused permission to present their perspective on the bill to the review committee, the group was accepted, but found that all other groups and individuals who had been accepted to appear before the committee were supporters of Bill C-279.

“It can scarcely be an impartial review of any bill if only the witnesses supporting the bill are invited to speak to it,” Landolt said.

Landolt explained that after passing second reading on June 6, 2012, Bill C-279 went to the Justice and Human Rights Committee for review.

At the review committee hearings, REAL Women of Canada presented a 12 page brief setting out the harms created by the bill, and pointing out that the terms “gender expression” and “gender identity,” as written in Bill C-279, were so broad that they could be used to protect pedophilia along with other sexual perversions, if passed into law.

REAL Women provided the committee with evidence that post-operative trans-gendered individuals suffer substantially higher morbidity and mortality than the general population, placing the so-called “sex reassignment” surgery and hormone treatment under continued scrutiny.

They pointed out that a pioneer in such treatment, Dr. Paul McHugh, distinguished professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, stopped the procedures because he found that patients were no better adjusted or satisfied after receiving such treatment.

McHugh wrote in 2004 that “Hopkins was fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness” by catering to the desires of people who wanted surgery to change their biological sex.

“We psychiatrists, I thought, would do better to concentrate on trying to fix their minds and not their genitalia,” he stated, adding that “to provide a surgical alteration to the body of these unfortunate people was to collaborate with a mental disorder rather than to treat it.”

Landolt noted that the committee hearings ended in confusion over the terminology presented in the bill, and that even the bill’s sponsor, NDP MP Randall Garrison (Esquimalt – Juan de Fuca), was not clear as to who is included and who is excluded in these terms.

“The definition for ‘gender identity’ proposed by Mr. Garrison is a subjective one that he defined as a ‘deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex that the individual was assigned at birth’,” Landolt said, adding that “The committee engaged in extensive discussions on the meaning of “gender identity” and “gender expression” without much clarification.”

“As a result, instead of a smooth, orderly dispatch of this bill through the Committee orchestrated by Garrison, Conservative MP Shelly Glover (St. Boniface, Manitoba) and Conservative MP Kerry-Lynne Findlay (Delta-Richmond-East, BC), the committee hearings broke down in confusion at the final hearing on December 10th. The result is that the bill will be reported to the House of Commons as originally written without amendments,” Landolt stated.

Following this state of confusion over terms at the review committee, REAL Women sought out an expert in order to provide the scientific and medical evidence relating to “transgenderism” and the other terms used in the bill.

Gwen Landolt told LifeSiteNews that REAL Women of Canada will be including Dr. Berger’s statement in an information package to be sent to MPs before the bill comes to final vote.

“It is crucial that MPs know that this legislation is harmful, not only to those who think themselves transgendered but also to society, and should not be passed into law,” Landolt said. “We must therefore write to our MP’s to request that they speak against this troubling bill.”

Dr. Berger is certified as a specialist in Psychiatry by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada and by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, and is an elected Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He is also a past Chairman of the Toronto district of the Ontario Medical Association and past President of the Ontario branch of the American Psychiatric Association.

Berger has been an Examiner in Psychiatry for the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology for twenty five years, has taught as Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, and is the author of many published papers on different aspects of Diagnosis and Independent Psychiatric Assessments, as well as author of the book “The Independent Medical Examination in Psychiatry” published by Butterworth/Lexis-Nexis.