Yesterday, U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) put to shame every Congressman and Congresswoman who refuses to state publicly and definitively that no medical professional should support cross-sex hormone-doping for minors or the elective removal of healthy parts of their sexual anatomy as “treatments” for disordered feelings about their maleness or femaleness.

The inspiring and courageous statements by Senator Paul occurred in a must-see exchange between Senator Paul and the pitiable Dr. “Rachel” Levine, a cross-dressing male physician whom the pandering Joe Biden has nominated to be his assistant health secretary. Of all the physicians in all of America, Biden chose a psychologically unwell man, and the reason for choosing Levine? Obviously, he was chosen because he masquerades as a woman and calls his masquerade “authentic identity.”

Senator Paul began by reminding Levine that female genital mutilation has been widely condemned:

Genital mutilation has been condemned by the WHO, the United Nations Children’s Fund, and the United Nations Population Fund. According to the WHO, genital mutilation is recognized internationally as a violation of human rights. Genital mutilation is considered particularly egregious because as the WHO notes, it is nearly always carried out on minors and is a violation of the rights of children.

Senator Paul further noted that as with genital mutilation, social forces today play a critical role in forming “trans”-cultic beliefs and practices that harm the bodies of minors:

Genital mutilation is not typically performed by force, but, as WHO notes, by social convention, social norm, the social pressure to conform, to do what others do and have been doing, as well as the need to be accepted socially, and the fear of being rejected by the community.

Evidence increasingly shows that social influences, including both the influence of social media and peers, have profound effects on adolescents, particularly on girls who tend to be more vulnerable to what are called “social contagions” (e.g., repressed memory syndrome, bulimia, and cutting) than are boys.

A study released in the United Kingdom showed that between 2009-2018, there was a 4,515 percent increase in the number of minor girls seeking to “transition,”—a shocking increase that many experts believe is the result of social media providing a distorted lens through which girls are misinterpreting their often normal feelings.

Rather than recommending waiting and counseling to get at the root causes for the confused and disordered feelings of minors, “trans”-cultists and their profiteering allies are recommending experimental medications and surgeries while banning counseling.

Senator Paul asked Levine,

Dr. Levine, you have supported both allowing minors to be given hormone blockers to prevent them from going through puberty, as well as surgical destruction of a minor’s genitalia. Like surgical mutilation, hormonal interruption of puberty can permanently alter and prevent secondary sexual characteristics. The American College of Pediatricians reports that 80 to 95% of pre-pubertal children with gender dysphoria will experience resolution by late adolescence, if not exposed to medical intervention and social affirmation. Dr. Levine, do you believe that minors are capable of making such a life changing decision as changing one’s sex?

Note U.S. Senator Paul’s inclusion of “social affirmation,” as a factor that contributes to minors persisting in their rejection of their biological sex. Affirming their delusional thinking through incorrect pronouns and restroom/locker room usage policies harm children.

Instead of answering Senator Paul’s direct and clear question, Levine dodged with a pre-memorized evasion, so Senator Paul tried again:

Let’s be a little more specific since you evaded the question. Do you support the government intervening to override the parent’s consent to give a child puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones, and/or amputation surgery of breasts and genitalia? You have said that you’re willing to accelerate the protocols for street kids. I’m alarmed that poor kids with no parents who are homeless and distraught, that you would just go through with this and allow that to happen to a minor.

Again, Levine robotically recited the same memorized, evasive non-answer, which revealed that Levine does, indeed, support the chemical sterilization and surgical mutilation of minors who experience sexual confusion, often because of abuse and/or the toxic influence of social media.

Barely containing his justifiable and righteous anger over the destructive ignorance and dissembling of Levine, Senator Paul said what every decent American should be saying publicly and often:

Let it go into the record that the witness refused to answer the question. The question is a very specific one: Should minors be making these momentous decisions? For most of the history of medicine, we wouldn’t let you have a cut sewn up in the ER, but you’re willing to let a minor take things that prevent their puberty, and you think they get that back? You give a woman testosterone enough that she grows a beard, and you think she’s going to go back looking like a woman when you stop the testosterone? You have permanently changed them. Infertility is another problem. None of these drugs have been approved for this. They’re all being used off-label. I find it ironic that the left that went nuts over hydroxychloroquine being used possibly for COVID are not alarmed that these hormones are being used off-label.

There’s no long-term studies. We don’t know what happens to them. We do know that there are dozens and dozens of people who’ve been through this, who regret that this happened. And a permanent change happened to them and if you’ve ever been around children, 14-year-olds can’t make this decision. In the gender dysphoria clinic in England, 10% of the kids are between the ages of three and 10. We should be outraged that someone is talking to a three-year-old about changing their sex. I can’t vote for you if you can’t make a decision.

U.S. Senator Paul’s concluding statement exposed the hypocrisy and dishonesty of leftists. To leftists, the off-label use of hydroxychloroquine for the emergency treatment of a viral pandemic that was killing thousands of people worldwide was unconscionable. Why? Because successfully treating COVID-19 would have helped President Trump.

But the off-label use of puberty-blockers like Lupron, and the prescription of estrogen for physically healthy boys and progesterone for physically healthy girls are not only medically sound but also altruistic acts of love. At least the “trans” cult and its legion of allies think so.

And who are these allies? Who are the groups that gain from exploiting confused children?

Well, there are the cosmetic surgeons, endocrinologists, pharmaceutical companies, mental health “professionals,” academics, and YouTube “influencers” whose greedy hands are grasping for the filthy lucre the “trans” cult generates for them.

And then there are the pandering politicians like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and every member of Congress who are content to say nothing as the bodies of children are destroyed. Children are expendable commodities because, unlike “trans”-cultists,” children have no power.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Rand-Paul-Confronts-Bidens-Cross-Dressing-Pick-for-Assistant-Health-Secretary_audio.mp3

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Yesterday, Senator Rand Paul put to shame every Congressman and Congresswoman who refuses to state publicly and definitively that no medical professional should support cross-sex hormone-doping for minors or the elective removal of healthy parts of their sexual anatomy as “treatments” for disordered feelings about their maleness or femaleness.

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Two years ago, homosexual activist and writer for the recently shuttered “progressive” website ThinkProgress, Zack Ford tweeted this:

I’ve personally met many trans men I’m attracted to. If genitals determine how you feel about someone, you’re transphobic.

To be clear in this shifty, slippery, imaginary, alchemical world in which cross-sex identifiers live and move and have their being, “trans men” are biological women, also known as women.

As anyone who is familiar with the homosexual community—particularly male homosexual community—knows, homosexuals care deeply about the genitals of their sexual partners. Calling a homosexual man “transphobic” for not being attracted to women is actually an act of “homophobia.” Oh, the tangled webs an incoherent ideology weaves.

Ford’s tweet provided yet more evidence of the growing schism in the LGB/T alliance, a schism of which many remain unaware.

“Gender critical” feminists, many of whom are lesbians, have been at the forefront of the schism, and for their justifiable objection to the presence of biological males in women’s private spaces and athletics, the “trans” community has turned on them with stunning viciousness. Within the “trans” community, it is primarily biological men who pretend to be women (henceforth referred to as pretend-women) who view gender critical feminists as quislings worthy of death.

In their quest to impose a totalizing and totalitarian ideology on all of society, pretend-women have done what “progressives” do best: manipulate language—a strategic phenomenon George Orwell called Newspeak. Pretend-women invented the epithet “TERF” to hurl at feminists who believe the ontological status of “woman” should not be appropriated by biological men, also known as men.

Gender critical feminists (as well as women who do not embrace second wave feminism), believe such appropriation erases women, violates their intrinsic right to be free of the presence of biological males in spaces where girls and women engage in personal bodily functions and undress, and puts at risk the physical safety of girls and women.

A more fitting nomenclature for feminists who object to the “trans” ideology in theory and practice would be “gender identity ideology” critics or as Ani O’Brien—who is herself a critic of the “trans” ideology—calls them, “sex essentialists.” They are aligned with second wave feminists who critiqued the rigid cultural expectations and conventions associated with maleness and femaleness. Gender critical feminists note and criticize that the entire “trans” ideology is built on these stereotypes:

[W]e believe that it is our biological sex and our biological sex alone that makes us women. It is not the gender stereotypes that we are socialised to associate with womanhood. It is not the “empathy” or outward expressions of femininity like how we dress or style our hair. Our POTENTIAL to become pregnant is a core part of our femaleness and it is central to a lot of the experiences women have in common…. [I]t is in fact proponents of gender identity ideology who are gender essentialist. After all, it is they who think gender is so innate that someone can be born in the wrong body. They conceptualise gender as a kind of soul that exists as separate from the biology of the person. Is it not terribly gender essentialist to suggest that a man who feels an innate sense of ‘womanness’ because he is (perhaps) empathetic, nurturing, gentle, sensitive, and presents femininely, must actually be a woman? Because no man could possibly possess those characteristics and present in that way? Rather than embrace the feminine man or the masculine women, gender identity ideology would have them switch place to ‘match’ their gender identity to the ‘appropriate’ sex.

For refusing to genuflect to pretend-women, sex essentialists are branded TERFs. TERF stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist,” and it is not a neutral descriptor. It is a hateful pejorative often accompanied by obscene and violent threats. In 2014 and 2015, gender critical feminists created a website on which they posted tweets from pretend-women about “TERFs” that are not for the faint of heart or decent of mind but are worth being aware of because they offer a glimpse into the dark side of a dark cultural movement.

In May 2018, the San Francisco Public Library had a shocking exhibit by the Degenderettes, pretend-men who hate “TERFs.”

Until recently, the LGB/T schism was largely driven by the efforts of gender critical feminists but recently evidence suggests that even male homosexual activists are joining the fight against at least some of the cultural goals of the “trans” cult.

In an open letter to the “LGBTQ” activist organization Stonewall UK, its founder Simon Fanshawe and 21 other homosexual “rights” activists expressed their opposition to the sexual integration of female private spaces. Reality can’t long be denied:

Last October a group of LGB rights supporters asked Stonewall to ‘commit to fostering an atmosphere of respectful debate rather than demonising as transphobic those who wish to discuss, or dissent from, Stonewall’s transgender policies.’ Since then, Stonewall has refused repeated requests to enter into any such dialogue…. We believe it has made mistakes in its approach that undermine women’s sex-based rights and protections. The most worrying aspect of this is that all primary-school children are now challenged to review their “gender identity” and decide that they may be the opposite sex if they do not embrace outdated gender stereotypes…. If Stonewall remains intransigent, there must surely now be an opening for a new organisation committed both to freedom of speech and to fact instead of fantasy.

The demise of the incoherent, science-denying ideology that is confusing and harming children, and will, if permitted to metastasize, violate the privacy, speech, and religious rights of countless people, is being hastened by the schism in the LGB/T alliance. How remarkable it is that so few Christians who should know truth lack the wisdom or courage or both to speak publicly against an ideology that will stain the landscape with the tears of the sterilized and mutilated.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

This article was originally published at SalvoMag.com

You may have thought I was overstating things in my recent article, “Will California Go from Banning Religious Books to Burning Them?” You may have thought I was exaggerating when I referenced LGBT activists who compared Christian conservatives to ISIS and Al-Qaeda. Be assured that there was not a word of hyperbole in what I wrote. The truth is unsettling enough.

To put things in perspective, when Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, he stated clearly that marriage was the union of one man and one woman. And he knew he needed to do this to win the conservative, black vote.

Today, you are branded a radical and a dangerous fanatic if you espouse that same view. You will be grilled by the tolerance inquisition!

Ten years ago, you would have laughed me to scorn if I told you Bruce Jenner would become Caitlyn Jenner and be named woman of the year. You would have ridiculed me if I told you the federal government would punish schools that refused to open the girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms to boys who identified as girls.

Today, “transphobic” is a household word, a gender-confused teen has his (her?) own reality TV show, and drag queens are reading stories to toddlers in libraries.

Ten years ago, you would have said “Impossible!” to the idea that a minor with unwanted same-sex attraction would be forbidden by law to receive professional counseling, even if that child expressly requested it and even if that child had been sexually abused. And you would have dismissed completely the notion that some states would seek to bar such counseling from adults as well.

Today, a number of states have outlawed this much-needed counseling for struggling minors, while California is poised to make it illegal for anyone of any age to receive professional help for unwanted same-sex attraction or gender-confusion. That is the unvarnished, unembellished truth.

And what happens when we draw attention to this outrageous California bill? We are attacked as maniacs.

As one gay activist put it (specifically, in the context of my opposition to the California bill), “Brown is a religious zealot — a Christian convert — who is barely distinguishable from the folks who flew airplanes into buildings for their god. Unlike them, Brown is nonviolent. However, like those 9/11 maniacs, Brown substitutes literalist religious belief for logic, science and common sense. Brown, I think, relishes the negative attention and while I say that he is nonviolent he does equivalent violence to LGBT people every day through misinformation.”

To parse these words in any serious way is to give them a dignity they do not deserve. I simply post them to say, “You see! I was not exaggerating.”

This is what comes your way when you oppose radical LGBT activism. This is what you can expect when you take a stand for liberty and freedom. This is what happens when you tell the truth.

This same gay activist wrote, “In the final analysis, Michael Brown is an advocate of pseudoscience in order to conform the world to his religious beliefs. It should be noted that Brown sports a PhD in Near Eastern Languages. Obviously, he has no training or work experience relative to human sexuality.”

And after claiming that there is no scientific evidence that sexual orientation can be changed through counseling or that gender-confused children can, with help, become at home in their own bodies, he writes, “If Michael Brown knows of more compelling research, he has not cited it. He has failed to make any meaningful argument in support of conversion therapy. Promoting the existence of this mythical approach only creates prejudice and discrimination. It serves no useful purpose. Come to think of it, Michael Brown serves no useful purpose. It is a cheap shot but the guy rails against LGBT people all day, every day. Maybe he needs a new hobby.”

Actually, I and others have been citing scientific literature for years, along with an endless number of personal anecdotes from friends and colleagues. (I’m talking about former-homosexuals and former-transgenders.) But whoever we cite gets discredited immediately, since the psychologists and psychiatrists and therapists and scholars do not adhere to the standard LGBT talking points.

Ryan Anderson provides ample scientific literature about transgender issues in his new book, while a major review of scientific literature by two prominent psychologists addresses broader issues of sexual orientation change as well. Be assured that the science is there.

This, however, is not to deny that there are many gays and transgenders who have tried to change, without success. They have suffered depression and fear and self-loathing, spiraling even deeper into hopeless after unsuccessful therapy efforts. I do not minimize their struggles, I do not pretend to be able to relate to what they have endured, and I constantly call on the Church to show great compassion to such strugglers.

But to each of them – and to the critics who attack us with such venom – I make a simple appeal. Allow others to find their own path.

When you try to pass laws that will take away essential freedoms of those you differ with, and when you demonize those who oppose your values, you only discredit yourselves. In the long run, this will work against you. We will overcome your venom and anger and bills and laws with grace and truth and love – and God’s help.

This article was originally published at Townhall.com