Tag Archives: #Transgender

Posted on by

Senator Karen Berg thinks that Jack can be Jill . . . and wants the public schools to enforce that

Kentucky, one of the most conservative and Republican states in the nation, elected Democrat Andy Beshear to be Governor of the Commonwealth in 2019. The previous Governor, Republican Matt Bevin, had tried to take serious action to restore the state’s employee pension fund to greater financial stability, and the teachers in the Bluegrass State went absolutely ape! Out of 1,442,390 total votes cast, then-Attorney General Beshear beat Governor Bevin by 5,189 votes, with 28,425 going to Libertarian John Hicks.

Having a Democrat as Governor has led to all kinds of mischief in Kentucky. Mr Beshear’s handling of the COVID-19 panicdemic[1]No, that’s not a typographical error; I spelled it panicdemic deliberately, because unreasoning panic is how the United States reacted to the disease. was to order churches closed — a decision eventually ruled illegal, but not until churches had been closed for nine weeks, including through Easter Sunday[2]Governor Beshear ordered the Kentucky State Police to record license plate and vehicle identification numbers of cars parked in one church parking lot on Easter Sunday, to order people who attended … Continue reading — “non-essential” businesses closed, mask mandates and the other intrusive measures. He ordered people not to have gatherings of more than ten people, from more than two households, for Thanksgiving in 2020, an order I am happy and proud to say we violated.

Another bit of horrible mischief was the appointment of other Democrats to fill executive positions in the Commonwealth, including the Commissioner of Education. From the Lexington Herald-Leader:

KY education chief defends state pronoun guidance after legislators’ attacks, bills

By Valarie Honeycutt Spears and Austin Horn | Monday, February 13, 2023 | 5:13 PM EST

Kentucky Education Commissioner Jason Glass spoke out Monday in response to lawmakers’ criticism about a state guidance document recommending the use of a student’s preferred pronouns and legislation that seeks to strengthen “parental rights” in schools.

In a Monday email to state education employees, Glass referenced his comments last week to the House Education Committee, where he was testifying about long-standing shortages in the educator workforce.

“While I was happy to share information with them about the shortages we are facing and trend lines in the teacher workforce,” Glass said, “I was disappointed with the turn the meeting took toward the end of the time I was there. Instead of staying focused on what we can do to support the teaching profession, some of the legislators ended up focusing on guidance the agency produced regarding use of student’s preferred names.”

At the meeting, lawmakers openly criticized Glass and the guidance, calling it part of a “woke agenda” driven by Glass.

The guidance says, in part, school leaders should consult with their local board counsel for advice on specific issues in their districts. It is considered best practice to recognize and use a student’s preferred name and pronouns when these preferences are requested, the document said.

If a student voluntarily discloses their sexual orientation or gender identity to an educator with the assumption that this information is to be kept private, it is best practice for the educator to maintain that confidence and keep the information confidential, the document recommends.

There’s more at the original. While what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal has a paywall, non-subscribers can access a couple of free articles a month.

As we have previously noted, the Central Bucks (Pennsylvania) School Board required teachers, administrators and staff to use students’ proper names, references and pronouns as recorded in school records, unless the individual student’s parents approved a change. This was done to avoid legal repercussions if a particular student wanted to claim he was the opposite sex, and his parents sued the school for ‘enabling’ gender transition. By setting up a system under which parents can ‘opt in’ to allowing their ‘transgendered’ students to be identified by their ‘preferred’ names and pronouns, the District is also setting up a policy which allows parents to choose not to go along with that silliness, and thus protect the District from being sued into penury.

While no such lawsuit has been filed in the Bluegrass State thus far, that doesn’t mean one couldn’t happen if teachers follow the Commissioner of Education’s ‘guidance’. Quite frankly, I hope that such does happen, sooner rather than later. More, I want to see not just the school systems sued for this, but the school administrators, staff, and teachers who go along with such nonsense.

Of course, the newspaper, which as we have previously reported makes endorsements uniformly rejected by voters in the sixth congressional district and the state as a whole, is very much on the side of the homosexual and ‘transgender’ lobby:

Sen. Berg: Please listen to a grieving mother. ‘Parents rights’ bills are dangerous. | Opinion

by state Senator Karen Berg (D-26th District) | Friday, February 10, 2023

I have been proud to represent the people of Kentucky and fight for their rights and well-being since being first elected in 2020. However, this proud moment was marred by a deep personal loss — my transgender son, Henry, who I loved with all my heart, took his own life. This tragedy has forced me to confront the harsh reality where discrimination and bigotry against the LGBTQ+ community are all too common.

We have previously noted Senator Berg, who is actually a physician, a diagnostic radiologist, who should understand the very elementary biology of sex differences, and her acceptance of her daughter’s transgenderism. While all of the sources I could find give only Miss Berg-Brousseau’s first name as “Henry,” and use the masculine pronouns and references to her, at The First Street Journal, we always tell the truth: Miss Berg-Brousseau was female, regardless of what she and her mother wanted to believe. The Herald-Leader uncritically wrote that Senator Berg’s daughter was her son. As is so often the case, the newspaper’s stylebook calls for referring to the ‘transgendered’ by the gender they claim to be, not the sex they actually are, and the use of the preferred ‘pronouns’ and faux name they chose. All of this is subtly designed to be courtesy, but also to normalize ‘transgenderism’ as something real.

Now, bills like Senate Bill 150 are being introduced in our state legislature and sold as “parental choice,” but in reality, they are nothing more than a dangerous attack on our children. These bills aim to limit the authority of the Kentucky Board of Education and the Kentucky Department of Education concerning parental rights and a student’s use of pronouns, prohibit school policies from keeping student information confidential from parents, and even require school personnel and students to use pronouns for students that do not conform to that student’s biological sex.

Perhaps Dr Berg isn’t that good a doctor, because she just referred to a ‘transgendered’ student’s ‘gender identity’ as his “biological sex.”

These measures are not just misguided. They are cruel and harmful. Bills like SB 150 send a message to LGBTQ+ students that they are not valued or respected and put them at greater risk of discrimination and harm, whether self-harm or bullying. They also undermine the ability of teachers and school staff to create safe and inclusive environments for all students, and they limit the ability of schools to provide the support and resources that our children need to thrive.

Senator Berg could, if she chose, try to amend SB 150 to allow, as the Central Bucks policy does, schools to refer to ‘transgendered’ students by their preferred names, pronouns and other gendered references if the student’s parents were notified and consented. But that isn’t what she wants; she wants the public schools — which, due to compulsory education laws, have what is, in effect, a captive audience — to keep a student’s ‘transgender identity’ a secret from the parents. While it’s difficult to imagine that parents could fail to notice these things, or that the gossip of neighborhood parents and other students would escape the parents’ notice, Senator Berg does not want them notified.

Of course, Dr Berg wants ‘transgenderism’ normalized as well:

The provision in SB 150 to establish requirements for public schools’ courses, curriculums, or programs on human sexuality is particularly concerning. These courses and curriculums should provide accurate and comprehensive information on human sexuality and gender identity in a way that is inclusive and respectful of all students. Requiring a specific perspective on these subjects limits educational opportunities and spreads harmful, inaccurate information about the LGBTQ+ community.

Actually, the public schools should not be presenting programs on human sexuality at all; that is the job of parents. But any curriculum on human sexuality is going to have a “specific perspective,” either normalizing and accepting what the federal government has euphemistically referred to as “minority sexual orientations,” or not doing so, which the homosexual and ‘transgender’ advocates would find terrible. Dr Berg is pushing a specific agenda. Dr Berg is wanting the public schools in Kentucky to push the acceptance of a transgender student as being the sex he claims to be rather than the sex he is; she wants the schools to push the notion that Jack is really Jill — or vice versa — with the schools enforcing the chosen names, pronouns, and other gendered references the ‘transgendered’ prefer, regardless of the beliefs of other students and other students’ families.

It isn’t much of a step to see another student referring to Jack as Jack rather than Jill being punished for bullying for not accepting the notion that Jack is really Jill.

In her OpEd piece, Dr Berg mentioned nothing about her daughter’s mental illness, I suppose because it would undermine the political goal she is trying to achieve. But it’s not a secret, as even Dr Berg previously admitted:

This lack of acceptance took a toll on Henry. He long struggled with mental illness, not because he was trans but born from his difficulty finding acceptance.

Henry Berg-Brousseau is seen with his politician mother Karen, father Bob, a marketing director, and sister Rachael, a rabbi. Photo from the Daily Mail. Click to enlarge.

To be blunt about it, young Miss Berg-Brousseau would have found ‘acceptance’ difficult even if people around her accepted her claim to be a boy. A photo of the family shows Miss Berg-Brousseau as being shorter than her mother and sister, as well as obese. Were she an actual boy who grew up that way, “he’d” have been the last picked for a team in Phys Ed, and been dateless as high school girls, real girls, would have rejected “him” for more masculine guys. As an adult, she might somehow ‘pass’ as a male, if no one asked any questions, but she’d have been the least impressive of ‘guys’. A female claiming to be male does not change the sexual dimorphism which exists in human beings, and Miss Berg-Brousseau grew up with a height much more typical of females than males.

You know, I get it: Dr Berg really, really, really wants to believe that her daughter was actually her son, and she wants her daughter to be honored for what she claimed to be. She is suffering the personal tragedy of having lost her child, and that is a devastating thing, but it doesn’t make her right.

More, I understand that some people think that it’s just common courtesy to accept the ‘transgendered’ as who and what they claim to be, rather than what they actually are. But people have a right to think for themselves, and if they do not want to agree that Jack is really Jill, they have that right, and the public schools should not be enforcing a perception that girls can be boys and boys can be girls. The ‘transgendered’ need mental help, to help them to come to terms with what they are, not coddling to continue their delusions of what they think they should be.

References

References
↑1 No, that’s not a typographical error; I spelled it panicdemic deliberately, because unreasoning panic is how the United States reacted to the disease.
↑2 Governor Beshear ordered the Kentucky State Police to record license plate and vehicle identification numbers of cars parked in one church parking lot on Easter Sunday, to order people who attended services into self-quarantine.
Posted on by

They can’t handle the truth!

I ran across a photo if the masthead of The Philadelphia Inquirer from February 25, 1953, and noticed the ‘taglines’ that it used: “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People”. By Public ledger, the Inquirer was setting itself up as Philadelphia’s newspaper of record, which Wikipedia defines as “a major newspaper with large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative.” That Wikipedia article named four newspapers of record for the United States: The New York Times (Founded 1851), The Washington Post (1877), The Los Angeles Times (1881) and The Wall Street Journal (1889). First printed on Monday, June 1, 1829, the then Pennsylvania Inquirer is older than any of them. “An editorial in the first issue of The Pennsylvania Inquirer promised that the paper would be devoted to the right of a minority to voice their opinion and ‘the maintenance of the rights and liberties of the people, equally against the abuses as the usurpation of power.’”

Boy has that changed! As has happened to other great newspapers, the newsroom of the Inquirer was captured by the young #woke, who forced the firing resignation of Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Stan Wischnowski over the headline Buildings Matter, Too.

“Devoted to the right of a minority to voice their opinion”? Yeah, that failed, too, in February of 2021, as the Inquirer closed comments on the majority of its articles, stating that:

Commenting on Inquirer.com was long ago hijacked by a small group of trolls who traffic in racism, misogyny, and homophobia. This group comprises a tiny fraction of the Inquirer.com audience. But its impact is disproportionate and enduring.

Really? How do they know? How can they be sure that these views do not represent more than a “tiny fraction” of their audience? Have they really done the research, or was it just that the #woke didn’t like the idea that the riff-raff could express their opinions? “An Independent Newspaper for All the People”? No, the Inquirer has now become a non-profit newspaper for the left.

However, the newspaper did leave commenting open on sports articles, and the Inky draws a fair number of them.

Marcus Hayes is a sports columnist for the Inquirer, one of some less than restrained opinions.

Ivan Provorov shuns LGBTQ+ community as Flyers miss a chance to make a difference on Pride night

Flyers coach John Tortorella should have benched the defenseman. Plain and simple.

by Marcus Hayes | Wednesday, January 18, 2023

Not long ago, John Tortorella would’ve benched a player for kneeling during the national anthem. These days, if you wear your homophobia like a Pride flag, you earn Tortorella’s respect.

More than a bit disingenuous, that. When Coach Tortorella made that statement, he was coaching the United States national hockey team, as they prepared to play in the 2016 World Cup of Hockey, an international tournament. That team was representing the United States, not just Philadelphia.

Oh, how far we’ve come.

There will be some who will equate that asking Ivan Provorov to skate in a Pride-themed jersey Tuesday night was like forcing him to kneel during the national anthem back in 2016. That’s ridiculous, of course.

Kneeling protested systemic racism aimed at Black men in the criminal justice system of the United States. Meanwhile, warming up in a jersey with rainbow numbers and nameplates simply supported the right of LGBTQ+ people all over the world to exist without persecution. For anyone, that’s pretty simple.

So, let’s not complicate the issue. Provorov refused to warm up Tuesday night against Anaheim because he does not support the right of LGBTQ+ people to even exist. He cites his devotion to the Russian Orthodox church; in his eyes, their life is a sin. About that: Patriarch Kirill, the church’s leader in Russia and reportedly a former KGB agent, in May justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because Ukraine allows Gay Pride parades, and if Russia and other homophobic states do not oppress LGBTQ+ persons, “then human civilization will end there.”

So, because Ivan Vladimirovich Provorov is a Russian Orthodox Christian, Mr Hayes states, pretty definitively, that Ivan Vladimirovich — who has the same patronymic name as Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin! — does not believe that homosexuals should even exist, because Patriarch Kirill believes that homosexual relations are a sin. A real journalist would have recognized that; a journolist[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading like Mr Hayes would not.

The source Mr Hayes linked does not say that Patriarch Kirill said that homosexuals have no right to exist. There is a difference between saying that something is a sin, and saying that those who engage in that sin have no right to exist.

Ahhh, but then again, Mr Hayes has never been particularly nuanced in his writing.

Though Mr Hayes is a sports columnist, writing about a particular sporting event, either Mr Hayes or one of the editors, decided that no, Mr Hayes column would not allow reader comments, not on this subject.

It’s hardly a surprise: the Inquirer did the same thing in January of 2022, when reader comments on an article about the University of Pennsylvania’s male swimmer Will Thomas, who declared that no, he was actually a female named “Lia”, were not supportive of that position, deleting all of the comments which didn’t accept the idea that Mr Thomas was actually a woman, and eventually closing comments entirely.

The Inquirer is our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, but still believes that the government should subsidize its reporters’ salaries, but does not believe that its readers, its taxpaying readers, should be able to express an opinion which might be critical of the homosexual or transgender agendas.

The truth is that the editors at the Inquirer know that acceptance of the abnormal ends of the sexual spectrum is not as universal as they believe it should be, and that yes, that “tiny fraction of the Inquirer.com audience” isn’t all that tiny, but that’s a truth that the editors just can’t handle.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
Posted on by

If this isn’t #grooming, then what is it?

As we have previously noted, the Central Bucks School Board required teachers, administrators and staff to use students’ proper names, references and pronouns as recorded in school records, unless the individual student’s parents approved a change, and is removing materials with sexualized content from school libraries. Of course, the homosexual lobby are just spittle-flecked with rage, claiming that this discriminates against homosexual, bisexual, and ‘transgender’ students, as though normalizing and promoting homosexuality and ‘transgenderism’ is some sort of civil right, and not an attempt at grooming.

So now, the Biden Administration is getting into the act, wanting to advance grooming of abnormal sexual orientations. From The Washington Post:

Are book bans discrimination? Biden administration to test new legal theory.

The federal government is investigating a Texas school district over its alleged removal of books featuring LGBTQ characters

by Hannah Natanson | Friday the 13th, January 2023 | 6:00 AM EST

The federal government has opened an investigation into a Texas school district over its alleged removal of books featuring LGBTQ characters — marking the first test of a new legal argument that failing to represent students in school books can constitute discrimination.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights is investigating the Granbury Independent School District, department spokesman Jim Bradshaw said this month. The probe is based on a complaint of discrimination lodged last summer by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said ACLU attorney Chloe Kempf. Continue reading →

Posted on by

It is time for total truth between us

This article title comes from Lt Saavik, in Star Trek: The Search for Spock.” David Marcus, Admiral James Kirk’s bastard son is questioned by Lt Saavik, who says that this artificial planet you have created is not what he expected.

  • Saavik : It’s time for total truth between us. This planet is not what you intended or hoped for, is it?
  • David Marcus : Not exactly.
  • Saavik : Why?
  • David Marcus : I used protomatter in the Genesis matrix.
  • Saavik : Protomatter. An unstable substance which every ethical scientist in the galaxy has denounced as dangerously unpredictable.
  • David Marcus : It was the only way to solve certain problems.
  • Saavik : So, like your father, you changed the rules.
  • David Marcus : If I hadn’t, it might have been years or never.
  • Saavik : How many have paid the price for your impatience? How many have died? How much damage have you done? And what is yet to come?

Sometimes, the total truth must be told, even if the truth is unpleasant. I will admit it: I have been called an [insert slang term for the anus here], but sometimes you need an [insert slang term for the anus here] to get around political correctness or misapplied courtesy to just tell the truth.

We all knew it would happen sooner or later: those of us who are smart enough to reject the cockamamie idea that girls can be boys and boys can be girls are being blamed for the death by suicide of “Henry” Berg-Brousseau. From what my, sadly now departed, best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal:

‘Lack of acceptance took a toll.’ KY senator says son, who pushed for trans rights, died

by Tessa Duvall | Tuesday, December 20, 2022 | 4:14 PM EST | Updated: 4:20 PM EST

Kentucky Sen. Karen Berg, D-Louisville, announced in a statement Tuesday that her son, who was transgender, died by suicide last week.

Henry Berg-Brousseau was 24.

Henry Berg-Brousseau is seen with his politician mother Karen, father Bob, a marketing director, and sister Rachael, a rabbi. Photo from the Daily Mail. Click to enlarge.

Note that the Herald-Leader uncritically wrote that Senator Berg’s daughter was her son. As is so often the case, the newspaper’s stylebook calls for referring to the ‘transgendered’ by the gender they claim to be, not the sex they actually are, and the use of the preferred ‘pronouns’ and faux name they chose. All of this is subtly designed to be courtesy, but also to normalize ‘transgenderism’ as something real.

Berg said her son spent his life “working to extend grace, compassion and understanding to everyone, but especially to the vulnerable and marginalized.”

“As the mother of a transgender son, I gave my whole heart trying to protect my child from a world where some people and especially some politicians intentionally continued to believe that marginalizing my child was OK simply because of who he was,” Berg wrote. “This lack of acceptance took a toll on Henry. He long struggled with mental illness, not because he was trans but born from his difficulty finding acceptance.”

Yes, Miss Berg-Brousseau “long struggled with mental illness,” but Senator Berg, who is a physician, doesn’t think that her daughter thinking that she was really a boy had anything to do with it. Much further down:

“In one of our last conversations he wondered if he was safe walking down the street,” Berg wrote. “The vitriol against trans people is not happening in a vacuum. It is not just a way of scoring political points by exacerbating the culture wars. It has real-world implications for how transgender people view their place in the world and how they are treated as they just try to live their lives.”

I have included a photo of the Berg-Brousseau family. In it, “Harry” — I have been unable to find her real name — is shown, seemingly shorter than her mother and sister, and certainly shorter than her father, as well as significantly overweight. Were she an actual boy who grew up that way, “he’d” have been the last picked for a team in Phys Ed, and been dateless as high school girls, real girls, would have rejected “him” for more masculine guys. As an adult, she might somehow ‘pass’ as a male, if no one asked any questions, but she’d have been the least impressive of ‘guys’.

Dr Berg claimed that Miss Berg-Brousseau believed that she was at risk, I assume from violence, walking out in public, but, in the end, the person from whom she wasn’t safe was not evil tormenters, but from herself. Had she been an actual boy who grew up to look the way she looked, she’d have had to get used to the kinds of insults that all boys growing up not masculine enough hear. But Dr Berg wants to blame her daughter’s suicide on people who recognize that her “transgender son” was actually her daughter, and refused to lie about it.

This, you see, is what the left want, for sensible people to be guilted into accepting something that they know to be false, to accept the mental illness of gender dysphoria as somehow being not a delusion but normal. More, they want sensible people to lie out loud, to call the ‘transgendered’ by their preferred pronouns and names, when that would be lying to others and to themselves. To me, the proper response is to not get involved in any way with the ‘transgendered,’ to not have to choose between going along with their delusions or angering them in public, but simply to ignore them as much as we can, as long as it has no effect on ourselves and society.

That’s why this site has spent so much bandwidth on Will Thomas, the male swimmer who thought he was a woman, and competed on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swimming team, utterly dominating women in the pool when he had been an average swimmer when competing as a male. That was actual harm, to the women he beat in the pool, and to society as a whole. Miss Berg-Brousseau? Obviously, the female-to-male ‘transition’ does not confer on someone biologically female the physical advantages of height, strength, quickness, and speed that actual males normally have, so there’s no threat to sports performance that Mr Thomas constituted, but it’s also obvious that, while there are short and obese males, the female-to-male ‘transgendered’ simply aren’t males.

Miss Berg-Brousseau? Other than her attempts to persuade the General Assembly not to pass legislation which would protect privacy of people from the opposite sex sharing their bathrooms and locker rooms — legislation which then failed, but failed during the last time in which Democrats controlled the state House of Representatives — she’s done little harm.

Perhaps Miss Berg-Brousseau would have found more acceptance among a smaller group of people, people who would go along with her claim that she was a man, but she tried to make herself an advocate, tried to push others to not only go along with her delusions, tried to get the law and the state to accept them; she put herself out in public, and putting yourself out in public invites those who disagree to state their disagreements, to make their positions clear and known.

Also see: Ronald Yates: How the Media are Brainwashing Us to Believe the “Woke New Normal”

This is what Dr Berg, and the Lexington Herald-Leader, as well as many other media sources, are trying to do, to stifle other people’s opinions, to try to blame other people for Miss Berg-Brousseau’s suicide, to try to guilt people into accepting other people’s lies and delusions.

Sorry, but no, just no.

Living out in the country in rural eastern Kentucky, I rarely see such individuals, only twice as a matter of fact: a male pretending to be female as a diner in Lexington’s Corta Lina restaurant, several tables away, and a male waiter pretending to be a waitress in the Applebee’s on Bypass Road in Richmond, Kentucky. He wasn’t our waiter, so we had no interaction with him, but it’s notable that that Applebee’s closed down just a few weeks later.

As far as I am concerned, the ‘transgendered’ can have their own delusions, and I will ignore them when I can. But I will not lie for them. Does that make me an [insert slang term for the anus here]?

You know what? I will proudly accept that appellation, if it means telling the truth. We can have sympathy for Miss Berg-Brousseau, and her family, but sympathy should not extend to lying to other people, and to ourselves. Referring to Miss Berg-Brousseau as a male isn’t like answering your wife’s question, “Do these pants make me look fat?” Referring to Miss Berg-Brousseau as male is actively harmful to society, in that it goes right along with the normalization of mental illness and transgenderism. And referring to Miss Berg-Brousseau as male falls right along with her mother’s attempt to blame those of us who do tell the truth for her daughter’s death.
____________________________
Editor’s note: This article has been significantly expanded, including changing the title, from the original.
____________________________
Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

Posted on by

In which a ‘transgender’ supportive CNN piece proves the opposite 'Transgender man' proves that 'he' really isn't

The Russo-Ukrainian War has seen hundreds of thousands of casualties, according to The New York Times:

Russia’s war in Ukraine has left more than 100,000 of Moscow’s troops dead or wounded, and Ukraine has probably suffered a similar number of casualties, the United States’ most senior general said this week.

“You’re looking at well over 100,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded,” Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in remarks at the Economic Club of New York on Wednesday. “Same thing probably on the Ukrainian side.”

General Milley said that Russia’s invasion had also killed about 40,000 Ukrainian civilians and displaced 15 million to 30 million.

That’s “a lot of human suffering,” he said.

He described the coming cold months, when many military experts expect a lull in the fighting, as an opportunity for both sides to consider peace talks. However, the prevailing U.S. opinion is that the two countries are far from such talks.

Well, leave it to CNN to find a much, much worse problem:

‘I wanted to resume my transition at all costs.’ Trans Ukrainians uprooted by war struggle to continue treatment

By Ivana Kottasová, CNN | Saturday, December 3, 2022 | 12:51 AM EST

Chisinau, Moldova and London — The best day of Eric’s life came just days before the worst.

After years of waiting, dozens of tests and a two-week stay on a psychiatric ward, Eric was finally getting his first testosterone shot. Eric is a 23-year-old transgender man from Ukraine. Assigned female at birth, he says starting hormone therapy was a major step in his quest to become his true self.

OK, let’s stop right there: “Eric” was not assigned female at birth, but recognized as being a girl when she was born. “Assignment” as being male or female is determined not by who looks at a newborn’s genitals, but by whether the sperm cell which fertilizes the egg is carrying an X or a Y chromosome, at conception. This is something our science has known for a hundred years now, but the ‘transgender’ activists word it as if there is actually a choice at birth.

“Eric”, as photographed by Ivana Kottasová, CNN. Click to enlarge.

“It was utter happiness. I was euphoric, it was the moment that I’ve been waiting for for so long,” Eric, who asked for his last name to not be used because he is concerned for his safety, told CNN in Chisinau, Moldova, in July.But just days after Eric had what should have been the first in a series of testosterone injections administered at a clinic in Kyiv, Russia invaded Ukraine. Everything changed.

“The clinic had closed because of the danger of airstrikes. I had the testosterone, but no way of getting [it administered]. I didn’t have the needles and there were huge shortages of everything in pharmacies, even the most basic stuff, because obviously, during the war, there’s a big need for things like syringes,” Eric said.

Russia’s brutal assault on Ukraine has upended the lives of millions of Ukrainians. But for Eric and many other trans people, the war has also made it much more difficult to be who they are.

Hundreds of thousands of people killed or wounded, and 15 to 30 million people displaced from their homes, but “Eric” and others are suffering because they can’t try to change their sex?

Article author Ivana Kottasová took a picture of “Eric” for the article, and you know what I noticed? She was standing on a sidewalk, in a nice, urban street in Chisinau, Moldova, an independent country which borders Ukraine but is not part of Ukraine. Moldova is not at war with Russia. If “Eric” really, really thinks she’s a man, shouldn’t she be out doing the manly thing of defending her country against the invading Russians? But no, instead she fled her homeland, and is safe in Moldova.

In a Council of Europe article linked in the original, it is noted:

In the course of my recent visit to Ukraine, I was also informed that some transgender persons are experiencing difficulties in leaving the country. For example, this is the case for several transgender women who are blocked in Ukraine because they have not completed the legal gender recognition process and consequently the gender markers in their identity documents remain male at a time when all men between 18 and 60 are required by martial law to stay in Ukraine.

In other words, “Eric” disobeyed the martial law edict that all men between 18 and 60 stay in Ukraine, to fight the invaders. She claims that she’s a man, but sure used her female identity to get the heck out of the country! Time magazine reported that “scores of foreign women” have gone to Ukraine to help fight the Russians, including some in direct combat, but “Eric” used her female identity to flee that fight. Ukraine’s military was 16% female before the war, and many have been directly fighting the Russians, but “Eric” fled nevertheless.

Miss Kottasová’s article was meant to portray the ‘transgendered’ as a special class of victims in the war, but it had the unintentional effect of highlighting that ‘trangender man’ “Eric” is not a man, and does not think like a man. Perhaps, after the war is over, she’ll be lucky enough to get the hormones she wants, and maybe even a quack plastic surgeon to build her a fake penis, but in the part of her she already claims is male, she has proven that she isn’t.

Posted on by

Progressives can’t see the forest because of all the trees

According to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page, there have been 473 people murdered in the City of Brotherly Love as of 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, December 1st. So, about what was District Attorney Larry Krasner worried on Thursday?

Advocates sound alarm on murders of transgender women in Philadelphia

Fox 29 News | Thursday, December 1, 2022 | 5:57 PM EST

PHILADELPHIA – Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner was among a group of LGBTQ activists who spoke about a troubling trend of deadly violence against trans women in the city over the recent years.

Investigators say on Thanksgiving morning, Sharee “Diamond” Jackson-McDonald – a transgender woman – was found shot to death inside a Germantown apartment. The murder of Jackson-McDonald was the 35 killing of a transgender or gender-non-conforming person in the United States this year.

Because I’m including the video from Fox 29 News, the rest is below the fold. I will warn the reader in advance: this is not politically correct in the slightest, and if that offends you, stop reading now. Continue reading →

Posted on by

Missing the elephant in the room Sociology professors Kelsy Burke and Emily Kazyak manage to miss the most important datum in their attack on Republicans

Sometimes the credentialed media send out computer information which tells readers that an article is biased even before you read it. From The Washington Post:

Americans’ support for transgender rights has declined. Here’s why.

The culture war over transgender rights is part of a fight over competing notions of gender and sexuality, including issues like abortion and sex education

Analysis by Kelsy Burke and Emily Kazyak | Tuesday, November 8, 2022 | 7:00 AM EST

During the 2022 midterm election campaign, Republican public officials targeted transgender rights in what NPR and other news media have called the new front in the culture wars. Last month’s Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Survey appears to offer confirmation, finding increased polarization on all measures of LGBTQ rights. In particular, Americans’ support for transgender rights has declined.

The article headline isn’t too terribly biased, but if you look at the tab for the page, the article title was, as first saved on the computer, “Why do Republicans attack transgender rights?” And the url for the article is https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/08/ transgender-republican-evangelical-bathrooms/. You can get around the Post’s paywall and read the article for free on the Microsoft network, but the msn.com version does not show the tab change; that can only be seen at the Post’s original.

Clearly, an editor at the Post changed the title the authors submitted electronically from Lincoln, Nebraska.[1]Article headlines in newspapers are normally written by an editor, so this isn’t anything abnormal.

Then there is the Post’s biography of the article authors, as shown in the screen capture to the right. Let’s face it: when sensible people see that one of the authors is an “associate professor of sociology and women’s and gender studies,” their eyes roll.

Take one measure: whether laws should require transgender people to use bathrooms that correspond to their sex assigned at birth, not their current gender identity. In 2016, only 35 percent of all Americans favored these “bathroom bills,” the first of which was proposed that year in North Carolina. In 2022, after numerous other states proposed similar laws, the number of Americans supporting them rose to 52 percent.

I always laugh when I see the phrase “sex assigned at birth.” No, sex is determined at conception, by whether the sperm cell which fertilizes the egg is carrying an X or a Y chromosome. This is something we’ve known for 100 years.

People chuckled when they read that His Majesty King Henry VIII blamed his wives for having girls rather than boys, because we now know that it is the father, not the mother, who actually determines the sex of the offspring.

But today? Today the silliness of the left is that sex is somehow “assigned” at birth, rather than recognized at birth. Good heavens, think of all of the troubles good King Henry could have avoided if he’d simply “assigned” Mary and Elizabeth as boys.

While I do wonder whether the Post has a stylebook preference or mandete for “sex assigned at birth” as a phrase, it’s very obvious that the good professors who wrote the article would have used it regardless; it is used several times throughout the article, and the transgender activists prefer it, because it makes it sound as though sex is something other than biologically determined and unchangeable.

The jump was especially pronounced for White evangelicals and Republicans. In 2016, only 41 percent of White evangelicals and 44 percent of Republicans supported the requirement that transgender people use bathrooms that aligned with their sex assigned at birth. By 2022, that number doubled to 86 percent and 87 percent, respectively.

Other groups also increased their opposition to transgender rights, but the rise was less dramatic for Democrats and Americans who are unaffiliated with religion. Only 27 percent of Democrats favored bathroom bills in 2016, compared with 31 percent in 2022. Among nonreligious respondents, support for requiring transgender people to use the bathroom that aligns with their sex assigned at birth increased from 21 percent in 2016 to 34 percent in 2022.

In other words, as people became more educated on the subject, they realized the silliness of transgenderism.

These numbers suggest that transgender issues are increasingly being lived out in polarizing ways among Americans — in other words, that the “culture wars” narrative holds true. As sociologists, we have sought to dig deeper than the quantitative findings to understand why Americans hold such diverging beliefs.

The article continues with their findings based on surveys, and they tell us the obvious: being conservative, Republican and religious makes you more likely not to accept the arguments of transgenderism. I’ll omit that for this article, because I cannot simply copy-and-paste the whole thing; that would be plagiarism, and you can read it yourself. However, while they want to blame people who are “politically conservative” and “White evangelicals”, they somehow never mentioned the most obvious and glaring bit of news about transgender people that people saw: the case of University of Pennsylvania swimmer Will Thomas, a male who claimed to be a woman named “Lia”, and went from being ranked #562 when competing as a male his first three years, to #1 as a female his senior season. Mr Thomas absolutely destroyed the real female competitors at the Zippy Invitational in Akron, Ohio. While some people are surely sympathetic to Mr Thomas psychological plight — it has to be traumatic to actually believe that you should be a different sex — he also awoke people who may not have paid much attention to transgenderism that this was a male, who had been a male athlete and gone through male puberty, and was simply different from real women.

You didn’t have to listen to Republican messages to realize that something was horribly wrong with the Will Thomas story.

Their politically liberal bias — and no, I do not claim to be unbiased myself — is blatantly obvious in their concluding paragraph:

Though these findings obviously relate to transgender people, they implicate cisgender people, too. The culture war over transgender rights is part of a war over competing notions of gender and sexuality, and how those should be regulated in the social world. Thus, in 2022, we have observed simultaneous political attacks on transgender people, reproductive freedoms, and sex education. Americans are divided because we have fundamentally different vantage points over whose identities deserve protection and which experiences are to be prioritized and believed.

Yeah, we get it: this was a biased article, listed as an “analysis” rather than an OpEd piece, and the conclusion, along with the original title, was meant to attack Republicans. But leaving out the huge input of the “Lia” Thomas story pretty much invalidates the authors’ conclusions. If, as the authors began, “Republican public officials targeted transgender rights in what NPR and other news media have called the new front in the culture wars,” such ‘targeting’ bore political fruit because Mr Thomas so thoroughly fertilized the ground.

References

References
↑1 Article headlines in newspapers are normally written by an editor, so this isn’t anything abnormal.
Posted on by

Journolism: ignoring the “Five Ws + H” in reporting due to political correctness

Despite having spent two years on the staff of the Kentucky Kernel, the University of Kentucky’s student newspaper, I was never a journalism major. That does not mean that I have been completely uneducated on reporting and newswriting, though I must say that newswriting under 2022 standards is nothing like it was in the 1970s.

One of the most basic journalism standards is the “Five Ws,” frequently referred to as the “Five Ws + H.” It’s pretty simple: “who, what, when, where, and why,” with the addition of “how”. Who is involved, what happened, when and where did it happen, why did it happen, and how did it happen. These are the things for which every responsible editor looks, and will come back to the reporter or newswriter — not always the same person — if one of them is missing.

Sometimes, especially with a breaking news story, one or more of those “Ws” is simply unknown, and deadlines being what they were, and are, a story will get rushed to publication while missing one of the six important points. In most such cases, there will be a note at the end to the effect of “This is a breaking story and will be updated.” With the advent of digital publication, where newspapers have online versions, this can be fairly frequent, as newspaper editors, in competition with television and internet media, don’t want to sit on a story.

Which brings me back to something I covered Thursday evening, the decision of the Cherokee County School Board to not play the Highlands School girls’ volleyball team. Several credentialed media sources covered the story, and they gave us the “who”, the Cherokee County School Board, the “what”, the decision to forfeit all scheduled games with Highlands, the “when”, Thursday, September 21st, the “where,” the Cherokee County School Board meeting, and the “why,” because a “Hiwassee Dam High School volleyball player got neck and head injuries when a Highlands athlete spiked a ball”.

Except, as it happens, the credentialed media sources all censored part of the “why.”

Volleyball players spike the ball! They all try to spike the ball, to deliver a shot against the opponent with such speed and force that the defense cannot react quickly enough to prevent the ball from hitting the ground inbounds. That a player in a (supposedly) non-contact sport was injured by a spiked ball is infrequent, but certainly not unheard of.

If you read only the credentialed media stories, you might be scratching your head, wondering why the School Board would take such a decision, against one player on one team. Spiking the ball is, after all, part of the game, and if the Board were concerned that a spiked ball injured a player, and that somehow made the game unsafe, then a reader might wonder why the Board didn’t simply cancel all girls’ volleyball games, with all opponents.

And that’s the part of the “why” the credentialed media censored: the Highlands School girls’ volleyball player that so forcefully spiked the ball isn’t a girl! The unnamed-in-the-media player is a boy who “identifies” as a girl, and that’s why the Cherokee County Board of Education took the decision the way they did. The report from the Cherokee County Board of Education is here.

The Board’s report noted:

Mr. Jason Murphy stated to the Board that he hoped they voted on this issue based on their morals, ethics and Christian upbringing.

In other words, there was a political and religious aspect to the Board’s decision, as raised in the meeting, and it is at least possible, though the Board denied it, that political and religious considerations influenced the decision. Surely that would be a newsworthy part of the “why” of the decision.

Ms. Jordan Lovingood asked the Board to consider how their decision will affect the Highlands’ player this decision is being made about. She stressed how we are teaching inclusion and acceptance in our schools, yet making a decision to not play a team based on sex.

(Board member) Mr. (Joe) Wood commented that no one is basing their decision on sex; it’s based on safety.

This would normally be a very contentious point, yet the credentialed media completely ignored all of it, because to have included it in their stories would have been to inform readers that the player in question is not, to use a phrase in the Board’s report, “100% girl”.

I frequently use the word “journolism”, the spelling of which comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. Perhaps some would find that unfair, but what better reflects when (purported) journalists ignore the basic principles of reporting and newswriting in order to protect the political position that ‘transgender’ girls are real girls?

The credentialed media got really, really upset when they were accused of #FakeNews, but what else would you call it when the media censor the news in the way they did in this story? If the media aren’t trusted, this is just part of the reason why.

I found out about this story not through the credentialed media, but due to definitely biased bloggers, and I put some effort into searching out confirmation of this through the credentialed media; it took the link to the Board of Education’s report of the meeting, in the Washington Examiner, certainly a conservatively biased source, to gain unbiased confirmation. But when biased bloggers report the whole story, while the professional media will not, there’s something wrong with our professional media.

Posted on by

Journolism: media bias at its finest The credentialed media didn't publish anything untrue, but they deliberately chose to omit the most important fact

No, there isn’t a typographical error in the article headline. The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.

Sometimes that bias is deeply buried, and at first, I wondered if this was a hoax, because I wasn’t finding any credentialed media verification of the story. But finally, I found it from an ABC News station:

After player injury, Cherokee Co. schools forfeit all volleyball games against 1 school

by Jordan Karnbach | Tuesday, October 4, 2022

CHEROKEEE COUNTY, N.C. — All girls’ volleyball teams in the Cherokee County school district will forfeit upcoming regular season games against one competitor due to a recent player injury, according to Cherokee County School Board member Arnold Mathews.

Mathews told us in an email on Tuesday that the board determined the varsity and junior varsity teams in the district won’t play the Highlands School volleyball team “due to safety concerns,” Mathews said.

That decision came after a Hiwassee Dam High School volleyball player got neck and head injuries when a Highlands athlete spiked a ball, which “forcefully struck” the athlete in the head, says Mathews.

Mathews says this decision does not affect any other sports or teams in the district.

You know what isn’t in any of the credentialed media reports? What isn’t there is that the ball which was forcefully spiked was spiked by a ‘transgender girl’, meaning: a male who identifies as a girl and is playing on the girls’ volleyball team.

Several non-credentialed sites picked up that part, and it took some digging through them to find the confirmation. There was considerable debate among the Cherokee County Board of Education meeting, but if you read through the meeting minutes, you’ll see what the credentialed media tried to hide: yes, the player in question is a “biological male”.

Dr. Lisa Fletcher, Principal Murphy High, informed the Board that at the athletic association meeting she had just attended the issue of student’s playing based on their birth certificate gender is going to be addressed in the future. She advised the Board to communicate with the Athletic Association regarding this issue.

Mr. Steve Colemen addressed the safety concern for the female players facing a biological male player. He added that the Board should make a stand because if it isn’t addressed now, it’s possible in the future that a Cherokee County team could face a team with all biological males playing; and if this isn’t addressed there is a risk for biological male students taking over women’s sports.

The Board of Education clearly took its decision based on the fact that the Highlands girls’ volleyball team had a male team member; that ought to be news, ought to be an important part of the story, and is the “why” for the entire decision, but the credentialed media have censored that part. The credentialed media didn’t publish anything untrue, but they skewed the entire story by deliberately omitting the most important, most relevant fact. How is that not lying?