BROADview in Brief

O Canada, O California!

Photo by Julian Myles on Unsplash

It was a blast to drive down to see Lisa in LA on Tuesday and to meet some fabulous BROADview subscribers! Here’s to more BROADview hangouts in the near future! (From Lisa: Samesies! I am so grateful to those of you who came out!)

Let’s start our gender news journey at the political magazine The Hill this week, where Brooke Migdon reported that the majority of Southern states have now enacted restrictions on youth gender medicalization. Her article is an excellent example of how reporting bias can ultimately screw over politicians and political insiders. Midgon framed these laws as principally driven by a Republican vs Democrat dynamic, but both Migdon and the people she interviewed missed the layers of nuance available both in polls and in political testimony. For example, she cited recent surveys by saying that “majorities of voters oppose legislation banning gender-affirming health care” without noting that linked polling data shows that American opposition to these laws has dropped dramatically from 65% to 54% in just two years (the data was covered by PBS last March). A Democrat reading her article might think that American voters were solidly behind the Democratic Party position when, in fact, the momentum seems to be swinging away from them. Left-wing politicians who take the trans activist position on gender legislation may then be blindsided by constituents and at the ballot box because they completely misunderstand the public’s changing views. This type of journalism does the political class no favors.

I thought Bethany Mandel in the Free Press nicely captured rising progressive confusion in The Revolt of Religious Parents in Montgomery County, especially when she noted that the left-wing Montgomery County Maryland Councilmember Kristin Mink had described Muslim families concerned about the LGBTQ curriculum in their schools as being on the same side as white supremacists. That apparently didn’t go down well.

In other state news, legislatures in the Midwest continued to align with the South, as Iowa school districts began to double check all student nicknames with parents, in Missouri, youth gender medicine restrictions took effect, the ACLU of Indiana sued the Indiana Department of Corrections for refusing to medicalize transgender inmates, and the Governor of Nebraska issued an executive order establishing the Women’s Bill of Rights. I talked about who’s behind the Bill of Rights movement when a similar executive order was signed in Oklahoma last month.

However, if you’re an obese man who identifies as a woman in Ohio, you’ll be happy to hear that you’re welcome in the women’s locker room at the YMCA, no questions asked. And there’s a sorority in Wyoming that would be happy to have you (if it has any members left). 

California is as fascinating as ever, with its zealous state attorney general now officially suing a local school board for its new parental gender notification policy just as a California mother received a $100,000 settlement from a district that had secretly socially transitioned her child. Knock, knock Attorney General Bonta, grassroots activists are at your door, and in what should be a helluvan election year battle, a new organization called Protect Kids California has filed three state initiatives: one to restrict males in female youth sport, one to restrict gender medicalization for minors, and one to require the type of parental notification statewide that Bonta is now suing Chino Valley Unified over. California is one of the few states to allow legislation to pass by citizen vote, and if these initiatives get enough signatures, they will appear on next November’s ballot as three separate propositions. Now that would be interesting, as I think the dominant Democratic politicians are very far—cluelessly far—from the California public on these issues. These are the same politicians who thought California voters would bring back affirmative action at the ballot box last year.

Many thanks to our Canadian readers for sharing the latest news from north of the border. I’ll point out first that Canada has issued a US travel advisory for its 2SLGBTQI+ citizens. I can’t imagine many Canadians coming down here for healthcare or to play high school sports—the primary issues being legislated in certain states—so I hope that odd notice doesn’t actually deter any 2SLGBTQI+ Canadians from visiting and enjoying American hospitality. Canada poses quite the gender conundrum and makes us all think carefully about what and who to blame for transgender extremism. When our European friends say the reason America can’t fix its gender problem is because we don’t have a national health service, we point north: then why can’t Canada self-correct? When some Americans say it’s all about the medical industrial complex, we look north again: that can’t be so. North American progressives on both sides of the border share the same authoritarian impulse to shut down alternative viewpoints on gender, but Canada does not have the strong free speech protections of the US. As a result, the court cases about language that move forward there can seem quite bizarre to an American (see here, here, and here). And yet there is hope, as some provinces start to wake up and enact common-sense parental notification laws, with polls showing broad support for this type of legislation. Keep us posted, O Canada!

And finally, there were some excellent opinion pieces this week from Colin Wright on the New York Times coverage of Jamie Reed, Moonlit Piglet writing from the teacher’s perspective on parental notification for Wes Yang’s substack, and Stephanie Davies-Arai writing from the UK on the impact of lying to children.

Please share your thoughts in the comments below and through this form. Until next week, Happy Labor Day!

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With much appreciated research assistance from Alejandra Q