As a parent - this is abhorrent to me. So too today's Senate vote FOR allowing men in women's sports. Our world has gone completely, totally mad. And, very, very stupid.
Hard to understand how the Dems managed to scupper the bill when they're in the minority in the Senate. Which GOP senators therefore want men in women's sports? They should be named and shamed.
Libs are so enamored with the idea that they are continuing a civil rights struggle that this doesn't end without kids getting hurt. I don't even think a lot of them realize that gender as a "social construct" is an ideological position that is detached from reality, or that people who are in opposition to it have reasoned through the consequences.
A lot of these libs need to directly feel the consequences of their position in order for anything to click with them. Yes, it is bat shit crazy, but that's how it is going to go. They are so self-righteous, so ignorant, and their "education" is so poor (largely due to allowing hysterical women to dictate what can and cannot be said while allowing them to bring up sensitive topics that provide them affirmation), this just doesn't end any other way... With stories and testimonials of the harm that occurs to children.
I'm not saying don't fight - fight hard. Just saying that reasoning with many of these people will not yield results.
Not to get too nihilistic here but if you're going to chop up a kids' reproductive organs, they kind of have a point. They are better off dying in utero if mommy is some social media addicted woke lefty psycho.
That's my concern. If it stays within the family, if the kid is clearly driving it, the parents are in full support, and all parties understand and take responsibility for the consequences, then let them do it. But they should not be allowed to use the public schools to entice other people's kids down that path behind the parents' backs.
Saw a late teen driving a car today, alone, with the windows rolled up, sun shining and a mask on. How twisted a sense of reality to be so propagandized by progressive media manipulation to think a mask is necessary at all, let alone in a car by yourself.
Time to say enough...don't tolerate stupidity because the behavior makes the uninformed comfortable. It's still stupidity and they need to learn to start to think for themselves, and that applies to all the TDS adherents on bluesky. Trump is right, time to reinstate some common sense into the conversation.
At 15-yo every young adult should be given unmutilated bodies, no MGM, FGM, piercing, tattoos, etc.
Accepting insanity as okay started small, birth-control, no-fault divorce family-father-children-mother destruction, mothers hire Witches to torture our babies to death silently screaming on whim, sure that is acceptable, sexually mind-body-soul mutilating children and mind-damaged adults, why not? Female-Pedo-psycho teachers in K-8th, drive men and others that would protect the children from Devouring Mother's life-destroying twisted abuse? That'sNormal.
What next? Open televised genocide .. ?
Give women vote, political power, and sanity, love, joy, life, hope, .. all murdered.
Same here. I'm so angry about the way the far-left has pushed this agenda. Especially the American Libraries Assn and teachers' union with the Biden Administration's blessing. THIS (and the whole covid response) is why I left the Dem party.
We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they're dazed and confused. The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.
Was a deck dpt officer on an LST...great people Boatswain Mates, but the dumb will make themselves irrelevant. Not the beginning of the end, but the beginning of a return to our roots as a free and independent people with government as small and subservient.
THANKS! You appear to be echoing one of my favorites: "I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases. The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first."
Well, then there's only one thing to do, consult Snoopes! "The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it."
The most hilarious part to me was the deferral "to the expertise of school officials, charged with the responsibility of educating children". Forget the debate about gender: you have many school districts that aren't exactly covering themselves in glory teaching basic math and English. Why would you defer to the "expertise" of people who are demonstrably incompetent at their core jobs?
It must be that big pile of books that pushes middle school librarians to the top of this dubious hierarchy. BTW, has anyone checked the percentage of male/female teachers in K-12 public school systems?
The authors of the Constitution never imagined that a court would purport to have power over your family...and the ones who might have imagined it, like the brilliant Ben Franklin, would have assumed that such a judge would be corrected by violence long before there was an appeal...
But they did know that if the people did not stay vigilant than they would eventually be happy to turn over their family to the state.
You could call this from a mile away because it's both covered implicitly and explicitly in our constitution.
That's the beauty of our constitution as opposed to others:
Its an instructional manual on how to REMAIN free, not just what it means to be free.
We would be wise to consult the manual. Because once you view it as a "living" document it just becomes another document and the ideals therin are forgotten.
To consider judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.
You don't have to go as far as the "atarah" example.
Consider a situation in which a teacher suspected a child had an eating disorder--threw his lunch away every day, or was heard throwing up after lunch every day, or maybe even told the teacher he was on a diet because he was "too fat." The teacher would *never* say, "Oh, I know about anorexia. I'll handle this" and keep the parents in the dark, and if the teacher did that, there is no court in the land that would back him up.
Gender dysphoria is a disorder. Even people who think surgical "transition" is the right "treatment" acknowledge that it is a disorder.
If a kid has a disorder of any kind, the parents are obviously the parties responsible for determining the appropriate treatment (in consultation, as necessary, with their family physician).
The only exception I can think of, legally, is a situation in which a teacher suspects a parent of physically abusing a child, in which case, the teacher is supposed to make a call to the authorities. In the state I cover as a journalist (Pennsylvania), the teacher is required by law to call ChildLine, and provide as much information as possible. The teacher is definitely *not* supposed to take matters into his own hands.
Also consider the consequences of the expanding student health centers where kids can get vaccinated without their parents knowing. “Rare” reaction occurs afterwards? How would you even know what it might possibly be? Oh and by the way, you have to pay to fix whatever the school fucks up. So that’s nice. This slippery slope is one we should stay so far away from.
These clinics can also dispense psych meds and birth control. A girl in central Maine brought home an unmarked baggie with psych meds. Luckily, her father jumped into advocacy.
They started all of this decades ago in the name of "privacy" by not talking to parents of their students' sexual activity, birth control access, and abortion access. And all of that started even earlier with the "sexual revolution." Separating the act from its inherent purpose—procreation in the context of a lifelong commitment—is what has led to the downfall of first, the family, and now, all of society.
I'm not sure what the relevant difference is between a "disorder" and a "symptom." I am pretty sure that the downgrade is for political rather than scientific reasons, just as was the ~1972 decision that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness.
Objectively, I would call it a type of birth defect resulting from a glitched trajectory of sexual differentiation in that individual, in which a critical part of the brain developed in the manner of the opposite sex rather than of the sex they otherwise belong to. The result is a person who is measurably of one sex, but who subjectively feels like they are or ought to be of the other sex, because that's what their most basic instincts are telling them. The thing is real, it probably happens in utero, and once it has happened is fundamentally incurable. It's a character trait, not an illness, and does not make the person insane. It does mess up their reproductive instincts, and makes them very unlikely to have kids whether they get a sex change or not. Changing sex is their dearest desire, but choosing to "transition" is a choice, not a necessity.
Being transgendered is a personal and family misfortune, but the "gender affirming care" may be worse than just privately accepting the defect. Public schools have no business meddling in the matter.
Most of the children who allegedly have gender dysphoria, whether it is a disorder or symptom, don’t actually have it. They are vulnerable children who are being sold the idea that changing gender will solve their problems. Unfortunately, the school “professionals” who are “helping” these children often are in need of psychological or psychiatric care.
I think that SCOTUS had better slap this down promptly, or there are parents of young children who may strike it down by violence.
I'm not kidding. My kids are loooooong past school age. But good gracious the number of decent parents who have just been told "Hey, don't you know that you're quite irrelevant to the « expertise » of the school system?" is uncountably large.
The idea that some asshole of a public school teacher thinks they can overrule parents on such fundamental issues is appalling.
Schools do not own our children. Increasingly, it is obvious that public schools should be avoided entirely, at the very least, and I would argue heavily in favor of disbanding them outright.
I agree with your sentiments. I think it’s probably lower energy to just withdraw support and start homeschooling. But if they start trying to make that harder, then people will have no recourse.
The public school system is irrevocably broken. Private schools and home schooling are your only choice. Please don’t tell me your school is good - it’s not. Ask the students what books they read or basic history questions (not black history or womyn’s history).
I substitute teach at our local high school. Parents don't care. 20 yrs ago, they managed to complain about "all the homework" so the school changed the schedule to 90 exhausting minutes per class (instruction time and "homework" time). This year, the school rolled out "smart pass" because having kids wander in the halls and dilly dally in the bathroom is new 🧐🤔. Only a small handful of parents complained about the excessive tracking of their kids. They managed to collaboratively create an opt out component. But the vast majority of parents are OK with this.
What if the kid declared himself a Pastafarian and insisted on wearing a colander on his head throughout the school day? Or a Jedi and demanded keeping his light saber on his person all day?
We all will disagree on various issues, but child abuse is something I think we all can agree is immoral and dangerous to advocate. “Gender affirming care” for minor children is child abuse.
To make matters worse, the American Pediatric Association, American Psychiatric Association and American Medical Association all advocate for “gender affirming care” for minor children.
If only all doctors cared about keeping the Hippocratic Oath to First Do No Harm:
an american friend of mine's son went to medical school in israel. According to the friend, he said the oath he learned instead was "in order to do good, you have to do some harm" (!)
Time for impeachment of judges to resume. It used to be a more common practice, but so rare in recent decades that judges now believe there are no limits to their power because there are no consequences.
While that is a great idea, homeschooled Johnny and Suzie have to live in the world created by the Public School system graduates... The 25 year old drones who spent 12 years in public school, 4 years in post secondary brain washing and the last 4 on mom and dads couch playing video games and smoking weed... And then they get hired as an HR manager and get to stare across the desk at your homeschooled kid with disdain...
I used to complain about this all the time to my husband. He would always shush me because “our kids are going to be fine!” But my point is they have to live in this world with all these other traumatized children. I don’t think that’s hyperbolic to say when I think of all the crazy shit they have told me about through the years. Every day I debrief them hoping it’s enough.
Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own, and control the corporations. They've long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.
Personally I’m too old for this shit. I want summary executions because if they want to scream Dictator then by all means let’s give them a Dictator. We can’t go back in time and whoop their whiny asses now can we?
Everything was fine until I woke up in this Twilight Zone episode, then holy moly it got surreal. Wake me up (before you go go) lol
The state shall not deny or interfere with an individual's reproductive freedom decisions, which includes the individual's fundamental right to choose to have an abortion, the individual's fundamental right to choose to use contraception, the individual's fundamental right to choose to use assisted reproductive technology, and the individual's fundamental right to be free from discrimination on the basis of the individual's pregnancy outcome, nor shall the state deny or interfere with an individual's gender-affirming care decisions. Nothing in this article narrows or limits the right to liberty, privacy, or equal protection under the laws.
Very very busy. The deep blue strongholds are doubling down on the crazy - even 'trans girls' in girls sports. (But since nobody is doing surgery on kids, those are just.....boys.)
OK then. All this is horrible and real, and we know courts historically have very often been wrong and their dreadful rulings must later be rectified in a better time.
But for now let's say I'm a parent of a school-age child and live in a progressive area, and for compelling inescapeable reasons cannot move; must work; do not want my child educated in any private other-cult school. I cannot homeschool, and no matter what any other commenter might patronizingly assert, I actually do have no other options.
I live in AL. I’d contact churches and see if there is a homeschool group (small not an organized co-op) that you could plug in to. Or if there are people who will volunteer to help w people in your situation. Our churches have to step up and provide an alternative to the world system which is Satan’s domain. No wonder it is crappy.
My comment portrayed an entirely hypothetical situation. I am by now the elderly mother of a grown child.
But my hypothetical desperate mother would not have her situation much relieved by the assistance of people who believe in the perverted concept of Satan promulgated by Christianity. Thanks anyway though.
My hypothetical desperate mother doesn't want her child to fall under the sway of any cult. And there's no guarantee of safety and appropriate moral safeguards in a church. As history shows us, both recent and earlier.
Parents need to help each other. Find like-minded families and form community homeschooling cooperative groups. Even include community members who don't have children to step up and help. I would definitely be willing to volunteer some time to help families establish and maintain something like that. I think a lot of retirees would.
To repeat--I am presenting a hypothetical situation.
And you are missing the point of that. A parent in that situation, as I explicitly said, cannot homeschool. That parent needs an actual physical school to provide, at the least, childminding.
And it is a painful reality in any community that people very eager to volunteer to be with other people's children may often be the last people one should allow unsupervised access to those children.
@Tonya What a thoughtful, generative response! I really appreciate it. It is an example of the best possible response to the insanity: to take the opposing forces and elevate rather than collapse.
ICYMI, a more or less recent article over on The Conversation about Congress(wo)man Sarah McBride and (his)her travails:
TC: "As an example of this era’s complexity, when Renee Richards, a transgender women’s tennis player, was forced to take a chromosomal test to qualify for the 1976 U.S. Open, she challenged the policy as discriminatory. The New York State Supreme Court agreed, with the judge declaring that there is 'overwhelming medical evidence that (Richards) is now female.'
How had Richards changed sex? The answer, she said, was gynecological. 'Have a gynecologist examine' me, she proposed in a 1976 television interview, 'and then you’ll have your answer, ‘Is this person a man or a woman?’' ..."
Rather profoundly depressing that so many people -- including the "judges" on the NY State Supreme Court -- apparently haven't the foggiest idea about the essential difference between human males and females -- to a first approximation, testicles and ovaries respectively.
When "Ms." Richards grows a pair of ovaries of "her" own is when I might concede that "she" has changed sex.
He later admitted--in an interview or his memoir, I don't remember which--that if he'd been playing at a younger age he'd've been unbeatable by any woman.
Wikipedia: "Richards has since expressed ambivalence about her legacy, and came to believe her past as a man provided her with advantages over her competitors, saying 'Having lived for the past 30 years, I know if I'd had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me. And so I've reconsidered my opinion.' ...."
Until there is a well-endowed Liberty Fund that can help parents everywhere, including with emergency stipends to help with living expenses if necessary in an immediate crisis situation, these horrors will in the short term continue.
All levels and strains of "society" have been infiltrated by deviant persons. A recent POTUS, except for his Hart, Shaffner, and Marx suits, and stolen millions, was indistinguishable from a homeless, mentally ill, drug addict.
As a parent - this is abhorrent to me. So too today's Senate vote FOR allowing men in women's sports. Our world has gone completely, totally mad. And, very, very stupid.
Hard to understand how the Dems managed to scupper the bill when they're in the minority in the Senate. Which GOP senators therefore want men in women's sports? They should be named and shamed.
Needed 60 votes.
Fill-a-buster
Should have forced a real filibuster and made them speak for 48 hours.
Still would not have passed. Would have just delayed.
Remember when the Democrat-controlled Senate wanted to end the Filibuster?
Libs are so enamored with the idea that they are continuing a civil rights struggle that this doesn't end without kids getting hurt. I don't even think a lot of them realize that gender as a "social construct" is an ideological position that is detached from reality, or that people who are in opposition to it have reasoned through the consequences.
A lot of these libs need to directly feel the consequences of their position in order for anything to click with them. Yes, it is bat shit crazy, but that's how it is going to go. They are so self-righteous, so ignorant, and their "education" is so poor (largely due to allowing hysterical women to dictate what can and cannot be said while allowing them to bring up sensitive topics that provide them affirmation), this just doesn't end any other way... With stories and testimonials of the harm that occurs to children.
I'm not saying don't fight - fight hard. Just saying that reasoning with many of these people will not yield results.
Its just the inverse of what they claim.
This study was published last week. Its clearly a mental health issue:
https://redstate.com/mike_miller/2025/03/04/new-comprehensive-national-data-base-study-links-gender-affirming-surgery-to-mental-health-risks-n2186267
Just like they deny that abortion causes physical and psychological harm, and try to claim that it is MORE dangerous to give birth than to abort.
Not to get too nihilistic here but if you're going to chop up a kids' reproductive organs, they kind of have a point. They are better off dying in utero if mommy is some social media addicted woke lefty psycho.
they're doing it to other healthy people's kids too though
That's my concern. If it stays within the family, if the kid is clearly driving it, the parents are in full support, and all parties understand and take responsibility for the consequences, then let them do it. But they should not be allowed to use the public schools to entice other people's kids down that path behind the parents' backs.
"the only SAFE thing is to kill the baby!"
No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot
Mark Twain
Saw a late teen driving a car today, alone, with the windows rolled up, sun shining and a mask on. How twisted a sense of reality to be so propagandized by progressive media manipulation to think a mask is necessary at all, let alone in a car by yourself.
Time to say enough...don't tolerate stupidity because the behavior makes the uninformed comfortable. It's still stupidity and they need to learn to start to think for themselves, and that applies to all the TDS adherents on bluesky. Trump is right, time to reinstate some common sense into the conversation.
Dick Minnis
removingthecataract.substack.com
At 15-yo every young adult should be given unmutilated bodies, no MGM, FGM, piercing, tattoos, etc.
Accepting insanity as okay started small, birth-control, no-fault divorce family-father-children-mother destruction, mothers hire Witches to torture our babies to death silently screaming on whim, sure that is acceptable, sexually mind-body-soul mutilating children and mind-damaged adults, why not? Female-Pedo-psycho teachers in K-8th, drive men and others that would protect the children from Devouring Mother's life-destroying twisted abuse? That'sNormal.
What next? Open televised genocide .. ?
Give women vote, political power, and sanity, love, joy, life, hope, .. all murdered.
God Bless., Steve
Yes, I increasingly see this as a zero-sum game between women who wish to be treated as children and actual children.
Same here. I'm so angry about the way the far-left has pushed this agenda. Especially the American Libraries Assn and teachers' union with the Biden Administration's blessing. THIS (and the whole covid response) is why I left the Dem party.
Related substack today. Interesting background. https://open.substack.com/pub/celiafarber/p/origins-of-militant-transgenderism
I have been against this on the internet since 2015. Mentally far before that.
I have spent most of my time when not working making others aware and carrying bits of information from platform to platform.
Now you know too: Step up, step up.
We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they're dazed and confused. The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.
Hunter S. Thompson
Was a deck dpt officer on an LST...great people Boatswain Mates, but the dumb will make themselves irrelevant. Not the beginning of the end, but the beginning of a return to our roots as a free and independent people with government as small and subservient.
Dick Minnis
removingthecataract.substack.com
THANKS! You appear to be echoing one of my favorites: "I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases. The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first."
Thomas Jefferson
Just FYI, Monticello site calls into question whether Jefferson said this: https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/two-enemies-people-are-criminals-and-governmentspurious-quotation/
Well, then there's only one thing to do, consult Snoopes! "The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it."
H. L. Mencken
What's this? Trump just said there will be no men in women's sports.
Trump signed an Executive Order which will likely be revoked under a Dem POTUS. The bill was meant to make it permanent.
The dums will revoke all of his EOs if congress doesn't step up and make some of them laws.
Edit: typo 🙄
Excuse me, just leafing through the Constitution to find the part about the powers delegated to schoolteachers, I’ll get back to you real soon….
The most hilarious part to me was the deferral "to the expertise of school officials, charged with the responsibility of educating children". Forget the debate about gender: you have many school districts that aren't exactly covering themselves in glory teaching basic math and English. Why would you defer to the "expertise" of people who are demonstrably incompetent at their core jobs?
As a parent, this is what I ask myself most regularly.
It must be that big pile of books that pushes middle school librarians to the top of this dubious hierarchy. BTW, has anyone checked the percentage of male/female teachers in K-12 public school systems?
It's near the "Good and Plenty" clause... you know, the one where people think the government is here to take care of them...
Ah, below the Takings Clause, where the government reserves the right to be "Takings yo money".
Not takings. Gibs.
The authors of the Constitution never imagined that a court would purport to have power over your family...and the ones who might have imagined it, like the brilliant Ben Franklin, would have assumed that such a judge would be corrected by violence long before there was an appeal...
Irony:
But they did know that if the people did not stay vigilant than they would eventually be happy to turn over their family to the state.
You could call this from a mile away because it's both covered implicitly and explicitly in our constitution.
That's the beauty of our constitution as opposed to others:
Its an instructional manual on how to REMAIN free, not just what it means to be free.
We would be wise to consult the manual. Because once you view it as a "living" document it just becomes another document and the ideals therin are forgotten.
Given the state of education today, the "Freedom Manual" seems a bit complex. I think the constitution needs to be dumbed down a bit.
"Yo Rights" (Bill of Rights)
1A) "Don't you tell what I can say"
2A) "Yup, it's loaded"
3A) "Get out my house!"
4A) "Stop lookin through my shit!"
5A) "I ain't talkin."
6A) "You charging me? Where's my lawyer? I want a jury trial!"
7A) "You suing me? Where's my lawyer? I want a jury trial!"
8A) "No way you pullin out my fingernails"
9A) "I got rights!"
10A) "You ain't the boss of me"
Give me your four year olds, and in a generation I will build a socialist state.
Vladimir Lenin
If Lenin had ever tried to run a preschool class, he would never have said that.
My guess is he'd delegate. "It is necessary to gain the common people to our order. The best means to that end is influence in the schools."
Adam Weishaupt
LOL!!!! May I steal this?
"living document" is the leftist way of saying, we can change it to disregard every core principle clearly enumerated.
As an old fart, I not only had to pass a constitutional test to graduate HS, but I had one in Jr College history as well.
As a result, I am no constitutional scholar, but I have a pretty good idea how it works. Era of Enlightenment for the Win.
As a "living document" it can also die. Our Constitution contains truths which are considered to be eternal.
To consider judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.
Thomas Jefferson
They’d roll over in their graves
Oh, for the good old days, when tarring and feathering was still legal.
I'll wait ; )
Then find the delegation to their unions.
You don't have to go as far as the "atarah" example.
Consider a situation in which a teacher suspected a child had an eating disorder--threw his lunch away every day, or was heard throwing up after lunch every day, or maybe even told the teacher he was on a diet because he was "too fat." The teacher would *never* say, "Oh, I know about anorexia. I'll handle this" and keep the parents in the dark, and if the teacher did that, there is no court in the land that would back him up.
Gender dysphoria is a disorder. Even people who think surgical "transition" is the right "treatment" acknowledge that it is a disorder.
If a kid has a disorder of any kind, the parents are obviously the parties responsible for determining the appropriate treatment (in consultation, as necessary, with their family physician).
The only exception I can think of, legally, is a situation in which a teacher suspects a parent of physically abusing a child, in which case, the teacher is supposed to make a call to the authorities. In the state I cover as a journalist (Pennsylvania), the teacher is required by law to call ChildLine, and provide as much information as possible. The teacher is definitely *not* supposed to take matters into his own hands.
Also consider the consequences of the expanding student health centers where kids can get vaccinated without their parents knowing. “Rare” reaction occurs afterwards? How would you even know what it might possibly be? Oh and by the way, you have to pay to fix whatever the school fucks up. So that’s nice. This slippery slope is one we should stay so far away from.
These clinics can also dispense psych meds and birth control. A girl in central Maine brought home an unmarked baggie with psych meds. Luckily, her father jumped into advocacy.
They started all of this decades ago in the name of "privacy" by not talking to parents of their students' sexual activity, birth control access, and abortion access. And all of that started even earlier with the "sexual revolution." Separating the act from its inherent purpose—procreation in the context of a lifelong commitment—is what has led to the downfall of first, the family, and now, all of society.
It's not a disorder, just a symptom. DSM-4 listed Gender Identity Disorder. DSM-5 downgraded it to a symptom.
Looks like a condition to me:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK577212/table/pediat_transgender.T.dsm5_criteria_for_g/
but disorder or symptom, it's a medical issue.
And as for "privacy," "socially transitioning" is all about publicity, not privacy, so that doesn't seem germane to the issue.
Good point on the privacy issue. You're absolutely right. Social transitioning is about publicity
I'm not sure what the relevant difference is between a "disorder" and a "symptom." I am pretty sure that the downgrade is for political rather than scientific reasons, just as was the ~1972 decision that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness.
Objectively, I would call it a type of birth defect resulting from a glitched trajectory of sexual differentiation in that individual, in which a critical part of the brain developed in the manner of the opposite sex rather than of the sex they otherwise belong to. The result is a person who is measurably of one sex, but who subjectively feels like they are or ought to be of the other sex, because that's what their most basic instincts are telling them. The thing is real, it probably happens in utero, and once it has happened is fundamentally incurable. It's a character trait, not an illness, and does not make the person insane. It does mess up their reproductive instincts, and makes them very unlikely to have kids whether they get a sex change or not. Changing sex is their dearest desire, but choosing to "transition" is a choice, not a necessity.
Being transgendered is a personal and family misfortune, but the "gender affirming care" may be worse than just privately accepting the defect. Public schools have no business meddling in the matter.
Most of the children who allegedly have gender dysphoria, whether it is a disorder or symptom, don’t actually have it. They are vulnerable children who are being sold the idea that changing gender will solve their problems. Unfortunately, the school “professionals” who are “helping” these children often are in need of psychological or psychiatric care.
I think that SCOTUS had better slap this down promptly, or there are parents of young children who may strike it down by violence.
I'm not kidding. My kids are loooooong past school age. But good gracious the number of decent parents who have just been told "Hey, don't you know that you're quite irrelevant to the « expertise » of the school system?" is uncountably large.
The idea that some asshole of a public school teacher thinks they can overrule parents on such fundamental issues is appalling.
Schools do not own our children. Increasingly, it is obvious that public schools should be avoided entirely, at the very least, and I would argue heavily in favor of disbanding them outright.
I agree with your sentiments. I think it’s probably lower energy to just withdraw support and start homeschooling. But if they start trying to make that harder, then people will have no recourse.
The child was groomed. Time to get out the pew pew.
The public school system is irrevocably broken. Private schools and home schooling are your only choice. Please don’t tell me your school is good - it’s not. Ask the students what books they read or basic history questions (not black history or womyn’s history).
Amen! Starve the beast. At this stage, even a kid at home doing nothing is better than being indoctrinated 8 hours a day.
I substitute teach at our local high school. Parents don't care. 20 yrs ago, they managed to complain about "all the homework" so the school changed the schedule to 90 exhausting minutes per class (instruction time and "homework" time). This year, the school rolled out "smart pass" because having kids wander in the halls and dilly dally in the bathroom is new 🧐🤔. Only a small handful of parents complained about the excessive tracking of their kids. They managed to collaboratively create an opt out component. But the vast majority of parents are OK with this.
What if the kid declared himself a Pastafarian and insisted on wearing a colander on his head throughout the school day? Or a Jedi and demanded keeping his light saber on his person all day?
Pastafarians can also wear pirate gear and demand beer fountains!
There is a movie about pastafarians on the Roku channel. I have it saved. Must watch lol
We all will disagree on various issues, but child abuse is something I think we all can agree is immoral and dangerous to advocate. “Gender affirming care” for minor children is child abuse.
To make matters worse, the American Pediatric Association, American Psychiatric Association and American Medical Association all advocate for “gender affirming care” for minor children.
If only all doctors cared about keeping the Hippocratic Oath to First Do No Harm:
https://lizlasorte.substack.com/p/first-do-no-harm?r=76q58
an american friend of mine's son went to medical school in israel. According to the friend, he said the oath he learned instead was "in order to do good, you have to do some harm" (!)
Yeah, but where's the money in *that*?
Any judge that is in favor of this, if male, needs to be castrated. This crap has got to end!
Sounds these were all female but who really knows. 2/3 had kids but now days WTFK.
Time for impeachment of judges to resume. It used to be a more common practice, but so rare in recent decades that judges now believe there are no limits to their power because there are no consequences.
HOMESCHOOL!
While that is a great idea, homeschooled Johnny and Suzie have to live in the world created by the Public School system graduates... The 25 year old drones who spent 12 years in public school, 4 years in post secondary brain washing and the last 4 on mom and dads couch playing video games and smoking weed... And then they get hired as an HR manager and get to stare across the desk at your homeschooled kid with disdain...
Yeah, I don’t envy the upcoming generations. Endless problems!
I used to complain about this all the time to my husband. He would always shush me because “our kids are going to be fine!” But my point is they have to live in this world with all these other traumatized children. I don’t think that’s hyperbolic to say when I think of all the crazy shit they have told me about through the years. Every day I debrief them hoping it’s enough.
Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own, and control the corporations. They've long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.
George Carlin
Parents need to pull their kids immediately, but also still fight for the return to sanity in the schools.
Personally I’m too old for this shit. I want summary executions because if they want to scream Dictator then by all means let’s give them a Dictator. We can’t go back in time and whoop their whiny asses now can we?
Everything was fine until I woke up in this Twilight Zone episode, then holy moly it got surreal. Wake me up (before you go go) lol
Add this to what they're trying to do in Washington state.......
https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2025-26/Pdf/Bills/Senate%20Joint%20Resolutions/8204.pdf?q=20250304130757
The state shall not deny or interfere with an individual's reproductive freedom decisions, which includes the individual's fundamental right to choose to have an abortion, the individual's fundamental right to choose to use contraception, the individual's fundamental right to choose to use assisted reproductive technology, and the individual's fundamental right to be free from discrimination on the basis of the individual's pregnancy outcome, nor shall the state deny or interfere with an individual's gender-affirming care decisions. Nothing in this article narrows or limits the right to liberty, privacy, or equal protection under the laws.
Isn’t this why we voted for President Trump? Where is our attorney general?
Very very busy. The deep blue strongholds are doubling down on the crazy - even 'trans girls' in girls sports. (But since nobody is doing surgery on kids, those are just.....boys.)
off the charts outrageous abuse of judicial discretion…SCOTUS will not uphold this ruling, guaranteed…
OK then. All this is horrible and real, and we know courts historically have very often been wrong and their dreadful rulings must later be rectified in a better time.
But for now let's say I'm a parent of a school-age child and live in a progressive area, and for compelling inescapeable reasons cannot move; must work; do not want my child educated in any private other-cult school. I cannot homeschool, and no matter what any other commenter might patronizingly assert, I actually do have no other options.
Who will help me? Who will step up and help me?
I live in AL. I’d contact churches and see if there is a homeschool group (small not an organized co-op) that you could plug in to. Or if there are people who will volunteer to help w people in your situation. Our churches have to step up and provide an alternative to the world system which is Satan’s domain. No wonder it is crappy.
My comment portrayed an entirely hypothetical situation. I am by now the elderly mother of a grown child.
But my hypothetical desperate mother would not have her situation much relieved by the assistance of people who believe in the perverted concept of Satan promulgated by Christianity. Thanks anyway though.
Your hypothetical desperate mother right be glad to have the help. It's funny that you think she wouldn't based on your own prejudices.
My hypothetical desperate mother doesn't want her child to fall under the sway of any cult. And there's no guarantee of safety and appropriate moral safeguards in a church. As history shows us, both recent and earlier.
Parents need to help each other. Find like-minded families and form community homeschooling cooperative groups. Even include community members who don't have children to step up and help. I would definitely be willing to volunteer some time to help families establish and maintain something like that. I think a lot of retirees would.
To repeat--I am presenting a hypothetical situation.
And you are missing the point of that. A parent in that situation, as I explicitly said, cannot homeschool. That parent needs an actual physical school to provide, at the least, childminding.
And it is a painful reality in any community that people very eager to volunteer to be with other people's children may often be the last people one should allow unsupervised access to those children.
You're very narrow-minded. Where there's a will, there's a way. You just want the state to provide what it was never meant to provide.
Try reading my original comment slowly and carefully.
@Tonya What a thoughtful, generative response! I really appreciate it. It is an example of the best possible response to the insanity: to take the opposing forces and elevate rather than collapse.
It does not take a majority to prevail... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.
Samuel Adams
Ghostbusters? 😉🙂
ICYMI, a more or less recent article over on The Conversation about Congress(wo)man Sarah McBride and (his)her travails:
TC: "As an example of this era’s complexity, when Renee Richards, a transgender women’s tennis player, was forced to take a chromosomal test to qualify for the 1976 U.S. Open, she challenged the policy as discriminatory. The New York State Supreme Court agreed, with the judge declaring that there is 'overwhelming medical evidence that (Richards) is now female.'
How had Richards changed sex? The answer, she said, was gynecological. 'Have a gynecologist examine' me, she proposed in a 1976 television interview, 'and then you’ll have your answer, ‘Is this person a man or a woman?’' ..."
https://theconversation.com/are-trans-women-biologically-male-the-answer-is-complicated-244465
Rather profoundly depressing that so many people -- including the "judges" on the NY State Supreme Court -- apparently haven't the foggiest idea about the essential difference between human males and females -- to a first approximation, testicles and ovaries respectively.
When "Ms." Richards grows a pair of ovaries of "her" own is when I might concede that "she" has changed sex.
He later admitted--in an interview or his memoir, I don't remember which--that if he'd been playing at a younger age he'd've been unbeatable by any woman.
Wikipedia to the rescue! 🙂
Wikipedia: "Richards has since expressed ambivalence about her legacy, and came to believe her past as a man provided her with advantages over her competitors, saying 'Having lived for the past 30 years, I know if I'd had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me. And so I've reconsidered my opinion.' ...."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9e_Richards
One of the links in the Wikipedia article that justify the above:
https://slate.com/culture/2012/10/jewish-jocks-and-renee-richards-the-life-of-the-transsexual-tennis-legend.html
Yup.
Not the school board, that's for sure. They'll just handcuff you for standing up for your child at a meeting.
Until there is a well-endowed Liberty Fund that can help parents everywhere, including with emergency stipends to help with living expenses if necessary in an immediate crisis situation, these horrors will in the short term continue.
You say at least two of the judges are parents, but do/did their children attend government schools?
All levels and strains of "society" have been infiltrated by deviant persons. A recent POTUS, except for his Hart, Shaffner, and Marx suits, and stolen millions, was indistinguishable from a homeless, mentally ill, drug addict.
The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.
Felix Frankfurter