“I went for two appointments and after the second one I had my letter to go get on cross-sex hormones.”
“[My therapist] didn’t really go into what my gender dysphoria might be stemming from. We only did a few sessions.”
“When everything that I set out to do was done, I still felt incomplete.”
These are the words of the young men and women who recently spoke to 60 Minutes about why they left the transgender movement. In each case, they sought help for gender dysphoria and depression and were very quickly put on a path toward cross-sex hormones and surgery only to experience regret after the fact. Sadly, stories like theirs are becoming all too common. Amid a rise in rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) the transgender movement continues to push for unquestioning affirmation when a young person is struggling with the feeling that they were born in the wrong body and encourage young adults, teenagers, and even young children to undergo puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible surgeries.
After watching biological males win their athletic events, fouryoung women in Connecticut stood up to the policy that cost them titles, opportunities, and potential scholarships. This week, a federal judge dismissed their case challenging the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference’s policy allowing biological males to compete in female athletics. Rather than weigh the merits of the case, the judge dismissed it as no longer relevant because the two male athletes who had been competing have since graduated. With the help of Alliance Defending Freedom, the four athletes are appealing the ruling.
In 2017, the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC) began to allow biological males who identify as female to compete in female athletic events. Very quickly, two male athletes, Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood began to dominate in girls’ track and field, and young women watched by the sidelines as their athletic events were won by young men. Alliance Defending Freedom has noted that two male athletes had, between the two of them, taken 15 women’s state championship titles and more than 85 opportunities to participate in higher-level competitions from female track athletes in the 2017, 2018, and 2019 seasons.
The Biden administration is appealing a federal judge’sruling affirming that religious hospitals should not be required to perform gender transition surgeries in violation of their deeply held beliefs.
In January, U.S. District Court Judge Peter Welte cited the Religious Freedom Restoration Act when he ruled in favor of Sisters of Mercy, an order of nuns committed to providing medical care to people in need. The Biden administration wants to see this ruling overturned and has filed an appeal in hopes of forcing religious hospitals to comply with the transgender agenda. Recently appointed HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra is leading the charge.
On Monday evening, Bloomington became the ninthMinnesota city to adopt a so-called “conversion therapy ban.” Other cities that have adopted these bans include Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Duluth, and Rochester. With Bloomington joining their ranks, that means the five largest cities in Minnesota have adopted counseling bans. These draconianbans prevent minors who are struggling with unwanted same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria from receiving counseling to help them live in accordance with their biological sex.
By policing what a licensed counselor or therapist may say to his or her clients, these bans inappropriately infringe on the relationship between mental health care providers and their clients. Under Bloomington’s ban, mental health professionals can be fined $500 for their first violation and $1000 for subsequent violations if they offer counseling that does not fall in line with the LGBT agenda.
It is not the place of elected officials to determine who gets counseling care and who doesn’t, and yet that is exactly what these bans do. These bans prevent families and individuals from pursuing and licensed professionals from offering counsel that accords with their Christian beliefs.
For young people struggling with gender dysphoria, counseling bans leave them to be ushered into social transition and medical “treatments” that carry tragic life-long effects and do not improve mental health outcomes. The vast majority of minors struggling with gender dysphoria who do not “transition” become comfortable with their biological sex by the time they reach adulthood.
This week Arkansas made history by becoming the first state to protect children with gender dysphoria from puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones, and mutilating sex-reassignment surgeries. On Monday, Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson vetoed the bill, arguing that it abandons conservative principles of limited government. Thankfully, the legislature overrode his veto on Tuesday afternoon.
By claiming that this bill goes against conservative principles, Hutchinson disregards the seriousness of so-called “gender-affirming treatments” for children with gender dysphoria, which prevent the normal development that happens during puberty. These “treatments,” which often dismiss underlying mental health concerns, are experimental, and have dangerous side effects, leaving children chemically castrated. Chemical interventions are frequently followed by mutilating surgeries to create the appearance of opposite-sex genitalia, and double mastectomies have been performed on girls as young as 13.
“Limited government” does not mean that the government should allow experimentation on children, or that we cannot unequivocally say that it is wrong to tell a child that he or she was born in the wrong body. And “limited government” certainly does not mean that the government gets to abdicate its responsibility to protect children from abusive practices at the hands of adults.
33 students and former students of Christian colleges and Universities are suing the Department of Education in an effort to strong-arm religious schools into accepting and promoting the LGBT agenda. Although the Department of Education is technically the plaintiff, the real targets are religious colleges and universities. The complaintlists 25religious colleges and universities and has serious implications for all religious schoolsthat receive federal funds. The students, all of whom identify as LGBT, are alleging discrimination because the religious colleges and universities that they attended or applied for prohibited sexual activity outside of marriage between one man and one woman and did not allow pro-LGBT student groups that were at odds with the school’s religious beliefs to be established on campus.
Most, but not all, of these colleges and universities are Christian schools and all of them maintainthese policies based on their deeply held and clearly stated religious beliefs concerning human sexuality. There is no reason whatsoever that these policies should have come as a surprise to these students. Each of these colleges and universities have made their stance on sexuality public for years. The students filing this lawsuit could easily have chosen to attend one of the myriads of schools that embrace the LGBT agenda. Demanding that religious colleges and universities either submit to the LGBT agenda or lose their funding is nothing other than a bully tactic to silence any and all disagreement.
As the Supreme Court prepares to decide the fate of religious foster care and adoption agencies in Fulton v. Philadelphia, Bethany Christian Services, the nation’s largest foster care and adoption agency, has announced that they will begin placing children with LGBT couples. This follows Bethany’s decision to avoid the legal fight for religious freedom by quietly choosing to place children with LGBT couples in states thatrefuse to work with religious agencies that hold to biblical sexual ethics. Now they have decided to make it their policy nationwide to place children with LGBT couples.
For many years, Bethany stated that they believed that “God’s design for the family is a covenant and lifelong marriage of one man and one woman.” This statement reflecting God’s design for the family was removed from their website in January. Speaking to the New York Times, Bethany’s senior vice president for public and government affairs, Nathan Bult, emphasized that Bethany’s board, which saw the departure of more than one of their more conservative members since 2018, now consists of members who have “diverse personal views on sexuality.”
Wow! We're amazed that thousands of Minnesotans took action on the three action alerts we sent out on Monday. I want to give you an update on the three major threats to life, family, and religious freedom that we saw unfold this week. The U.S. House of Representatives passed the so-called “Equality Act,” two Senate Committees held confirmation hearings for President Biden’s HHS nominee, Xavier Becerra, who is known for using his position as California Attorney General to attack the pro-life movement, and here in Minnesota, another hearing on a bill mandating “comprehensive” sex education in K-12 classrooms across the state moved that piece of legislation forward.
1. The Inequality Act
Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Equality Act, which, if it passes the Senate, would make sexual orientation and gender identity a protected status under the Civil Rights Act. By equating subjective, fluid, and invisible qualities like sexual orientation and gender identity with race and ethnicity, this act presents a serious threat to religious freedom, free speech, and conscience rights. Additionally, it radically expands abortion “rights,” threatens the safety and privacy of women and children, and would destroy opportunities for female athletes.
Recent research from Gallup found that 5.6% of the US population identifies as LGBT, representing a 4.5% increase from 2017, the last year that Gallup collected data on this. Gallup Research points out that one of the reasons for this rise is that Generation Z is more likely to identify as LGBT than older generations. Currently, one in six Gen Zers identify as LGBT.
Of that one in six, 72% say that they are bisexual. Abigail Shrier has pointed out the way that LGBT-affirming curriculum in schools often reduces maleness and femaleness to rigid stereotypes, leading many students to embrace an LGBT identity because they do not feel like they fit those stereotypes. Shrier writes,
All this purported education encourages adolescents to focus relentlessly on their own gender identities and sexual orientations. It encourages students to look constantly for landmark feelings or impulses, anything that might point toward “genderfluid,” “genderqueer,” “asexual,” or “non-binary.” And it encourages the subtle formation of two camps: us and them. The imaginary divide between those who fit perfectly into cartoonish gender stereotypes and those who don’t. The dauntless young, who welcome different gender identities and sexual orientations, versus their phobic elders, who don’t.
When male and female are reduced to cartoonish stereotypes and students are encouraged to constantly question their identity andsexuality, students are likely to fixate on the slightest indication that they might be LGBT, even if they are attracted to members of the opposite sex. Given this, it’s not surprising that nearly three-quarters of young adults who identify as LGBT describe themselves as bisexual.
The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote next week on House Resolution 5 (H.R. 5), the so-called “Equality Act,”a measure that will have disastrous consequences for women, children, people of faith – all Americans.
H.R. 5 adds the legally undefined “sexual orientation and gender identity” (SOGI) to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other federal non-discrimination laws. The bill redefines “sex” to no longer mean the biological “male or female.” Instead, “sex” would include sex stereotypes, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
H.R. 5 brings the police power of the federal government against those who believe the biological truth of God's design, that "male and female He created them" (Genesis 5:2). The bill labels Christian beliefs about marriage, sexuality, and family “discriminatory.” It empowers the federal government to punish disagreement on this important issue.
This dangerous bill provides no religious exemptions. In fact, it explicitly exempts the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as a defense for violations.
It is no secret that Planned Parenthood has a history of disregarding human life and dignity.While committing over 300,000 abortions per year,the abortion giant has been caught injuring women disregarding their safety, aiding sex-traffickers,and profiting off of the body parts of unborn babies who have been killed in abortions, when they are not disposing of those babies as medical waste.Planned Parenthood’s recent expansion into “gender medicine” once again demonstrates their willingness to put profits over people as they dole out harmful “treatments” to teenagers with almost no questions asked.
Abigail Shrier recently wrote that about her interactions with a former Planned Parenthood “reproductive health assistant” whose job was to screen patients and take down their health history. The former employee told Shrier, “[Planned Parenthood’s] recent roles in trans activism are abhorrent,” explaining that during her 18 months working for Planned Parenthood, an average of 1-2 girls arrived at the clinic seeking testosterone every day.
We live in a sexually broken society. Increasingly, sex is divorced from marriage, marriage is redefined, children are taught that gender identity exists apart from biological realities, and our culture struggles to even acknowledge that men and women are different. It’s a tragedy and one that requires the church to respond. Writing at The Public Discourse, Timothy O’Malleyrecently observed that at least one aspect of this sexual brokenness, “hookup culture,” is not simply about sexual excess, but is driven by fear of commitment and vulnerability, anxiety over the future, and ultimately, hopelessness. O’Malley argues that this anxiety and fear create a greater willingness to engage in casual sex. Behind much of the brokenness of the world around us is fear and despair.
O’Malley points out that, in order to respond to this, we need to commit ourselves to a high view of marriage and family. He writes,
What if religious and conservative higher education ceased speaking about marriage and family life as an accomplishment and began to treat marriage and children as that which enable human flourishing and a meaningful future?
All too often, marriage and family are treated as something extra, rather than something that is essential. God’s design for marriage, family, and sexuality is not theicing on the cake but necessary to human flourishing and part of the bedrock of a strong and stable society.
Within hours of President Joe Biden’s inauguration yesterday, he signed an executive order advancing the transgender agenda. Expanding on last summer’s Bostock decision, which redefined “sex” to include sexual orientation and gender identity under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, this order requires all federal agencies to accept this definition of sex in their policies against sex discrimination. When the Supreme Court ruled on Bostock, the majority held that “bathrooms, locker rooms or anything else of that kind” were questions for another day. Yesterday’s executive order makes these questions a pressing concern for today.
The order specifically states that Bostock’s definition of sex should be applied to Title IX as well as the Fair Housing Act. This will mean that federal policy will require male athletes who identify as female to be allowed to compete on girls’ sports teams, and that women’s shelters would not be allowed to deny housing to biological men who identify as women. The Biden administration has set a course to deny athletic opportunities to our nation’s girls, as well as disregard the safety and privacy of women and children.
In a recently approved rule package for the 117th Congress, passed along partisan lines, the House of Representatives has House adopted “gender-neutral” language in the name of “diversity and inclusion.” The document removes sex-specific terms, replacing words like “father” and “mother” with “parent,” “aunt” and “uncle” with “parent’s sibling” and so on, attempting to erase the way that the differences between the sexes shape these relationships.
The push for “gender-neutral” language matters because words are never “just” words. Words are how we communicate with and about the world around us, and it’s important that the words we use tell the truth about the world. If they don’t, then we put ourselves at odds with reality. Insisting on “gender-neutral” language implies that humans are essentially “gender-neutral.” This simply is not the case. A person’s “true self” cannot be separated from their biological sex. To be a human is to have a body and to have a body is to be either male or female. We cannot deny this without denying reality itself.
Cali was trafficked and abused beginning at the age of nine. At 23, she is five years out of that life, but videos of her abuse continue resurfacing on pornography sites no matter how many times she asks to have them removed. “Pornhub has become my trafficker,” she told Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times. Her story is one of many documented in Kristof’s recent investigative column “The Children of Pornhub,” documenting how the pornography industry profits off of rape, abuse, and exploitation, wreaking havoc on the lives of innocent victims, many of whom are minors. Kristof’s article has drawn public attention to the evil being done by Pornhub, prompting a swift response that will hopefully have lasting effects.
Pornhub, owned by Mindgeek, the largest pornography company in the world, is notorious for its willingness to profit from exploitation and abuse. Laila Mickelwait of Exodus Cry launched a petition in February to shut down Pornhub after publishing an article detailing the ways that the company was complicit in exploiting women and children for profit. In March, lawmakers called on the Justice Department to launch an investigation into the companyafter a missing teenage girlwas found in over 50 videos on the website. Pornhub confirmed that she had been a “verified user” when the videos were uploaded, unintentionally highlighting the way that their lax verification standards had enabled her abuse. Her rapist was prosecuted, but Pornhub faced no consequences.
Between 2016 and 2017, the number of “gender transition” surgeries performed on adolescent girls quadrupled. This shocking increase in teenage girls suddenly claiming they were “born in the wrong body” and seeking life-altering, experimental surgeries is made even more alarming by the fact that this appears to be a “craze”—an intense and often short-lived cultural enthusiasm that spreads like a virus. Unlike other crazes that have affected teenagers in recent years, this one comes with lifelong effects and frequently encourages teens to completely alienate themselves from their parents.
In her recent book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, Abigail Shrier documents this disturbing trend. One of the contributing factors that she highlights is the role that many public schools play in fueling the transgender movement and undermining parents. Shrier reports that in June of 2019, the California Teachers Association’s policy-making branch voted on a proposal that would allow students to leave campus during school hours to receive puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones without the “barrier” of parental consent. In January of this year, the CTA’s Civil Rights in Education Subcommittee recommended creating “school-based healthcare clinics” that would offer “cisgender, transgender and non-binary youth equal and confidential access to a broad range of physical, mental and behavioral services.”
According to a recently released documentary,Pope Francis has expressed approval of civil unions for same-sex couples, saying, “Homosexuals have a right to be a part of the family. They’re children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out, or be made miserable because of it,” and “What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered.” Some have argued that the Pope’s comments are taken out of context and that the film misrepresents his position, but the Vatican has not yet issued clarification on this matter.
Pope Francis would not be the first person to call for civil unions as an alternative to same-sex marriage. While this may seem like a compassionate approach, affirming and encouraging people in a lifestyle that is at odds with God’s design is not a loving thing to do. In 2003, the Catholic church affirmed this by saying,
The Church teaches that respect for homosexual persons cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behaviour or to legal recognition of homosexual unions. The common good requires that laws recognize, promote and protect marriage as the basis of the family, the primary unit of society. Legal recognition of homosexual unions or placing them on the same level as marriage would mean not only the approval of deviant behaviour, with the consequence of making it a model in present-day society, but would also obscure basic values which belong to the common inheritance of humanity. The Church cannot fail to defend these values, for the good of men and women and for the good of society itself.
Parents should know what happens in their children’s schools and they should be informed immediately if their child is experiencing or mental health struggles while they are at school. This is basic common sense. Unfortunately, Madison Metropolitan School District adoptedan update to their policies and guidelines handbook in 2018 allowing and encouraging teachers to deceive parents of children struggling with gender dysphoria. Under these guidelines, students are able to socially “transition” behind their parents back, adopting a new name and using opposite sex pronouns while at school without their parents ever knowing. The district encouragedteachers to exploit a legal loophole in order to conceal information from parents by filing “Gender Support Plans” in their personal notes instead of in the student’s official records. Earlier this year, a group of concerned parents filed a lawsuitchallenging this harmful policy and this week the court issued an injunction prohibiting the school district from deceiving parents. The injunction will be in place until the court rules on the case.
A policy that encourages children to live a double life and enables teachers to hide important information about a child’s mental health from their parents is unhealthy and troubling. In an expert affidavit, Dr. Stephen Levine wrote,
For a child to live radically different identities at home and at school, and to conceal what he or she perceives to be his or her true identity from parents, is psychologically unhealthy in itself, and could readily lead to additional psychological problems.
Yesterday the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled that the Anoka-Hennepin school district must allow students to use restrooms and locker rooms on the basis of their gender identity rather than their biological sex. Last year the parents of a student identified as N.H. alleged that the school had discriminated against their daughter, who identifies as a male, by telling her not to use the main boys’ locker room. The school provided a separate locker room for her because she was not comfortable using the girls’ locker room.
Treating a student who is struggling with gender dysphoria with compassion and dignity does not have to come at the expense of the privacy of other students, and the school demonstrated that fact by making accommodations for N.H. Unfortunately, the Appeals Court has determined that privacy for all students is discriminatory and that students should be required to share intimate spaces with members of the opposite sex.
In 2015, a Virginia high school was sued for a policy maintaining single-sex restrooms and locker rooms.Three years after graduation, Gavin Grimm, a female student who announced before her sophomore year that she identified as male, is still pursuing litigationagainst the school board. The Gloucester County School board has stood their ground in defendingthe policy. Following a loss in a federal court, the school’s most recent appeal means that the case could make its way to the Supreme Court.
When Grimm first announced to school administrators that she identified as male, they allowed her to use the restroom in the nurse’s office. Grimm complained that this was stigmatizing and insistedon using the boys’ restroom. When parents expressed concern, the school adopted a policy that required students to use restrooms and locker rooms corresponded with their biological sex, while also making unisex, single-stall restrooms available to any student who wished to use them. In response, Grimm sued with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union,alleging that the school had violated Title IX and discriminated against her on the basis of sex.In 2017, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower courts, leading to three more years of court battles. In the case’s most recent development, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Grimm, prompting the school to appeal for a full review of the case.
