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On April 26th, at the annual Pediatric Academic Societies’ meeting, a psychologist, a bioethicist, a plastic surgeon, and a psychiatrist spoke on a panel called “A Scientific Dialogue on the Care of Transgender and Gender Diverse Youth.”

That the session went forth is some cause for, well, if not celebration then relief, since there was a concerted effort to make sure no such dialogue took place, both before and during it.

Critics of having a dialogue about what is arguably the most important medical and psychological decision a human being can make during his or her lifetime asserted that, essentially, the speakers were morally tainted. They were associated with groups that the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled hateful (as if critics of gender medicine are on par with the KKK). Or they had worked on a project for the Trump Administration. Or they had blown the whistle on dangerous practices leading to reforms that conflicted with their visions. Or they had conducted research whose outcomes they didn’t like.

But aside from the objection to what amounts to catching intellectual cooties, what was the actual problem with these people talking?

The biggest fear seemed to be that pediatricians would have to hear a point of view that they’d already determined they didn’t agree with, and that meant that they’d have to withstand the discomfort of having their beliefs challenged rather than affirmed. One clinician told a trans activist publication that “Platforming a one-sided perspective that is not based in medical society guidelines or in the preponderance of the scientific evidence misleads pediatricians, who are attending these talks in good faith that what they hear will be free from bias and rooted in science and good patient care.”

Now, one could argue with this statement in all kinds of ways. Since the speakers’ remarks weren’t pre-published, the assumption of one-sidedness was speculation. Based in medical society guidelines? Well, okay, technically—but panelists Anna Hutchinson and Riittakerttu Kaltiala both reflect the guidelines of their countries, England and Finland respectively. Also, who says that you can’t ever question anything about a guideline at a medical conference? Isn’t that that the ideal setting in which to do just that? And the preponderance of evidence has been deemed low-quality, meaning no one can predict anything from the conclusions, so many American guidelines are actually not in alignment with the evidence.

As for bias—the problem is you don’t want to hear people with difference biases because you only want to exist within the snowglobe of your own biases? Okay, that’s fine if you’re in a cult or in eighth grade—but not if you’re a doctor, whom people trust with their lives. “I’m biased against anyone who doesn’t share my biases” is not a good slogan for those in the helping professions.

There was a lot of figurative noise before the panel, and it was interrupted by some literal noise. Two disrupters, who were apparently not conference-goers, burst into the panel and screamed “You’re a hate group, motherfuckers” and shouted “Fuck you” repeatedly, among other choice words. The conference organizers had dissuaded panelists from bringing their own security, and what security they had in the room didn’t actually protect the panelists. Nor did they help re-establish the peace, and norms, after the incident. At the end of the session, rather than apologizing to the panelists, PAS apologized to the audience for not widening the range of perspectives in it. (For the record, I think it would be fantastic if all of these conferences had panels with different perspectives on this topic. But they have to start by ensuring that the panelists are physically safe.)

Despite these problems, the show did go on, and I think that’s really important to acknowledge. PAS stood its ground and didn’t back down. If the bulk of American medical associations aren’t willing to evolve in the face of evidence (which should scare us all), the least they can do is not cave to the loudest and most extreme voices, and allow panelists to speak.

Other medical groups weren’t so brave, and had to send out statements that were the equivalent of “don’t worry, we didn’t catch the intellectual cooties and are still in the hands-over-ears bunker with the rest of you who definitely don’t want to learn anything new.” The conference was the Pediatric Academic Society, not the Pediatric Endocrine Society, but the PES sent this out anyway.

Here, by contrast, is some version of what I think groups could send out when faced with pushback against viewpoint diversity and knowledge expansion:

“We recognize that some people objected to the scheduling of this presentation. As clinicians, though, we always put science and ethics first, especially in a relatively new area of medicine with a weak evidence base. We should be willing to evolve in the face of new evidence and unafraid to reevaluate existing evidence. That is what good scientists and good clinicians do. That is good medicine. We respect every attendees’ right to avoid panels that they aren’t interested in or find irrelevant. However, if you are interested and it is relevant to you, we suggest that you attend the workshop, listen, and ask questions—and propose a panel of your own if you find the answers unsatisfactory. As professionals, we do our best work when we put politics and personal opinions aside. We serve our clients and our colleagues best by modeling robust scientific debate.”

Imagine that there was a presentation on diabetes research, and conference-goers didn’t like the attitudes or beliefs or work of the panelists, who had an important perspective on insulin that, yeah, okay, was different from the guidelines or the American Diabetes Association (which many believe is corrupt, by the way). What would be the harm of hearing it, of attending and asking questions and pushing back or, heaven forfend, being open to and interested in it, even if you were skeptical?

The only potential harm is that you will change your beliefs. That you will have to admit you were wrong. That you will have to face an unbearable well of doubt and discomfort. But if you did, you’d emerge stronger and better able to perform your job. (Why have I switched to the second person? Maybe because I desperately want to preach to the unconverted.)

We can see the destructiveness of clinging to certain beliefs in the panel disrupter’s behavior. He had been convinced that a discussion about best practices for treating gender dysphoria was so dangerous to him, because the modern concept of gender identity relies on the affirmation and participation of all other human beings. The most important thing anyone treating gender identity, or anyone who believes they have a gender identity, needs to do is interrogate that concept.

Doctors, psychologists, and therapists with blinders on and fingers in their ears cannot perform their jobs well, if they’re fending off information instead of absorbing it. When they disrupt instead of listen and push back, they endanger the very clients they want to help. We all want medical care that is “free from bias and rooted in science and good patient care.” Having clinicians who listen to competing perspectives, and are willing to evolve with the evidence, is the best way to get it.

—Lisa

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LTE to WaPo March 26, 2026, no response:

To the editor:

Re the Post’s March 26 article “Transgender women athletes banned from female Olympic events by new IOC policy”:The Post’s coverage of this important news item is misleading at best, and inaccurate at worst.

The headline is close to accurate (though I wish the Post would use the simple and straightforward word “men”), but it is followed by this subheading: “​​Transgender women athletes are now excluded from the Olympics after the IOC agreed to a new eligibility policy It aligns with U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order on women’s sports ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Games.” This strongly suggests that male athletes who call themselves “transgender” are being excluded from the Olympics entirely, which is not true.

The policy that the IOC announced on Thursday morning simply states that athletes will be required to undergo a simple and non-invasive sex test in order to compete, and that only female athletes will be permitted to compete in the women’s category. Male athletes will be eligible to compete in the men’s category. That’s it.

In a survey of female athletes at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, 82% said that sex testing should be continued and 94% said they were not made anxious by the procedure. Female athletes want sex testing.

This is a very sensible move on the IOC’s part to protect the integrity of female sports. The Washington Post would do well not to mislead readers about it.

Kara Dansky

LTE to NYT March 24, 2026, no response:

To the Editor,

Thomas B. Edsall’s March 24 opinion piece, “Why Are So Many Democratic Politicians So Far Out of Touch?,” is a welcome contribution to the discussion about why elected Democrats are out of touch with the majority of voters on the “trans issue.”

There has been very good reporting on this phenomenon, including in the Times. That reporting demonstrated that the vast majority of voters (including 67 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Independents) think that male athletes (including “transgender women”) do not belong in women’s sports.

When voters are asked clear questions, using precise language about specific scenarios, even stronger majorities understand that sex is real and matters. Polling commissioned by the group Women’s Declaration International USA in the fall of 2023 shows that:

• 4 out of 5 voters understand the word “women” means adult humans who are biologically female.

• 88% say a female 12-year-old attending a sleep-away summer camp for boys and girls, who has been signed up by her parents for a girls’ cabin, should be assigned bunkmates who are female only.

• 87% say an elderly or disabled female client of a home health agency who requests only women home health aides help her with showering should be sent female aides only.

This issue truly is not complicated.

Kara Dansky

Lifelong Democrat

Former President, Women’s Declaration International USA

To WaPo March 18, 2026, rejected; to Newsweek March 22, 2026, rejected; eventually published by The Hill on March 31

“Gender Identity” Renders Women’s Rights Unspeakable: The era of “swinging dicks” litigation

“It is truly a testament to where we are as a society today that it must be said in the context of federal civil rights litigation that women don’t have penises.”

I wrote those words in an amicus (friend-of-the-court) brief filed by the U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International (WDI USA) in the matter of Olympus Spa v. Armstrong.

In his March 12 dissent to a decision in the case, Judge Lawrence VanDyke of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit put it more colorfully: “This case is about swinging dicks,” he wrote. The language caused an uproar, and rightly so.

But Judge VanDyke isn’t wrong.

Olympus Spa is a traditional Korean-style spa near Seattle, Washington. It is open to women and girls aged thirteen and over, who visit to soak in herb-infused baths, lie on sand in warm rooms, and eat Korean food. Nudity is expected and, under certain circumstances, required.

In 2020, a man sought access to the spa. He was denied because the spa is only for women and teenaged girls.

This should have been straightforward. Most Americans of both sexes understand that it’s sometimes appropriate to have single-sex spaces. However, we are living in an era in which society (and sometimes, the law) allows for people to “identify as” the opposite sex.

This is the era of “trans,” or “gender identity.”

After the man was denied access, he filed a complaint against the spa before the Washington State Human Rights Commission (WSHRC). Claiming that the spa’s female-only policy violated his rights under Washington state law., he argued essentially as follows:

• State law prohibits public places from discriminating against people on the basis of their sexual orientation.

• State law defines the phrase “sexual orientation” to include “gender identity.”

• He identifies as a woman.

• Therefore, the spa discriminated against him on the basis of his sexual orientation.

He won. The WSHRC agreed that state law gave him a right to access the spa because he identifies as a woman.

On appeal, the Ninth Circuit agreed that Washington state law requires a female-only spa to accommodate a man who identifies as a woman.

Judge VanDyke disagrees.

The majority–and some commentators–were outraged at the language in his dissent. Slate called it “crass and indecent.” The lead judge in the majority called it “vulgar barroom talk.” A concurring judge said: “We are better than this.”

They are not wrong.

Judge VanDyke should never have had to come out swinging, as it were, on behalf of the women and girls who did not consent to sharing a nude space with males. He said as much:

You may think that swinging dicks shouldn’t appear in a judicial opinion. You’re not wrong.

However, he used the phrase very deliberately, and for good reason.

This is literally a case about whether a man, with male genitalia, should be able to access what is intended to be a female-only space in which women and girls as young as thirteen are naked. It is a clear example of the real-world harms to female citizens when the words “women” and “girls” are redefined to include males.

Judge VanDyke’s dissent echoes arguments in WDI USA’s brief before the court: that women have fought hard for centuries for our rights, that we have largely succeeded in winning those rights in the law, and that all of that goes away when men are permitted to “identify as women.”

Judge VanDyke chose his startling words carefully in order to make an important point. He said:

[A]s much as you might understandably be shocked and displeased to merely encounter that phrase in this opinion, I hope we all can agree that it is far more jarring for the unsuspecting and exposed women at Olympus Spa—some as young as thirteen—to be visually assaulted by the real thing.

He’s right. If the man in question hadn’t claimed a female “gender identity,” the majority of the Ninth Circuit would presumably have agreed that Washington’s criminal statutes against flashing and voyeurism applied. But because he invoked the shibboleth “I identify as a woman,” the rights of the spa’s female patrons seem to have evaporated.

Judges and pundits alike are more interested in language-policing those who speak out against sex crimes than in preventing those crimes against women in the first place.

This case may end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. If it does, the Supreme Court should say, unambiguously, that it is wrong for state law to force unconsenting women and girls to see penises. It should affirm, once and for all, that women are female and men are male.

It should not have come to this, but this is where we are. Let the era of “swinging dicks” litigation come to an end.

To Newsweek Feb. 16, 2026, no response:

Hillary Clinton: Women’s Rights Champion Turned Traitor

Presidents’ Day was February 16. Hillary Clinton, the woman who in 2016 nearly became the first female President of the United States, spent the weekend pandering to a man who calls himself a woman.

As a feminist and a lifelong Democrat, I voted enthusiastically for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary and general elections.

She had, after all, championed the Family and Medical leave Act, worked to increase funding for child care, helped start the National Campaign to End Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, campaigned for access to emergency contraception, voted in favor of abortion, and co-sponsored the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (about fair pay for women).

Based on her record I, like many of her supporters, was confident that at a fundamental level Hillary Clinton both understood women’s rights and was committed to protecting and advancing them.

That’s why I was so disappointed to watch her platform a man during Saturday’s Fundamental Rights for Women panel at the Munich Security Conference.

As moderator, Clinton introduced U.S. Representative Sarah (born Timothy) McBride as the very first speaker. She described him as “someone who’s been involved in this work for a long time, in trying to explain, and truly bring people together, around issues of gender.”

To make matters worse, Clinton pretended that McBride is a woman. She described McBride as a “US Congresswoman from the state of Delaware.” She continued (speaking to McBride), “As a gender rights champion, and also the first openly transgender member of the United States Congress, you’ve been on the front lines of this fight.”

When Clinton described McBride as someone who’s “been involved in this work for a long time,” what did she mean by “this work?”

As a former national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign (a leading organization in the push to prioritize self-declared “gender identity” over the material reality of sex in law, policy, and culture), and a close family friend of former President Joe Biden, whose administration did more than any other to advance the goals of the gender identity movement, McBride has certainly been involved in the work of making it possible for men to “identify as” women, over the objections of actual women.

McBride has, however, never done a thing to protect the fundamental rights of women. Quite the opposite, in fact, because McBride works to ensure women have no right to exclude men who call themselves women (“transgender women”) from female-only spaces, sports, or opportunities.

Clinton’s fulsome praise of McBride in Munich was not her first betrayal of the female sex. While in 1995, Clinton famously stood on a UN stage in Beijing and declared that “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all,” it appears that “once and for all” really only meant until the early 2010s.

That was when the entire Democratic Party establishment decided that some men are women if they say so, if they mimic the stereotypes associated with femininity, and/or if they take hormones and have surgeries to make them more closely resemble women (i.e., “are trangender women”).

An early adopter of the new Democratic orthodoxy, in 2010, then-Secretary of State Clinton relaxed the rules for changing sex markers on passports so that surgery was no longer required.

It has not always been clear what, exactly, Hillary thinks about all of this. In 2019, she gave an interview with her daughter Chelsea. The interviewer asked them both if someone with a beard and penis can ever be a woman, Chelsea offered an enthusiastic “Ye-ess. Yes.” Hillary, however, looked “uneasy.”

When asked about sports, Chelsea stated that “she supports children being able to play on sports teams that match their gender identity.” Hillary was more cautious: “I think you’ve got to be sensitive to how difficult this is,” Hillary said. “There are women who’d say, ‘You know what, you’ve never had the kind of life experiences that I’ve had. So I respect who you are, but don’t tell me you’re the same as me.’ I hear that conversation all the time.” Hillary said that men should “absolutely” not be in women’s bathrooms and Chelsea glared at her.

Two days later, she posted on Facebook to say that “Trans rights are human rights.” She continued, “Let me be clear: transgender people deserve nothing short of full equality.”

Clinton’s capitulation on “gender” probably eased her relationship with her adult daughter, and with other Democratic elites, but at what cost?

People often use the word “gender” as a euphemism for sex, but this is dangerous. People like McBride have capitalized on the general public’s acceptance of the use of “gender” to mean sex in order to fight for men’s rights to be legally and socially recognized as women.

There was a spot on that panel in Munich that was meant for a woman. And Hillary Clinton gave it to a man who calls himself a woman.

In 1995, Secretary Clinton promised us that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, “once and for all.” Now she has completely abandoned us. As a traitor to her sex class, she should be ashamed.

Democratic contenders in 2028 should draw a lesson from the woman who was never President: speak the truth, even when pressured to lie. In doing so, you will protect your legacy—and you might just get yourself elected.

To WSJ January 5, 2026, no response:

In 2020, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit challenging Idaho’s House Bill 500, which limits women’s and girls’ sports to biologically female athletes. Five years and much litigation later, Little v. Hecox is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet, ahead of oral arguments scheduled for January 13, the ACLU has asked the Court to declare its own suit moot. Why?

On the surface, Hecox and the similar West Virginia v. B.P.J., which justices will hear on the same day, present a narrow question: May states, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, maintain single-sex sports?

In both cases, U.S. appellate courts have ruled that laws excluding males from women’s and girls’ sports violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. In the West Virginia case, an appellate court also ruled that the state’s law violates Title IX (which prohibits sex discrimination in education). A Supreme Court decision is expected next summer.

While the current Court seems unlikely to take up former President Biden’s position that the transgender movement is “the civil rights issue of our time,” the scope of its rulings in these cases could vary widely.

As the ACLU’s Gillian Branstetter wrote in September, “What we don’t know–and won’t know until that ruling is handed down—is whether that ruling will be narrowly tailored to the context of athletics or implicate a broad range of rights for transgender people.”

In other words, will the Court issue a few limited protections for female athletes, or will it finally address the elephantess in the (court)room? Does the class “women and girls” mean female people? Or does it mean people of either sex who say they are female?

In seeking to have Hecox declared moot, the ACLU may hope to avoid a definitive answer to that question from the conservative-majority Court.

It is not only conservatives who resist redefining the words “women” and “girls” to include males. A 2023 survey conducted by SurveyUSA on behalf of Women’s Declaration International USA (a feminist organization of which I am a past president) found that four out of five American voters, including two thirds of Democrats, understand that women are “adult humans who are female.”

The Supreme Court has already decided that women as a sex class deserve protection under the Equal Protection Clause. In 1971, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued that women are people for equal protection purposes, and the Court agreed. The case was Reed v. Reed, and it concerned an Idaho law that explicitly elevated males over females in the administration of probate estates. The Court rightfully ruled that this was unfair to women. A long line of jurisprudence followed, culminating in the landmark 1996 case U.S. v. Virginia, in which the Court (led by Justice Ginsburg) ruled that the Virginia Military Institute could not exclude women.

How long can the Court delay facing the issue head-on?

In 2020, Justice Samuel Alito issued a dissent to the Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision, in which a 6-3 majority ruled that employers may not discriminate on the basis of “transgender status.” The decision did not define “transgender status,” leaving muddled the question of whether, under the law, some males are women if they call themselves “transgender.”

He warned: “Although the Court does not want to think about the consequences of its decision, we will not be able to avoid those issues for long. The entire Federal Judiciary will be mired for years in disputes about the reach of the Court’s reasoning.”

His warning was prescient. In case after case, the federal courts are being asked to consider who qualifies for accommodations and protections designated for women and girls.

During the summer of 2024, after the Biden Administration announced that it was redefining the word “sex” to include the concept of “gender identity” in regulations pertaining to Title IX, the federal judiciary had to grapple with over twenty lawsuits about what words like “sex” and “women” mean. Outside the Title IX context, federal courts have faced the question of whether female-only spas and sororities are permitted to exclude men (“transgender women”).

Last year, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the matter of United States v. Skrmetti, which concerned state laws banning the administration of “puberty blockers” and other hormones to children. While advocates hoped to make the case that the phrase “transgender people” constitutes a sufficiently coherent category of people to be considered what is known in the law as a “quasi-suspect classification,” they faced skepticism from several justices.

Justice Alito questioned ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio as to whether “transgender status” is immutable. Strangio acknowledged that it is not “immutable,” but maintained that it is a “distinguishing characteristic.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett challenged the U.S. Solicitor General on the question of whether “transgender people” have historically lacked political power. This matters in part because one of the reasons the Court initially extended equal protection to women was that women had historically been excluded from civic institutions like the franchise and juries.

Six members of the Court ruled earlier this year that laws such as the one at issue in Skrmetti are constitutional. Significantly, Justices Alito, Barrett, and Thomas published concurring opinions stating they would have ruled explicitly that the phrase “transgender status” is not a “quasi-suspect class.”

However, the Court did not go far enough in Skrmetti, and it failed to clarify the ambiguity left by Bostock. Unless the Court rules unambiguously that “transgender” is not a “quasi-suspect class,” and that women and girls exist as a coherent sex class, courts and lawyers will be left (again) to grapple with these matters.

In the sports cases currently pending before the Supreme Court, the Court has two options: it can uphold Justice Ginsburg’s important legacy by ruling that women and girls—and only women and girls—belong to the female sex class, or it can, once again, leave the matter for another day.

I am friendly with the folks at TFP and a few days after Charlie Kirk was killed, I pitched the idea of publishing my interview. TFP said they passed my message on to Bari, and nothing ever came of it.

The TERF Report

My 2022 interview with Charlie Kirk

September 13, 2025…

Listen now

7 months ago · 3694 likes · 16 comments · Kara Dansky

To spiked August 24, 2025, responded and rejected

Fighting for Women’s Sex-Based Rights is Not “MAGA”

It’s feminist

August 24, 2025

As readers surely know, in April of this year, the group For Women Scotland (FWS) won a stunning legal victory before the U.K. Supreme Court, when the Court ruled that the words “woman,” “man,” and “sex” refer to biology with respect to the U.K.’s Equality Act.

Now, Dr. Rebecca Don Kennedy, the head of Scotland’s Equality Network, is calling FWS “MAGA” in an article published by the Scottish outlet The Herald. As a U.S. Democratic feminist who has never voted for Donald Trump, this makes me quite cross.

According to The Herald:

The issue quickly moved from the fringes to the centre to Scottish and UK politics. At first, Kennedy wondered: “Where was it coming from? Down south? America?”

She adds: “I think now we know that it’s coming from concerted MAGA rhetoric.”

…

Kennedy believes the culture war around trans people “tracks” on to the timing of the first Trump presidency.

If Kennedy had done her research, she would know that American leftist feminists have been fighting for women’s sex-based rights for decades, long before an odious man named Donald Trump ascended to the Oval Office.

She would know that an American leftist radical feminist lesbian named Lisa Vogel founded the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF or MichFest) in 1976, and that it had to fight to protect its female-only policy when a bunch of men calling themselves women started inserting themselves into it in 1991. She would know that a different American radical feminist leftist lesbian named Janice Raymond published a book titled The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male in 1979, and republished it in 1994 with an Introduction warning us of the emergence of the word “transgender.” None of that had anything to do with Donald Trump, who, according to investigative journalist Wayne Barrett, spent the 1970s running his father’s New York real estate company and discriminating against black people.

If she had done her research, Kennedy would know that the American radical feminist group Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) was founded in 2013 to fight for women’s sex-based rights, free from men who call themselves women (I served on its board from 2016 to 2020). She would also know that the global feminist group Women’s Declaration International (WDI) launched in 2019 in New York and that the American chapter (WDI USA) was formed in 2020 (I served as the president and member of the board of directors of the U.S. chapter from 2021 to 2024).

Kennedy goes further and suggests that fighting for women’s sex-based rights is akin to opposing abortion, and that it’s only men who fight sex-denialism in the law. She said, “Many of the men attacking trans rights would strip abortion rights from women in a heartbeat. The ultimate objective is quashing women’s rights. Once we allow trans women to be scapegoated it’s a slippery slope.”

Kennedy is right that many American men would love to strip women of the right to terminate a pregnancy. That is one reason I have never voted for Donald Trump (I have voted Republican once in my life, in a 1990s mayoral race, where the Republican was openly pro-abortion rights and I believed the Democratic candidate to be corrupt). But to compare the fight for sex-based rights to the American right-wing obsession with stripping women of abortion rights is ludicrous. American leftist radical feminists support abortion rights.

WoLF’s mission is to “restore, protect, and advance the rights of women and girls using legal argument, policy advocacy, and public education.” Among other objectives, it “defends women’s bodily sovereignty and unapologetically supports abortion on demand.” When Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, I published a piece on the WDI USA blog titled, “How the Supreme Court Got it Wrong in Dobbs.” It stated, “The U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International (WDI USA) stands categorically and unapologetically in support of women’s and girls’ right to terminate a pregnancy at will, on demand, and without apology.”

The day after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, I launched the Democratic Women’s Declaration (DWD). I am ideologically left of the Democratic party, but I have been a registered Democrat since 1990 (except for a few years in the early 2000s, when I was registered Green). I care about women and girls as a sex class. Article IV of the DWD states:

Only women are capable of becoming pregnant. Women must have access to medical care with respect to pregnancy, including during the prenatal, perinatal, and postnatal periods. Accordingly, all areas of law, policy, and practice should ensure that the full reproductive rights of women and girls, including access to comprehensive reproductive services including abortion, are upheld.

The DWD was inspired by the global Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, the Labour Women’s Declaration, and the Green Women’s Declaration.

In more recent years, other U.S. groups have popped up, including Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender (DIAG), which opposes reckless medical interventions that ignore developmental science, supports the rights of women and girls to single-sex spaces and sports, believes there’s no wrong way to be a boy or girl, and is committed to open dialogue and free speech. There’s also the LGB Courage Coalition, a “lesbian and gay advocacy group committed to promoting evidence-based medical care, ending the medicalization of gender nonconformity, safeguarding homosexual rights, and building a pathway back for LGB individuals who have undergone medicalization.” The LGB Alliance also has a U.S. chapter. Some individuals in these groups may vote Republican, but none of the groups can fairly be accused of being “MAGA.”

WDI USA and WoLF are nonpartisan American feminist organizations. The DWD is a feminist document, inspired by leftists in the U.K. To impose the label of “MAGA” onto FWS ignores decades of American feminist organizing and fighting for the right of women and girls to exist as a sex class distinct from men (and for abortion rights).

This has nothing to do with Donald Trump. This has everything to do with women. To paint FWS as “MAGA” is inaccurate at best (and insulting to women at worst). Rebecca Don Kennedy should know better. She probably does.

To Spectator, June 23, 2025, no response:

U.S. v. Skrmetti: A Transatlantic Return to Reality

In the matter of U.S. v. Skrmetti, the U.S. Supreme Court last week upheld Tennessee’s ban on the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones intended to disguise the sex of minors. The decision strikes a major blow against the human rights abuse that is pediatric “gender medicine.”

But its full implications are even broader. Although the U.S. Court did not go as far as the U.K. Supreme Court did in April when it found that the words ‘woman,’ ‘man,’ and ‘sex’ refer to biology, the Skrmetti decision confirmed what broad majorities of Americans have known all along: that sex is real, in the law and otherwise.

In this case, the state of Tennessee enacted a law that protects minors from harmful drugs such as puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones. It is well established that such drugs cause long-term harm such as sterility, disease, and the inability to develop sexual function as an adult.

And yet, a group of minors and their parents, represented by the A.C.L.U. (where I worked from 2012 to 2014), sued the state, demanding access to these harmful drugs. They argued that the Tennessee law violates their right to equal protection of the law under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

They won at the district court level, but lost when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit rightly ruled that the phrase “transgender people” is not a coherent category of people under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court majority did not address that aspect of the lower court’s ruling, though Justices Barrett and Alito agreed with the Sixth Circuit on it.

Progressives frame Skrmetti—and the entire conflict over “gender identity”—as but one front in their larger war on Trump and the G.O.P. “I didn’t pick this fight around trans rights,” said Anthony Romero, the A.C.L.U.’s executive director. “The right-wing conservatives of the MAGA G.O.P. have made this one of their cause célèbre issues…”

In response to the Court’s decision, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer took to X to decry “Republicans’ cruel crusade against trans kids.” His fellow Democratic Senator Ed Markey declared, “Today, hate won. The far-right justices of the Supreme Court endorsed hate and discrimination by delivering a win for Republicans who have relentlessly and cruelly attacked transgender Americans for years.”

Elected Democrats, progressive activists, and even most news outlets tend to credit the political right with all opposition to so-called “gender identity” (or “trans”).

But this narrative simply isn’t true, either in the U.K. or in the U.S.

The founders of For Women Scotland, who brought the case that led to the U.K. legal victory for sex over “gender identity,” are left-leaning liberals who found themselves politically homeless as the gender lobby marched through the parties and institutions of the left, steamrolling women’s sex-based rights along the way. The “lesbian interveners” who bolstered the feminist case likewise hail mostly from the political left.

The same is true of grassroots advocates for the material reality of sex in the U.S. In the Skrmetti case, not only did left-leaning lesbians, gay men, feminists and Democrats rally outside the Supreme Court in support of the state of Tennessee, but the feminist group Women’s Declaration International USA filed a friend of the court brief, urging the Supreme Court to reach the result it issued last week. (I represented WDI USA on the brief).

WDI USA’s brief argued that the word “transgender” is a linguistic sleight of hand that has no coherent meaning, is not an immutable trait, and does not describe a politically powerless group of people. It said that children have an international human right to grow into adulthood. It maintained that sex is grounded in material reality, whereas “gender” is grounded in regressive stereotypes. Further, it asked the Court to rule that the Tennessee law is not sex discrimination.

I am pleased to see that the Supreme Court agrees.

Chief Justice Roberts concluded the majority opinion by saying, “This case carries with it the weight of fierce scientific and policy debates about the safety, efficacy, and propriety of medical treatments in an evolving field. The voices in these debates raise sincere concerns; the implications for all are profound. The Equal Protection Clause does not resolve these disagreements.”

Justice Alito mostly agrees, but says that he is “uneasy” with the Court’s analysis as to whether the Tennessee law “discriminates against transgender people” and that he “would reject the plaintiffs’ argument for a different reason: because neither transgender status nor gender identity should be treated as a suspect or ‘quasi-suspect’ class.’”

He continues: “Transgender status is not ‘immutable,’ and as a result, persons can and do move into and out of the class. Members of the class differ widely among themselves, and it is often difficult for others to determine whether a person is a member of the class. And transgender individuals have not been subjected to a history of discrimination that is comparable to past discrimination against the groups we have classified as suspect or ‘quasi-suspect.’”

Like Justice Alito, I am disappointed that the majority did not clearly rule that “transgender” is not a protected category for equal protection purposes. As WDI USA argued in its brief, using the ACLU’s own tortured definition of “transgender,” the U.S. Supreme Court “ought not want to be the Court that establishes such a classification for a group of people that, at least according to the ACLU, includes part-time cross-dressers.”

Dissenting, Justice Sotomayor said, “In addition to discriminating against transgender adolescents, who by definition ‘identify with’ an identity ‘inconsistent’ with their sex, that law conditions the availability of medications on a patient’s sex.” Somehow, Justice Sotomayor manages to know what “sex” means, but fails to see its relevance in the realm of medical treatment. It’s an assertion we might have expected from Justice Brown-Jackson, famously “not a biologist.” (Surprising no one, Brown-Jackson joins Sotomayor’s dissent, which the latter issued “in sadness.”)

How have the feminists who supported Tennessee in Skrmetti found themselves siding with the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, in opposition to three of the four female Justices?

It’s not because they are secret conspirators with the right. It is because sex—not self-declared “identity”—is the basis for all genuine feminist advocacy.

For lesbians and gay men to fight discrimination against their same-sex attraction, the law must recognize the material reality of sex. For women and girls to fight discrimination against their female sex, the law must recognize that female is a material fact, not a feeling.

Sex is real and immutable; it’s not complicated. It is a fact of human existence so fundamental that it even got Justice Samuel Alito to agree with radical feminists. If American progressives are serious about defeating Trump and the G.O.P., they should look across the Atlantic for a preview of how the battle between sex (reality) and “gender identity” (fantasy) must inevitably end.

Labour has started to come around; what next, U.S. Democrats?

To WSJ June 18, 2025, no response:

U.S. v. Skrmetti: A victory for feminists and reality

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided the matter of U.S. v. Skrmetti, and it confirmed what broad majorities of Americans have known all along: that sex is real, in the law and otherwise.

In this case, the state of Tennessee enacted a law that protects minors from harmful drugs such as puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones. It is well established that such drugs cause long-term harm such as sterility, disease, and the inability to develop sexual function as an adult.

And yet, a group of minors and their parents, represented by the ACLU (where I worked from 2012 to 2014), sued the state, demanding access to these harmful drugs. They argued that the Tennessee law violates their right to equal protection of the law under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

They won at the district court level, but lost when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit rightly ruled that the phrase “transgender people” is not a coherent category of people under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

In the coming days, progressive commentators will shake their heads and lament that this decision was made by the Court’s conservative majority. The political right is often credited with all opposition to so-called “gender identity” (or “trans”).

But this narrative simply isn’t true.

In the Skrmetti case, not only did left-leaning lesbians, gay men, feminists and Democrats rally outside the Supreme Court in support of the state of Tennessee, but the feminist group Women’s Declaration International USA filed a friend of the court brief, urging the Supreme Court to reach the result it issued today. (I represented WDI USA on the brief).

WDI USA’s brief argued that the word “transgender” is a linguistic sleight of hand that has no coherent meaning, is not an immutable trait, and does not describe a politically powerless group of people. It said that children have an international human right to grow into adulthood. It maintained that sex is grounded in material reality, whereas “gender” is grounded in regressive stereotypes. Further, it asked the Court to rule that the Tennessee law is not sex discrimination.

I am pleased to see that the Supreme Court agrees.

Chief Justice Roberts concluded the majority opinion by saying, “This case carries with it the weight of fierce scientific and policy debates about the safety, efficacy, and propriety of medical treatments in an evolving field. The voices in these debates raise sincere concerns; the implications for all are profound. The Equal Protection Clause does not resolve these disagreements.”

Justice Alito mostly agrees, but says that he is “uneasy” with the Court’s analysis as to whether the Tennessee law “discriminates against transgender people” and that he “would reject the plaintiffs’ argument for a different reason: because neither transgender status nor gender identity should be treated as a suspect or ‘quasi-suspect’ class.’”

He continued: “Transgender status is not ‘immutable,’ and as a result, persons can and do move into and out of the class. Members of the class differ widely among themselves, and it is often difficult for others to determine whether a person is a member of the class. And transgender individuals have not been subjected to a history of discrimination that is comparable to past discrimination against the groups we have classified as suspect or ‘quasi-suspect.’”

Like Justice Alito, I am disappointed that the majority did not clearly rule that “transgender” is not a protected category for equal protection purposes. As WDI USA argued in its brief, using the ACLU’s own tortured definition of “transgender,” “this Court ought not want to be the Court that establishes such a classification for a group of people that, at least according to the ACLU, includes part-time cross-dressers.”

Dissenting, Justice Sotomayor said, “In addition to discriminating against transgender adolescents, who by definition ‘identify with’ an identity ‘inconsistent’ with their sex, that law conditions the availability of medications on a patient’s sex.” Somehow, even Justice Sotomayor manages to know what “sex” means. And yet, she dissents “in sadness.”

Meanwhile, feminists on both sides of the Atlantic are celebrating. In April, grassroots group For Women Scotland secured a major victory when the U.K. Supreme Court made it clear that the words “sex,” “woman,” and “man” are defined biologically in that nation’s law.

Like their U.S. grassroots feminist counterparts, the founders of For Women Scotland are left-leaning liberals who found themselves politically homeless as the gender lobby marched through the parties and institutions of the left, steamrolling women’s sex-based rights along the way.

As a lifelong Democrat (except for a few years as a member of the Green party), I sympathize. Every day, I hear from rank-and-file Democrats and leftists who are angry at party leadership for throwing women and girls under the bus. They are also angry at the party for (as they see it) handing easy wins to President Trump and conservatives each time elected Democrats take the side of “gender identity” over sex.

How have the feminists who supported Tennessee in Skrmetti found themselves on the same side as the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court?

It’s not because they are secret conspirators with the right. It is because sex—not self-declared “identity”—is the grounds for all of their advocacy as civil rights classes.

For lesbians and gay men to fight discrimination against their same-sex attraction, the law must recognize the material reality of sex. For women and girls to fight discrimination against their female sex, the law must recognize that female is a material fact, not a feeling.

Sex is real and immutable; it’s not complicated. It is a fact of human existence so fundamental that it even got Justice Samuel Alito to agree with radical feminists. What will it take for the liberal justices and elected Democrats to come around?

To Boston Globe, and later to The Free Press, no response from either, April 2025:

Boston Marathon’s Policy on Sex and Gender Should Be Scrapped

A man will compete in the female category at next week’s Boston Marathon. According to the website hecheated.org, Riya Young Suising, born Robert Chien Hwa Young, has competed in the female category in races more than 330 times, including at least eight Boston Marathons, and placed on the podium for his age group more than 130 times. His presence in the female category in Boston this year will unfairly impact all female competitors, including former world record-holder, Paula Radcliffe.

Not only does Boston allow men into its female category, it also has a “non-binary” category, predictably dominated by men. The qualifying times for the “non-binary” category are the same as the women’s times, meaning men who claim to be “non-binary” can ‘earn’ a coveted Boston Qualifier despite running up to 30 minutes slower than men who don’t claim a special identity. So men get three categories for fair competition, while women get none. Young only secured a place by lying about his sex, as he failed to run the men’s qualifying time for his age group.

Far from being unique, Young is part of a trend, or rather a tidal wave, of men and boys (often called “transgender women and girls”) competing in women’s and girls’ sports.

An August 2024 report by Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, stated that as of last March, over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports to males.

The website shewon.org, dedicated to “archiving the achievements of female athletes displaced by males in women’s sporting events and other types of competitions expressly for women,” states that more than 1500 female athletes in more than 900 competitions have lost more than 2100 medals in 44 different sports to males.

A January 2025 poll conducted by the New York Times and Ipsos indicated that 79 percent of American voters, including 67 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Independents, don’t think men should be in women’s sports.

In February, President Trump signed Executive Order 14201, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” Since the EO, the U.S. Department of Education is pursuing at least six state-wide Title IX investigations in addition to dozens of investigations into individual universities and school districts.

Simply put: There are two immutable sexes, male and female. We play sports with bodies, not “identities.” A man can never be a woman, regardless of cross-sex hormones and surgeries, regardless of falsified documents. Everyone knows this.

How did we get here? Janice Raymond is a radical feminist lesbian and professor emerita of women’s studies and medical ethics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, having served on its faculty since 1978. In 1979 she published a groundbreaking book, The Transsexual Empire, in which she explained how allowing men to call themselves women harms women and girls as a sex class. In 1994, she published a reprint of the book, warning readers of the emergence of a new device: the word “transgender.” When she retired in 2002, the Boston Globe included her among several “marquee talents.”

Article 7 of the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights states that women have the right to participate in sports and physical education designated for women only: “To ensure fairness and safety for women and girls, the entry of boys and men who claim to have female ‘gender identities’ into teams, competitions, facilities, or changing rooms, inter alia, set aside for women and girls should be prohibited as a form of sex discrimination.”

If you agree that no man or boy should compete in women’s sports, please contact the individuals and groups below, all of whom are committed to protecting the sex-based rights of women and girls, including exclusion of men and boys from athletic competitions designated exclusively for female athletes.

Join us to save women’s sports!

Mara Yamauchi, Two-time Olympian and member, Advisory Group, Sex Matters

Elizabeth Chesak, Women’s Declaration International USA

Kara Dansky, Democratic Women’s Declaration

Martina Navratilova

Jenny Poyer Ackerman, Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender

Jennifer Sey, XX-XY Athletics

Kim Jones and Marshi Smith, Independent Council on Women’s Sports

Sharon Byrne, Women’s Liberation Front

Janice Raymond, Professor Emeria, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Riley Gaines, 12-time NCAA All-American swimmer

Selina Soule, women’s sports advocate

Linda Blade, International Consortium on Female Sport

Emily Kaht, Marathon runner

To The Free Press, July 2024, no response (later published in The Washington Examiner):

An Open Letter to Vice President Kamala Harris

Dear Madam Vice President,

I am writing to ask you to consider the leftist radical feminist critique of “gender identity” (or “trans”) as you continue on your likely path to securing the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention next month.

I am a lifelong Democrat. I registered as a Democrat in 1990 and the only time I have not been a Democrat was a brief period in the mid-2000s when I was a registered member of the Green Party; I re-registered as a Democrat in order to vote in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary election. I am also the president of the US chapter of Women’s Declaration International, which works to advance the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights throughout U.S. law, policy, and practice (my term as president expires at the end of this month). We are predominantly leftist radical feminists. We are a nonpartisan organization that is not aligned with any political party; in this piece, I am speaking solely in my personal capacity.

My life-long progressive credentials can not fairly be questioned. So it is from that standpoint I say with a not small dose of bitterness that the Democratic Party has completely abandoned women and girls. It has done so at the altar of the nebulous, sexist, regressive, authoritarian, homophobic concept of “gender identity.” I know that you know this; all the Democrats in positions of power know it. This is why I wrote the book The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls. A copy of that book is making its way to your office as I write. I hope you will find a minute or two of time to at least take a peek at it before the DNC.

You and I have met on three occasions: at an event sponsored by the Stanford University Black Students’ Association when you were the District Attorney of San Francisco and I was the executive director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center at Stanford Law School; in an elevator at an event about the plight of incarcerated women that was taking place at a journalism museum in Washington, D.C. when you were a senator from California; and at a fundraiser for your 2020 presidential campaign. All three encounters were very brief, and you would have no reason to remember meeting me at any of them.

I have followed your career over the years.

I was in the audience during the 2017 symposium “Women Unshackled: Policy Solutions to Address the Growth of Female Incarceration” when you were a U.S. senator. I remember listening to you speak movingly about the plight of incarcerated women. You talked about the Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act, which would mandate that female inmates receive free menstrual products, outlaw shackling and solitary confinement for pregnant women, and provide that the location of a mother’s children would factor into her placement in the federal prison system. After the event, you told reporters that many of these solutions were “pretty obvious.” You argued that “this is something that should not be thought of as even bipartisan—this should be a nonpartisan issue.” I agree with you completely. Neither should the dignity of women and girls or the material reality of sex be partisan issues.

I was also in the audience during the 2012 Women in the World conference at Lincoln Center in New York City, where you appeared on a panel with your sister, Maya. At the time, you were the Attorney General of California and Maya was the Vice President for Democracy, Rights and Justice at the Ford Foundation. I distinctly recall you and Maya discussing the importance of teenage girls having access to menstrual products in schools and juvenile detention facilities. For a moment, you appeared to be uncomfortable discussing the topic, but then you settled in and said something along the lines of, “Oh, it’s okay, we’re all women here, right?” Indeed.

I know you know that women are exclusively female and that there are no male women. I especially appreciated your questioning of then Judge Kavanaugh during his 2018 confirmation hearing, emphasizing the differences between male and female bodies when it comes to laws that regulate the provision of healthcare.

I worked with Maya during Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run. I was part of a team, led by Maya, to help Clinton craft her positions and policies on criminal justice topics. Maya and I met once in person at Clinton’s Brooklyn, New York campaign headquarters and corresponded frequently by email and phone. In May 2019, I wrote her an email message, laying out the entire Democratic progressive case against enshrining “gender identity” in the law including, especially, the argument that including “trans” along with the sexual orientations “lesbian, gay, and bisexual,” is homophobic and regressive. I explained that “gender identity” erases women and girls. I sent her a written version of testimony that lesbian radical feminist Democrat Julia Beck had read to the House Judiciary Committee the previous month, explaining the threats that “gender identity” poses to the human rights of women and girls. I asked her to share the contents of my message with you. She did not respond. When I learned that she had joined the board of directors of the Arcus Foundation (one of the largest funders of “trans” and “queer” causes) in 2017, I understood why.

Democrats like me have been trying to explain all of this to Democratic Party leadership for years. Every day, I hear from rank-and-file Democrats (and, importantly, former Democrats) about how disgusted they are with the Party’s complete abandonment of women and girls (including lesbians) as a sex class at the altar of “trans.” We have been begging you to change course. We have been ignored.

A tiny handful of Democrats have broken ranks with Party dogma and voted to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls (and to protect children from harmful hormones and surgeries that block puberty and cause long-term problems including loss of bone density, loss of sexual and reproductive function, and premature death). I wrote about them in my book, The Reckoning, in a chapter called “The Democrat Defectors.” I commended them. I celebrated when Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) voted against the judicial nomination of Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn to a seat on the District Court for the Southern District of New York. Judge Netburn had authorized the placement of a male prisoner who had been convicted of multiple counts of rape and child sexual abuse in a women’s prison. But there are too few of these Democrats.

In late 2019, as the 2020 presidential election was heating up, comedian Bill Maher did a segment called “Nowhere Else to Go.” In it, he mocked all the Democratic presidential candidates, including you, admonishing them to “stop being weird.” He called you the “Rosa Parks of pronouns” because you had announced your “preferred pronouns” during a town hall earlier that year. He mocked Elizabeth Warren for supporting the use of taxpayer dollars to fund “sex changes” for “transgender prisoners.” He also made fun of candidate Julian Castro’s support for abortion rights for “transgender women.” Maher criticized this, saying, “They can’t get pregnant! They don’t have a uterus (unless they’re in prison and Elizabeth Warren buys them one)!”

The Democratic presidential ticket prevailed in 2020 for two reasons, in my view: (1) a clear majority of Americans wanted Donald Trump to go; and (2) many Americans foresaw the overturning of Roe v. Wade and wanted Democrats in place at the highest levels to protect abortion rights (which I firmly support). I’m not at all sure the same will be true this time. I cannot tell you the number of people who have told me that they plan to vote for Donald Trump this year because of this issue. Trump made it that much harder for you by saying clearly during the RNC in Milwaukee earlier this month that he’s committed to getting men out of women’s sports—a position that is popular with the vast majority of American voters. The Democratic Party, yourself included, handed him that talking point.

It’s not too late. You can still do the right thing. You can stand up at the DNC and say that a woman is an adult human female and a lesbian is a female homosexual. You can say that sex is real and sometimes matters. You can say right out loud that sex is immutable and no man is ever a woman—even if he claims to be one, even if he adopts the traditional stereotypes of femininity, and even if he has his penis surgically removed. You can apologize to American women for that utterly embarrassing letter you sent to Dylan Mulvaney (on White House stationery, no less) celebrating his supposed “365 days of girlhood.”

You profess to care about American women and girls; it’s time to walk the talk. Many of us will be watching and hoping you do the right thing.

LTE to Washington Post Sept. 3, 2025, no response:

To the Editor:

Regarding “TV writer Graham Linehan’s arrest over transgender posts sparks free speech outcry in the UK,” thanks to The Washington Post for reporting on this important story. It’s not just sparking free speech outcry in the UK; the outcry is happening in the US too.

Unlike the UK, the US has a First Amendment, and Americans are unlikely to be arrested for our X posts that stand up for women and girls as a sex class, at least not while on US soil. But that does not mean we aren’t vulnerable.

I am a lifelong Democrat and a feminist. I understand that women and girls exist as a sex class. I use my time and energy to make sure that our rights as women and girls (female human beings) are protected. That means excluding men (“transgender women”) from women’s sports and spaces. I will not apologize for this.

I am the former president of the group Women’s Declaration International USA, which works to advance the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights throughout US law, policy, and practice. I have also published two books on the topic of protecting women and girls as a sex class. I publish a newsletter on Substack called The TERF Report. I also launched the Democratic Women’s Declaration the day after the 2024 US presidential election.

This issue is not going to go away, and elected Democrats need to address it head-on.

I have been invited to speak at the Battle of Ideas in London in October. This is an annual conference that addresses a variety of topics, and welcomes all viewpoints. It’s a free speech zone. I’m scheduled to land at Heathrow on the morning of October 10. Will the Met Police arrest me too? I look forward to finding out.

In solidarity with Graham,

Kara Dansky

To The Washington Post, January 2025, no response (eventually published in spiked):

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/05/whats-at-stake-in-the-trans-us-supreme-court-case/

To the NYT, January 3, 2025, no response:

To the editor: Mr. Carville is both misguided and short-sighted

On January 2, the Times published an essay by Democratic strategist James Carville titled, “I was Wrong About the 2024 Election. Here’s Why.” His conclusion? “It was, it is, and it will always be the economy, stupid.”

Carville is right that the economy played a role in persuading a majority of the electorate to cast votes for Trump. But what Carville and the vast majority of other prominent Democrats steadfastly refuse to acknowledge is that countless rank-and-file Democrats have had it with the party’s full-throated embrace of “gender identity” or “trans.”

I am a leftist radical feminist. I hear from rank-and-file Democrats every day who tell me that they voted for Donald Trump and/or that they have left the party completely over this issue. And we know from a post-election survey by Blueprint that concerns over “trans” were more important than concerns over the economy.

In 2023, I published a book called The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls, warning the Democrats that this was coming. I published an open letter to VP Harris in August, asking her to say at the 2024 DNC that a woman is an adult human female. Nothing is going to change until the Democrats get the memo: Voters, including many rank-and-file Democrats, have had it with the sexist, homophobic, reality-denying, authoritarian “trans” movement.

To the NYT Dec. 5, 2025:

To the editor:

Thanks for Ross Douthat’s December 4 opinion piece and interview with Chase Strangio from the ACLU, “The Shifting Politics of Transgender Rights.”

It’s very interesting to learn that Strangio is now interested in discussion and compromise. For over a decade, Strangio has been insisting that “trans women are women and trans men are men,” without showing even a hint of willingness to engage in either discussion or compromise. About one book critical of the transgender movement (Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage) Strangio tweeted “stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”

What has changed since that tweet?

The ACLU represents a male athlete in the matter of Little v. Hecox, a case before the Supreme Court. It is scheduled for oral arguments on January 13, and expected to be decided next summer. Hecox is a male athlete (a “trans woman”) who challenged Idaho’s 2020 law protecting female-only sports in educational institutions in the state. After five long years of litigation, the ACLU has attempted to withdraw the original 2020 complaint and asked the Supreme Court to dismiss the entire matter.

Could it be that Strangio is now open to discussion and compromise because Strangio knows that the ACLU stands little chance of prevailing before the Supreme Court?

It’s clear from the interview that Strangio knows that the general public is no longer going along with the lie that a person’s sex can be changed. I have been fighting for the sex-based rights of women and girls for more than ten years. I would be happy to talk at any time.

To The Atlantic March 29, 2024, no response:

Subject line: Pitch: A Riposte to Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender?

Dear Ms. Kim, et al.,

As a radical feminist, lifelong Democrat, and the author of the 2023 book, The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls, I am one of the women often called a TERF: “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” as Katha Pollitt explained in her recent review for The Atlantic of Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? I think your audience would be interested in my response to Butler’s claims that those who oppose “gender identity” are embracing “fascism.”

Pollitt asks whether “in 10 or 20 years, the present moment might seem like a parenthesis in the long history of an overwhelmingly sexually dimorphic species.” I predict that it will.

For all Butler’s insistence that feminist objections to gender constitute a “phantasm,” the material reality of sex is and will remain salient in the lives and politics of human beings—especially women and girls, whether they consider themselves feminists or not.

But Democratic Party leadership must not be allowed to slink away quietly from the harms it has imposed on American women and girls in the name of “gender identity.”

I wrote The Reckoning because too many women have been raped in prison. Too many women have lost out on opportunities, competitions, and medals in sports. Too many children have been harmed medically and psychologically. The Democratic Party must be held accountable—not allowed to simultaneously impose the tenets of the new gender religion and also conceal them from the American electorate, with whom they are deeply unpopular.

A Washington Post article from yesterday suggests I am right to be concerned. It appears that the Biden Administration is trying to memory-hole its support for laws and policies that harm women and children by, in this instance, tabling its proposal to redefine sex to include “gender identity” under Title IX until after the November elections.

Women, including lesbians and black women, make up the most crucial segment of the Democratic Party base. As voters, they are in a bind: the Democratic Party is the only major party to embrace women’s critically-important reproductive autonomy rights. Yet to vote for Democrats is to endorse their platform that being a woman is not a material reality, but instead a subjective idea, informed by stereotypes, that anyone of either sex can claim.

How long can party leaders expect women to give up their own safety, privacy, and dignity—and that of their daughters—in the service of the unfalsifiable, pseudo-spiritual, even (thank you, Judith Butler) “phantasmatic” concept of “gender identity?”

Women all over the world are rejecting their left-of-center parties for refusing to represent their interests and for sacrificing women and children at the altar of “gender identity.” If the Democrats in power don’t change course, American Democratic women will, and should, vote accordingly.

If you would like to discuss the possibility of publishing a longer form of this analysis, please feel free to reach out.

To the Spectator, Jan. 26, 2024, no response

Dear Mr. Moore,

On January 24, New York NBC News affiliate Channel 4 published this headline: “Man posing as transgender woman raped female prisoner at Rikers, lawsuit says.”

To feminists who have for years raised the alarm about male prisoners in women’s facilities, the allegations echo a 2017 U.K. case, in which Karen White (born Stephen Wood), sexually assaulted two women at HMP New Hall.

Describing White, Prosecutor Christopher Dunn told the court, “She is allegedly a transgender female…The prosecution suggest the reason for the lack of commitment towards transitioning is so the defendant can use a transgender persona to put herself in contact with vulnerable persons she can then abuse.”

Former First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon did essentially the same thing when she said that convicted rapist Adam Graham (Isla Bryson if you believe the pretense) was “almost certainly faking” it when he “claimed” to “be transgender.”

“Posing.” “Use a transgender persona.” “Faking ‘being trans.’” In other words, the problem with the policies that incarcerated White, Graham, and the alleged Rikers rapist in women’s facilities wasn’t that these prisoners were male but that they weren’t sincere enough in their claims to be women.

Would their female victims have been less harmed if the perpetrators could be proven truly to believe that lady souls animate their bepenised bodies?

Rather than aiming to read the minds of convicted criminals—famed, as a class, for their honesty and integrity—-might it not be more effective for prison officials to assess inmate placement on the basis that in the United States, 93-97% of sexual offenders are male?

The “gender identity” faith insists that once a man utters the shibboleth, “I am a woman,” his sex ceases to matter under any circumstance.

Therefore any man who reminds the public of certain stark differences between the sexes must be disavowed. “Transwomen are women,” incant believers. Women as a class do not rape. Therefore no rapist is a true “transwoman.”

It’s a convenient sleight of hand, but a pitiful excuse for logic. Perhaps that’s because the real logic behind the pretense that some men claiming to be women are not really women and some men claiming to be women really are women is this: Men and boys are entitled to what they want, no matter the cost to women and girls.

Men pretending to be women are men. “Trans” is all a pretense. Can we all please just stop pretending?

The U.S. chapter of global feminist organization Women’s Declaration International is grateful to the Spectator for being one of the few publications in the anglosphere to publish feminist and other critiques of “gender identity” and its associated policies.

We hope that an opinion piece of 800-1,000 words by our president, Kara Dansky, will be a good fit for the Spectator’s audience both in the U.K. (a.k.a. “TERF Island”) and abroad.

Kara Dansky is a radical feminist and an attorney with an extensive background in criminal justice law and policy. She is the author of two books: The Abolition of Sex: How the “Transgender” Agenda Harms Women and Girls and The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls. She serves as president of the U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International.

Thank you for your consideration. We look forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes,

Megan Rose

Vice President, Women’s Declaration International USA

To the NYT Nov. 13, 2024, no response:

Will the Democrats finally start listening to the TERFs?

I’m glad to see some Democrats starting to pay attention to the fact that sex is real and that it matters.

On November 7, Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) said, “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” Moulton is not backing down. On November 12, he told the Boston Herald, “I’m not going to refuse to have this debate, and I’m not going to apologize for bringing up the issue. This is the problem with Democrats: We’re more concerned about offending people than actually talking about issues, and that’s why a majority of Americans just think we’re out of touch.”

I’m glad to hear Democrats expressing these sentiments in support of female-only sports.

As we all know, the Democrats got trounced in this election cycle. And we know for a fact that this issue played a role in the 2024 presidential election. According to polling, “The results paint a clear picture: Democrats were punished for inflation, misalignment on immigration and cultural issues, and Biden.” The top two reasons not to vote for Harris were inflation and immigration. But the top third reason was “’Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class’ (+17).” The third was “the most frequent criticism among swing voters who broke for Trump (+28).”

The thing is, the Democrats were warned that this would happen. Specifically, they were warned by the TERFs–the leftist radical feminists who know what a woman is and aren’t afraid to say it. I’m a lifelong Democrat, staunch leftist, and radical feminist. I also know what a woman is, and that sex is real and that it matters. That makes me what is sometimes called a “TERF.” Gender identity activists coined the term as a slur for any “trans exclusionary radical feminist” who opposed their demands, but many women have reclaimed it in recent years. Some of us say it stands for “tired of explaining real facts” or “tired of explaining reality to fools.” All it really means is that we’re women of the left, feminists, who understand that sex is real and that it matters.

Two books served as warnings to the Democrats of what was in store for 2024: 2021’s The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls, and 2023’s The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls.

I wrote both books; I did my best to warn the Democrats. They didn’t listen.

The problem arose when the Democrats in power and the establishment left (by which I include traditionally progressive organizations like the ACLU, where I once worked) started telling everyone that some men are women if they say they “are transgender” or if they claim to have a “female gender identity.”

President Biden has been saying that “transgender discrimination” is the “civil rights issue of our time” since 2012. In 2015, Congressional Democrats introduced the so-called Equality Act, which would redefine the word sex to include the nebulous, sexist, homophobic concept of “gender identity” for all purposes under U.S. civil rights law, in both chambers of Congress. In 2016, President Obama issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to U.S. schools, instructing them to interpret the word sex to include “gender identity” for all Title IX purposes. At that time, few Americans had any idea what was going on, because no one with any real power was telling them.

Things have continued largely unabated on the political left ever since.

Groups like the ACLU continue to insist that some men are women, that they deserve to be housed in women’s prisons if they claim to be women, and that it’s perfectly fine to give children puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormones, and sometimes surgeries (all collectively and euphemistically referred to as “gender affirming care”) if the children think they are “born in the wrong body” (i.e., they “are transgender”).

I can already hear the objections: “Men aren’t being housed in women’s prisons!” “There are hardly any biological boys playing in girls’ sports!” “Kids are not getting gender surgeries!”

To these objections, I say: Men are being housed in women’s prisons, but most media outlets won’t tell you that (only relatively obscure feminist publications such as Reduxx will). There are hundreds of men and boys playing in sports intended for women and girls and even if there weren’t, how many is too many? And yes, thousands of children received “gender affirming care” in the form of either hormones or surgeries or both between 2019 and 2023 in the United States.

TERFs have known all of this for a long time. We’ve been sounding the alarm; no one listened. I hear from rank and file Democrats every day who tell me they have tried to explain the problem to their Democratic lawmakers, who ignored them.

So I published The Reckoning in November 2023 to tell the Democrats to knock it off, already. I told them that if they didn’t change course, they would bleed female voters. I warned them of what was coming. In August 2024, I published an open letter to Vice President Harris, practically begging her to say out loud at the Democratic National Convention that a woman is an adult human female. I didn’t expect her to, and she didn’t.

President Bill Clinton knew this was going to be a problem and warned the Democrats to knock it off. President Clinton, you were the first presidential candidate I voted for. If you would like to have a word with an OG TERF, let me know.

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Last week, WNYC—America’s most listened-to public radio station—spoke with lefty journalist Amy Goodman, the subject of the new documentary, “Steal This Story, Please!” I haven’t seen the movie, but I did listen to Goodman discuss her career, her show Democracy Now! (which airs on some NPR stations, among other outlets), and the state of journalism on the midday show All of It.

Many of the sentiments she espoused, I agreed with. “I personally think you’re waving the American flag when you express dissent,” she said. “I think dissent is what will save us.”

She used that language several more times.

I am an advocate for independent media. It is absolutely critical to be a sanctuary for dissent. I think dissent will save us. Independent media is the oxygen of a Democratic society. As we see these corporate newsrooms being devastated, the legacy media being sliced and diced, Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, cutting a third of the newsroom, we have to support independent media brought to us by the listeners, the viewers, the readers who are really citizens, citizens of the world craving authentic voices. This is the kind of media that will save us.

Oddly, she doesn’t mention publications like this one, BROADview, which lives on the premier independent platform (and charges writers plenty for it), Substack. Or that many of us who made our living writing for the media retreated here because not only legacy media but the supposedly independent outlets, like Democracy Now!, wouldn’t allow dissent on the gender issue.

Here’s a sampling of Democracy Now! stories:

Each of these stories is carefully crafted to go deeper than traditional media, to push beyond the left/right framing and consult dissenting liberals to show us that, for instance, “banning trans women” actually means allowing men who identify as women to compete—as long as they do so in their sex, not their identity, category. No one is banned!

Oh wait, sorry, no, that’s what you get on Substack, not mainstream, liberal, or left media.

It pains me that many old school lefties are still unaware that they’re framing injustices against men as what could (and dare I say should) be framed as injustices against women; they do not realize that the sly switch from sex to gender identity upends many of their long-held cherished causes and beliefs.

What I have wanted in the five-plus years since I’ve been fully public with what I’ve learned—in the hopes that others would learn it, too—is to be allowed to dissent. I want those who see the issue differently to be considered, and not just labeled bigot or transphobe. It turned out that we in the dissenting camp also had science on our side, which should have shifted the entire framing of the conversation.

It didn’t.

After WNYC star journalist Brian Lehrer’s recent disastrous conversation with Michael Shermer, he pivoted slightly to acknowledge some dissent and concerns about the science of gender-affirming care. Or rather, he brought on someone to explain why we shouldn’t listen to the dissent or be concerned. Who? Mr. Jack Turban, the doctor whose own studies were deemed so low-quality that they couldn’t determine whether gender medical interventions will hurt or help young people.

Turban said on the program that “there are over 20 studies in this area. They all have different strengths and weaknesses, but they all point in the same direction that these kids are getting better with treatment.”

They don’t, though. That’s what it means to have weak evidence. They point in no direction. Lehrer failed to point out that it was Turban’s own incredibly weak evidence, based on anonymous surveys, that was rated weak.

Yesterday, Lehrer spoke with Frederick S. Barrett, director of the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, about psychedelics, after Trump released an Executive Order to speed up research on them. (I will give Trump credit where it’s due: this seems like a good thing.) They talked about the effectiveness of the psychedelic ibogaine, which some people claim can be a silver bullet of sorts.

“Is that real science or is that podcaster chatter?” Lehrer asked.

Barrett admitted that the research is based on low-quality surveys and reviews, and that “none of this to date has been done within a controlled experimental context.” Why? It’s too risky. It has a known cardiotoxicity that can kill people.

I couldn’t help but think of the stories I’ve heard of young people committing suicide after transition—including the two in the rare long-term research we have in this country, who were simply excised from the data. We need to follow up with all medically transitioned young people because we may discover that they have the same high rate of suicidality and completed suicide as the adults did. It was the ineffectiveness of transition in adults that inspired the Dutch to intervene earlier. No one is finding out if it worked.

If dissent is what will save us, these media outlets need to allow dissident voices to raise these important points. Democracy, not hypocrisy, now.

My happiest two weeks in college occurred when my dog Taj came to live with me in my “mod”—the name for the group houses most students lived in at Hampshire College, after our first year in the dorms.1

With apologies to those who mistakenly believe their dogs were the best, it was Taj who was actually the greatest to ever walk the face of the earth. The perfect sized mutt at 40 pounds, with long russet hair, floppy ears, and a fluffy tail, Taj was both fiercely loyal and fiercely independent. Thus, he entertained himself while I was in my various classes during my second year, in 1990, and met me at the door of each building when I was done. When my dad and stepmom returned from vacation, they picked him up. It wasn’t long after that history’s greatest dog left us for good.

That my most contented moments relied on canine companionship illustrates just how lonely and lost I was at Hampshire, but also how great their pets-on-campus policy was—at least for those of us who didn’t abuse and/or abandon our pets, which ended up happening with such increasing frequency that the pets policy was abolished a year or so later. Some of Hampshire’s more revolutionary policies left us for good, too, as the revolution couldn’t quite be sustained.

The idea for Hampshire College came from the presidents of its neighboring schools: Amherst, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. They wanted “to reexamine the assumptions and practices of liberal arts education.” Founded in 1965, the first class arrived in 1970.

Since then, Hampshire helped launch a lot of brilliant people who thrived in its alternative environment, from Ken Burns to John Krakauer, Lupita Nyong’O to Liev Schreiber. Forging partnerships between once-siloed disciplines; allowing students to design their own majors; narrative evaluations instead of grades; making us write papers or craft projects over and over until they were good, rather than just accepting a middling grade—those were all great things, and very unusual at the time.

But I’d gone there not because I was desperate for that alternative education—my public high school, three miles north, had allowed me to concentrate mostly on ceramics and pot-smoking for three-and-a-half years, after which I arranged to graduate, mid-senior year. Alternative was mainstream to me. I went to Hampshire because my mother worked there. It was free. She had become a college librarian so that her kids would someday be able to go to college without having to secure a full-ride merit scholarship, as she did (and which I couldn’t). I’ve been called a nepo baby because of that free tuition, but for most of my life, I had a single mom with a low-paying job, whose folk musician ex often failed to pay child support. She might not have chosen wisely in marriage, but the job was a shrewd move.

My discontent at Hampshire didn’t stem from a lack of cool people around me. In fact, maybe I was too surrounded by cool people—or just so many who were their high school’s most eccentric pupils that it rendered me, by comparison, awkwardly normal. Or maybe it was just that I was encased in constant shame about my body, as many young women are. I would have been unhappy anywhere.

So it was something of a relief when, whatever class I signed up for—The Psychology of Oppression, The Frankfurt School, the History of Sensationalism—it manifested into some version of Images of Women in the Media. Much of the curricular content served to explain my misery: magazines made me feel bad.

We were critiquing institutions and ideologies that themselves had sprouted from critiques of institutions and ideologies. The world was faulty and revolutions had failed and that’s why I felt so bad about my thighs and so few people wanted to date me. (It couldn’t be that I had an undiagnosed personality disorder, extremely low self-esteem, and a lot of unpressed childhood crap—if that’s not the making of a winning personals ad, I don’t know what is.)

Of course, I wasn’t aware that I was partaking of an ideology at an institution myself. We weren’t studying what our professors’ critiques were critiquing, the traditions against which they rebelled. We were studying their rebellions. I ended up getting a degree in, essentially, experimental feminist video and neo-Marxist theory, but I didn’t study the filmmaking behind Citizen Kane or take economics, as my professors had. The opening of Overton window was clear—and narrow.

Still, I had no reason to object or ask for other viewpoints. I liked a lot of my classes, and the worldview being constructed around me felt safe and familiar. The first week of school, a professor regaled us with the thrilling and horrifying tale of her back alley abortion, and I signed up for every pro-choice march I could. That week, too, a bunch of us took the free public bus over to UMass for a “Take Back the Night” rally. We planted ourselves in front of frats screaming: “We know who you are! We know what you’re doing to women!” I did not know who they were or exactly what they were doing to women, but I had been to a frat party at UMass in high school (which was a mile away) and the smell of 1990s’ UMass boy cologne will forever repel me. I accepted the message: all frats and all frat boys were bad.

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Atonement is a big theme—both in my life and in my upcoming book about the youth gender culture war—so I was very interested to listen to a podcast about conversion therapy with this title. I’m going to publish a piece about the podcast, and that theme, soon, but in the meantime I wanted to schedule next month’s paid subscriber hang. I hope that others will listen and we can talk about it—as we did with the movie club recently (which was so great). In the wake of the recent SCOTUS decision on conversion therapy, the story of John Paulk is especially important, which is why it’s worth taking the time to help people understand what this podcast got right and what it’s going to have to end up atoning for later.

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In honor of a BROADview supporter’s visit to NYC, I’ll be hosting a meetup for paid subscribers on 5/4 at 6PM near downtown Brooklyn. Register here (this is a Zoo…

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To whom it may concern:

The story, “Texas Supreme Court upholds state ban on gender affirming care for transgender minors” posted on the PBS Newshour website on Friday, June 28th, was not an accurate reflection of the current state of healthcare for gender dysphoric and gender non-conforming children and youth. The story quoted Dr Jack Drescher who does not practice child and adolescent psychiatry; he is a spokesperson for a political movement, not an expert in this area of care. The story could have sought commentary from Dr Erica Anderson who is an expert in this area of care and readers would have gotten more realistic and balanced information.

On June 9th, John Yang conducted an interview with Dr Jack Turban about his book, “Free to Be.” Yang asked Turban about the Cass Review and did not challenge Turban’s spin on the review. Turban obfuscated on the question of evidence for the gender affirmative model of care. Did it occur to Yang to ask Turban about the whistleblowers at gender clinics and hospitals around the country who counter what Turban claims to be the standard of care? Or to ask about de-transitioners who are speaking out and bringing lawsuits against the clinicians who treated them?

Has anyone at the Newshour listened to the interview of Dr Cass by your colleague at Boston Public Radio, Meghna Chakhrabarti in May? Did you read David Brooks’s NYT op-ed about the Cass Review?

The one thing Turban and Drescher have in common is that they are deeply invested in the politics of “gender affirmative care” and in their reputations, but not invested in following the evidence for medical science. Is the Newshour going to collude in this behavior or will you report on this area of medicine and politics more fully and accurately?

I am a lifelong liberal and Democrat. I am also a psychologist and a member of Therapy First, an association of mental health professionals who support and promote psychotherapy as first-line treatment and care for gender-distressed and gender non-conforming youth and their families. I used to believe a person could be born in the wrong body; I trusted my teachers and other authorities in my field. And I have long trusted the PBS Newshour.

This question of trust is central to a functioning democracy -- and not just in this area of medical care and science. (Alice Dreger made a forceful argument in her book, Galileo’s Middle Finger, that being able to trust our institutions is what is at stake. She also “knows a few things” about sex, gender and medicine. Maybe the Newshour will interview her?) If we can’t trust the Newshour to report honestly in this area of concern, how can we trust the Newshour’s coverage about anything? Please, cover this issue more fully and deeply with the care and nuance it deserves. Parent’s are being misled and children and youth are being harmed. And, our very democracy is at stake.

Thank you for reading my message.

best,

[name and credentials]

Dear Ms Sy and Newshour producers:

I listened to your August 31, 2022 story, “Children’s hospitals become targets of anti-transgender attacks and harassment” about Boston Children’s Hospital and a recent bomb threat. Political violence and threats of political violence are abhorrent and should be called out, resisted and legally prosecuted.

In the online intro to the transcript of your piece you say, “[a]nti-transgender activists have been using social media to spread disinformation about gender-affirming medical care.” Your story about Boston Children’s was narrowly about gender politics not the care of children. It highlighted only terrorists (Proud Boys) on the “one side” and interviewed the leader of a political action group, the Human Rights Campaign, on the other. Your reporting repeated the unexamined cultural assumptions that “trans kids need gender affirming medical care” and that only hateful—even violent--people would question this idea.

The story did not explain gender affirming medical care – treatment that Boston Children’s does provide – or provide any reasons for why many professional and lay people raise concerns about what is known as the “gender affirmation model” of care—puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery—for gender questioning youth. These medical interventions for young people are not, as is often parroted, a well-researched, long, well-established and agreed upon protocol of care for children, adolescents and young adults who struggle with questions about gender identity or dysphoria.

I am very concerned that this story and others like it that narrowly focus on political and cultural controversies are neglecting important medical and psychological questions and increasing risk of harm to the very people we want to nurture and protect.

Gender dysphoria and identity are complex medical and psychological questions not political issues. When PBS or any news organization broadcasts a story like this about gender politics they play right into the hands of conservative ideologue politicians seeking political power. As a liberal-progressive, a feminist, a parent and a practicing psychologist, I am deeply troubled by this.

I urge you and your staff to do more critical research about these questions, and consult professionals, parent groups, trans people, detransitioners, and others who seek high-quality care for gender distressed young people.

Thank you for your work--I am a longtime member of PBS and Newshour viewer--and for reading and considering my letter.

Sincerely,

[name and credentials]

“I sent the following to Eric Weiffering, who is I think the editor-in-chief of the Minnesota Star Tribune. He responded positively saying “this could be a story” in about 2 minutes (thus confirming the 100% success rate of my patented email subject line, see below) and I subsequently sent him all kinds of background info and contacts for women in Shakopee, prison officials, orgs that work with female inmates, the whole package. Two months later, the Star Tribune ran a front page story about the improvements the state had made to the men’s prison in Stillwater—barber shop, tattoo parlor, book group. Male inmates were sure living their best life. (Choir, book group, art classes in the women’s prison had shut down because the volunteers who ran them felt unsafe when the state put five violent men in Shakopee). So that’s the postscript to this pitch.”

This Septic Tank Isn’t Going To Drain Itself

Hi Eric—

Fellow journalist here. Though in scale, my experience is nowhere near yours, I did go to j-school, actually went to class, absorbed the basics of the business, and have been putting those lessons into practice every day for creaking decades. I fancy myself pretty good at identifying a story, but have been utterly defeated on this one—batting .nada—to the point that I’m taking it personally. Wonder if you can help me out.

Men in Shakopee women’s prison. Specifically, these guys:

Mother of god, I could have had the good taste to provide a trigger warning, right? But that’s my point. I think I know a story when I see it, and this is a story. As you can see, these men are not women. They’re predatory, manipulative men, convicted of murder, rape, sexual assault of a minor, sexual assault of his own 6-year-old niece. These dudes were moved from a male prison to Shakopee because they experienced Prison Onset Gender Dysphoria. They said the magic words—I identify as a woman—and instantly were given power they could never have dreamed of—over prison administrators, guards, and importantly, the 500 women housed at Shakopee who they are terrorizing every minute of every day. This is state-sanctioned torture of women, a ninth-circle-of-hell violation of women’s rights, and obvious breach of the Geneva Convention that the good people of Minnesota would be horrified by, if they knew about it.

Women who’ve lived through this nightmare have written to the Star Tribune. Women who quit their teaching jobs at Shakopee because they had been threatened by the depraved men there wrote to the Star Tribune. Women still inside, sharing showers with men who openly talk about what they’re going to do to these women, wrote to the Star Tribune. The Star Tribune received press releases about protests that happened in late October and yesterday, Nov 16, at Shakopee. Yet, the Star Tribune has not seen this as worthy of even the most minimal coverage. Am I just dead wrong? Are my journalistic instincts way off? If so, please explain why this is not a story. Otherwise, help me understand how I can frame this story in a way that the Star Tribune will find newsworthy. What’s missing? Appreciate your help.

If you have receipts of your attempts to get liberal and mainstream media to cover this story, and you’d like me to share them, drop me a line.

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Friends, frenemies, haters, agnostics, fans, detractors:

I am racing to the draft finish line, and after that I am going to be physically and emotionally present with my family for a full ten days! What the heck is that gonna be like?!

While I’m away, please use this as an open thread to talk about…anything! Subscriber hang coming in late April, but you might not hear from me much before the 13th, even though there is so much to discuss.

Speaking of…in light of the SCOTUS conversion therapy decision, here’s a primer from a while back on how gender identity got looped in with, you know, electroshocking gay people—which may help some people understand the decision better. It’s not as bad as it sounds! Stop the panic!

I loved the group chat about the trans kid documentaries of what seems like ages ago, Growing Up Trans from 2015 and Gender Revolution from 2017. They were well worth re-watching. If there are other shows or films—fiction or non—you want to suggest for BROADview Movie Club, please put them in the comments.

Guess what? My book is starting to really seem like a book! I have some questions to pose to my still-liberal, still-love-nuance readers when I’m back, related to this project. Speaking of still-liberal…The Liberal Patriot is dead, long live The Liberal Patriot! Or not. I guess Dems won’t moderate. Read these words from Ruy Teixeira and weep.

Or, if you don’t want to cry, do what I’m doing: accept that we’re not going to see daylight about this issue for sometime, keep your head down, do good work, get thee to some nature, forgive people, snuggle animals, do something in person with other humans, sing songs, make good food, summon some gratitude, watch tear-inducing auditions for talent shows on YouTube.

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Tue, Jan 25, 2022, 9:03 AM

Hi, XXXX and XXXX. I’m writing—in confidence—in response to this article, which makes claims about the efficacy (though not the safety) of gender-affirming care. I have been writing about gender for the last five years, mostly about gender nonconformity, and as it happens I too have spent the last few weeks sifting through many of these studies to try to access what they actually say for an article which will appear next month in a science publication. In the meantime, I attach a piece that’s going up on my Substack later this week—I will amend it to include and correct some of what you’ve published.

This piece says Abigail reviewed it, but I wanted to make sure you looked at what the studies actually assert. Most are a real mixed bag, and show both positive and negative outcomes. In addition, especially in studies of Dutch participants, those with other mental health problems would have been turned away—this is key to the Dutch protocol—and only people with higher-functioning mental health would have been gone through with medical interventions in the first place, so those who didn’t get gender-affirming medical interventions already had worse mental health.

The Dutch protocol is based on kids with lifelong gender dysphoria, who were not socially transitioned (because this practice tends to increase dysphoria at puberty). It has no bearing on the kids that make up the bulk of gender clinic practices today, whose dysphoria appears at puberty and who tend to have many co-occurring mental health problems. In addition, most of those kids with childhood GD grew out of it and the majority were same sex attracted. It is vital that we look at ALL the research, not just that which helps our own arguments or our own careers.

As for what’s actually written here, it obscures the complexity of the research. For instance, the very first entry in this article:

“Study 1: De Vries, A. L., Steensma, T. D., Doreleijers, T. A., & Cohen‐Kettenis, P. T. (2011). Puberty suppression in adolescents with gender identity disorder: A prospective follow‐up study. The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 8(8), 2276-2283.

This study from the Netherlands followed 70 transgender adolescents and measured their mental health before and after pubertal suppression. Study participants had improvements in depression and global functioning following treatment.”

Here’s what it actually says: “Feelings of anxiety and anger did not change between T0 and T1. While changes over time were equal for both sexes, compared with natal males, natal females were older when they started puberty suppression and showed more problem behavior at both T0 and T1. Gender dysphoria and body satisfaction did not change between T0 and T1. No adolescent withdrew from puberty suppression, and all started cross-sex hormone treatment, the first step of actual gender reassignment.”

Clearly, there were some improvements, some things got worse, some things got better. Notably, gender dysphoria—the very reason for the treatment—did not improve.

I would also ask that you correct Turban’s assertion that those trying to correct the record on gender-affirming care research are bots. I see you have no link or citation for that. People objecting to this narrative are neither right-wing nor bigots nor bots. They are mostly against bans and feel that speaking out about the medical abuses—and there are many, which I am happy to share with you, as I’ve been cataloging them for months—are the only way to continue the medical interventions that they have seen work, after careful evaluation. They include many adult trans people, and some of the most experienced clinicians in the country, far more experienced than your writer. I am happy to put you in touch with many of these people, whom I’m sure would like to rebut this article or write other things for you.

I’d also be willing to write for you about the many trans adults who are happily transitioned but who advocate for the watchful waiting technique, or why most of the long term studies about kids with gender dysphoria don’t apply to today’s cohort, or the controversies over social transitioning. But it concerns me that you are allowing someone to cherry-pick outcomes from studies that tend to not show what he’s saying they show. You must know that there are vehement debates about how to handle this never-before seen cohort, and that the ranks of detransitioners are growing. I believe it is the media’s duty to report this story in all its complexity and honesty, and I don’t believe this article reflects that duty.

The only outlet I have found that reports well on it is Medscape. If you haven’t followed the debates there, I’d suggest looking at it.

I’m happy to talk more if either of you are open to it. I am working very hard to correct the media record on this subject, at great cost to me personally and professionally. I ask that you not forward this note to the author—or that, if you do, you don’t use my name—because I find him to be a bully who paints people who are concerned about medical abuses as bigots and transphobes. I do not wish to draw attention to myself, especially from him. I am only doing this because I believe the media has the story very, very wrong, and I only understand this after many months of going deep into the research. It’s incredibly complicated, and we should always present it that way.

Thanks,

Lisa

Wed, Jan 26, 2022, 7:54 AM

Hello. Just making sure you both saw this. I can go through all the citations if you want and pick out what else needs to be corrected, but in the meantime if you can correct the first citation, which shows no improvement in gender dysphoria, anger or anxiety, and correct the misinformation about “bots” objecting to this care, I’d appreciate it. The main people objecting to affirmation-only are the most experienced clinicians in the country, including those who brought the medical protocol to this country, some of whom are trans. If you’d like to speak to them, I’ve been interviewing them extensively and can put you in touch.

Thanks,

Lisa

Wed, Jan 26, 2022, 5:06 PM

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for your email, and we have updated this blog post.

Best,

XXXX

Wed, Jan 26, 2022, 5:58 PM

Thanks so much. I see it is stealth-edited, though—is it possible to put the corrections so people who read earlier versions know that the most experienced clinicians are not bots (!) and that it was printed that global functioning improved but left out the other outcomes? Many people are trying to whistleblow—including many trans people, as I mentioned. They’re actual compassionate, lefty, empathic, kind humans who care about kids with gender dysphoria.

I will try to find time to go through the rest of the studies to see if there are other factual errors, but if you have anyone there who is able to do that, I imagine he did this cherry picking for each of the studies. I have read many of them, which is how I came to understand that what he’s asserting here isn’t supported. I don’t know if you know what’s going on in Sweden, Finland or the UK, but you can read this evidence review from the UK which showed that the research largely doesn’t support what’s happening. Nothing ideological at all—just science. Any remotely balanced article would have to include that there is tremendous disagreement about how to help these kids, and that the science is very, very unclear.

Thanks for the stealth edits for now!

Lisa

No response ever again. Later, Leor Sapir succeeded in getting further corrections.

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Hillary Clinton: Women’s Rights Champion Turned Traitor

Presidents’ Day was February 16. Hillary Clinton, the woman who in 2016 nearly became the first female President of the United States, spent the weekend pandering to a man who calls himself a woman.

As a feminist and a lifelong Democrat, I voted enthusiastically for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary and general elections.

She had, after all, championed the Family and Medical leave Act, worked to increase funding for child care, helped start the National Campaign to End Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, campaigned for access to emergency contraception, voted in favor of abortion, and co-sponsored the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (about fair pay for women).

Based on her record I, like many of her supporters, was confident that at a fundamental level Hillary Clinton both understood women’s rights and was committed to protecting and advancing them.

That’s why I was so disappointed to watch her platform a man during Saturday’s Fundamental Rights for Women panel at the Munich Security Conference.

As moderator, Clinton introduced U.S. Representative Sarah (born Timothy) McBride as the very first speaker. She described him as “someone who’s been involved in this work for a long time, in trying to explain, and truly bring people together, around issues of gender.”

To make matters worse, Clinton pretended that McBride is a woman. She described McBride as a “US Congresswoman from the state of Delaware.” She continued (speaking to McBride), “As a gender rights champion, and also the first openly transgender member of the United States Congress, you’ve been on the front lines of this fight.”

When Clinton described McBride as someone who’s “been involved in this work for a long time,” what did she mean by “this work?”

As a former national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign (a leading organization in the push to prioritize self-declared “gender identity” over the material reality of sex in law, policy, and culture), and a close family friend of former President Joe Biden, whose administration did more than any other to advance the goals of the gender identity movement, McBride has certainly been involved in the work of making it possible for men to “identify as” women, over the objections of actual women.

McBride has, however, never done a thing to protect the fundamental rights of women. Quite the opposite, in fact, because McBride works to ensure women have no right to exclude men who call themselves women (“transgender women”) from female-only spaces, sports, or opportunities.

Clinton’s fulsome praise of McBride in Munich was not her first betrayal of the female sex. While in 1995, Clinton famously stood on a UN stage in Beijing and declared that “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all,” it appears that “once and for all” really only meant until the early 2010s.

That was when the entire Democratic Party establishment decided that some men are women if they say so, if they mimic the stereotypes associated with femininity, and/or if they take hormones and have surgeries to make them more closely resemble women (i.e., “are trangender women”).

An early adopter of the new Democratic orthodoxy, in 2010, then-Secretary of State Clinton relaxed the rules for changing sex markers on passports so that surgery was no longer required.

It has not always been clear what, exactly, Hillary thinks about all of this. In 2019, she gave an interview with her daughter Chelsea. The interviewer asked them both if someone with a beard and penis can ever be a woman, Chelsea offered an enthusiastic “Ye-ess. Yes.” Hillary, however, looked “uneasy.”

When asked about sports, Chelsea stated that “she supports children being able to play on sports teams that match their gender identity.” Hillary was more cautious: “I think you’ve got to be sensitive to how difficult this is,” Hillary said. “There are women who’d say, ‘You know what, you’ve never had the kind of life experiences that I’ve had. So I respect who you are, but don’t tell me you’re the same as me.’ I hear that conversation all the time.” Hillary said that men should “absolutely” not be in women’s bathrooms and Chelsea glared at her.

Two days later, she posted on Facebook to say that “Trans rights are human rights.” She continued, “Let me be clear: transgender people deserve nothing short of full equality.”

Clinton’s capitulation on “gender” probably eased her relationship with her adult daughter, and with other Democratic elites, but at what cost?

People often use the word “gender” as a euphemism for sex, but this is dangerous. People like McBride have capitalized on the general public’s acceptance of the use of “gender” to mean sex in order to fight for men’s rights to be legally and socially recognized as women.

There was a spot on that panel in Munich that was meant for a woman. And Hillary Clinton gave it to a man who calls himself a woman.

In 1995, Secretary Clinton promised us that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, “once and for all.” Now she has completely abandoned us. As a traitor to her sex class, she should be ashamed.

Democratic contenders in 2028 should draw a lesson from the woman who was never President: speak the truth, even when pressured to lie. In doing so, you will protect your legacy—and you might just get yourself elected.

Submitted to Newsweek, Feb. 16, 2026

If you’re only going to watch one of them, I’d watch Growing Up Trans, but it’s worth it to see the differences—not just between documentaries, but between the discourse of 2015 and 2017.

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For our next episode of Whatever This Is (is that the name of our podcast?), Sarah and I will answer your questions. Ask away!

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I’m in the midst of a massive book rewrite, and revisiting the cultural products that influenced me as I was first trying to understand trans kids and their relationship to gender nonconforming kids in the mid-2010s.

So, I just started rewatching Katie Couric’s 2017 documentary Gender Revolution, and soon I’ll rewatch the Frontline documentary Growing Up Trans. I’ll be hosting an online discussion groups for paid subscribers on Thursday, March 26, 5PM ET.

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On yesterday’s episode of “Whatever This Is Called,” Sarah and I discussed the looming reality of politics. Pro-gender identity Democrats fared well in this week’s primaries and anti-Trump Republicans fared poorly. Increasingly, it seems we’re going to have the same choices we’ve had for the last twenty years (although we didn’t realize it for the first decade or so): Democrats who support gender identity in law and policy, or Republicans who don’t.

I don’t think there are that many single-issue voters, but it’s hard to tell. I am not one of them, so I know which I choose. What about you? Are there any other options? Candidates to watch? Effective messaging? Model policies? Discuss.

Here’s something I wrote for Unherd about it, too.

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Why Some Liberals Embrace the “Don’t Say Gay” Bill

Much of the outrage over Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, HB 1557, is aimed at what many see as its censorship clause: The bill “prohibits classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in certain grade levels”—namely, until fourth grade. While some LGBT kids, or kids with LGBT parents, have interpreted this as forcing them to deny their existence—thus protesters shouting “We say gay”—others note that it says nothing explicit about homosexuality or transgender identity. As a conservative Christian said to me, “It could just as easily be called the ‘Don’t Say Straight’ bill.”

But some believe the bill is actually called “Don’t Say Gay” and not the “Parental Rights in Education” bill—in part because much of the media is calling it the former. And if they do know, they assume it’s a cynical cover for Republicans’ real aim: to erode the rights of trans and gay people, and transform the classroom into a petri dish of traditional, patriarchal Christian values.

Because we are living in such partisan times, many people denouncing this bill aren’t actually reading or considering what’s in it, and thus are missing something crucial. While it’s true that its overly broad censorship clause could be wielded in some frightening ways that could affect gender and sexual minorities, some of HB 1557’s tenets are addressing concerns of both liberal and conservative parents.

The bill aims to make sure parents have rights such as accessing school records, and “prohibits school district personnel from discouraging or prohibiting parental notification & involvement in critical decisions affecting student’s mental, emotional, or physical well-being.” It prevents schools from encouraging “a student to withhold from a parent such information.”  

Why would “the fundamental right of parents to make decisions regarding upbringing & control of their children” be necessary to vote into law when the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects parental rights?

Because some schools have been keeping information about children’s gender identity and mental health from their parents. Parts of this bill address a nonpartisan and very real issue: whether a school can secretly socially transition a child.

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For example: January Littlejohn, a licensed mental health counselor, was kept in the dark that her 13-year-old daughter, who suffered from anxiety and was questioning her gender, had met secretly with teachers and administrators to assume a new name and pronouns. Together, child and teachers filled out a transgender support plan, detailing preferred bathrooms and whether to bunk with boys or girls on overnight trips; she found out only when her daughter told her later. “[My daughter] became more angry, more withdrawn, very sad all of the time,” Littlejohn said. “This did not fix anything for her. It got much worse.”

Now the Littlejohns are one of two families that have filed lawsuits against Florida school boards for facilitating their children’s secret social transitions, not only without telling the parents, but deliberately keeping it from them. In one case, the school hid not only the child’s gender identity from parents, but a suicide attempt. Parents have also filed lawsuits in California and Wisconsin.

Children are regularly asked their pronouns and allowed and encouraged to choose them for themselves—and many believe it is their right to do so. But social transition—assuming a new identity, including those pronouns—is actually a serious mental health treatment and a “huge decision” that should be made by the family, said Dr. Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist specializing in gender, who is trans herself. Secret social transition is, essentially, performing a psychological intervention without parental knowledge or permission, even if parents need to sign permission slips for field trips.

But the practice is enshrined within many states’ school guidelines, which require school employees to use a student’s chosen pronouns or name but allow—and sometimes compel—withholding them from parents. Indeed, a Ludlow, Mass. teacher was fired for revealing students’ social transition to their parents.

In Iowa, “A student has a right to keep his or her status as a transgendered [sic] student private at school.” California schools must respect a transgender student’s wishes, including “not sharing that information with the student’s parents.” Some teachers provide a “transition closet,” so kids can assume secret gender identities (albeit through stereotypes about clothing), away from parents. In Hawaii, “Disclosing [a transgender identity] to other students, their parents, or other third parties may violate privacy laws, such as FERPA,” the guidelines read.

But the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, is designed to help parents protect their own children’s privacy from others. “FERPA does not in express language or intent create a divide of privacy between children and their parents,” said Mrs. Littlejohn’s lawyer, Vernadette R. Broyles. Thus, even if social transition was the best course for a child, schools have no authority to facilitate it secretly, and not all teachers want to. If once schools were sued for not being willing to facilitate a child’s desire for a particular bathroom or locker room, now they are being sued for facilitating those desires behind parents’ backs. It is an overcorrection. The pendulum must swing back toward the middle.

We should assume that those keeping critical information from parents are doing so to support those kids, and indeed many LGBT adults were rejected by families when they came out, and some had teachers who provided a safe haven. But there is also a culture of parental demonization at work here, in the form of a narrative, oft-repeated by organizations like the Trevor Project and adopted in schools, that parents are potentially dangerous, denying treatment out of bigotry rather than concern for their children’s mental health. “Outing a student, especially to parents, can be very dangerous to the student’s health and well-being,” read the guidelines Littlejohn’s child’s school used, continuing that the action could lead to homelessness.  Most parents, like most teachers, are trying to do what’s best for kids. The problem is: it’s quite hard to know what that is.

There’s little consensus over how to treat kids with gender dysphoria, distress at an incongruence between biological sex and gender identity. Though some describe social transition as a completely reversible intervention, in reality, it was “Relatively unheard-of 10 years ago,” according to a 2019 paper, which notes that “early-childhood social transitions are a contentious issue within the clinical, scientific, and broader public communities.”

Multiple studies show that most prepubescent kids with gender dysphoria desist, and many grow up to be same-sex attracted. “Because most gender dysphoric children will not remain gender dysphoric through adolescence, we recommend that young children not yet make a complete social transition,” notes the book Treating Transgender Children and Adolescents.

Still, social transition “can minimize the risk of depressive symptoms, poor self-esteem, self-harm, and suicidal ideation, gestures, or attempts,” per a 2017 paper, even as it noted that “little evidence that psychosocial well-being varied in relation to gender transition status.” Another study found that socially transitioned children supported by parents have “developmentally normative levels of depression,” though higher anxiety than average. Some socially transitioned kids may grow into happy trans teens and trans adults, or they may desist.

But sometimes social transition exacerbates complicated mental health problems, as it did for Littlejohn’s child. Studies show that family support is critical to LGBT children’s mental health. But affirmation is not synonymous with support, nor is cutting parents out of the picture. Doing so drives a wedge between vulnerable kids and their parents at a time when they need them most, pitting parents against kids, and schools against families.

Meanwhile, the little and unclear research we have is of socially transitioned kids in supportive families. We don’t have research on kids secretly socially transitioned by teachers and administrators, hidden from parents, and it’s unreasonable to assume that this intervention would have the same effect on a different population. School personnel, untrained in helping gender dysphoric kids, may overlook children’s depression, anxiety, autism, trauma and/or eating disorders, seeing them as symptoms of GD—as may be the case for some—rather than the source of it.

It would be best to leave education to educators, medicine to doctors, psychological interventions to therapists, but few such professions seem to be rising to their challenges. Children are having mental health crises at unprecedented levels in the pandemic era, and some schools function as support centers, focusing more on social justice than reading, writing and arithmetic. How should they navigate that some families, regardless of political party, have different beliefs about gender identity and sexuality? Whose version of reality gets taught? How do we move forward when ideologies pull us in opposite directions? And how do we overcome the political polarization that has us serving those ideologies over the needs of kids?

The truth is that the Republican bills restricting access to health care for trans kids in other states, like Texas and Idaho, are just as guilty of violating parental rights. Both sides should stop interrupting parental authority and support families staying close and intact. Just as some families with trans-identified kids are fleeing Texas for bluer states, some blue state residents are heading to Florida, where they feel their kids will be safer. The great gender migration is a sign of how poisonous this debate has become.

It’s amazing that we need a bill to mandate what should be a given: Parents need to be involved in their kids’ mental health treatments. Children’s mental health, parental rights, and support for LGBT kids should all be possible if that’s our goal. Schools need to figure out how to work with parents, not against them, and encourage family connection, not dissolution. And knee-jerk neoliberals should read a bill like HB1577 with an open mind, and listen to the families who support it. Because we do all have one thing in common: We want to do what’s best for kids.

FYI: I pitched this piece to NYT, Washington Post, Time, Common Sense, FAIR, The Bulwark, NY Mag, USA Today, The Atlantic, CNN, WSJ, Unherd, Tablet. Only two outlets bothered to even say no. Thank you for reading it here—I’m sorry I couldn’t share these ideas with a wider audience.

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Critics of “gender-affirming care” sometimes refer to elective mastectomies and cross-sex hormones as mutilation—and accuse parents who facilitated their kids’ medical transition of child abuse. In fact, in some states like Texas, sterilizing a child is officially a form of child abuse, and moving directly from puberty blockers to cross-sex hormones, without experiencing endogenous puberty, almost certainly caused sterility. So did the gender-affirming procedures of oophorectomy (removal of ovaries) or orchidectomy (removal of testes). Thus, Texas’s child protection agency said it would investigate affirming families for child abuse.

But some argued the opposite. In 2023, Dr. Emily Georges published “Prohibition of Gender-Affirming Care as a Form of Child Maltreatment” in Pediatrics. Withholding those interventions, and not offering medicine to “achieve the patient’s goals,” was child abuse, she argued. Because gender-affirming care “decreases many negative health outcomes, including rates of depression, and improves well-being,” and the benefits “have been shown to far outweigh the risks,” denying them would cause “significant harm.” To do so “meets diagnostic criteria for medical neglect.”

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