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It's so frustrating, isn't it? I submitted no fewer than six op eds to major outlets in the wake of the election, including to the Washington Post, New York Times, and Boston Globe (I didn't try the LA Times). The Post at least did me the courtesy of rejecting me; the others ignored me. I finally got this published in The Hill, but it's such a slog. https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/5004781-democratic-leftist-feminist-criticizes/

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Oy. Thank goodness for Substack! I see signs of a shift in the MSM in the wake of Skrmetti--they seem more willing to talk about laws re medicalization of minors, because hey, it's SCOTUS--but they still won't touch the ideology as it affects women and girls.

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As I'm sure you know, the NYT interviewed Glenna Goldis during the rally outside the Court during oral arguments, but didn't bother to print what she had to say. It's infuriating.

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Thanks for Your perseverance against the borg.

I only wish there were a comments section on the Hill article—which would be overwhelmingly in support of Your position, as commenters alws have been in the few instances where commenting has been allowed on trans-related articles in the NYT, on YouTube, etc.

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The message of your op ed is way too threatening to the status quo at this time. Maybe state your case less overtly? Raise questions. Be as succinct and concise as you can while acknowledging the good intentions of the activists you oppose. Remember, they have been grossly mislead by trusted institutions (AMA, APA, Pediatric Endocrine Society, ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Planned Parenthood, etc.) that have been overtaken by gender ideologues. For example: (https://unherd.com/newsroom/american-medical-association-doubles-down-on-gender-ideology/)

What we are up against is HUGE. I don't know what approach would work best, but it's going to be tough. Just don't give up.

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We won't :)

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Gender craziness is just one (but an important) issue that killed the Democrats in November. Here’s my stock response. Sorry if you’ve seen it before.

After the election the Democratic Party (my party) must rethink many of its policies as it ponders its future.

To be entrusted with power again Democrats must start listening to the concerns of the working class for a change. As a lifelong moderate Democrat I share their disdain for many of the insane positions advocated by my party. We are no longer the patriotic, sensible party of FDR and JFK.

Democrat politicians defy biology by believing that men can actually become women and belong in women’s sports, rest rooms, locker rooms and prisons and that children should be mutilated in pursuit of the impossible.

They believe borders should be open to millions of illegals which undermines workers’ wages and the affordability of housing when we can’t house our own citizens.

They discriminate against whites, Asians and men in a futile effort to counter past discrimination against others and undermine our economy by abandoning merit selection of students and employees.

Democratic mayors allow homelessness to destroy our beautiful cities because they won't say no to destructive behavior. No, you can’t camp in our city. No, you can’t shit in our streets. No, you can’t shoot up and leave your used needles everywhere. Many of our prosecutors will not take action against shoplifting unless a $1000 of goods are stolen leading to gangs destroying retail stores. They release criminals without bail to commit more crimes.

The average voter knows this is happening and outright reject our party. Enough.

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You're making unfair generalizations about "Democrat" politicians. It's DEMOCRATIC, got it? Most of us Democrats aren't even on board with gender ideology or CRT. We go along with DEI initiatives to keep our jobs, not because we agree with what we're taught in these training sessions. We absolutely don't want "open borders," or cities overrun with homeless people and criminals. Cities that have elected these incompetent officials are throwing the bums out. We want a free and fair society, not a dysfunctional one. How to get there is a challenge no one has solved, and that goes for Republicans too.

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E. Kathryn: Democrat or Democratic. I am a Democrat. It seems like you generally agree with my points. You are smart to do so. 😎

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Good list overall. The only item you listed that couldn't reasonably have ••cost the Dems votes IN 2024•• is reverse racial discrimination—since that has been a pillar of Democratic politics for decades (as "affirmative action").

It's actually a bit ironic that you've spotlighted reverse racial discrimination here, since that's the one part of the runaway identity politics that's as old as dirt and therefore isn't going to make tons of voters suddenly cross the aisle in 2024.

What HAS made tons of ppl turn their backs on Dems and the left, though, is all of the OTHER, newer, hyper-"woke" prongs of DEI and ESG—the parts of DEI where all of corporate America is now completely in thrall to made-up luxury identity groups, and the ESG points dictated by global elites with an explicit agenda to immiserate and dispossess huge majorities of people under the dubious guise of "net zero" and other such fairy dust.

.

Seeing huge numbers of state and federal Democrats side with a repressive military dictatorship run by a murderous Islamic theocratic terrorist junta, against America's longtime strategic ally which also happens to be the only democratic republic in the Middle East—while brainlessly repeating IRGC lies about "genocide" and "apartheid" (I'm so old I remember when those words actually MEANT things... very serious things)—was the final straw for a not-insignificant number of longtime Democratic voters, too.

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Alewifey: Good points. I guess I saw the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action in elite universities as highlighting the issue broadly. I certainly agree with your view of the impact of the war in Gaza although the Democratic Party itself has been very supportive of Israel and taken a lot of heat from its left wing for it. I don’t think that climate change did much one way or the other. Thanks again for a well written analysis.

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The climate stuff may seem innocuous or understated to random people on the street, because that's part of the point—ir's been kept broadly unobjectionable, so that it could be used as a Trojan horse to inject gender ideology into mega-corporate America, via ESG ratings.

More specifically, ESG scores—on which corporate credit now heavily depends (and therefore so do big corporations themselves, most of which are vastly over-leveraged and dependent on massive lines of credit)—was originally instituted as a way to encourage/reward sustainability practices. But now, the financial entities that control the levers of ESG and corporate credit are just as captured as other institutions—to the tune of fully 25% of the ESG score now being transgenderist garbage, and much more of it designed to siphon off corporate assets to "net zero" and other schemes of the WEF and their worldwide network of cronies—which (shocker!, I know) have no estimated budget or scope limitations, and no criteria whatsoever on which they can be evaluated or reassessed. Just blank checks all around.

This Is why big corporations have "gone woke"—because their financing is being ransomed. Not, contrary to popular belief, just because everybody in marketing suddenly caught the same terminal case of stupid at the same time.

Read more here (archive link—this article was public for over a year) https://archive.ph/yo0LC

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This piece is pitch-perfect. My compliments to whoever was involved in writing it. I will restack, as I hope others do, as it should be widely read and shared.

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Thank you, Susan!

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Very well done, a pleasure to read.

The Tuskegee Syphilis “experiment” involved 600 men who were not informed they were in an experiment, and the entire exercise was an atrocity which took 40 years, and caused wives and infants to develop syphilis.

The effect of the atrocity was decades of black distrust of effective medicine, likely leading to additional disease, suffering and death,

We now have at least 12,000 children who were not informed they were involved in an experimental procedure which has no evidence of effectiveness.

I think if I could give you feedback I would make clearer this is an experiment on children, similar to Tuskegee and perhaps Lobotomy, where they were never informed they were given an experimental procedure which has failed.

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"The damage goes beyond lost medals for female athletes and lost healthy lives for young people." Exactly. Bravo! How much goodwill has the ACLU lost, thanks to this performative liberalism? Who will believe them when they want to fight for actual civil liberties once again? How has NPR, SPLC, or lost? How much has the Democratic Party lost? And most importantly, how much has SCIENCE lost? Performative liberalism is easy. Doing it is hard because that involves doing unglamorous tasks away from the limelight. Helping an adolescent in distress with their gender expectations, sitting down with each one of them, months or even years at a time, listening to them, and understanding them is hard, unglamorous work. The kind of work that CNN will not interview you for, and nor will Simon and Schuster publish a book about that. You will not get to write op-eds in the New York Times about the “transcendent sense of gender” that “goes beyond language." So, yeah, one can understand *why* these institutions (and the individuals that house them) became so enamored by their narcissistic navel-gazing instead of doing the hard yards.

I will argue that once these institutions lost sight of their lodestar and equated value to the attached dollar tag, *everything* was lost. How do you measure the impact of the ACLU? Easy. Look at the number of dollars they raked in. Or the impact of NPR? Easy. Look at the dollar value of their fall (or spring) fund drive. The Democratic Party? By the $1.5 billion that they raked in just three months (it is only now that the New York Times is reporting how that money was squandered; see, for example, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/07/us/politics/harris-philadelphia-black-latino-voters.html). What's the impact of science and research (in general and more specifically in gender medicine)? Easy. Look at the number of dollars the researchers raked in from their latest grant (and never mind if they don't publish the findings when the results do not suit their agenda).

And when the *worth* of everything is in terms of their dollar tag, expect the true practitioners to cede ground to hucksters. That is not to say that there are vulnerable people who are suffering and who need solutions. They do.

However, when *everything* becomes performative, hucksters will always be there to fill the void. Whether it is Donald J. Trump in politics or Jack L. Turban in "gender-affirming care." And in their wake, there will be their most zealous acolytes... most often the people who are hurting the most and who will be hurt the most by their actions.

How long we allow the likes of DJT or JLT to flourish is up to us.

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Beautifully put, ML. Part of me feels we also need to do some fighting fire with fire, dollars with dollars. I see a nascent market for gender-rational services of various types, from lawyers to life coaches to therapists to educators to detrans medicine. Let's harness capitalism and help that market grow. Why should the devil have all the best tunes?

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Gender was the last straw for many working class voters. It showed the Dems had given up on common sense. We should never forget the “ groups “ that pushed Biden to this lunacy. To compare trans rights to the civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s is an insult. These are kids and kids who need a lot of mental health support.

Now we have Trump. Medicaid will get gutted. We don’t deserve this.

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Can we please have the main media tell the USA that this was a lie and that are children fell for the biggest lie ever and to get proper mental help.

We need our adult children to stop getting access to hormones and to please get mental help to come out of this cult.

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Part of the problem here in the UK, which seen to have imported the “trans” wars from the US, is the absolute unwillingness of the gender-absolutists to engage in dialogue. I scheduled a (philosophical) talk entitled ‘Changing “Sex”: Can progressives disagree about “trans rights”?’ to students at my university and it was cancelled by my Head of Department after some colleagues denounced me as a “transphobe”!

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I know, it's the same here. It's like they're all wearing giant horse blinkers and earmuffs.

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Yes. I found it way too ironic that I was supposed to be excited for Biden getting Ketanji Brown Jackson on the court BECAUSE she is the first Black, FEMALE Supreme Court Justice, who will make decisions regarding Title IX, but she can't tell us what a woman is. Just full hand slap to the forehead.

I left the Democrats this year and am now a registered Independent. Your common sense, if heeded, would likely get my vote back for the Dems, nationally. Locally, I live in San Francisco and am done signing off on the one person running for each state office, and the incessant inanity of the 'social justice' progressive left. They are more illiberal than the Moral Majority whom I grew up despising and pushing back against. Fight the morons out of the parry to save it. Get back to fighting for the working class. Give up on DEI and, to me the most important thing, stop being so goddamned smug. Tha k you for your sanity!!!🙏

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Well said, and thank you, Matt! We are going to do our level best to restore common sense and make Dems electable again. Hope you'll sign up at di-ag.org, if you haven't already. We need numbers to build influence.

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A lot of us may never come home to the Democratic Party. This gender policy is so insane.

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Imo, we need some New Blue Dogs to seize the reins and wrench it back on track, as in the early 90s

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😆 the dream of the 90s used to be alive in Portland, but they desperately need your message!

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You're right about all this, of course.

"The trans lobby, though, demands more than protection from discrimination—which we also support and which is already legally guaranteed—seeking special privileges for men to “identify” into women’s legally protected spaces. And it tells proto-gay boys who like to play with dolls or girls who hate to wear dresses their bodies need to be "fixed.""

It's conversion therapy, all right. Gay kids can magically be turned straight by the expedient of surgery and hormones. It's very popular in Iran.

One of the most frustrating aspects of gender ideology is how it has made doubt illicit. In the name of banning conversion therapy, only trans conversion therapy (aka "gender-affirming therapy") is now legal. In my state, if a young lad tells his therapist he isn't sure about his gender, she is only allowed to agree that he must be a woman. She can lose her career otherwise.

It would be nice if DIAG could try to shine a spotlight on the "conversion therapy ban" laws that smuggled in this mandate.

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Same problem that gender critical theorists are having with the academic journals!! So I decided to write a book...

May I suggest my newly published book as an aid in your arguments about why the Democrats and the rest of the world need to rethink gender ideology?

https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-0364-1478-8

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Well done! Looks great!

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Thank you

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I doubt that Democrats will give up the trans ideology. They are too much entrenched in this.

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It's a tough assignment, but we at DIAG (diag.org) remain undeterred!

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You have to keep at it! It’s such a DANGEROUS ideology !

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JKR said it best:

"Dress as you please. Call yourself what you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who'll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But prosecute women for saying sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotaDrill"

In other words: You do you! But we will continue to insist that sex (not gender) is a material, immutable reality that sometimes matters (and when it matters, it matters a lot) to law and policy. An ideology that demands we all pretend sex isn't real or doesn't matter is extremely problematic in all sorts of ways, and especially harmful to vulnerable women, children, and young people.

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Mine is not a religious belief. It is a scientific belief as the TED talk I posted makes clear. If you believe that we are nothing more than our bodies, that is your prerogative.

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Amy Sousa says it well. We are not "in" our bodies, we ARE our bodies.

"We ARE our bodies. There is no “other” thing to be.

This is a neutral observation about the form and function of how we physically experience the world. Just as it is neutral to observe that I have one stomach and not 4 like a cow, and this is how I have to digest nutrients, it is neutral to observe the sexual developmental path I’m on.

When people dissociate in the name of the trans dogma “born in the wrong body” this both keeps them from being able to critique the social roles they reject AND it keeps them from from being able to listen to their body’s signals of pain and act in self-preserving ways.

Understanding and embracing our embodiment is the path of nourishment and health."

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I’m a lot more than my body. Just sayin’.

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I, too, believe we are more than our bodies. What that "more" consists of is a question for philosophy or religion, not science. Science deals in observable phenomena and falsifiable theories; gender identity is neither. Gender dysphoria, on the other hand, is no doubt just as real and painful a psychiatric disorder as depression, anxiety, or anorexia. That doesn't mean a male GD sufferer is "really" female, any more than an anorexia sufferer is "really" overweight.

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I think “ gender dysphoria “ is way overstated! It’s the newest fad and excuse for general anxiety in young people. I sincerely doubt that it is as prevalent as it’s made out to be. However, this new illness is a boom to the medical industrial pharmaceutical complex so it won’t go away for a while. Much too profitable.

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You think that. But your thoughts aren’t based on evidence or medical knowledge.

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Sanbonmatsu is a scientist. Apparently you didn’t watch her TED talk that I posted.

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Of course sex is real. But for transgender people, there is a discrepancy between their physical sex and their mental sex, what health care professionals call gender identity. And as the TED talk I posted makes clear, there is probably a biological basis in epigenetics for the discrepancy. A person’s identity, their self, is in their brain. If a soldier goes to war and has an arm blown off, they are still the same person. If someone loses their mind as a result of Alzheimer’s, they are not the same person. So in a very real sense, my gender identity having always been female, I have always been female. I think where folks JKR go off the rails is a belief in the primacy of the sex of the physical body.

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You are absolutely free to believe in "mental sex" and to live your life accordingly. Many people believe in immortal souls, or astrology, or personality typing. (I'm a big fan of Myers-Briggs, myself!) But liberal societies, while they tolerate religious beliefs, do not make laws imposing religious beliefs on their citizens. And what you've got with "mental sex" or "gender identity" is just that: an unfalsifiable, personal, quasi-religious belief which you are free to embrace and organize YOUR life around, but which you cannot make others embrace and organize THEIR lives around. Rights in a liberal society are based on material realities that reasonable people can all perceive and agree on. Sex -- as in the evolved, binary reproductive strategy that's immutable in mammals -- is one of those material realities. Gender identity, however you may personally understand it, is not.

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Mine is not a religious belief. It is a scientific belief as the TED talk I posted makes clear. If you believe that we are nothing more than our bodies, that is your prerogative.

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Not based in science but postmodern elitist intellectualism-a philosophy that masquerades as science but is merely a theory. We are indeed our bodies and all of us are born in the right bodies. Sex is real, a biological fact, changing sex is impossible-the synthetic pharma induced secondary sex characteristics and cosmetic surgery does not change the fact that one remains his or biological sex. Stop harming kids, erasing women and lesbians-work to free everyone by working to destroy gender roles (a social Construct) instead of enforcing rigid regressive traditional gender roles. Yes, the religion of the left is Transgenderism just as harmful of the extreme Right. Democratic Billionaires on the left, Republican Billionaires on the right both want to colonize our bodies, for different reasons. Billionaires have power, influence and ability to control media to get their messaging (propaganda) to the masses. The left has been duped just as the so-called simpletons on the right by billionaire oligarchs who do not care at all about the rest of us. Transgenderism is a cash cow for billionaires like Pritzker, Stryker, Gill (all Lefties) who are heavily invested in big pharma, bio-tech, medical industrial complex, big finance on a global basis and control research at elite ivy league schools because they donate huge amounts and have schools named after them and therefore control messaging and research. Transgenderism is not based in science but is filled with distortions, lies, deception and suppression of valid research that contradicts their propaganda. I am not a republican or right wing and up until recently I support Transgenderism but after doing my own research-no longer. And, btw, much long-standing credible research confirms the vast majority of non-gender conforming kids would if left alone, grow up to be Gay or Lesbian. So leave the kids alone, Stop Transing Gay Kids.

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The Dems must also correct course on the normalization and acceptance of internet pornography. That ad they ran was beyond delusional - they do not understand heterosexual sexuality - why cultivate the worst in people by endorsing this insanity?

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