Your Receipts #2
What you couldn't say
Thank you for continuing to send your receipts, which I’ll keep sharing. Kara Dansky had the brilliant idea of making a Receipts tab where they will live permanently, so I’ll do that soon.
A compendium of rejected pitches and letters to mainstream Canadian outlets can be found here: “Parent Account: Mainstream Media Ignore Parent Concerns and Mounting Evidence that GAC is Harming Children.”
Journalist pitches to NY Times:
From: XXXX
Date: Wed, Aug 4, 2021 at 2:17 PM
Subject: Ideas
Hi XXX
Exploring gender during adolescence. The other idea I find myself thinking about a lot these days is how teens are exploring gender. Many of my own teenager’s friends are identifying as nonbinary (as they/them) and I’m wondering why this is becoming so common versus when I was an adolescent. What is driving this? In my limited experience, it appears that many of the kids are rejecting our society’s binary, gendered norms. I was taught, as a young girl, that girls could do or be anything, just as boys could. For this generation of teens, that seems to be shifting. Gender is both fluid for some kids and irrelevant for others. What is at the heart of this wave of questioning? And how can we parent our teens through this somewhat uncharted territory?
For this article I would talk to developmental psychologists, gender experts, and people in the trans community for their perspectives. I think many parents may be facing this new territory and wondering how to support their children as they evolve.
Thank you so much for considering these ideas,
XXX
___
On Wed, Oct 19, 2022 at 11:55 AM - XXX wrote:
Subject: Huge increase in top surgery for trans youth and majority are white adolescent girls -JAMA Pediatrics
Hi XXX,
Just wondering if you’ve seen this new study (attached). I wanted to send it along because I honestly think it’s an important issue to cover.
(We’re dealing with a lot of gender questioning in my house- -with my pre-teen and teenage kids- - and it’s no surprise since it is everywhere and all over tiktok, etc.)
This study shows a huge increase in top surgeries for teens between 2016 and 2019 (which doesn’t even include the continued rise in trans-identifying kids in the years since 2019):
“Between 2016 and 2019, the annual num- ber of gender-affirming chest surgeries increased by 389% (100 in 2016 vs 489 in 2019; P < .001) “
It also breaks down the demographics, which shows it’s 70 percent white teens. MUCH more common to go from female to male- -and to happen in a more affluent population.
I’ve just been seeing and reading a lot about the huge numbers of white teenage girls transitioning to boys in the last several years. And frankly, it’s happening in my house. I have a lot of evidence re. why I think it’s happening but I just thought you may want to cover this issue. Not even with me as the writer.
Hope all is well,
XXX
Grow Some Labia’s post that got her banned from Medium:
From UU Minister Richard Trudeau, to the UU alternative publication UUnderWorld
PRELIMINARY CATEGORIZATION OF UU MINISTERS WHO ENDORSE THE GENDER TRANSITION OF MINORS
Rev. Richard Trudeau
1. Fools. “Little girls can sometimes grow up to be boys, and little boys, to be girls. They know who they are, and just want to be their authentic selves. It’s no one else’s business.”
2. Ostriches. “If I investigate this issue, I may discover that I have to make a tough moral decision. I don’t want to find myself in that position, so I choose not to investigate. If anyone asks what I think, I’ll just repeat the UUA-UUMA party line.”
3. Some transgender ministers. “I don’t want to have to face the fact that I may have made a terrible mistake.”
4. Sheep. “I can see that the gender transition of minors is both a psychotheraputic-medical scandal and deeply immoral. But I don’t want the UUA, the UUMA, or my congregants to be mad at me, so I’ll lie and pretend to believe in it.”
5. Toxic empaths. “I think not hurting anyone’s feelings is more important than telling them what I think is the truth.”
The UUMA motto is “because we need one another.” Indeed, we need one another in order to maintain the echo-chamber that keeps us UU ministers isolated from common sense and reality. While the UUA’s 1961 birth certificate may have said that “the foundation of our religious fellowship” is “a free and disciplined search for truth,” today we know that, actually, belonging is the most important thing.
The editor’s response:
"I'm not gonna run the one about the Preliminary Categorization of UU Ministers. The 'trans' issue is just not something I want to deal with in the magazine. There is way too much emotion, and from what I have seen in other venues, no one is listening and I cannot allow UUnderWorld to get caught up in that endless, fruitless debate.”
From@RoisinMichaux:
I sent this article to @POLITICOEurope in response to their claim that the issue of the erasure of women’s sex-based rights in the EU is a non-organic “toxic culture war” that has been recently “imported” to the EU bubble by nefarious far-right forces.
Here’s the truth: this issue has been ignored by Brussels media for many years, despite the long-running effort of extremists inside and outside of the EU institutions to replace sex with gender identity in law and policy (EU law and policy being Politico Europe’s domain). Women’s rights are being demolished, but Politico Europe is pretending they haven’t noticed it up until now, and anyway it’s a non-story, so why u bitches acting so crazy. Everyone knows this is not true. The reality is much more likely that they can’t touch it because it makes their woke staff (and political-access granters) big mad. Many such cases.
I did not receive any responses from anyone of the editorial staff. The text has been lightly edited.
There’s an ongoing effort to remove – or at least to downgrade the primacy of – biological sex in European law and in policy. This effort began many years ago. It was never stated explicitly in so many words that that was the goal, so nobody really noticed it was happening. Instead, it was given the label “promoting transgender rights” and you had to look under the hood to discover the specificities, among which is this: the sex that someone feels that they are should have supremacy – for all purposes – over the sex that that person actually is.
By the time anyone noticed this sex/gender identity switcheroo was happening, it was well underway, and it looked far too late to do much about it. Many wondered how it had got so far without any of us noticing. Had the details of “promoting transgender rights” ever been examined out in the open?
But why does it matter, anyway, you might wonder, if we replace actual-sex with felt-sex in the legal and administrative domains? That question is a really good test of one’s ability to engage in second-order thinking. If we open up the possibility to anyone to claim to be the opposite sex, what kinds of downstream effects would that have in society?
For the more pragmatic among us, we might immediately think in terms of healthcare spending, insurance rates, demographic predictions, and so on. For those of us who care about the safety and dignity of women and girls, our predictions are more oriented towards prisons, sports, and intimate care, among other areas of life.
Women’s rights campaigners like me looked to the media, the place where such analysis usually emerges when big social changes like are being proposed, and we found nothing. We looked to the EU-funded organisations that are purported to represent women’s and lesbian’s interests. Nada.
We found that not only had nobody looked under the hood; but that the establishment seemed to be unquestioningly supporting the change, at worst, and ignoring that it was happening, at best.
It turned out that the question “Why does removing sex in law and policy matter?” can also be a great way to reveal one’s social class.
It’s not news to point out that those of us who circulate in the rarified media, public administration, political lobbying, and knowledge-producing sectors of this city – basically, the Brussels bubble – are somewhat at a remove from the realities of the daily lives of EU citizens.
Many have fallen into the trap of thinking that a press release from an EU-funded “civil society stakeholder” NGO represents the interests of the people of this continent. Many might also make the mistake of thinking that the median opinion of a WhatsApp Ixelles-yoga-brunch-dogwalking meetup bears any kind of resemblance to public opinion generally.
The rise of right-wing populism all around the EU shows how delusional this thinking really is. People are opening their news sites and finding a world described to them that bears little resemblance to the world they see when they walk outside their front doors. This disconnect has shown up repeatedly in the polls.
And to what does the Brussels establishment attribute this electoral swing to the right? Do we wonder if perhaps the gender stuff has been overdone?
Nope!
It’s all just “toxic culture wars”, according to the reporters of Politico Europe (Influence newsletter 12/2). Imported, no less, from hotbeds of hate like the UK, the US and Hungary. No woman in Brussels, it was concluded, would have ever wondered about the consequences of sex-erasure on her and her daughters had it not been for Trump, Orban, Putin, or Mr <insert baddies name here>.
Do I even have to point out how sexist this is?
Women’s rights campaigners in Belgium and around the EU (no, not just the UK) have been trying to expose the myriad horrors that have resulted from the sex/gender identity swap-out for years. You might not have heard about us, because Brussels media has studiously ignored us.
Did you know that in the Netherlands, young gender non-conforming boys – who would most likely just turn out to be gay men – are having their knee joints fused to avoid them growing too tall, for the explicit purpose of helping them “pass” as female when older?
With horrors like this going on, I was delighted when MCC Brussels, a think tank funded with money from big scary Budapest, invited me, multiple times, to help expose to a Brussels audience what’s going on. I was delighted when
a Green MP from Austria, who went on to found
, was asked to speak on an MCC Brussels panel about the harms of the erasure of sex-based rights to same-sex attracted people like her, rights that were decades in the securing.
Finally a microphone!
Our decision to accept, graciously, the invitation of MCC Brussels was not simply a case of “any port in a storm”. Nobody will pay for polling on this for fear of upsetting the “stakeholders” but social media, and non-mainstream news outlets, show that on this hot topic social issue, public opinion is far more aligned with the prevailing social attitudes of the leaders of Europe’s eastern bloc than it is here in Etterbeek. Again, just look at who’s rising in the polls.
MCC Brussels, and Viktor Orban, might have political goals that horrify the Brussels elite. But your reporter got the dynamic backwards. The establishment – and the media – reflexively dismissing people’s concerns because Orban Man Bad is digging itself into a hole that it will be very hard to crawl out of.
The same day I learned that fighting to protect the safety and dignity of women and girls was an “imported toxic culture war”, the European Parliament plenary voted that the UN should recognise that all “trans women are women”, specifically demanding that they have access to women-only spaces, including domestic violence shelters.
If anyone at Politico Europe is interested in interviewing someone about the potential consequences of this, hit me up and I’ll put you in touch with some very smart women. There are millions of us.
love the UU minister’s contribution.
Receipts! In the last year, I’ve sent 4 different sensible letters to the Ed of Boston Globe, re transing kids.