RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/georgia-state-lawmaker-proposes-making-gender-transition-surgery-for-minors-a-felony/

Republican State Representative Ginny Ehrhart from Georgia wants to make it a felony for doctors to perform gender transition procedures on minors, including mastectomy, vasectomy, castration and other forms of genital mutilation, and ban the prescription of puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormone therapy.

State Rep. Ginny Ehrhart, R-Powder Springs, said the legislation aims to protect children from having irreversible procedures done when they are young. Current law requires a parent to consent to surgery or for a minor to be prescribed medication.

While the bill is still being drafted, Ehrhart said Georgia medical providers who perform surgeries or administer or prescribe medications that assist minors with gender transition could be charged with a felony. The legislation would not affect doctors working with adults who seek to undergo gender transition.

“We’re talking about children that can’t get a tattoo or smoke a cigar or a cigarette in the state of Georgia but can be castrated and get sterilized,” she said.

While this seems like common sense to most people, Jeff Graham, the executive director of Georgia Equality, an LGBT rights group in the state, blasted the proposed legislation. “This legislation would criminalize decisions that are made carefully within families in consultation with medical professionals and mental health professionals. Supporting children in recognizing their gender identity is not only humane, it saves lives and strengthens families.”

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/24/it-should-be-illegal-to-give-children-transgender-hormones-and-surgery/

The left uses children as political pawns in the gender war and calls it a moral good, but the consequence of forcing kids into transition is denying them the ability to choose their own future.

When I was a child, I was fascinated with makeup. My grandmother would often let me sit on a small pink crushed velvet stool in her bathroom while she “put on her face,” as she liked to say. After putting every platinum blonde curl in place, she would carefully pout her lips and apply a thin layer of ruby red lipstick.

I watched, captivated by her transformation and the satisfaction on her face when every line, every shade was perfectly applied. My mother remembers catching me modeling my sister’s clothes, unaware of her presence and therefore entirely un-selfconscious of my movements. Everything about the female world inspired my imagination, and I longed to be connected to it.

A large contributing factor into this obsession was my grandmother’s open and repeated wish that she had a beautiful granddaughter to dress up and show off at social events. Per my father’s wishes, I was denied the ability to see my mother until I was about seven years old or so, and thus my need for a female role model fell squarely on my grandmother’s shoulders.

My grandmother improvised, highlighting my hair, painting my fingernails, and surrounding me exclusively with her female friends. Around my father, I had to pretend, as he grew aggressively angry whenever I presented the slightest feminine tendency.

At school I blended in with my female peers, who seemed to appreciate having a boy to give them attention, but it was safety for me. The boys were cruel and aggressive, and they never ceased in tormenting me daily. I only felt safe and free to be myself when I was alone with women. I would cry myself to sleep praying for G-d to turn me into a girl when I woke up so I could finally be free from the constant stress and conflict of my daily life. Each day I woke up sad and afraid.

My Struggle with Gender

As I grew up, I learned how to mimic my male peers just enough to avoid suspicion and to exploit my gentle nature as something adults found positive around their daughters. I was just “creative” or “sensitive” or, as was popular at the time, “in touch” with my feminine side to anyone who observed me.

But to me, I was struggling to feel a sense of holistic unity, divided by too many outside expectations that never quite fit into place. I explored transgender transition as a young adult and attempted to dress as a girl, change my voice, and wear makeup, but as the years passed, none of this felt quite right.

Eventually I found a balance between adolescent self-obsession and adult responsibility that did not allow for endless changes in identity or character, and I essentially grew up. Who I am now is everything left over from when I gave up on trying to be someone else, and for that I am grateful.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/23/gov-abbott-two-gov-offices-looking-into-case-of-little-boy-transitioning-to-girl-against-dads-wishes/

Texas governor Greg Abbott announced Wednesday evening that the Texas Attorney General’s Office and the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services is looking into the sad saga of James Younger, the seven year-old boy who may be forced to undergo chemical castration at the behest of his mother.

On Monday, a jury in Dallas ruled in favor of the boy’s mother, Dr. Anne Georgulas, allowing her to continue “transitioning” James to “Luna” using puberty blockers and eventually cross-sex hormones. The child has reportedly been “transitioning” into a girl since he was three.

Meanwhile, the boy’s father, Jeffrey Younger, will be required to “affirm” that his son as a girl, despite his religious and moral objections, and will be forced to take a class on transgenderism.

A few minutes after the governor’s tweet, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) also commented on the case, calling it “horrifying & tragic” and characterizing the procedure as “nothing less than child abuse.”

https://mashable.com/article/national-period-day-what-is/

We rarely talk in public about periods, but this is changing with Saturday’s first-ever National Period Day. 

On this day, people in all 50 states are rallying to highlight an invisible problem — period poverty. Many menstruators (not all people who menstruate are women; transgender men and non-binary people get their periods too) cannot access or afford essential items to manage their periods, like tampons and pads. This is in part because 35 states in the U.S. levy a sales tax on menstrual products, considering them non-essential. 

Everyone, whether a menstruator or not, is welcome to join in on the rallies. 

Nadya Okamoto, 21 years old, is leading the clarion call. Okamoto founded PERIOD, a youth-run nonprofit that supplies people with period products, when she was 16 years. She was drawn to the issue when she learned about period poverty while talking with people experiencing homelessness who couldn’t afford menstrual products, as Mashable reported in 2018. Okamoto was a homeless teenager herself at the time.

PERIOD @periodmovement

If faces were bleeding, someone would do something THIS SATURDAY is the first-ever #NationalPeriodDay. We’re hosting rallies in all 50 states to demand menstrual equity and an end to the #tampontax. Find your local rally at http://nationalperiodday.com . @SeventhGen @BBDOSF

https://quillette.com/2019/10/18/the-defenestration-of-domingo/

The #MeToo movement has ended the U.S. career of legendary 78-year-old Spanish tenor Placido Domingo, one of classical music’s greatest ambassadors and impresarios. For nearly half a century, his intense stage presence and warm, soaring voice captivated opera audiences; during the 1990s, he reached millions of new listeners as a member of the itinerant Three Tenors. In recent years, long after most singers have retired from the stage, he has continued a grueling international performance schedule, now singing baritone roles with remarkable pitch control and legato.

Domingo’s entrepreneurial drive has been as untiring as his stage career. He was pivotal in creating Los Angeles’s first full-time opera company, LA Opera, the culmination of two decades of artistic diplomacy in Southern California. As LA Opera’s general director, he wooed philanthropic support from philistine Hollywood and the city’s political class. In 1993, he founded the international opera competition, Operalia, one of several institutions he has established to promote young singers. He led the Washington National Opera as general director from 1996 to 2011, and his conducting career has spanned opera pits and concert stages around the world.

He has championed the unjustly neglected Spanish opera form, Zarzuela, which he sang growing up in Mexico City, and his charitable endeavors have extended beyond classical music; he led fundraising for Mexico City following its catastrophic earthquake in 1985. Testimonials to his kindness, generosity, and bottomless work ethic abound. Helga Rabl-Stadler, the president of the Salzburg Festival, the most important classical music gathering in the world, recently praised Domingo’s “appreciative treatment” of festival employees: “He knows every name, from the concierge to the secretary; he never fails to thank anyone performing even the smallest service for him.”

On August 13, 2019, however, the AP announced that nine females, all but one anonymous, were accusing Domingo of making unwanted sexual advances decades ago. The accusers—chorus singers, a few small-time soloists, and one ballet dancer—alleged wet kisses, solicitations to rehearse at his apartment, whispered blandishments while on stage, a hand down a shirt or up a skirt in cabs, and persistent phone calls.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/the-origins-of-the-transgender-movement/

We must not ignore cultural blind spots that put children at risk of abuse.

Editor’s Note: This article has been adapted from remarks delivered at a Heritage Foundation summit.

I’ve been asked to talk about the origins of transgenderism and how it relates to children and their exploitation. But first, I would like to start with a little story.

Yesterday I was wandering around outside the Supreme Court chatting with some people who were there to support what’s known as the LGBTQ+ community. I spoke with a lovely guy who identified as homosexual and then four teenage girls who identified as lesbian and queer. They asked me what I thought of the Human Rights Campaign, so I told them up front that I think it’s a force for tremendous harm in this country. Then, I asked them what they thought of Martin Luther King’s idea, the one about not defining people by irrelevant characteristics like their skin color, or in this case their sexual desires. They said it sounded like a very good idea.

Later, two men who were slightly less open-minded wanted to tell me about some horrible feminists called “terfs” who are apparently in cahoots with an even more horrible right-wing institution I probably hadn’t heard of because I’m Scottish. It’s called the Heritage Foundation. So, if anyone knows anyone from there, just let me know, because I want to make sure I don’t die by association.

The reason I mention this story, of course, is — other than the Heritage Foundation being a symbol for all that is evil and far-right in American politics — my experience with the LGBTQ+ community was that it wasn’t really a community so much as it was a big mishmash of people who feel they belong to a certain cause for very different reasons. Yet they were all there at the end of the rainbow to claim their pot of gold, which they had been promised by the Human Rights Campaign.

I’ve been asked to get to the origins of this movement, and I’m going to try to do that. Of course, as you know, it’s just one stripe of the rainbow, and I couldn’t possibly do it justice in ten minutes, but I’ll do my absolute best. There are three things that I think have been changing since the mid-20th century. The first is in medicine, the second is what I like to call an ontology of desire, and the third is what I and others call the politicization of everything.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/political_correctness_versus_common_sense.html

The masters of political correctness in America are moving fast. 

For example, consider the explosion of so-called gender identities.”  In 2016, New York City released a list of 31 genders approved by the city’s Commission on Human Rights.  While writing my book Reclaiming Common Sense, I consulted Google to find out how many genders there were then and was told that the answer was 63.  Today, while writing this article, I re-Googled that question, and it was revealed to me that the latest number is 112.

Political correctness about gender identities is metastasizing rapidly, making it difficult for ordinarily busy people to keep up.  And keep up we must, just as people living in the Soviet Union had to keep up with the constantly changing Communist party line.  Not long ago, everyone understood the unchanging commonsense reality that human beings are either male or female.  Today in New York City, the rules have been changed — and failure to keep up can have dire consequences.  New York City’s special 31 genders are surrounded by special legal protections.  Businesses can now be fined as much as $250,000 for refusing to address someone by his preferred pronoun.  As we have seen in the news, even in cities that have not yet have caught up with New York City in terms of imposing legal penalties, failing a test of political correctness about genders can result in public shaming or the loss of a job.

There is more to this story.  Consider the names given the genders officially approved by New York City’s Commission on Human Rights.  The names include “drag king,” “drag queen,” “butch,” “femme queen,” “gender fluid,” “gender blender,” “gender gifted,” “gender bender,” and “femme person of transgender experience.”  Talk about rubbing our noses in it!  The commissioners have gone out of their way to be outrageously transgressive.  This is not accidental.  They are making it abundantly clear they are ridiculing normal people and the world of common sense — the more outrageous, the better.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/10/let

In his essay Politics and the English Language George Orwell wrote:

A man may take a drink because he feels himself to be failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

On Fox News the other day Tucker Carlson interviewed Ralph Abraham, a Republican Louisiana gubernatorial candidate who happens to be a medical doctor experienced in delivering baby girls and boys. Both madly agreed that there are only two genders; thus, all unbeknown, falling into a linguistic quagmire. Taking a lead from Orwell, this is me writing to Carlson:

You interviewed a doctor today running for a state governorship. Both you and the doctor referred to gender not to sex. Language is important in moulding culture. There are two sexes, male and female. Using the term gender — a modern affectation transposed from the field of grammar, where it is used in some languages to describe the masculine or feminine forms of nouns and pronouns — muddies the water.

I have seen outlandish claims about there being tens upon tens of different genders. It is self-evidently ridiculous to claim that there are tens upon tens of different sexes. Language has allowed outlandish claims to be made and you and many other conservatives (or more generally, if you like, people of common sense) have fallen into the trap.

Sex is the right word as a noun to cover the two categories of people, according to their reproductive function. Stick to that and you expose the foolishness before it gets to first base.