The following are excerpts from the article: “I used to be transgender. Here’s my take on kids who think they are transgender”, published in The Daily Signal. Life in society is not some fantasy world where a boy should pretend he has magically transformed himself into a girl simply by uttering the words ‘I am a girl’ and changing how he presents himself.
“My feelings of not wanting to be a boy started in early childhood as a result of cross-dressing at the hands of my grandma,” writes the author of the article. Caregivers all too often collaborate with a mental disorder instead of treating it. Telling a psychologically troubled boy he has changed genders is not compassion, but can become reckless parenting. By withholding psychotherapy, parents could be abusing the kid. Living in a self-made gender fantasy world void of reality is not psychologically or emotionally healthy. I know that to be true. I was a transgender kid at the age of 4.
“I underwent gender reassignment surgery at 42 years of age after cross-dressing for most of my life. I discovered that trans kids most often are suffering from a variety of disorders, starting with depression – the result of personal loss, broken families, sexual abuse, and unstable homes. Deep depression leads kids to want to be someone other than who they are.
“Finally, I had discovered the madness of the transgender life. It is a fabrication born of mental disorders. I only wish that when I went to the gender counselor for help he would have told me I couldn’t really change genders, that it is biologically impossible. Instead, he approved me for gender reassignment surgery, a surgery that, if I had been provided proper psychotherapy, would never have been necessary or appropriate.
“The transgender life is often the direct result of early childhood difficulty or trauma. Assisting a young child into the fabricated ideology of a transgender life is not helping the child sort out what is real and what is fiction. Most likely in 15 or 20 years, reality will set in that he really never changed genders. This is often a turning point where the trans life is not looking as good as it once did. Thankfully, like me, many transgender persons return to the gender they once shed. Slowly they restore the life that was lost.”
Gender Ideology
As explained by John-Henry Westen, Editor-in-Chief of LifeSiteNews: “Under the guise of fighting homophobia, sex education, freedom of choice, LGBT rights, and non-discrimination, we are experiencing the imposition of gender ideology. It proposes that a person’s sex is not biologically determined but that it was historically socially constructed and that individuals should have the choice to determine their own sex – or gender. It is a belief system that denies bodily reality and forbids even the consideration of the risk factors associated with abnormal sexual activity.
“Across North America and Western Europe for the last 20 years we’ve seen bakers, wedding photographers, florists, professors, counselors, media personalities, professional sports players, bed and breakfast owners, mayors, printers, politicians, foster parents, fire chiefs, magistrates, and police fined and some lose their jobs and livelihoods for criticizing homosexuality or homosexual ‘marriage.’
“The openly lesbian mayor of the city of Houston, Texas, issued subpoenas demanding five pastors turn over any sermons dealing with homosexuality or gender identity. If they failed to comply, they could be held in contempt of court.
“The United Nations, Europe, and North America have conditioned aid money to poor countries on the acceptance of contraception, abortion, and homosexuality. According to Bishop Badejo of Nigeria, even help with fighting Boko Haram was impeded by the nation’s refusal to accept homosexual ‘marriage.’”
North Carolina and Mississippi
In March, North Carolina enacted the Public Facilities Privacy Security Act, which requires government buildings and public universities to designate restrooms to be used by people whose biological sex at birth matches the sign on the door. This provided protection of its citizens by mandating gender-specific public restrooms, and allowing private businesses to set up their own bathroom policies, which overturned the City of Charlotte’s ordinance requiring private businesses to allow men to use women’s bathrooms and locker rooms.
Mississippi enacted a Religious Freedom Bill prohibiting the state government from penalizing those who refuse to provide services, based on religious beliefs, to same-sex “marriage,” extramarital sex, or transgender persons. Claiming discrimination, the ultra-left governors of New York and Massachusetts banned their state employees from traveling to North Carolina and/or Mississippi. Bruce Springsteen, a longtime leftist cultural warrior, canceled his concerts in these two states. Major corporations, including Apple, PayPal, Pfizer, Microsoft, and Marriott, signed public letters to the Governor of North Carolina urging him to repeal the new state law. Deutsche Bank canceled plans to create new jobs, and PayPal has canceled plans for a global operations center.
In Mississippi, GE, Pepsi, and Dow publicly criticized the new law. Pointing out the appalling hypocrisy of these corporations, and left-wing politicians, Heritage Foundation noted: “Why do many of these same corporations do business in foreign countries with terrible records of human rights in general and for LGBT people in particular?” Heritage Foundation noted that PayPal’s international headquarters is located in Singapore, a country that will punish people engaged in homosexual acts with up to two years in prison, as noted by the Mindszenty Report.
The Report also noted that New York Governor Cuomo did not show any concern with human rights violations when he visited Cuba recently to promote trade with that country. Last year, Arkansas amended its Religious Freedom Bill after a corporate backlash led by Walmart.
Target
The retailer Target announced in April that its bathrooms were opening to sexual differentiation, offering the strange claim: “Everybody deserves to feel like they belong.”
The American Family Association asked people to boycott Target, commenting: “This means a man can simply say he ‘feels like a woman today” and enter the women’s restroom…even if young girls or women are already in there. Target’s policy is exactly how sexual predators get access to their victims.”
Less than three weeks into Target’s new, transgender-affirming policy of allowing men into girls’ bathrooms and changing rooms, the authorities in Frisco, Texas, released a surveillance photo of a man whom a girl noticed was looking into the stall and recording her with his cell phone, reported LifeSiteNews.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asked Target for a full text of its safety policies “regarding the protection of women and children from those who would use the cover of Target’s restroom policy for nefarious purposes. …It is possible that allowing men in women’s restrooms could lead to criminal and otherwise unwanted activities.”
NBA and NFL and Hypocrisy
The National Basketball Association has given an ultimatum to the state of North Carolina that unless it changes its Public Facilities Privacy Security Act, the NBA will change the location of its 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte to somewhere else.
Not to be outdone by the NBA, the National Football League Commissioner, Roger Goodell, issued a statement that the NFL “will continue to fight” North Carolina’s bathroom privacy law.
San Francisco 49’s owner Jed York has donated $75,000 to a gay and transgender activist group which is fighting the North Carolina law.
On the other hand, we are still waiting to hear the announcement from the NBA and/or the NFL that they will be permitting men to use the women’s restrooms in all of their sports facilities.
“Liberals have decided they want to bully Americans in every aspect of our lives: music, TV, movies, and now sports,” Medical Research Center Vice President Dan Gainor told LifeSiteNews. “The major sports leagues, heavily influenced by left-wing, social justice journalists, are intent on turning the NBA, NFL, NCAA, and more into weapons to blackmail states into accepting the unacceptable.
“It’s time for states and fans to tell the leagues and the journalists who play puppet master that our families are more important.”
Boy Beats Girls in Track
As reported by LifeSiteNews, parents and teenage girls in Alaska are asking whether allowing biological males to compete against biological females in sports is fair after a boy who identifies as a female won a high-profile track and field event.
“It is not fair, and it is not right for our female athletes, and we have a responsibility to protect our girls that have worked really hard – that are working toward college scholarships,” Stephanie Leigh Golmon Williams of the Alaska Family Council told local media.
The Alaska Schools Activity Association’s policy is consistent with the Obama administration’s controversial transgender guidance, which states that students must be allowed to use or participate in “restrooms, locker rooms, shower facilities, housing, [and] athletic teams” consistent with their gender identity. Ignoring the scientific fact that there are physical differences between males and females, and ignoring the scientific fact that there are psychological differences between the sexes, males are now allowed to compete as females.
“As everyone on the Left fall all over themselves to extend every possible right to transgender individuals, this case forces the question that always pops up when one group’s ‘rights’ conflict with another’s. Whose rights win? Whose rights are more important?” asks Larry O’Connor of HotAir.com.
“The question should be put to Hillary Clinton: You claim to be a champion for women’s rights and you also claim to support transgender rights,” he wrote. “Well, whose rights should win in this case, the transgender student who competed in the women’s track meet, or the young woman who lost her chance to race because she lost to a man?”
I wonder what will happen when males decide to compete in professional women’s sports, especially the very lucrative ones of golf and tennis.
Obama
Obama’s newly appointed Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced in May that the Justice Department filed a suit that day against North Carolina, claiming that it violated federal civil rights laws by overturning ordinances mandating that transgender people can use the restroom and shower facilities of the opposite biological sex. The U.S. Departments of Education, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) also threatened in May to withdraw funds totaling about $3 million if North Carolina does not rescind its law. It appears once again that Big Brother has become the big bully.
On the other hand, 51 Chicago families sued the federal government and Township High School District 211 for disregarding students’ privacy and safety. The district secretly opened its schools’ restrooms to the opposite sex and then opened the girls’ locker room to a boy after the U.S. Department of Education threatened the district’s federal funding.
The Alliance Defending Freedom legal counsel Matt Sharp noted: “The Department of Education is exceeding what it is legally and constitutionally allowed to do. In fact, at least five other federal and state courts have rejected the DOE’s interpretation of Title IX.”
As the lawsuit explains, no law – including Title IX, the federal law concerning sex discrimination at schools and colleges that receive federal education funds – requires schools to allow boys into girls’ restrooms or girls into boys’ restrooms. In fact, Title IX and its regulations specifically state that a school receiving federal funds can “provide separate toilet, locker room, and shower facilities on the basis of sex” without putting that funding at risk, reports LifeSiteNews.
“It’s a massive step backwards to force women to give up their inherent right to bodily privacy,” said Thomas More Society attorney Jocelyn Floyd. “To impose such a rule on still-developing teenage girls, as they’re already struggling with puberty’s changes on their bodies and social pressures to look a certain way, undermines their dignity and tells them that their rights don’t matter. This isn’t a message our schools should be sending to our girls.”
Two Bishops Speak Out
“The guidance issued May 13 by the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Education that treats ‘a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex’ is deeply disturbing,” Buffalo Bishop Richard Malone and Omaha Archbishop George Lucas stated in a May 16, 2016, statement. “The guidance fails to address a number of important concerns and contradicts a basic understanding of human formation: that the young need to be helped to accept their own body as it was created.” They went on to state, “biological sex and the socio-cultural role of sex (gender) can be distinguished but not separated.” The Bishops’ statement that children and loved ones in the “difficult situations” of gender dysphoria deserve compassion and respect, but, “all of these can be expressed without infringing on legitimate concerns about privacy and security on the part of the other young students and parents.”
Catholic Colleges
Although sad to report, some ultra-liberal Jesuit Catholic institutions have embraced the general ideology in their housing policies.
The College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts’ housing policies “will allow students of different sexes to room together based on gender identity.”
The University of San Francisco updated its gender-inclusive housing policy, stating that students should develop their own understanding about gender identity, including recognition that “human beings are not necessarily male or female as ascribed by their assigned gender at birth. …The bathroom is a communal bathroom and is shared by all members of the community (regardless of gender, gender identity, gender expression, or sex).”
The Fate of Our Nation
“Controversies about life, generation, and death are decisive for the fate of any civilization,” writes Robert R. Reilly, author of Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior is Changing Everything. He continues: “A society can withstand any number of persons who try to advance their own moral disorders as public policy. But it cannot survive once it adopts and enforces the justification for these moral disorders as its own. That is what is at stake in the cultural war. That is why everything is changing.”
Being Bullied by Big Brother
In May, President Obama, through the Departments of Justice and Education, has declared that “both federal agencies treat a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex for the purposes of enforcing Title IX,” which allows the federal government to deny funds to schools and to states who do not implement Obama’s administration’s obsession with sex to rewrite their policies allowing boys unfettered access to girls’ locker rooms.
President Obama’s taking upon himself to rewrite law, in reinterpreting the 1972-enacted Title IX, is another example of unnecessary meddling in state and local matters by an increasingly powerful and out-ofcontrol federal government. The Obama administration states today that a “school may not require transgender students to have a medical diagnosis, undergo any medical treatment, or produce a birth certificate or other identification document before treating them consistent with their gender identity.” The administration goes on to say that “gender identity refers to an individual’s internal sense of gender.” In other words, sheer say-so makes it so.
Second, based on the sheer say-so of a student, the Obama administration is directing schools to allow “students to participate in sex-segregated activities and access sex-segregated facilities consistent with their gender identity.” Yes, that means when it comes to sports teams, bathrooms, locker rooms, dorm rooms, and hotel rooms for field trips – these all must now be based on the self-declared gender identity of the students.
“The Obama administration’s official policy is that boys who identify as girls should have unfettered access to girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and shower facilities,” concludes The Daily Signal.
The pro-life Governor of Kentucky, Matt Bevin, quickly vowed that his administration would resist Obama’s directive ordering schools to let transgender students use bathrooms of the opposite sex. Kentucky schools “should not feel compelled to bow to such intimidation.” The governor concludes: “It is difficult to imagine a more absurd federal overreach into a local issue.”
In a defiant press conference, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said in May that the state would refuse federal funding before putting its children at risk.
“We will not be blackmailed by the president’s 30 pieces of silver,” Patrick said. He said the policy, if adopted, will be the end of public education. People will pull their kids out of unsafe schools,” he said. “Homeschooling will explode. Private schools will increase. “I believe it is the biggest issue facing America since prayer was taken out of schools,” Patrick added.
Assault Victims Speak Out on Open Bathroom Bills
A new video from the Alliance Defending Freedom features the testimonies of sexually assaulted victims, each exposing new aspects of how transgender bathroom ordinances inflict a very personal cost on the most vulnerable.
Gretchen Flores remembers how, as a 10-year-old girl, her male swim coach talked her into letting him “help” massage the cramps out of her legs in the locker room. His assistances turned into sexual abuse, and a secret that burned a hole in her memory. “I think about the countless victims of this man in the locker room,” she says. Back then men were not allowed in women’s locker rooms. The only reason he had access was that he was the swim coach.”
Kaely Triller reveals that she was fired from her job as communications director at a YMCA last March for saying that she opposed the new policy of gender identity-based locker rooms. Triller had never publicly revealed her own secret: She had been abused “from the time I was in diapers.”
She told her employer that she could not imagine facing a man in a women’s facility. Grouping males and females in such an intimate setting would traumatize her and a percentage of other women who had similar, tragic experiences.
“The presence of a male of any variety – whether he’s somebody who identifies as trans or not, whether he has devious motives or not – that’s irrelevant to the reality that for survivors of sexual trauma to just turn around and to be exposed to that is an instant trigger.”
She said laws granting males access to female facilities are promoted in the name of transgender rights, and people often support them because “they think that it’s a compassionate thing to do. I think what they’re not considering, and what I’m hoping that they will, is that this has such devastating implications for people like me.
“The message that sends really loud and clear to those teenage girls,” Triller says, finally breaking out into tears, “is that that’s OK, that a grown man can come and watch them shower, and we’re not going to do anything about it.
