I'm not sure I understand the analogy. As the parent, you want your kid to clean up the room, so you ask nicely, then with increasing volume, till you end up yelling. Ok. But your intent is essentially reasonable and benevolent-- you want a clean house. You're not telling the kids they are evil perverts because they delayed cleaning up.
I don't think the intent of this executive order is just to get the room cleaned up, and have youth gender medicine become more scientific and evidence driven. I think it's more to polarize and divide. I don't really see Trump as the adult in this, or any, room.
Executive orders are not written by presidents, they’re written by experts on a particular subject, and then approved and signed by the president. A feminist lawyer wrote Trump’s gender executive order.
And the order doesn’t call kids evil perverts. I would think that those who think it’s ever okay to castrate and sterilize healthy children are the evil perverts. 🤷♀️
It's to stop the non-evidence based (that would be the reasoning with the kids) medical scandal underway in this country.
He ("he" the president, really whoever wrote it) asked for a review of best practices by HHS.
Now, GLAAD, HRC, ACLU *could say*: wow, the evidence isn't very good, we should be fighting to get outcomes to protect these kids so that they get the best care possible! Let's do that! Hey, it looks like we're actually medicalizing a lot of gay kids and other distressed people--hit the brakes, now! (Think if we suddenly found out a treatment for some other childhood condition was causing a lot of harm and despair down the road and wasn't even shown to help every time a study looked, and people realized they'd been only looking at selective, in some cases "honeymoon," outcomes.)
I'm thinking the families aren't going to be told that. They're going to be told that the president and Republicans hate them and want them to not get the "care" that will make them happy. And maybe the false "lifesaving" myth, violating suicide prevention guidelines.
We Democrats, as a party, didn't need to take the "side" of unproven invasive medical interventions on kids. No political party needed to.
The analogy doesn’t work because we who saw the trans thing for the grift it us were not allowed to express this or otherwise be exiled. It wasn’t a polite order that went unheeded; there was bonafide censorship on Twitter and elsewhere preventing us from speaking.
Wow. You seem to have slept thru the past 10 years. The trans madness has prevailed not by science or truth, but by endless merciless bullying. The worm has turned, the adults are back, and we are going to restore sanity to the delusional psychosis of trannidumb.
There are three executive orders (EO’s) that Trump has signed that are worthy of support by everyone across the moderate political spectrum
The first of these EO’s recognizes that open borders are politically unacceptable and that the age of mass migration is over. Importing millions of people who will work for next to nothing just to be here destroys the wages of working class Americans and drives up housing costs when we can't house our own citizens. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their own country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay home and work there to improve their living conditions.
His second important EO addresses the insanity of gender identity which denies the reality of human sexuality and results in men invading women’s sports, restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. Women need and are entitled to privacy from men. Even more diabolical is the mutilation of innocent children (many who would grow up gay) in pursuit of the impossible because you can’t change your birth sex.
Finally his EO that corrects the craziness of DEI which discriminates against whites, Asians and men in attempting to cure past discrimination against others is absolutely the correct approach. Who could believe that creating a new privileged class and a new discriminated against class would provide a solution to the problem? Not to mention that it’s clearly unconstitutional.
It would well serve both Democrats and independents to get behind these changes even as they choose to vigorously oppose other aspects of his agenda.
The problem is that many people don't bother to actually read and listen to what the opposite side says. They just go with the mainstream media interpretation. A Facebook friend posted "I read that Trump revoked anti-discrimination law of 1964". Say, what? Anyone who bothered to go on the White House website and read what the executive order actually say would know he did no such thing...
The role of overpopulation is simply misunderestimated or called xenophobic. But most Central American countries have grown 4x since 1970, except Costa Rica, which doesn't figure in migration patterns.
Lisa- once again, you captured my feelings over the last week. While I celebrate the protection of children, I see people being hurt and confused by the language, but even more hurt by the media stirring up a frenzy. I fell for the frenzy the first time around and this time I feel much calmer. Getting the kids to clean the room is a a great analogy. He makes huge, sweeping remarks- it shakes the person or group that they could lose all their privileges- and forces them to think about the problem. Then, hopefully, the room is cleaned and a reasonable compromise is reached. I‘m with you in hoping that the media will settle themselves a bit and focus on what these policies actually do and do not mean rather than taking bait. We’ll see. Thank you for putting into words, what I’ve been thinking about.
I love the analogy of asking kids to clean up—and they don’t until you scream.
Watching Trump’s first week I have found myself thinking: “well, that’s what you (Democrats) get for refusing to look at reality.”
I’m afraid the lesson may be that only strong, aggressive actions work—not reasonable compromise and negotiation. Today I find myself disinterested in “compromise”—that opportunity has passed.
I love this Lisa. I so relate to the progression of the voice. And then we get the side eye and blamed for the upset, over reaction and so on.
These EO’s were necessarily brutal. What is being done to kids and families is nothing short of child abuse.
Democrats had thousands of opportunities to keep their room clean and reign their activism and doctors in and keep the situation from exploding. They did not. I heard Callie Means in an Honesty podcast say something to the effect of, ‘when did democrats stop protecting children?’ He is damn right. Democrats could have said, hey doctors, let’s get some research. Let’s be realllllly careful. Let’s talk about detransitioners and listen to them. Let’s hold a conference and open it up to anyone. They could have said, Teachers, this is not your place, stay in your lane. They could have said, hold up, let’s not remove parents from the decision making process of taking action on a child’s body.
But they did not. And here we are with Trump. This is not his fault. He did not ask for this or create this. No one will respond to negotiations. There is no reaching across the aisle. Seth Moulton is being hammered for speaking up for girls.
So stop blaming Trump. He is not the enemy here. And how to accept these when you hate him and his policies so much, one commenter asked? Just do. Be part of the solution.
We are also going to have a Federal election by April or May that could see the election of a government with Trumpist sympathies on this and other issues. The State government of Queensland (from where our Federal Opposition Leader hails) has paused the approval of "gender transition drugs" for young people. Watch this space.
Great article, Lisa. What I continue to worry about is if these EOs will really manage to effect lasting changes in liberal states and cities, where the ideology is deeply ingrained, and whether Trump being the one who issued them will just make people dig in their heels and try to carry on with the program. As you said, the legacy press is still unable to cover them fairly, so how would any minds get changed?
As satisfying as it is to see these EOs come into effect, if they only harden the fronts, and will be revoked if Democrats win back the White House in four years, I'm afraid the costs, with Trump currently taking a wrecking ball to the civil service in a self-serving effort to turn it into an army of political lackeys, will be too high. On the other hand, if Harris had won, and the federal policies on this issue would have continued unchecked, there would be no end in sight either. On balance, I hope, these EOs will provide a permission structure for more people to speak up against this activist-driven insanity.
I’m confident that once the financial incentives of so-called gender medicine have been reduced, it will shrink so much that even if Democrats return to power in 4 years there will be fewer providers and the demand for transitioning will move on to some other form of self harm.
i agree. i dont think anyone is going to lose their funding. i dont think trump can unilaterally cut funding thats been approved by congress. but i hope im wrong. lets hope congress can make some laws with teeth on this issue but without doing anything else crazy.
What the EO's can do is draw attn to the issue, which is the last thing the gender cultists want.
It's certainly great to see the statutes of limitations extended. But do malpractice lawsuits have any hope of being successful as long as professional organizations like the AAP consider "gender affirming care" the "standard of care"? These EOs aren't going to induce them to change course, if their actions after Trump's call to reopen schools in 2020 are any indication for how their minds work.
And yes, Virginia and DC are pretty liberal, and so far all I see among friends and colleagues is despair at how "unkind" these orders are to trans people... I'd love to see schools stop teaching gender identity ideology, and maybe they will (at least the public ones, the privates around here are all in as well). But changing the minds of indoctrinated parents will take the mainstream press to come to their senses, and no Trump EO is ever going to help with that.
What happened to WPATH is a judge asked them to show why they were the standard of care (because they called their recommendations that) and in discovery a whole scandal came out.
If it is the "standard of care"--what process was this decided by? There are rules in medicine for trustworthy guidelines. You can look at a talk by Florez (SEGM, youtube). And then look at what AAP did. Not up to par. Some people's guess as to what might help, with misrepresentation of their references when the references didn't agree with what they wanted to say. (Cantor wrote a peer reviewed article in 2020 fact checking them). A judge will ask. I think some Attorneys General have also already asked.
The point was to make these groups providing guidelines show why we should listen to them. Until now it was just "we are the experts." Expert opinion is the least reliable form of medical evidence. That is why is it not the basis of trustworthy guidelines. Doctors don't realize how off the rails this field has gone, they thought standards of care meant something else, I think.
OMG! This is a masterpiece that delivers the confusingly complicated history of the last decade of woke invasion into all aspects of life as a thoroughly relatable story! I will share this far and wide!
Having read this and the comments after watching the last Informed Dissent podcast, I would like to add that although I love your analogy in this piece because it’s relatable, a point you all made in that discussion resonates with my own concerns that we are sitting on a fragile precipice where the inflammatory language in the order was regarded as unnecessarily “triggering” in its language and didn’t reference evidence that isn’t “junk science”, and so might push those who are dug in as a result of phobia indoctrination towards further alienation because it reinforces their fears and can be fact-checked to prove it comes across as evidence of trans genocidal and hyper political agenda
I liked how you said how the order could have been written more like the tone Hillary Cass took in her Review publication—speaking directly to her audience in a caring manner, and I shared your wish that there could have been an option to create a directive to bring different stakeholders together in an effort to determine good policy based in that kind of discussion instead of handing this down from on high in autocratic fashion
The other point you all agreed on in that ID podcast is we can’t afford to alienate future allies—and I would say also that many of us are in no position to judge those still captivated by the ideology since we were once stuck where they are now—as Eliza says, the radicalization happened on the left without any of us realizing it, so regarding all this tough talk from those who either never bought into it in the first place as committed conservatives or who are former believers who have opened our eyes, I agree it might be necessary to take a strong authoritative stance (backbone parent) but if it veers into authoritarianism (brick wall parent) it might be sabotaging because it treats the other side as children which is inherently demeaning, and therefore alienating-you get what looks like cooperation in the moment but you haven’t really changed anyone’s minds and you might just set up more defiance built in resentment
Supernanny used to get parents to have family meetings at which the kids were helped to have buy-in with creating the boundaries (limits, consequences and rewards) they would have to live by—the parents were still in charge, and although we don’t have a moderate backbone style parent in the (White) house who could play this role right now, I believe we can still strive to be that person in our own spheres of influence
PS the concept of backbone vs brick wall parenting comes from author Barbara Coloroso who wrote a book on parenting called “Kids are Worth It”
The left perfected the art of coded "trans-world" language so now the right is catching up but there is no left and right? "Mutilated" appears ten times in the EO.
The problem, IMO, is going too overboard with anything. The term mutilation is accurate, but should we forget that it also refers to the bodies of de-transitioners who don't often appreciate being referred to as mutilated? Would you? Frankly, I don't fully trust anything that emanates from the Trump White House, anymore than I trusted almost anything that emanated from the Biden White House. I thought individual states and individual girls' sports teams were making strides in the right direction without the voting in Trump and his cronies. How can we separate this good executive order from all the bad that he's already doing and plans to do? Please enlighten me, someone, anyone... (that's a joke, as I already have a well-formed, well-intentioned opinion of my own)
Misplaced "compassion." I don't care what detransitioners think about the word mutilation compared to the necessary use of the word to stop what's happening to children like them.
Good god almighty. They DID get mutilated. That's real.
We're living in reality, now, Mildred, not a fantasy world.
you thought that when girls on girls sports teams quit and every adult that supported them quitting was fired - that was making progress? you thought blue states were going to somehow come around? no they wont. no they havent. whats going is a PR battle. in blue states the gender cultists have already won this battle. what the exec orders allow trump to do is pick out the most egregious example of blue state harm to vulnerable ppl, and sue them. most have no idea whats going on. maybe after trump sues, some will wake up to what dems have been up to. but one cant blame Republicans for this. its dems who enacted this harmful fraud into our public policies that harm a half doz vulnerable groups and helps no one.
That's your opinion, spoken as if it were fact. You can do that, I can't stop you, but this is not a discussion, you appear to be making a proclamation. When will people stop having tunnel vision about which women and children (and men), vulnerable children and adults, matter the most? Your attitude is as fanatic and cultish as any the "dems" (small case; that insult is noted) suffer from. It's just a different cult, but a cult is a cult. Criticize Biden and blue states, and I agree in part, but if you think vulnerable groups outside of the focus of your "crusade" will not suffer badly under a Trump administration, you are wrong. So you can keep your proclamation. Best of luck in Trumpworld. You and lots of other people are going to need it.
after trump issued EO stating a return to title IX that protects girls from men invading their spaces, and on Jan 31, US dept of Education issued clarification letter to all of nations schools saying that title IX protects girls from discrimination. on the same day, california issued their own letter to california schools saying california will not protect girls right to same sex spaces. the families of at least two girls who were disadvantaged by issue are sueing the state of california.
ive never voted for trump. but i live in calif so it doesnt mater. dems have a super majority here and are severely harming women, kids, gays, orphans, ppl with psych issues and others via the mens rights movement called gender ideology. gender ideology doesnt help anyone, not even one person. claims it does are nothing more than quackery. yes, its my opinion that dems wont come around. thats my opinion based on living in california. but maybe some of what trumps doing will wake some of them up. probably people are smarter in your state
This makes me sad. Yes, I am 100% with you on the urge to yell a your kids when they don’t clean up their rooms. I’ve done it. However, it’s not the only way to parent (my parents did that thing with the chore box described above). Most parents and their children have an underlying trusting relationship that is not threatened by occasional yelling. The same is not true of left and right in our country. If we truly want to be able to treat gender medicine as an issue outside of left and right, it really helps to avoid screaming and throwing insults. It may feel satisfying to have the harsh language of the executive order, but it does not build bridges. I live in a very blue leftie community, where many believe what they read on bluesky. I have a young adult child who has been taking cross sex hormones for over two years and now reads as male. This executive order, while much of the content is good, legitimizes a harsh discourse that will help create a world that is more hostile to my child, and will further polarize the political conversation on the left in a way that is also harmful for my young adult child. The order could have been and should have been written in a way that was clear and strong, without including further polarizing language. Not leading with that kind of sentiment is throwing my kid under the bus. I get that many of the commentators here don’t really give a crap about my kid and others like my kid, but I do, and I am very sad and discouraged.
I see 'intersex' gets cited once again as a reason why Trump is a big meanie. People with differences of sex development which make their biological sex ambigious comprise less than 200 out of a million people. It's incredibly rare & I'm not aware of any need in this population for transgender health facilities. People with a range of DSDs including ones that don't cause sex ambiguity could be affected by the banning of prescriptions for some endocrine medications or the banning of some surgical procedures, but this is not proposed.
The writing here is terrific, especially the comparison to getting kids to clean up their rooms.
I'm not sure I understand the analogy. As the parent, you want your kid to clean up the room, so you ask nicely, then with increasing volume, till you end up yelling. Ok. But your intent is essentially reasonable and benevolent-- you want a clean house. You're not telling the kids they are evil perverts because they delayed cleaning up.
I don't think the intent of this executive order is just to get the room cleaned up, and have youth gender medicine become more scientific and evidence driven. I think it's more to polarize and divide. I don't really see Trump as the adult in this, or any, room.
Executive orders are not written by presidents, they’re written by experts on a particular subject, and then approved and signed by the president. A feminist lawyer wrote Trump’s gender executive order.
And the order doesn’t call kids evil perverts. I would think that those who think it’s ever okay to castrate and sterilize healthy children are the evil perverts. 🤷♀️
It's to stop the non-evidence based (that would be the reasoning with the kids) medical scandal underway in this country.
He ("he" the president, really whoever wrote it) asked for a review of best practices by HHS.
Now, GLAAD, HRC, ACLU *could say*: wow, the evidence isn't very good, we should be fighting to get outcomes to protect these kids so that they get the best care possible! Let's do that! Hey, it looks like we're actually medicalizing a lot of gay kids and other distressed people--hit the brakes, now! (Think if we suddenly found out a treatment for some other childhood condition was causing a lot of harm and despair down the road and wasn't even shown to help every time a study looked, and people realized they'd been only looking at selective, in some cases "honeymoon," outcomes.)
I'm thinking the families aren't going to be told that. They're going to be told that the president and Republicans hate them and want them to not get the "care" that will make them happy. And maybe the false "lifesaving" myth, violating suicide prevention guidelines.
We Democrats, as a party, didn't need to take the "side" of unproven invasive medical interventions on kids. No political party needed to.
The analogy doesn’t work because we who saw the trans thing for the grift it us were not allowed to express this or otherwise be exiled. It wasn’t a polite order that went unheeded; there was bonafide censorship on Twitter and elsewhere preventing us from speaking.
But medicine and education and big pharma definitely weren’t going to clean up the room. And it needed cleaning.
Wow. You seem to have slept thru the past 10 years. The trans madness has prevailed not by science or truth, but by endless merciless bullying. The worm has turned, the adults are back, and we are going to restore sanity to the delusional psychosis of trannidumb.
I remember a lot of yelling at the kids. I guess everyone does it. I didn't yell enough - 2 of the 3 are complete disasters about tidying up.
Rags: But medicine and education and big pharma definitely weren’t going to clean up the room. And it needed cleaning.
There are three executive orders (EO’s) that Trump has signed that are worthy of support by everyone across the moderate political spectrum
The first of these EO’s recognizes that open borders are politically unacceptable and that the age of mass migration is over. Importing millions of people who will work for next to nothing just to be here destroys the wages of working class Americans and drives up housing costs when we can't house our own citizens. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their own country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay home and work there to improve their living conditions.
His second important EO addresses the insanity of gender identity which denies the reality of human sexuality and results in men invading women’s sports, restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. Women need and are entitled to privacy from men. Even more diabolical is the mutilation of innocent children (many who would grow up gay) in pursuit of the impossible because you can’t change your birth sex.
Finally his EO that corrects the craziness of DEI which discriminates against whites, Asians and men in attempting to cure past discrimination against others is absolutely the correct approach. Who could believe that creating a new privileged class and a new discriminated against class would provide a solution to the problem? Not to mention that it’s clearly unconstitutional.
It would well serve both Democrats and independents to get behind these changes even as they choose to vigorously oppose other aspects of his agenda.
The problem is that many people don't bother to actually read and listen to what the opposite side says. They just go with the mainstream media interpretation. A Facebook friend posted "I read that Trump revoked anti-discrimination law of 1964". Say, what? Anyone who bothered to go on the White House website and read what the executive order actually say would know he did no such thing...
The role of overpopulation is simply misunderestimated or called xenophobic. But most Central American countries have grown 4x since 1970, except Costa Rica, which doesn't figure in migration patterns.
This: "These executive orders on sex and gender are screaming things that many people have said nicely for 10 years."
Lisa- once again, you captured my feelings over the last week. While I celebrate the protection of children, I see people being hurt and confused by the language, but even more hurt by the media stirring up a frenzy. I fell for the frenzy the first time around and this time I feel much calmer. Getting the kids to clean the room is a a great analogy. He makes huge, sweeping remarks- it shakes the person or group that they could lose all their privileges- and forces them to think about the problem. Then, hopefully, the room is cleaned and a reasonable compromise is reached. I‘m with you in hoping that the media will settle themselves a bit and focus on what these policies actually do and do not mean rather than taking bait. We’ll see. Thank you for putting into words, what I’ve been thinking about.
I love the analogy of asking kids to clean up—and they don’t until you scream.
Watching Trump’s first week I have found myself thinking: “well, that’s what you (Democrats) get for refusing to look at reality.”
I’m afraid the lesson may be that only strong, aggressive actions work—not reasonable compromise and negotiation. Today I find myself disinterested in “compromise”—that opportunity has passed.
Maybe I’ll share this on my super lefty Facebook account so my progressive friends who have been sobbing over the election of Trump can read it.
I love this Lisa. I so relate to the progression of the voice. And then we get the side eye and blamed for the upset, over reaction and so on.
These EO’s were necessarily brutal. What is being done to kids and families is nothing short of child abuse.
Democrats had thousands of opportunities to keep their room clean and reign their activism and doctors in and keep the situation from exploding. They did not. I heard Callie Means in an Honesty podcast say something to the effect of, ‘when did democrats stop protecting children?’ He is damn right. Democrats could have said, hey doctors, let’s get some research. Let’s be realllllly careful. Let’s talk about detransitioners and listen to them. Let’s hold a conference and open it up to anyone. They could have said, Teachers, this is not your place, stay in your lane. They could have said, hold up, let’s not remove parents from the decision making process of taking action on a child’s body.
But they did not. And here we are with Trump. This is not his fault. He did not ask for this or create this. No one will respond to negotiations. There is no reaching across the aisle. Seth Moulton is being hammered for speaking up for girls.
So stop blaming Trump. He is not the enemy here. And how to accept these when you hate him and his policies so much, one commenter asked? Just do. Be part of the solution.
The Australian Government is going to conduct an inquiry into youth gender medicine.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/use-of-puberty-blockers-and-trans-treatment-for-children-under-review-20250131-p5l8oi.html
We are also going to have a Federal election by April or May that could see the election of a government with Trumpist sympathies on this and other issues. The State government of Queensland (from where our Federal Opposition Leader hails) has paused the approval of "gender transition drugs" for young people. Watch this space.
Great article, Lisa. What I continue to worry about is if these EOs will really manage to effect lasting changes in liberal states and cities, where the ideology is deeply ingrained, and whether Trump being the one who issued them will just make people dig in their heels and try to carry on with the program. As you said, the legacy press is still unable to cover them fairly, so how would any minds get changed?
As satisfying as it is to see these EOs come into effect, if they only harden the fronts, and will be revoked if Democrats win back the White House in four years, I'm afraid the costs, with Trump currently taking a wrecking ball to the civil service in a self-serving effort to turn it into an army of political lackeys, will be too high. On the other hand, if Harris had won, and the federal policies on this issue would have continued unchecked, there would be no end in sight either. On balance, I hope, these EOs will provide a permission structure for more people to speak up against this activist-driven insanity.
I’m confident that once the financial incentives of so-called gender medicine have been reduced, it will shrink so much that even if Democrats return to power in 4 years there will be fewer providers and the demand for transitioning will move on to some other form of self harm.
i agree. i dont think anyone is going to lose their funding. i dont think trump can unilaterally cut funding thats been approved by congress. but i hope im wrong. lets hope congress can make some laws with teeth on this issue but without doing anything else crazy.
What the EO's can do is draw attn to the issue, which is the last thing the gender cultists want.
It's certainly great to see the statutes of limitations extended. But do malpractice lawsuits have any hope of being successful as long as professional organizations like the AAP consider "gender affirming care" the "standard of care"? These EOs aren't going to induce them to change course, if their actions after Trump's call to reopen schools in 2020 are any indication for how their minds work.
And yes, Virginia and DC are pretty liberal, and so far all I see among friends and colleagues is despair at how "unkind" these orders are to trans people... I'd love to see schools stop teaching gender identity ideology, and maybe they will (at least the public ones, the privates around here are all in as well). But changing the minds of indoctrinated parents will take the mainstream press to come to their senses, and no Trump EO is ever going to help with that.
What happened to WPATH is a judge asked them to show why they were the standard of care (because they called their recommendations that) and in discovery a whole scandal came out.
https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/387/bmj.q2227.full.pdf
If it is the "standard of care"--what process was this decided by? There are rules in medicine for trustworthy guidelines. You can look at a talk by Florez (SEGM, youtube). And then look at what AAP did. Not up to par. Some people's guess as to what might help, with misrepresentation of their references when the references didn't agree with what they wanted to say. (Cantor wrote a peer reviewed article in 2020 fact checking them). A judge will ask. I think some Attorneys General have also already asked.
The point was to make these groups providing guidelines show why we should listen to them. Until now it was just "we are the experts." Expert opinion is the least reliable form of medical evidence. That is why is it not the basis of trustworthy guidelines. Doctors don't realize how off the rails this field has gone, they thought standards of care meant something else, I think.
OMG! This is a masterpiece that delivers the confusingly complicated history of the last decade of woke invasion into all aspects of life as a thoroughly relatable story! I will share this far and wide!
🎯🎯🎯
Having read this and the comments after watching the last Informed Dissent podcast, I would like to add that although I love your analogy in this piece because it’s relatable, a point you all made in that discussion resonates with my own concerns that we are sitting on a fragile precipice where the inflammatory language in the order was regarded as unnecessarily “triggering” in its language and didn’t reference evidence that isn’t “junk science”, and so might push those who are dug in as a result of phobia indoctrination towards further alienation because it reinforces their fears and can be fact-checked to prove it comes across as evidence of trans genocidal and hyper political agenda
I liked how you said how the order could have been written more like the tone Hillary Cass took in her Review publication—speaking directly to her audience in a caring manner, and I shared your wish that there could have been an option to create a directive to bring different stakeholders together in an effort to determine good policy based in that kind of discussion instead of handing this down from on high in autocratic fashion
The other point you all agreed on in that ID podcast is we can’t afford to alienate future allies—and I would say also that many of us are in no position to judge those still captivated by the ideology since we were once stuck where they are now—as Eliza says, the radicalization happened on the left without any of us realizing it, so regarding all this tough talk from those who either never bought into it in the first place as committed conservatives or who are former believers who have opened our eyes, I agree it might be necessary to take a strong authoritative stance (backbone parent) but if it veers into authoritarianism (brick wall parent) it might be sabotaging because it treats the other side as children which is inherently demeaning, and therefore alienating-you get what looks like cooperation in the moment but you haven’t really changed anyone’s minds and you might just set up more defiance built in resentment
Supernanny used to get parents to have family meetings at which the kids were helped to have buy-in with creating the boundaries (limits, consequences and rewards) they would have to live by—the parents were still in charge, and although we don’t have a moderate backbone style parent in the (White) house who could play this role right now, I believe we can still strive to be that person in our own spheres of influence
PS the concept of backbone vs brick wall parenting comes from author Barbara Coloroso who wrote a book on parenting called “Kids are Worth It”
http://www.kidsareworthit.com
Well said, Lisa. Thanks.
The left perfected the art of coded "trans-world" language so now the right is catching up but there is no left and right? "Mutilated" appears ten times in the EO.
Mutilation is the truthful and accurate term
The problem, IMO, is going too overboard with anything. The term mutilation is accurate, but should we forget that it also refers to the bodies of de-transitioners who don't often appreciate being referred to as mutilated? Would you? Frankly, I don't fully trust anything that emanates from the Trump White House, anymore than I trusted almost anything that emanated from the Biden White House. I thought individual states and individual girls' sports teams were making strides in the right direction without the voting in Trump and his cronies. How can we separate this good executive order from all the bad that he's already doing and plans to do? Please enlighten me, someone, anyone... (that's a joke, as I already have a well-formed, well-intentioned opinion of my own)
Misplaced "compassion." I don't care what detransitioners think about the word mutilation compared to the necessary use of the word to stop what's happening to children like them.
Good god almighty. They DID get mutilated. That's real.
We're living in reality, now, Mildred, not a fantasy world.
you thought that when girls on girls sports teams quit and every adult that supported them quitting was fired - that was making progress? you thought blue states were going to somehow come around? no they wont. no they havent. whats going is a PR battle. in blue states the gender cultists have already won this battle. what the exec orders allow trump to do is pick out the most egregious example of blue state harm to vulnerable ppl, and sue them. most have no idea whats going on. maybe after trump sues, some will wake up to what dems have been up to. but one cant blame Republicans for this. its dems who enacted this harmful fraud into our public policies that harm a half doz vulnerable groups and helps no one.
That's your opinion, spoken as if it were fact. You can do that, I can't stop you, but this is not a discussion, you appear to be making a proclamation. When will people stop having tunnel vision about which women and children (and men), vulnerable children and adults, matter the most? Your attitude is as fanatic and cultish as any the "dems" (small case; that insult is noted) suffer from. It's just a different cult, but a cult is a cult. Criticize Biden and blue states, and I agree in part, but if you think vulnerable groups outside of the focus of your "crusade" will not suffer badly under a Trump administration, you are wrong. So you can keep your proclamation. Best of luck in Trumpworld. You and lots of other people are going to need it.
after trump issued EO stating a return to title IX that protects girls from men invading their spaces, and on Jan 31, US dept of Education issued clarification letter to all of nations schools saying that title IX protects girls from discrimination. on the same day, california issued their own letter to california schools saying california will not protect girls right to same sex spaces. the families of at least two girls who were disadvantaged by issue are sueing the state of california.
https://www.cde.ca.gov/nr/ne/yr25/yr25rel08.asp
https://www.foxnews.com/sports/families-sue-california-ag-trans-athlete-laws-after-teen-girl-loses-varsity-spot-transgender-competitor
"You appear to be making a proclamation."
So what are you gonna do about it?
ive never voted for trump. but i live in calif so it doesnt mater. dems have a super majority here and are severely harming women, kids, gays, orphans, ppl with psych issues and others via the mens rights movement called gender ideology. gender ideology doesnt help anyone, not even one person. claims it does are nothing more than quackery. yes, its my opinion that dems wont come around. thats my opinion based on living in california. but maybe some of what trumps doing will wake some of them up. probably people are smarter in your state
Welcome to being a Democrat. This is what they're like.
Amen.
This makes me sad. Yes, I am 100% with you on the urge to yell a your kids when they don’t clean up their rooms. I’ve done it. However, it’s not the only way to parent (my parents did that thing with the chore box described above). Most parents and their children have an underlying trusting relationship that is not threatened by occasional yelling. The same is not true of left and right in our country. If we truly want to be able to treat gender medicine as an issue outside of left and right, it really helps to avoid screaming and throwing insults. It may feel satisfying to have the harsh language of the executive order, but it does not build bridges. I live in a very blue leftie community, where many believe what they read on bluesky. I have a young adult child who has been taking cross sex hormones for over two years and now reads as male. This executive order, while much of the content is good, legitimizes a harsh discourse that will help create a world that is more hostile to my child, and will further polarize the political conversation on the left in a way that is also harmful for my young adult child. The order could have been and should have been written in a way that was clear and strong, without including further polarizing language. Not leading with that kind of sentiment is throwing my kid under the bus. I get that many of the commentators here don’t really give a crap about my kid and others like my kid, but I do, and I am very sad and discouraged.
I’m so sorry to hear this Mina. You are truly in a double bind.
I see 'intersex' gets cited once again as a reason why Trump is a big meanie. People with differences of sex development which make their biological sex ambigious comprise less than 200 out of a million people. It's incredibly rare & I'm not aware of any need in this population for transgender health facilities. People with a range of DSDs including ones that don't cause sex ambiguity could be affected by the banning of prescriptions for some endocrine medications or the banning of some surgical procedures, but this is not proposed.
Brilliant, Lisa. I have restacked.
Yes! Excellent writing and relatable humor makes this whole nightmare feel a little less scary.. Ty Lisa.. Well presented.