Drag 3 Trans
est 4 24
oops see other 3 >
see two
includes some homophobia // FASCISM MACHO, ANTI FEM
conspir coming for kids hype fear
see cult war 3 wedge TARGET CRUELTY XIAN NATL VOUGHT
see they them ad
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morn joe tons of ads football kamala sex surgery prisoners
taxpayer prison sex change density of trigger terms
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an 3 26
Trump uses voter ID push to stoke base with 'men in women’s sports' claim - Alternet.org
an 3 26
https://www.alternet.org/trump-iran-invasion-6/
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an 11 25
Public libraries in Tennessee have begun to shut down as they carry out an order from state officials to remove children’s books containing LGBTQ+ themes or characters.
For Popular Information, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims reported Tuesday that the “book purge” is required to be carried out at all 181 libraries in the Tennessee Regional Library System, which encompasses most of the state, aside from cities like Nashville and Memphis.
It comes after Tennessee’s Republican Secretary of State, Tre Hargett, sent a pair of letters earlier this fall. The first, sent on September 8, said that in order to receive state and federal grants, which run through his office, libraries needed to comply with a Tennessee law banning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices from agencies, as well as President Donald Trump’s executive order on “gender ideology,” which effectively ended the federal recognition of transgender and nonbinary individuals.
As the report notes, neither of these orders says anything about library books. However, Hargett argued that compliance with the executive order mandated book bans because it states that “federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology.”
Not only do executive orders typically not apply to state and local governments, but the federal funds Tennessee’s libraries receive are not used to purchase books at all. Instead, according to the secretary of state’s website, they “provide all state residents with online access to essential library and information resources, including licensed databases, a statewide library catalog and interlibrary loan system, bibliographic services, and materials for the disadvantaged.”
The Every Library Institute, an advocacy group that supports federal funding for libraries, said that Hargett’s instructions “contain significant errors, likely exceeding the secretary’s authority and reflecting a political agenda rather than a neutral or accurate interpretation of federal or state law.”
“Hargett is setting a dangerous precedent by placing Tennessee’s state and municipal government under the authority of any executive order by any president,” the group continued. “Executive orders are not laws.”
But Crosby and Sims argued: “Even if the executive order did apply to Tennessee local libraries, simply having books with LGBTQ stories and characters does not constitute ‘promoting gender ideology.’ The classic fairytale Little Red Riding Hood involves a wolf eating a little girl, but does not promote violence. Children’s books are stories, not instruction manuals.”
On October 27, Hargett sent another letter, giving libraries 60 days to undertake an “age appropriateness review” of all books in their children’s section to find any books that may be inconsistent either with Tennessee’s age appropriateness law or with Trump’s executive order.
As Ken Paulson, the director of Middle Tennessee University’s Free Speech Center, noted, the age appropriateness law, which was last updated in 2024, “is modeled after obscenity laws and prohibits nudity, excessive violence, and explicit sexuality, hardly the stuff of children’s sections. Further, the law applies to school libraries, not public libraries.”
Though Hargett provided no criteria for how to assess what books would need to be purged, he did provide an example of one he felt violated both orders: Fred Gets Dressed, a 2021 picture book by the New York Times bestselling author Peter Brown. As Popular Information noted:
The book, which was written by a straight, cisgender man, does not feature any LGBTQ characters. Instead it is based on a childhood experience of the author in which he tried on his mother’s clothing and makeup. If a book about a boy trying on his mother’s clothes is the strongest example of “promoting gender ideology” that Hargett could identify, it raises questions about the necessity of the review.
Earlier this month, the state’s Rutherford County Library System, which serves the cities of Smyrna and Murfreesboro, shut down several of its library branches for up to a week to “meet new reporting requirements” from Hargett’s office.
It’s unclear why the Rutherford County system determined it needed to shut down in order to carry out the review, nor has it been made clear whether other library systems will be expected to do the same.
As former librarian Kelly Jensen noted for the blog Book Riot, the Rutherford County system has made its own efforts to ban transgender-friendly books, but backed off from the policy earlier this summer for fear of litigation after a Murfreesboro law branding “homosexuality” as a form of “public indecency” resulted in the city being forced to settle a lawsuit for $500,000.
Kelly wrote that for Rutherford library system’s board, Hargett’s order is “a convenient means of subverting their fears of litigation, which drove them to change their anti-trans book policy earlier this summer. If the directive is from the state, then they ‘have to’ comply. The Tennessee secretary of state is granting permission slips to public library boards to ban away.”
This week, a group of 33 major publishers, library advocacy groups, and free speech and civil rights organizations signed onto a letter to Hargett expressing “profound concern” over its review mandate.
The coalition included PEN America, the American Library Association, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and the transgender rights advocacy organization GLAAD. Major publishing houses also signed on, including Penguin Random House, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster.
“These types of reviews create immense administrative burdens for library systems and often lead to illegal censorship, which raises liability risks for local communities and the state,” the groups said. “Many libraries, uncertain about the legal and procedural basis for the mandate, have had to redirect limited resources, with some temporarily closing branches to complete these reviews, which are implied to be necessary for future funding.”
“The demands in your letter need immediate clarification, as it is not reasonable to expect libraries to follow directives that would risk violating applicable law, including the US Constitution,” they added. “It is illegal to remove books from public libraries because some people do not like them. This is a well-settled legal principle.”
The Rutherford County Library Alliance, which has challenged municipal anti-LGBTQ+ laws as well as the censorship policies of the library’s own board, said that “we have seen firsthand the concrete harm of the Secretary’s directives—library closures during story time, intimidation of professional librarians, and the breakdown of democratic representation in our public library system.”
“We hope Secretary Hargett will fulfill their duty to promote library development by supporting our constitutionally-guaranteed rights and our highly trained librarians,” the alliance added, “rather than enabling censorship from 0.001% of our community for 100% of our community.”
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MMA
Right-wing media told Republicans anti-trans politics would deliver a winning coalition. 2025 races show they misunderstood why the message ever worked.
Written by Ari Drennen & Vesper Henry
Research contributions from Casey Wexler
Published 11/06/25
After three cycles of predictions that voter backlash against LGBTQ people would propel Republicans to victory, the elections themselves continue to tell a different story. In 2022, the promised “red tsunami” never arrived. In 2024, Donald Trump won — and right-wing media declared that anti-trans politics had finally proven their electoral value. But 2025 tested that assumption in two high-profile governor’s races where Trump was not on the ballot — and found again that voters’ priorities did not include infringing on the liberties of their trans neighbors.
In Virginia and New Jersey, right-wing media saturated the airwaves with stories about bathrooms, school sports, and “gender ideology.” Both Republican candidates lost. Democratic nominee Abigail Spanberger won in Virginia, and Democrat Mikie Sherrill won in New Jersey, even after months of Fox News coverage and paid advertising that presented their races as referendums on transgender rights. These results reflect the same pattern as 2022, demonstrating that the supposed backlash vote exists mainly in right-wing media rhetoric, not in voter behavior.
Right-wing media insisted anti-trans attacks would deliver again in 2025
Right-wing media treated the 2025 races as proof-of-concept opportunities for the same messaging they claimed worked in 2024. Coverage on Fox News, The Daily Signal, The Washington Stand, The Washington Times, and the New York Post heavily emphasized transgender issues in both races, even as voters consistently ranked the economy, health care, and public safety as top concerns.
In Virginia, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears’ campaign messaging closely aligned with Fox News narratives that cast Spanberger — who once cursed at a House colleague over his “aggressive” language about trans people — as unwilling to protect students from “nude men in locker rooms” and “boys in girls’ sports.”
Video
Citation
From the August 22, 2025, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
Articles in The Daily Signal and The Washington Stand — a publication of the Family Research Council — followed this same framing, backing Earle-Sears’ mischaracterization of Spanberger’s pro-trans record as endangering children by supporting legislation that would supposedly “allow naked men inside girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms.”
One reporter in Virginia showed just how effective the right has become at turning local news into a delivery system for culture-war grievances. Nickolaus Minock — a former Trump administration press official now working at Sinclair-owned WJLA — consistently pressed the Spanberger campaign on transgender issues. For months, Minock chased Spanberger on camera with the same scripted questions, misgendering trans students and framing school policies protecting them as an issue gaining “national attention.”
An official from Loudoun County schools eventually filed a 36-page complaint to the Federal Communications Commission accusing the station of “broadcast news distortion,” including six instances of “dishonest and distorted” reporting that “injures the public interest.”
But Minock didn’t stop. He continued producing bathroom-panic segments as if refusal to indulge the premise was proof of guilt. The result was a pipeline that laundered a national talking point through a local broadcast feed to make it look organic.
Right-wing media followed the same script in New Jersey. Coverage in the New York Post asserted that Republican nominee Jack Ciattarelli could win the governor’s race “by opposing transgenderism,” while Fox News cited polls from November 2024 and January 2025 to argue that Sherrill’s pro-trans voting record would threaten her electability.
Although Republicans devoted millions of dollars in ad money to the issue — including a majority of all ad spending by the Earle-Sears campaign — polling showed a vanishingly small number of voters listing transgender issues among their top concerns. Both races ended the same way: The anti-trans messaging campaign failed. Spanberger and Sherrill both won.
The 2022 “red tsunami” never happened — but right-wing media claimed it did anyway
In 2022, right-wing media insisted that Republicans had turned “gender ideology” into a losing issue for Democrats — even as election results undermined their claims. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh claimed Democrats were “doomed” by their stance on trans rights. Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Rufo framed the election as proof that voters were rejecting “radical gender surgeries.” The American Principles Project boasted that it had spent $15 million turning “the transgender issue” into a “litmus test issue” for the midterms.
In reality, the “red tsunami” never arrived. Democrats out-performed midterm expectations, Republicans under-performed when compared to historic averages, and exit polls failed to show LGBTQ issues as a top concern for voters.
But instead of abandoning the narrative, right-wing media reframed the failure: Republicans lost because they didn’t attack hard enough.
Trump’s 2024 win convinced the right their strategy had finally worked — but they mistook the messenger for the message
When Trump won in 2024, right-wing pundits declared vindication. They treated his closing attacks on “they/them” as proof that anti-trans messaging had become a universal wedge among the electorate.
But the attack functioned differently in 2024 than it did in 2022 or 2025. Trump used anti-trans rhetoric as a proxy for class resentment — not as a standalone issue. “Kamala is for they/them” was presented less as a policy critique than as a cultural code for elite detachment, campus liberalism, and Democratic priorities. The effect was specific to Trump’s delivery, and the issue worked only when attached to a much broader narrative about who the government serves and who it ignores — and even then, it functioned as part of a composite message, not a single-issue referendum.
Right-wing media took the wrong lesson from 2024, concluding that the issue was the driver rather than the messenger. Republicans in Virginia and New Jersey this year thus attempted to run the 2024 playbook without its central ingredient. The results were the same as in 2022: No backlash wave, no realignment, no measurable voter movement.
Even with blanket coverage, even with sustained amplification on Fox News, even with paid ads regurgitating right-wing media narratives, the messaging failed to change outcomes. Spanberger won. Sherrill won. Voters did not list “transgender issues” as a priority, and when pressed, declared that they prefer Democratic messages on the issue anyway.
Right-wing media’s own mixed messages might have reduced the salience of the issue for their base. By October 2025, figures like Matt Walsh were already declaring that “transgenderism is effectively over” and calling it the “clearest and most decisive cultural win that conservatives have ever achieved.” APP’s Terry Schilling published an op-ed before polls closed on Election Day claiming that the reason “Democrats are struggling in Virginia and New Jersey” was in large part their “support for policies allowing biological men in girls’ private spaces, and their backing of taxpayer-funded medical interventions for gender-confused minors.” When the loudest voices on the right announce the fight over transgender rights is already won, it should come as no surprise when the issue stops functioning as a voter-mobilizing grievance.
Conclusion: Right-wing media sold Republicans the wrong lesson. Again.
The midterms in 2022 disproved the claim that anti-trans messaging was an effective backlash engine. The presidential election in 2024 seemed to validate it only because Trump acted as a cultural amplifier. Now, with 2025 elections removing Trump from the equation and producing the same results as 2022, we see once again that the attacks failed to move voters.
The pattern is now clear. Right-wing media can continue producing bathroom panics for clicks, but their electoral theory has failed twice in three cycles — and only “worked” once under conditions they likely cannot reproduce.
Democrats who answer the attacks and re-center voters’ priorities keep winning. Republicans who mistake Fox News programming for the electorate keep losing.
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RWW 10 25
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pitt knowles
Leah Libresco Sargeant, the chief of staff for debates and public discourse at political depolarization nonprofit Braver Angels, moderated the debate. It was sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and hosted by Pitt College Republicans.
More than 11,000 students signed a petition before the debate demanding Pitt cancel it. In response, Pitt stressed its commitment to the First Amendment.
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2X
mma 9 25
Right-wing media rushed to blame killing of Charlie Kirk on trans people
Authorities pushed back on unverified claims that the alleged shooter's ammunition was inscribed with “transgender ideology”
Written by Gideon Taaffe, Jack Winstanley & Noah Dowe
Published 09/12/25
After the September 10 killing of Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk, right-wing pundit Steven Crowder and The Wall Street Journal separately reported on an internal law enforcement bulletin claiming cartridges possibly connected to the shooting and recovered by police were engraved with “transgender and anti-fascist ideology.”
Some media figures seized on the scant reporting as key evidence of the suspect’s motivations, with right-wing commentators and outlets claiming the killer was a “leftist Trans radical,” labelling the killing an act of “trans terrorism,” and calling for the “trans movement” to be labeled “as a terrorist movement.”
Following a September 12 press conference with law enforcement that detailed the messages inscribed on the ammunition, initial reports suggesting a connection between trans people and the phrases on the bullet casings appear to be based on a misinterpretation of evidence.
- ## Right-wing outlets published unverified reporting that the alleged shooter engraved “transgender and anti-fascist ideology” onto the ammunition
- Right-wing pundit Steven Crowder claimed on social media that he received an internal bulletin from an officer working at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that indicated, “All cartridges have engraved wording on them, expressing transgender and anti-fascist ideology.” Crowder’s post included a screenshot of the internal bulletin bearing a Louder with Crowder watermark. He followed up the post hours later, saying, “Just received word that my company is being subpoenaed by the ATF. No details yet.” Twitter/X, [9/11/25, 9/11/25]
- The Wall Street Journal similarly reported, “An early bulletin circulated widely among law enforcement officials said investigators found ammunition engraved with expressions of ‘transgender and anti-fascist ideology.’”The Journal did note, “Justice Department officials said the probe was in its early stages, investigators were still analyzing the evidence and the bulletin may not accurately reflect the messages on the ammunition.” The Wall Street Journal, [9/11/25]
- According to The New York Times, the reporting had not been verified.The Times reported “a senior law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation” said the report seized on by Crowder and the Wall Street Journal “had not been verified by A.T.F. analysts, did not match other summaries of the evidence and might turn out to have been misread or misinterpreted.” The New York Times, [9/11/25]
- During a press conference, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox clarified the engravings found on the bullet casings, which appear to be online references. He stated, “Inscriptions on a fired casing read, Notices bulges. Capital OWO, what's this? Inscriptions on the three unfired casings read: Hey, fascist! Catch!, Up-arrow symbol, right-arrow symbol, and three down-arrow symbols. A second unfired casing read, Oh, bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao ciao. And a third unfired casing read, If you read this, you are gay. LMAO.” On September 12, The Wall Street Journal appended an editor’s note to its earlier article, explaining that Cox “gave no indication that the ammunition included any transgender references.” CNN,*The Situation Room*, [9/12/25; The Wall Street Journal, 9/11/25]
- As reported by The Advocate, “The Gun Violence Archive has tracked mass shootings since 2013 and found in 2023 that just 0.1 percent involved a transgender shooter.By contrast, 96 to 98 percent have been committed by cisgender men.” The Advocate also found that several right-wing online accounts falsely suggested the shooter was a trans woman living in Washington, who quickly faced “a tidal wave of harassment.” The Advocate, [9/12/25]
- ## Many right-wing figures and outlets cited Crowder and WSJ’s unverified reporting about “transgender ideology” as evidence
- On hisWar Roompodcast, Trump ally Steve Bannon claimed The Wall Street Journal’s reporting confirmed “what Steve Crowder and his team put out, which is that the bullets they found with the assassin's gun had radical t-----, you know, ideology on it — transgender ideology.” Real America’s Voice,*War Room*, [9/11/25]
- RedState, The Daily Caller, The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and The Washington Times cited reports from Crowder and The Wall Street Journal to suggest that engravings with “transgender” ideology were recovered by police.RedState, [9/11/25; The Daily Caller, 9/11/25; The Daily Wire, 9/11/25; The Federalist, 9/11/25; The Washington Times, 9/11/25]
- Fox & Friendshost Ainsley Earhardt claimed that the suspected shooter “had pro-trans and anti-fascist messages, according to sources, on the gun.” Fox News,*Fox & Friends*, [9/12/25]
- Newsmax host Ed Henry suggested “the ammunition was actually covered with transgender ideology.”Henry also argued CNN “tried to downplay that by saying there were just cultural phrases on the ammunition,” referring to CNN’s reporting that investigators had discovered ammunition “scrawled with cultural phrases.” Newsmax,*Ed Henry: The Briefing*, [9/11/25; YouTube,
] VID]
- ## Others used the story as a rallying point to blame “transgenderism” and claim the shooter was a “trans killer”
- Right-wing influencer Ian Miles Cheong: “A transgendered mutant murdered Charlie Kirk. Transgenderism must be banned, all trans people rounded up and forcibly institutionalized.” Twitter/X, [9/11/25]
- Right-wing host Megyn Kelly: “What we know right now about motive — Charlie Kirk's killer engraved the ammunition used to murder him with pro-transgender ideology, according to reporting in multiple outlets, to the surprise of literally no one.” Kelly continued, “There's one particular group that's been running around killing Americans in the name of transgender ideology lately, and it's transgender activists or individuals or those who proclaim that they are.” SiriusXM, *The Megyn Kelly Show*, [9/11/25]
- Federalist editor-in-chief Mollie Hemingway accused CNN of “demonic support for radical murderous trans ideology … via obscuring the truth.”Twitter/X, [9/11/25]
- Right-wing influencer The Quartering posted that Kirk was “confirmed killed by far leftist Trans radical.” Twitter/X, [9/11/25]
- Infowars host Alex J
- ones said Crowder’s claims proved “the cold blooded killer of Charlie Kirk is another psychotic trans activist.” Jones later said, “All evidence points towards the killer being another trans death cult psycho.” Twitter/X, [9/11/25, 9/11/25]
- Right-wing conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich referred to the shooter as a “trans killer.”Twitter/X, [9/11/25]
- Citing “trans paraphernalia written on the cartridges of this rifle,” Donald Trump Jr. claimed on Fox News that he “can’t frankly name a mass shooting in the last year or two in America that wasn't committed by a transgender lunatic.”Fox News, *Fox News Live*, [9/11/25]
- OnThe Megyn Kelly Show, Donald Trump Jr. suggested he “can’t name, including probably like Al Qaeda and the Taliban, a group that is more violent per capita than the radical trans movement.”He continued, “I’m sure people are totally sane after jacking themselves up on hormones given to them by some rainbow hair freak doctor because they think men can somehow magically become women.” The Advocate, [9/11/25]
- Newsmax host Rob Schmitt: “That is the least surprising part of all of this, that this came down to trans, … that it came down to the ever-so-violent far left in this country.” Newsmax, *Rob Schmitt Tonight*, [9/11/25]
- Right-wing influencer Alexander Muse, known online as Amuse: “Here on a visa and celebrating the trans terror assassin’s murder of Charlie Kirk? Time to pack your bags.”Twitter/X, [9/11/25]
- Right-wing host Benny Johnson said Kirk's killing “does match, on some degree, these other shootings that we’ve seen from transgenders.” YouTube, *The Benny Show*, [9/11/25]
- In a repost of Crowder’s claims, Trump ally Laura Loomer wrote: “If this is true, it’s time to designate the trans movement as a terrorist movement.” Twitter/X, [9/11/25]
- Daily Wire host Matt Walsh acknowledged “more confirmation is needed,” adding, “If this is more trans terrorism we must bring ruthless vengeance down on these savages.” Twitter/X, [9/11/25]
mma //
On the killing of Charlie Kirk, political violence, and the right’s response
09/12/25 1:22 PM EDT
08/28/25 2:42 PM EDT
08/12/25
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08/28/2025
by
- William Wolfe claims that "there’s a direct connection between the 2015 Obergefell decision and the wave of lethal transgender violence that America is experiencing today."
- Montana state Rep. Lukas Schubert declares that the "LGBTQ movement needs to be classified as a terrorist organization."
- The anti-porn app Covenant Eyes is now sponsoring the webcast of antisemitic, misogynistic, racist, fascist Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon.
- Rick Green says that "election are report cards on how the church is doing in discipleship."
- Dave Reilly proclaims that "the struggle for our generation" is "to make our country Christian, to make our country Catholic": "We're not going to be able to do it without confronting Jewish power."
- Finally, Elijah Schaffer insists that he "meant it as a joke" when he said that he hates women because they are "whores" and "just a bunch of holes." Nice try, but the video proves that absolutely was not kidding.
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an 8 25
Next to his long-running radio show, Dennis Prager, now 77, is best known for PragerU — which isn't an actual university, but rather, a program of far-right propaganda videos launched in 2009. One of PragerU's admirers is Ryan Walters, Oklahoma's ultra-MAGA public schools superintendent. And according to CNN, Walters is now using PragerU to screen applicants for ideological purity and to make sure teachers in the state's public schools aren't "woke."
The screening process, CNN's Sunlen Serfaty reports, gets underway on Friday, August 15.
"Teachers from 'liberal' states who have relocated to Oklahoma and are seeking to work there must take a controversial new assessment, given for the first time today, that 'keeps away woke indoctrinators,' according to Oklahoma’s top education official," Serfaty explains. "Ryan Walters, Oklahoma's superintendent for public instruction, told CNN that if applicants do not pass the test, they will not earn a teaching certificate to be able to teach in public schools in the state this school year, which begins for some Oklahoma districts on Monday."
READ MORE: This single sentence will fast-track Trump to a prison cell
Serfaty adds, "The decision to use the assessment, developed by PragerU, a conservative media company whose teaching materials are now approved for use in public schools in ten U.S. states, opens a new front in the education culture wars just days before schools are to open their doors."
PragerU's materials, according to the CNN reporter, have "been embraced by the political right for offering curriculums that champion ideas aligned with the Make America Great Again movement."
According to Serfaty, Walters' "multiple-choice assessment for teachers" contains "around 50 questions." One proposed question, Serfaty reports, "deals with gender — asking teachers to select from a series of multiple-choice answers which chromosome pairs determine biological sex."
"Another question asks why freedom of religion is important to America's identity," Serafty notes. "Other questions include asking for the first three words of the Constitution, naming the two chambers of the U.S. Congress, and identifying the number of U.S. senators…. The test specifically evaluates educators on areas including their understanding of 'American exceptionalism' and their 'grasp of fundamental biological differences between boys and girls,' Walters said."
READ MORE: 'Financial ruin': Trump's White House is terrified of losing this lawsuit
*Read the full CNN article at this link.
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an 8 25
U.S. President Donald Trump's administration earned condemnation from Amnesty International on Thursday over its leaked plans to downplay human rights violations in countries favored by the American government.
News of the plan was originally reported on Wednesday by The Washington Post, which documented how the administration has been revising State Department reports on human rights in El Salvador, Israel, and Russia to "strike all references to LGBTQ+ individuals or crimes against them." The Post also added that "the descriptions of government abuses that do remain have been softened."
In the case of El Salvador, where the administration earlier this year began lawlessly shipping immigrants deported from the United States, the administration's report stated that were "no credible reports of significant human rights abuses" there, even though a State Department report under former President Joe Biden's administration issued last year documented "significant human rights issues" in the country.
Human rights violations against LGBTQ+ people were deleted from the State Department's report on Russia, while the report on Israel deleted references to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption trial and to his government's threats to the country's independent judiciary.
Amanda Klasing, Amnesty International USA's national director of government relations and advocacy, ripped the administration for selectively whitewashing human rights records of nations favored by the president.
"The leaked chapters of the latest Annual Human Rights Report reveal a disturbing effort by the Trump administration to purposefully fail to fully capture the alarming and growing attacks on human rights in certain countries around the globe," she said. "Alarmingly, we understand that the mandate from Secretary Rubio was... to go back and wipe out portions of the reports that had already been written—to delete stories from survivors of human rights violations."
Klasing went on to accuse the administration of turning the human rights report "into yet another tool to obscure facts to push forward anti-rights policy choices."
She also emphasized that "it would be a travesty and subversion of congressional intent to downplay or ignore human rights violations faced by marginalized populations including refugees and asylum seekers, women and girls, Indigenous people, ethnic and religious minorities, and LGBTQI+ people throughout the world."
An unnamed State Department official this week told the Post that the administration was merely simplifying the human rights reports to make them more "readable."
"The 2024 Human Rights report has been restructured in a way that removes redundancies, increases report readability, and is more responsive to the legislative mandate that underpins the report," the official said. "The human rights report focuses on core issues."
NOW READ:DOJ memo reveals Trump’s dark plan for a new Red Scare — and it may be perfectly legal
AN 8 25
It was meant to be a routine discussion on pollution. One by one, delegates at the United Nations expressed support for a new panel of scientists who would advise countries on how to address chemicals and toxic waste.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
But the U.S. delegate took the meeting in a new direction. She spent her allotted three minutes reminding the world that the United States now had a “national position” on a single word in the documents establishing the panel: gender.
“Use of the term ‘gender’ replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity and is demeaning and unfair, especially to women and girls,” the delegate told the U.N. in June.
The Trump administration is pushing its anti-trans agenda on a global stage, repeatedly objecting to the word “gender” in international resolutions and documents. During at least six speeches before the U.N., U.S. delegates have denounced so-called “gender ideology” or reinforced the administration’s support for language that “recognizes women are biologically female and men are biologically male.”
The delegates included federal civil service employees and the associate director of Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for Trump’s policies, who now works for the State Department. They delivered these statements during U.N. forums on topics as varied as women’s rights, science and technology, global health, toxic pollution and chemical waste. Even a resolution meant to reaffirm cooperation between the U.N. and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations became an opportunity to bring up the issue.
Insisting that everyone’s gender is determined biologically at birth leaves no room for the existence of transgender, nonbinary and intersex people, who face discrimination and violence around the world. Intersex people have variations in chromosomes, hormone levels or anatomy that differ from what’s considered typical for male and female bodies. A federal report published in January just before President Donald Trump took office, estimated there are more than 5 million intersex Americans.
On at least two occasions, U.S. delegates urged the U.N. to adopt its language on men and women, though it’s unclear if the U.S.’ position has led to any policy changes at the U.N. But the effects of the country’s objections are more than symbolic, said Kristopher Velasco, a sociology professor at Princeton University who studies how international institutions and nongovernmental organizations have worked to expand or curtail LGBTQ+ rights.
U.N. documents can influence countries’ policies over time and set an international standard for human rights, which advocates can cite as they campaign for less discriminatory policies, Velasco said. The phrase “gender ideology” has emerged as a “catchall term” for far-right anxieties about declining fertility rates and a decrease in “traditional” heterosexual families, he said.
At the U.N., the administration has promoted other aspects of its domestic agenda. For example, U.S. delegates have demanded the removal of references to tackling climate change and voted against an International Day of Hope because the text contained references to diversity, equity and inclusion. (The two-page document encouraged a “more inclusive, equitable and balanced approach to economic growth” and welcomed “respect for diversity.”)
But the reflexive resistance to the word “gender” is particularly noteworthy.
Advocates for LGBTQ+ rights said the U.S.’ repeated condemnation of “gender ideology” signals support for more repressive regimes.
The U.S. is sending the world “a clear message: that the identities and rights of trans, nonbinary, and intersex people are negotiable,” Ash Lazarus Orr, press relations manager at the nonprofit Advocates for Trans Equality, said in a statement.
Laurel Sprague, research director at the Williams Institute, a policy center focused on sexual orientations and gender identities at the University of California, Los Angeles, said she’s concerned that other countries will take similar positions on transgender rights to gain favor with the U.S. Last month Mike Waltz, Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the U.N., told a Senate committee that he wants to use a country’s record of voting with or against the U.S. at the U.N. as a metric for deciding foreign aid.
In response to detailed questions from ProPublica, White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement: “President Trump was overwhelmingly elected to restore common sense to government, which means focusing foreign policy on securing peace deals and putting America First — not enforcing woke gender ideology.”
A clash between Trump’s administration and certain U.N. institutions over transgender rights was almost inevitable.
Trump’s hostility to transgender rights was a key part of his election campaign. On his first day in office, he issued an executive order called “Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government.” The order claimed there were only two “immutable” sexes. Eight days later, Trump signed an executive order restricting gender-affirming surgery for anyone under 19. Federal agencies have since forced trans service members out of the military and sued California for its refusal to ban trans athletes from girls’ sports teams.
In June, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights criticized American government officialsfor their statements “vilifying transgender and non-binary people.” The human rights office urges U.N. member states to provide gender-affirming care and says the organization has “affirmed the right of trans persons to legal recognition of their gender identity and a change of gender in official documents, including birth certificates.” The officealso supports the rights of intersex people.
“Intersex people in the U.S. are extremely worried” that they will become bigger targets, said Sylvan Fraser Anthony, legal and policy director at the intersex advocacy group InterACT.
“In all regions of the world, we are witnessing a pushback against women’s human rights and gender equality,” Laura Gelbert Godinho Delgado, a spokesperson for the U.N.’s human rights office, said in an email. “This has fueled misogyny, anti-LGBTI rhetoric, and hate speech.”
The Trump administration’s insistence on litigating “gender” complicates the already ponderous procedures of the U.N. Many decisions are made by consensus, which could require representatives from more than 100 countries to agree on every word. Phrases and single words still under debate are marked with brackets. Some draft documents end up with hundreds of brackets, awaiting resolution at a subsequent date.
At the June meeting on chemical pollution, delegates decided to form a scientific panel but couldn’t agree on crucial details about whether the panel’s purpose included “the protection of human health and the environment.” A description of the panel included brackets on whether it would work in a way that integrates “gender equality and equity” or “equality between men and women.”
The U.S. delegate, Liz Nichols, reminded the U.N. at one point that it “is the policy of the United States to use clear and accurate language that recognizes women are biologically female and men are biologically male. It is important to acknowledge the biological reality of sex to support the needs and perspectives of women and girls.”
Career staffers like Nichols are hired for subject-matter expertise and work to execute the agenda of whichever administration is in charge, regardless of personal beliefs. Nichols has a doctorate in ecology from Columbia University and has worked for the State Department since 2018. When asked for comment, she referred ProPublica to the State Department.
A State Department spokesperson said in a statement, “As President Trump’s Executive Orders and our public remarks have repeatedly stated, this administration will continue to defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.”
Gender is a crucial factor in chemical safety, said Rachel Radvany, environmental health campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law who attended the meeting. Pregnant people are uniquely vulnerable to chemical exposure and women are disproportionately exposed to toxic compounds, including through beauty and menstrual products.
Radvany said the statement read by Nichols contributed to the uncertainty on how the panel would consider gender in its work. The brackets around gender-related issues and other topics remained in the draft decision and will have to be resolved at a future gathering that may not happen until next summer.
The U.S. has also staked out similar positions at U.N. meetings focused on gender. At a session of the Commission on the Status of Women in March, Jonathan Shrier, a longtime State Department employee who now works for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, said the U.S. disapproved of a declaration supporting “the empowerment of all women and girls” that mentioned the word “gender.” The phrase “all women and girls” in U.N. documents has been used as a way to be inclusive of trans women and girls.
Shrier read a statement saying that several factors in the text made it impossible for the U.S. to back the resolution, which the commission had recently adopted. That included “lapses in using clear and accurate language that recognizes women are biologically female and men are biologically male.”
During the summit, Shrier repeated those talking points at an event co-sponsored by the U.S. government and the Center for Family and Human Rights, or C-Fam. The group’s mission statement says its goal is the “preservation of international law by discrediting socially radical policies at the United Nations and other international institutions.”
Shrier directed questions to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, which did not respond. Responding to questions from ProPublica, C-Fam’s president, Austin Ruse, said in a statement that the U.S. position on gender is in line with the definitions found in an important U.N. document on the empowerment of women from 1995.
Some countries have pushed back against the U.S.’ stance, often in ways that appear subtle to the casual observer. The U.N. social and environmental forums where these speeches have been delivered tend to operate with a culture of civility and little direct confrontation, said Alessandra Nilo, external relations director for the Americas and the Caribbean at the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Nilo has participated in U.N. forums on HIV/AIDS and women’s health since 2000.
When other delegates speak out in support of diversity and women’s rights, it’s a sign of their disapproval and a way to isolate the U.S., Nilo said. During the women’s rights summit, the delegate from Brazil celebrated “the expansion of gender and diversity language” in the declaration.
Nilo said many countries are scared to speak out for fear of losing trade deals or potential foreign aid from the U.S.
Advocating an “America First” platform, Trump has upended U.S. commitments to multinational organizations and alliances. He signed orders withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization and various U.N. bodies, such as the Human Rights Council and the cultural group UNESCO.
It’s rare for the U.N. to directly affect legislation in the U.S. But the Trump administration repeatedly cites concerns that U.N. documents could supersede American policy.
In April, the U.S. criticized a draft resolution on global health debated at a meeting of the U.N. Commission on Population and Development. Spencer Chretien, the U.S. delegate, opposed references to the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, which provide a blueprint for how countries can prosper economically while improving gender equality and protecting the environment. Chretien called the program a form of “soft global governance” that conflicts with national sovereignty. Chretien also touted the administration’s “unequivocal rejection of gender ideology extremism” and renewed membership in the Geneva Consensus Declaration, an antiabortion document signed by more than 30 countries, including Russia, Hungary, Saudi Arabia and South Sudan. The first Trump administration co-sponsored the initiative in 2020 before the Biden administration withdrew from it.
Chretien helped write Project 2025 when he worked at The Heritage Foundation. He is now a senior bureau official in the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. Chretien couldn’t be reached for comment.
The U.N. proposal on global health faced additional opposition from Burundi, Djibouti and Nigeria, where abortion is generally illegal. Delegates from those countries were upset about references to “sexual and reproductive health services,” which could include abortion access. The commission chair withdrew the resolution, seeing no way to reach consensus.
During a July forum about a document on sustainable development, the U.S. delegate, Shrier, asked for a vote on several paragraphs about gender, climate change and various forms of discrimination. In his objections, he cited two paragraphs that he argued advanced “this radical abortion agenda through the terms ‘sexual and reproductive health’ and ‘reproductive rights.’”
The final vote on whether to retain those paragraphs was 141 to 2, with only the U.S. and Ethiopia voting no. (Several countries abstained.)
When the results lit up the screen, the chamber broke into thunderous applause.
an 625
'Monsters': Democrats lash out as TX legislature bans school clubs that support gay teens
heated email 6 25
Across the U.S., a dangerous movement is brewing, one that seeks to silence trans folks and push them into the shadows. One of its leaders is the Alliance Defending Freedom.
On May 20, the right-wing organization ADF sued Minnesota over its advocacy for trans rights. ADF argues that allowing trans girls and women in women’s sports discriminates against cis girls and women. ADF, a Project 2025 adviser, has been at the helm of several anti-trans initiatives, its lawyers authoring model bathroom bills that would force trans people into the bathrooms of their assigned sex at birth. In 2025, lawmakers have already passed more than 100 anti-trans bills across the U.S., including 13 bathroom bills.
But where is ADF getting money for its anti-trans advocacy? These days, it's almost impossible to tell due to regulations that allow nonprofits to hide their donors, but one verifiable source is the fossil fuel industry. Between 2013 and 2022, Shell USA Company Foundation donated $58,002 to ADF, per an investigation by the Guardian. Phil Anschutz, a billionaire who built his wealth on fossil fuels and now owns Anschutz Entertainment Group, Inc., which puts on live entertainment events like Coachella, also donated $110,000 to ADF between 2011 and 2013.
ADF isn’t the only anti-trans organization with financial ties to the fossil fuel sector. An independent analysis of 45 right-wing groups advocating against trans rights found that 80% have received donations from fossil fuel companies or billionaires. The analysis, conducted by two independent researchers in 2023 and not peer-reviewed, was shared exclusively with Atmos and HEATED. Through a qualitative search, the researchers identified 45 groups advancing anti-trans lobbying, events, and publications and checked reports about their donor disclosures for fossil fuel funding....
// UK POOL TURN?
MMA
Late last month, fencer Stephanie Turner took a knee rather than compete against trans opponent Red Sullivan and was disqualified from the University of Maryland's Cherry Blossom tournament. The event sparked a campaign on Fox News, filled with anti-trans bigotry but lacking key context, and eventually prompted both federal and state investigations into USA Fencing's trans-inclusive policy. The Department of Education's investigation was announced during an interview with Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Fox News' Faulkner Focus, further underscoring the network's role in promoting the incident.
Here are three things you might have missed about the fencers, the tournament, and right-wing media's role in driving the backlash:
- Turner competed in a coed tournament just seven days before she refused to spar with a trans opponent. Previously reported in Rolling Stone, Turner finished in eighth place out of 32 fencers at the Swarthmore College Phoenix Cup C & Under tournament, where she competed, and won, against multiple male fencers in the mixed foil event. During the course of that tournament, Turner, 31, also had bouts against teenage and college club opponents.
- Sullivan finished 24th out of 39 fencers in the all-women's event that prompted controversy. Sullivan lost four of her six bouts in the women’s foil event, as previously reported in Rolling Stone. Earlier this year at the USA Fencing 2025 Junior Olympics, she placed 172nd out of 246 fencers, losing five of her seven bouts in the junior women’s foil event.
- Following the forfeit, Turner received $5,000 from anti-trans organization XX-XY. XX-XY CEO Jennifer Sey announced that Turner would be honored as a “Courage Wins Champion” and awarded the sum during an interview on Fox News. XX-XY has been endorsed by former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines, who has been a longtime proponent of trans exclusion in women's sports and beyond. In addition to her partnership with XX-XY, Gaines hosts her own show on Fox News’ sports outlet, OutKick, where she has promoted her exclusionary views and targeted trans athletes.
In spite of all this, Fox News hosts and guests have promoted backlash against Sullivan, deploying anti-trans rhetoric and using the case to urge further exclusion of trans athletes.
- Turner gave an interview onAmerica Reports,where she spoke about her forfeit. Despite her history of coed competition, Turner told co-host John Roberts, “I am a woman, and I have an athletic disadvantage to men, so I compete in the women's division, which is where I rightfully am." Turner added that she knew Sullivan was trans because she recognized the name from Reduxx, an outlet that had published a “hit piece” on the athlete's identity. Fox News, *America Reports*, [4/3/25; Rolling Stone, 4/12/25]
- Gaines appeared onAmerica's Newsroom,where she praised Turner's forfeit. Gaines falsely stated that the competition was a “junior women’s olympic qualifying event,” adding, “It’s the pinnacle of their sport at this point.” The tournament was a regional event that had no ties to the Olympics, as Turner stated on America Reports. Fox News, *America's Newsroom,* [4/3/25; Fox News, America Reports, 4/3/25]
- OnOutnumbered,Fox contributor Nicole Saphier suggested that Sullivan transitioned solely for an alleged competitive advantage, saying, “These men can't cut it with the other male athletes, so therefore they are coming into the female sports.” Co-host Emily Campagno added that there should be a “full house cleaning” of “sports that are letting biological men compete with women.” Fox News, *Outnumbered,* [4/3/25]
- OnThe Five, co-host Dana Perino said she was “disgusted” that USA Fencing had, in co-host Jesse Watters' words, “backed the man.”She said of Turner, “I think it's horrible that she has to be the most courageous person compared to all these other women athletes who have succeeded and are now in retirement with all of their millions.” *The Five,*Fox News, [4/3/25]
- Host Jesse Watters praised Turner, saying that she wouldn't let her opponent “get off on his little fetish.”Watters also mistakenly referred to Turner as a “collegiate fencer.” Turner, 31, is not affiliated with a college or university. Fox News, *Jesse Watters Prime Time,*[4/5/25]
- OnAmerica's Newsroom,guest and Fox anchor Martha MacCallum praised Turner, calling her “courageous.”Co-host Dana Perino expressed dismay that older athletes were not making exclusionary statements and said young competitors “are not being backed up by the very women who wanted Title IX in the first place.” Fox News, *America's Newsroom,*[4/9/25]
Amid the backlash, USA Fencing stood by its trans-inclusive policies which require “one calendar year (12 months) of testosterone suppression treatment” for athletes assigned male at birth who wish to compete in the women's category. A USA Fencing spokesperson told Fox News that Turner's disqualification had nothing to do with her protest of the policy, saying, “In the case of Stephanie Turner, her disqualification was not related to any personal statement but was merely the direct result of her decision to decline to fence an eligible opponent, which the FIE rules clearly prohibit.” Sullivan told Rolling Stone that the broader fencing community had also been supportive amid the backlash.
The campaign against USA Fencing and Sullivan has already had real-world consequences. Both Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon have announced investigations into the incident.
mma
04/09/25
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no lnx
Harris Loss Has Democrats Fighting Over How to Talk About Transgender Rights
Kamala Harris left Donald J. Trump’s anti-transgender attack ads largely unanswered. Some Democrats call it political malpractice.
:{Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign’s decision not to rebut attacks from Donald J. Trump has landed in the center of a contentious debate over the role transgender issues played in her party’s losses around the country
By Adam Nagourney and Nicholas Nehamas
Nov. 20, 2024
In the weeks before Election Day, aides to Kamala Harris could see in campaign polling that Donald J. Trump’s attacks on Ms. Harris’s support for transgender rights were driving away swing voters.
Struggling to put together a rebuttal, they produced a series of ads arguing that Mr. Trump was trying to distract from more important issues. Some of the spots noted that the policy Mr. Trump was seizing on, taxpayer-funded gender-transition surgery for inmates, was in place when he was president.
But none of the messages significantly swayed voters when the ads were tested with focus groups, according to four former Harris campaign aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
After a sharp, internal debate, the campaign shelved the ads. Instead, it settled on an anodyne television spot that showed the vice president condemning “negative ads” without mentioning Mr. Trump’s transgender attacks.
Since Ms. Harris’s defeat, her campaign’s decision has landed in the center of a contentious debate over how large a role transgender issues played in her party’s losses around the country. Several prominent Democrats said Ms. Harris’s relative silence was a damaging concession to Mr. Trump — and evidence that the campaign was so out of step with Americans’ views that it did not appreciate the potency of the ads.
“Malpractice was committed by that campaign,” said Ed Rendell, a Democratic former governor of Pennsylvania and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Rendell said he was so alarmed by the Trump attacks that he called top Harris campaign advisers, pleading for them to respond directly.
“They saw the ad, they knew it was being bought in heavy quantities,” he said. “Where were they? What were they thinking?”
That view has faced vocal pushback from some Democrats, particularly on the left, who warn against pinning Ms. Harris’s loss on her position on transgender rights. In a year when voters were so concerned about the economy and unhappy with President Biden, they argue, there is little hard evidence that transgender issues had a significant impact on the results.
“I never heard it anywhere on the campaign trail,” said Representative Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, a Democrat. Mr. Pocan said that scapegoating a small and vulnerable group was “the ultimate misdirection” — and that the party instead needed to address its failure to deliver on the economic concerns of working-class voters.
Representative Mark Pocan said the Democratic Party instead needed to address its failure to deliver on the economic concerns of working-class voters rather than focusing on transgender rights.Credit...Narayan Mahon for The New York Times
But for Democrats now turning to rebuild after a demoralizing and decisive loss, the question of how the party deals with transgender rights has emerged as a challenge for the years ahead. Democrats are divided as they watch what many see as a matter of basic human rights become part of the Republican arsenal.
What is taking place is both an autopsy of the Harris campaign strategy and a debate over key questions about the future. Does the party need to adjust its messaging before the 2026 midterm elections and the 2028 presidential race? Should transgender people’s access to health care or sports teams be embraced as the kind of civil rights cause Democrats have championed for generations? Should the party allow for more dissent and open discussion, as Representative Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat, argued after the election?
Republicans clearly see a political opportunity. The Trump campaign spent more than $37 million on television ads that invoked transgender issues, nearly 20 percent of its overall ad budget, according to data provided by AdImpact, an organization that tracks political ad placement and spending.
Republicans also deployed advertisements on transgender issues in Senate races. In Ohio, Republicans attacked Senator Sherrod Brown by saying he supported “allowing trans biological men in girls’ locker rooms.” Mr. Brown, unlike Ms. Harris, responded with his own ad, calling that claim “a complete lie.” (He lost his seat.)
Ms. Harris could not dismiss the Trump attacks so easily. Mr. Trump’s most prominent ad used a 5-year-old video clip of Ms. Harris saying that “every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access” to taxpayer-funded gender transitions. “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” an announcer said.
In an interview, Senator John Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat, denounced political attacks on transgender people. But the Trump campaign ad, he acknowledged, amounted to a “brilliant type of political messaging” that cast Republicans as focused on “you” and the Democrats as overly attuned to issues that did not affect the lives of many Americans.
“How can you sum up ‘woke’ in one commercial?” Mr. Fetterman said. “Try and top that.”
Image
John Fetterman waves to a crowd in front of a Harris campaign bus. He is wearing a purple hoodie.
Senator John Fetterman supporting Ms. Harris at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania in September.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Mr. Trump’s attacks on transgender rights came from a familiar playbook. For nearly 50 years, Republicans have seized on divisive social issues that touch a nerve with the public but are often underestimated by Democrats. They typically focus on an issue that affects a small minority of Americans — but can be used to cast a candidate as out of touch.
Mr. Trump’s message tapped into some Americans’ unease about changing gender norms, particularly as the issues were framed by the Republican presidential candidate. At his rallies, he mocked transgender female athletes, and, later in the campaign, claimed — falsely — that schools had conducted transition surgery on students without informing their parents.
It is difficult to know how effective these attacks were. The issue was far from the top concern mentioned by voters in polls before Election Day: It trailed well behind the economy and immigration. In a Gallup poll, voters ranked transgender rights as the least important of 22 issues in the 2024 election. Only about 1 percent of Americans identify as transgender, according to Gallup.
But pollsters said it might have played a less obvious and still significant role: For one thing, Mr. Trump used it to reach his core base of voters, who turned out for him in strong numbers on Election Day.
“That’s what Republicans do very, very well,” said Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster. “They keep their vote energized and mobilized.”
The attacks might also have had an impact on swing voters in indirect and subtle ways. Part of the Trump campaign’s aim was to portray Ms. Harris, whose election would have broken gender and racial barriers to the White House, as out of the mainstream, analysts from both parties said.
“That was the headline: That she is ‘other,’” Mr. Belcher said. “That entire ad says, ‘She is not one of us. She doesn’t share our values. She’s scary.’ It’s not just transgender people: It’s all Americans who are not quote-unquote, traditional Americans.”
Americans have nuanced and sometimes contradictory views in the debates over transgender rights. And the positions of many Democrats on critical issues — such as support for minors using puberty-blocking medications and surgery to transition — are not in line with many Americans.
Roughly 55 percent of voters said support for transgender rights in government and society has gone too far, according to AP VoteCast. More than 60 percent of adults say transgender women and girls should not be allowed to compete in sports with other women and girls, a Washington Post-KFF poll found. And strong majorities oppose minors’ using medications or hormone treatments, according to the Post-KFF poll.
At the same time, more than 60 percent of Americans support protecting transgender people from discrimination, according to the Pew Research Center. Most also oppose the government banning gender-affirming care for minors, including medication and surgery, Gallup found.
For Democrats, a central question is how much these issues will be used by Republicans in future presidential campaigns — as well as whether they will prove to be effective as the issue becomes more familiar to Americans.
Public attitudes on social debates have historically evolved with time. In 2004, the campaign of George W. Bush tapped into opposition to same-sex marriage as a way to rally conservative voters and turn independent voters against Democrats. Two decades later, gay marriage is almost a mainstream position.
Representative Sara Jacobs, a California Democrat, said that rather than ignoring the issue, she believes Democrats must make a proactive case to dispel the fears of voters, as they did in the fights against same-sex marriage bans.
Image
Sara Jacobs speaking at a lectern with a placard that reads “She leads the world.”
Representative Sara Jacobs said that Democrats must make a proactive case to dispel the fears of voters, as they did in the fights against same-sex marriage bans.Credit...Paul Morigi/Getty Images for CARE
And for all the attention on Mr. Trump’s use of the issue, voters elected the first transgender member of Congress this year: Sarah McBride, a Democrat from Delaware. (Even before Ms. McBride was sworn in, Representative Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, said she would introduce a measure to bar transgender women from using women’s rooms and changing rooms in the Capitol complex.)
Democrats positioning themselves for the 2028 presidential race are looking for lessons from the Harris campaign.
The Trump ads on transgender surgeries for inmates were among the most damaging attacks on the vice president — although not as potent as the messages about the economy, crime and immigration — said the campaign officials, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations. The campaign’s research concluded that the ads made voters think that Ms. Harris was focusing on things they did not care about, instead of the economy, their top priority.
After testing several response ads with focus groups and online panels, the campaign ultimately resorted to smaller-scale direct rebuttals, including digital ads that focused on the Trump administration policy that also paid for transition surgeries. And it ran ads on search engines that would appear if people searched for more information about Mr. Trump’s attacks.
The aides did not say whether Ms. Harris weighed in on the discussion.
But largely the campaign decided the best response was changing the subject. Meg Schwenzfeier, the chief analytics officer for the Harris campaign, said the vice president’s team determined its economic message was the most effective answer.
“In all of our quantitative and qualitative research on this ad, our best-testing responses pivoted to the economy,” Ms. Schwenzfeier said. “These responses not only neutralized the attack but actually moved people towards us — because they showed voters that the vice president did care about you.”
Exit polls show the vice president did not win the economic argument. More than half of voters said they trusted Mr. Trump, rather than Ms. Harris, to handle the economy.
In this charged post-election environment, the Trump attacks are outliving the campaign. Activists and others who work with transgender people, particularly transgender youths, say the political debate has resulted in a spike in reports of cyberbullying, online harassment and family tensions.
“I can talk about the harm caused as evidenced by a surge of calls to our crisis line,” said Jaymes Black, the chief executive of the Trevor Project, which focuses on suicide prevention among L.G.B.T.Q. youths. “This peddling of the negative stereotypes exacerbates the mental crisis of our young people.”
Katie Glueck and Ruth Igielnik contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Adam Nagourney is a national political reporter for The Times, covering the 2024 campaign.
Nicholas Nehamas is a Times political reporter covering the presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris.
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 21, 2024, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Debating Role Of Trans Rights In Harris’s Loss. Order Reprints |
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President Donald Trump mentioned the transgender community half a dozen times throughout his address to Congress on Tuesday, though trans people make up an estimated 1% of the U.S. population.
Less than 15 minutes in, he noted that he had signed an executive order declaring that the federal government will only recognize two unchangeable sexes, male and female, and another order banning trans women from participating in women’s sports.
He then introduced Payton McNabb, who played volleyball in high school in North Carolina and, Trump said, planned to play sports in college until “her girls’ volleyball match was invaded by a male.”
Trump said the player “smashed the ball so hard in Payton’s face causing traumatic brain injury, partially paralyzing her right side and ending her athletic career.”
It’s still unclear whether the player who spiked the ball and hit McNabb during the September 2022 match was trans. McNabb has said in interviews that she and her teammates were aware of a trans player on the team, but that player’s name has not been shared and she has not spoken to the press. Since then, McNabb has become a paid national advocate for state laws prohibiting trans students from playing on school sports teams that match their gender identities. She testified in favor of such a measure in North Carolina, which passed and took effect in August 2023.
Trump then said trans women are hurting other sports, referring to a case in which a trans woman finished a long-distance cycling race and set a record by five hours, beating a cisgender woman. Trump appears to be referring to Austin Killips, a trans woman cyclist who did win the 800-mile Arizona Trail Race in May.
Trump used the same reference before signing the executive order banning trans women and girls from playing in female sports. Killips responded in an op-ed for the Guardian, noting that she did set a course record, though the previous record was held by a man, who had broken a record set by a woman before him.
Killips said the reason she was interested in the event was because it was co-ed and argued that Trump had used her as a scapegoat.
However, Trump on Tuesday said her record — which Killips said has since been broken — is “demeaning for women and it’s very bad for our country.”
‘Making mice transgender’
Trump brought up trans issues again about 20 minutes into his speech, in what many on social media have described as one of the most bizarre moments of the address. He said Elon Musk was helping to find wasteful government spending, including “$8 million for making mice transgender.”
It’s unclear exactly what Trump was referring to, though it appeared to be a subcommittee hearing led by Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., last month titled “Transgender Lab Rats and Poisoned Puppies: Oversight of Taxpayer Funded Animal Cruelty.” During her opening remarks, Mace referred to a report last year from the White Coat Waste Project, a watchdog organization that aims to stop government spending on animal testing, that found more than $10 million in taxpayer funds had been “wasted to create transgender mice, rats, and monkeys in university labs.”
The report included eight studies that received funding from the National Institutes of Health, with most of them studying the effects of hormone therapy. One studies the effects of testosterone and estrogen on wound healing, with the goal of improving care for trans people and developing new approaches for treating millions of patients with chronic wounds.
Another uses mice to study how estrogen and anti-testosterone therapy affects immune response to an HIV vaccine. Trans women are disproportionately affected by HIV, with one study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finding that 42% of transgender women surveyed in seven U.S. cities in 2019-2020 were HIV positive.
The third and fourth studies mentioned in the report examine the effects of hormone therapy, with one specifically focused on how testosterone affects fertility and whether infertility related to testosterone can be reversed if a patient stops taking it.
Recommended
The remaining studies are reviews and editorials on improving studies and clinical support for LGBTQ patients.
The White House released a statement about Trump's comment Wednesday that referenced most of the above studies and a few more, including one that examines the effects of gender-affirming testosterone therapy on breast cancer risk and treatment, and another that studies the role estrogen plays in how gender influences asthma. None of the studies the White House referenced were specifically focused on "making mice transgender," but rather on the health effects of hormones.
Transgender youth
About an hour into his speech, Trump introduced January Littlejohn, a Florida mom who sued her child’s school district for allegedly creating a plan to allow her child to use a different name and pronouns at school without Littlejohn’s knowledge, which Trump described as “child abuse.”
A judge dismissed Littlejohn’s lawsuit in 2022, after the school district amended the internal support plan for her child. The court also said her claim couldn’t meet the high burden to show that what the school did had violated her parental rights. Littlejohn has appealed.
Her 2021 complaint against the school district states that she was in contact with the school about her child’s “confusion” about the child’s gender. She and her husband agreed to have the child work with a school counselor temporarily, according to the complaint. When the child asked to go by a different name and they/them pronouns ahead of the 2021 school year, Littlejohn and her husband said they wouldn’t make those changes at home but told the child’s math teacher that the child could use the requested name as a nickname, according to Littlejohn’s complaint.
The teacher asked if Littlejohn would like her to share the nickname with other teachers, according to the complaint, which added that Littlejohn did not authorize the teacher to share the nickname.
Additional emails obtained by CNN and the Tallahassee Democrat reportedly show that, in response to the teacher’s question about whether she should share the child’s nickname with other teachers, Littlejohn wrote, “Whatever you think is best or” the child “can handle it herself.”
Littlejohn later told the teacher she appreciated her support and that she was going to allow her child to “take the lead on this,” CNN reported.
In an emailed statement, Littlejohn said that at the time of the emails, she was referring only to the use of a nickname.
“We were not supporting the denial of our daughter’s sex and would have never imagined the creation of a formal transition plan where our daughter would meet alone in a room with three adults who asked her questions that would absolutely impact her upbringing and safety, such as which sexual identity would be assigned to her, which restroom and locker room she would be authorized to would use and whether she would room with males or females on overnight field trips,” Littlejohn said.
She added that she “never would have expected that we, as parents, would be cut out of such personal and consequential decisions.”
Littlejohn’s case has been used by conservatives to lobby for state legislation supporting parents rights to information about how their children are identifying at school and barring schools from referring to students with a different name or pronouns without their parent’s permission. Five states have enacted legislation that would require school staff to notify parents if a student asks to use a different name or pronouns, which critics refer to as “forced outing” legislation.
Just after introducing Littlejohn, Trump noted that he had signed an order “to cut off all taxpayer funding to any institution that engages in the sexual mutilation of our youth,” using inflammatory language to describe transition-related medical care, which is supported by major medical associations in the U.S. That order has since been blocked by two federal judges.
He went on to say that he planned to ask Congress to pass a bill “permanently banning and criminalizing sex changes on children and forever ending the lie that any child is trapped in the wrong body,” in effect denying the existence of trans youth.
Jo Yurcaba is a reporter for NBC Out.
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rww
02/27/2025
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- Malcolm Ferguson @ The New Republic: Andrew Tate Is on His Way to the U.S. Thanks to Trump
The misogynist facing charges of human trafficking is on a plane back to the United States.
- Angry White Men: Christian Nationalist Podcasters Interview Holocaust Denier Ron Unz
As part of a new interview series, white Christian nationalists C. Jay Engel and Andrew Isker spoke with Ron Unz about Charles Lindbergh and World War II. A well-known Holocaust denier, Unz has written that the Holocaust was a “hoax” and that Jews have a “notorious tendency to lie and dissemble.”
- Hemant Mehta @ Friendly Atheist: GOP Congressman: It's OK if Elon fires you since "God has a plan and purpose for your life"
Republican Congressman Mark Alford of Missouri offered thoughtless religious platitudes to his constituents.
- Janna Brancolini @ The Daily Beast: Johnson Tries to Shrug Off Anti-DOGE Town Halls as the Work of ‘Paid Protesters’
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) claimed Wednesday that Americans who attended recent rowdy Republican town halls were “paid protesters.”
- Ahmad Austin Jr. @ Mediaite: Trump Says He Doesn’t Remember Calling Zelenskyy a Dictator When Confronted in Oval Office: ‘Did I Say That?’
President Donald Trump on Thursday acted as though he had no recollection of calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator.”
- Annabelle Timsit @ The Washington Post: Transgender troops will be removed from U.S. military, Pentagon says
> The previous Trump administration effectively banned transgender people from joining, but the new memo says currently serving transgender troops will be discharged.
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AN 2 25
Two already vulnerable groups, transgender people and undocumented immigrants, are feeling increased fear since Trump took office. Both groups face increasing discrimination and are changing their day-to-day behaviors. Trump has signed multiple executive orders targeting the groups as well.
“Regardless of how President Trump's executive orders shake out in the courts, experts say the widespread fear and micro and macro changes to daily life will have lasting implications for these groups,” Erica Pandey writes at Axios. "Life is already changing for members of both communities, in ways big and small — with bigger changes likely coming."
For many undocumented immigrants, fear of ICE raids has meant staying home, avoiding work and school. Trump’s presidency has affected documented immigrants as well, some of whom have begun carrying their papers with them.
READ MORE:'Not just blood that they’re after': Expert says Christian Nationalists 'want a show'
An immigration lawyer in Albany, N.Y., L.J. D'Arrigo, told Axios his "phone has been ringing off the hook."
Transgender people are losing access to crucial gender-affirming care and protections in the workplace.
"The messaging is, 'It's okay to discriminate against transgender people,' Corinne Goodwin, the executive director of the Eastern Pennsylvania Trans Equity Project, told Axios. "The cruelty is the point."
Trump signed at least four executive orders slashing trans rights. He banned trans people from women’s sports, signed an order saying there are two sexes and they are “not changeable,” barred trans people from the military and restricted access to gender-affirming care for people under 19.
READ MORE:'A lot of MAGA': 20 million Americans could lose health coverage under new GOP bill
“The barriers and actual impacts are already coming hard and fast” for trans Americans, said Erin Reed, a trans rights activist and writer.
"For transgender youth, if your government is telling that they don’t want you, if your society is telling you that they don’t want you, how does that make you feel?" she said. "And the message to cisgender youth is that this is an acceptable group of people to hate and that this is an acceptable group to bully."
Trump’s executive orders have targeted immigrants as well. On Wednesday, the president signed an executive order to end federal benefits for undocumented people. Earlier in his presidency, he signed a controversial order banning birthright citizenship, which is being tried in court.
The consequences of Trump’s actions are felt strongly across the country. In Texas, an 11-year-old died by suicide after classmates bullied her by claiming her family was in the country illegally.
READ MORE:'A lot of disinformation': GOP lawmakers reach the breaking point with Trump
“This week, the White House's X account shareda video of people in shackles preparing to board a deportation flight and called it ‘ASMR,’ referring to an online trend of posting videos with pleasant, gentle sounds,” Pandey writes.
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AN 2 25
A federal judge sharply criticized an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice over Pentagon policy asserting that the U.S. Armed Forces could somehow be compromised simply by requiring service members to use a colleague’s preferred pronoun.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, a Biden appointee, appeared skeptical of both the President’s and the Department of Justice’s stance on transgender service members during Tuesday’s hearing.
Reyes “asserted flatly that the idea that the greatest fighting force in the history of the world would be adversely effected by the need to use specific pronouns for a few thousand members of the military is, ‘Ridiculous,'” Fox News producer Jake Gibson reported.
READ MORE: ‘Bloodbath by Design’: Trump’s Russia Negotiators Criticized for ‘Almost No Experience’
According to Politico’s Kyle Cheney, this is how the exchange went:
“REYES: Can we agree that the greatest fighting force… is not going to be impacted in any way by less than 1 percent of the soldiers using a different pronoun than others might want to call them?
DOJ ATTORNEY: I can’t agree with that here.
REYES: Would you agree with me that if our military is negatively impacted in any kind of way that matters… We all have a lot bigger problems than pronoun use. We have a military that is incompetent. Any common sense rational human being knows that it doesn’t. It is pretext. It is frankly ridiculous. If you want to get me an officer of the U.S. military who is willing to get on the stand and say that because of pronoun usage the U.S. military is less prepared because of pronoun usage. I will be the first to give you a box of cigars.”
An estimated 15,000 service members are transgender.
In another striking exchange, Judge Reyes also called Trump’s executive order on transgender service members “unadulterated animus.”
Currently, the Pentagon has ordered service branches to stop accepting new transgender recruits into the military, and to pause any gender-affirming medical care for transgender troops.
READ MORE: ‘Sociopathic’: USAID Worker Sues Alleging State Dept. Medevac Refusal for Pregnant Wife
“One of the plaintiffs,” in the case, WUSA9‘s Jordan Fischer reports, “Koda Nature, a 23-year-old transgender man from Texas, said he had been working with a recruiter to join the U.S. Marine Corps when he was informed last month he would no longer be able to enlist. Nature said joining the military had been his dream since he was 5 years old – a dream to follow in the footsteps of 17 generations of his family.”
President Donald Trump has signed at least four executive orders restricting the civil rights of transgender people in the United States, including one that could be used to ban open service by transgender troops, under the guise of prioritizing military excellence, readiness, and “unit cohesion” — tropes that for decades were also used to try to prevent lesbian, gay, and bisexual troops from serving openly in America’s armed forces.
“Consistent with the military mission and longstanding DoD policy, expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service,” Trump’s January 27 executive order reads. Trump also alleged that “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life. A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.”
That order specifically targeted the use of preferred pronouns, which he called, “invented and identification-based pronoun usage.”
“It is the policy of the United States Government to establish high standards for troop readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity, and integrity. This policy is inconsistent with the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria. This policy is also inconsistent with shifting pronoun usage or use of pronouns that inaccurately reflect an individual’s sex.”
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mma
Trump keeps escalating his anti-trans policies. Right-wing media still want more.
02/06/25
mace 2x dn on slur after gerry c calls her
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an 2 25
Last week, Marana High School physics teacher Les Beard learned about a chromosomal disorder with relevance to current events and decided to share what he’d learned with his students.
This week, followers of right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe are calling for Beard to be fired for defying an executive order from President Donald Trump in which he declared that “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.”
Beard is a former geophysicist who has taught physics at Marana High for six years.
It started when Beard was doing some nighttime scrolling on his phone and came across a news clip about a woman with androgen insensitivity syndrome, a rare genetic disorder, and decided to share what he’d learned with his students.
Those with the syndrome have the XY chromosomes of a male but their bodies don’t react to the hormones that cause development of male sex characteristics. Many of those with the syndrome outwardly appear to be female, but have internal sex organs of a male, according to the National Library of Medicine. Some have characteristics of both sexes.
“It piqued my interest, so I thought I would mention it,” Beard told the Arizona Mirror during a Jan. 31 phone interview.
Beard told his students that those with the syndrome are often raised as girls and don’t find out that their chromosomes are XY until they go to the doctor to find out why their menstrual cycle never started. Many of them balk when told that they’re actually male, Beard said.
“None of them really believe it, because they’ve been women all their lives,” he told the students last week.
Beard showed the class clothed photos of some of the women with the syndrome, which he said “looked every bit like a woman” and asked the class, “Are these guys? Mr. Trump says so.”
The lesson caused a “ruckus” in the classroom, which Beard — who speaks in a slow Texas drawl — said he expected, with some kids loudly disagreeing or shaking their heads while others seemed to agree with his point.
“I wanted the kids to understand that, if we make rules, they should encompass all situations that might appear,” Beard said. “It was all too easy to find an outlier that doesn’t seem to fit the two gender idea.”
The following week at school began uneventfully for Beard, but on Jan. 28, he learned that one of his students had recorded the discussion and shared it with her mother, who had then sent it to O’Keefe.
O’Keefe posted the video on the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, where he has 3 million followers.
In the post, O’Keefe accused Beard of “misleading students by contradicting the NIH and referring to people affected by AIS as ‘women.’”
“Then all sorts of craziness broke loose,” Beard said.
Commenters on social media called Beard a “groomer,” a label that generally means a person who preys on children to condition them for sexual abuse but which has become a catch-all term for conservatives to refer to adults who are accepting of trans students and members of the LGBTQ community. Some of them said that Beard’s lesson on biology was proof of their claims that public school teachers were indoctrinating students with their “woke agenda.”
Others called for him to be arrested and charged with sexual harassment or endangering the welfare of a child. O’Keefe himself repeatedly called a Marana Unified School District spokeswoman to ask if Beard would be punished for defying Trump’s executive order.
O’Keefe’s followers sent Beard nasty emails and contacted the district, calling for him to be fired for sharing “gender ideology” with students.
The video about Beard’s lesson, which O’Keefe posted on X Jan. 28, garnered 600,000 views, 10,000 likes and 332 comments over the next three days.
On Tuesday, Beard was called into a meeting with an administrator to talk about the off-topic lesson and the district’s expectation that teachers stick to their curriculum and avoid sharing personal and political opinions. The next day, he was told to work from home and ordered not to have contact with any Marana teachers or students.
Next week, he expects to find out if he still has a job.
Beard said that he had not previously received any criticism from administrators for the content of his lessons.
Allison Benjamin, a spokesperson for the district, told the Mirror via email that she couldn’t answer specific questions surrounding Beard’s suspension or school policies, but instead supplied a statement similar to one she previously provided to O’Keefe.
In the statement, Benjamin shared two “policies that address expectations for classroom instruction that include: 1. Teaching to the state standards that are focused on course content. 2. Providing a learning environment where teachers remain neutral and refrain from sharing their personal beliefs and opinions.”
“The administration will continue to follow appropriate guidelines detailed in district policy to ensure all staff fulfill these expectations,” she wrote.
O’Keefe’s video features an at-times combative phone call between him and Benjamin. In it, O’Keefe tells her that trying to get comments from the district is a “kafkaesque nightmare.” Benjamin later agrees with O’Keefe that this was “an extraordinary situation and I’m glad that you’re reporting on it.”
Who is James O’Keefe?
O’Keefe, who already had a penchant for publishing highly-edited and misleading undercover recordings, founded Project Veritas in 2010.
Project Veritas became a mainstay of the conservative media ecosystem for sending its “undercover journalists” — some of whom were trained by a former spy on how to covertly infiltrate their targets — to secretly record liberals and journalists in an effort to catch them saying something embarrassing.
One of the so-called reporters set up a date with a top Twitter employee and secretly recorded him venting about Elon Musk. Another made a secret recording of Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs’ twin sister, Becky Hobbs. In the video, apparently recorded during dinner at a restaurant, the governor’s twin said the Democratic Party had been donating to MAGA Republicans in Arizona primary elections to give Democratic candidates a better chance of winning in the general election.
The Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics says journalists should only opt to work undercover in rare circumstances, when there’s no other way to obtain the information.
O’Keefe was pushed out as the chairman of Project Veritas in 2023 following accusations that he mistreated staff by yelling at them and making them do his personal errands and mismanaged finances, the Associated Press reported.
O’Keefe has continued publishing sting-style videos since his ouster from Project Veritas. He even recruited volunteers to make undercover recordings of election worker training in Maricopa County ahead of the November election. He later claimed that trainers’ accurate description of the state’s election laws brought up “serious questions about the integrity of the voting process.”
The recording of Beard was submitted anonymously to O’Keefe’s recently launched Citizen Journalism Foundation, according to the article on O’Keefe’s website.
Numerous commenters who reacted to the video said that they thought Beard belonged in jail for his disregard of Trump’s executive order.
In reality, the White House doesn’t have any legal authority to control local school district curricula. But Beard said that his administrators are worried about losing federal funding.
He admitted that he veered from physics and into a politically charged subject, which his supervisors did not appreciate.
“I didn’t intend to bring politics too sharply into the discussion, but it got there,” Beard said.
Beard, 69, moved to the Tucson area 12 years ago with his wife and two children. His daughter has since graduated from the University of Arizona and his son, who often features his father in his own goofy YouTube videos, is a freshman at Marana High. Beard said that he enjoys teaching the students at Marana High, and he hopes to hold onto his job, even after administrators suggested that he voluntarily resign.
“I think it would make things very easy for them if I resigned,” Beard said, adding that his administrators are not “nasty people” and that he understands the difficult position that they’re in.
College professors have some First Amendment protections when it comes to academic expression in the classroom, but court decisions over the last 20 years have not given the same protections to K-12 teachers.
Beard said he believes teaching opportunities are lost when instructors are strictly limited in topics of discussion, causing students to wonder why teachers steer clear of interesting, socially relevant subjects.
“To be able to freely express yourself will lead to a richer conversation among people who may have very different opinions,” Beard said.
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NOTE CULT WAR PIVOT TO CEO CORP; HAKEEM J PRED EMPWER ACT
AN 1 25
While Republicans claimed a bill restricting transgender girls' participation in school sports was aimed at protecting "our culture and civilization" on Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the legislation benefits the corporate class as it distracts from true life-threatening emergencies faced by communities across the country.
"Thank you for your concern about women for the first time that I've seen," said the New York Democrat on the House floor, noting that Republicans have consistently voted against the Violence Against Women Act and backed abortion bans that have stripped women of the ability to control their own bodies proven deadly.
But contrary to the GOP's claims that barring transgender girls and women from playing on sports teams that align with their gender will protect girls from assault, Ocasio-Cortez suggested, the biggest beneficiaries of the legislation include corporate executives whose companies do far more harm to American families than transgender athletes.
"I know who loves this bill," said the congresswoman. "Yes, bigoted folks love this bill. Assaulters love this bill. But also, CEOs love this bill. Because Los Angelesis on fire right now, and this is the number one priority this majority has."
The bill passed 218-206, with the entire Republican caucus supporting it and all but two Democrats voting no. If the legislation is signed into law, schools that receive federal funding would be barred from allowing transgender girls from playing on girls' sports teams.
Republicans have poured $111 million on political ads regarding the issue in the past year, as communities in the Southeast have suffered catastrophic hurricane damage andhomelessnesshas soared by 18%.
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) agreed with Ocasio-Cortez's comments about the distraction caused by the transgender sports bill.
"Republicans fearmonger about the trans community to divert attention from the fact they have no real solutions to help everyday Americans," said Bonamici. "Transgender students, like all students, they deserve the same opportunity as their peers to learn teamwork, to find belonging and to grow into well-rounded adults through sports."
Ocasio-Cortez added that the bill, which lacks an enforcement mechanism, would open the door to "genital examinations" of student athletes as it would force schools to confirm the sex assigned at birth of each member of a school sports team.
"What this also opens the door for is for women to try to perform a very specific kind of femininity for the very kind of men who are drafting this bill, and to open up questioning of who is a woman because of how we look, how we present ourselves, and yes, what we choose to do with our bodies," said Ocasio-Cortez.
The so-called Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act was the subject of a letter signed by more than 400 civil society groups on Monday, who urged members of Congress to reject the "discriminatory proposal."
"Although the authors of the legislation represent themselves as serving the interests of cisgender girls and women, this legislation does not address the longstanding barriers all girls and women have faced in their pursuit of athletics," said the groups, led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. "We firmly believe that an attack on transgender youth is an attack on civil rights."
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mma The Daily Wire take credit for stirring up Capitol Hill bathroom controversy
12/11/24
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an 12 24
Milwaukee State Rep. Ryan Clancy readily admits he was the odd one out last week at a Washington, D.C., meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
ALEC, a nonprofit that brings together state lawmakers and corporations and drafts model legislation, describes its point of view as “dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism.” It has produced state policies embraced almost solely by Republicans — drafted with input from corporate members of the organization.
Clancy is neither a Republican politician nor a corporate official. “To the best of my knowledge, I would be the only Democrat — and almost certainly the only socialist” at the States & Nation Policy Summit ALEC held Tuesday through Thursday, Clancy said in an interview. But as a state legislator, he was technically welcome at the event.
On the last day, however, Clancy was summarily kicked out and told his registration would be withdrawn and the fee refunded. While declining to explain how, an ALEC spokesman said Clancy was being “disruptive” — something Clancy categorically denies.
Attending an ALEC event was important to him, said Clancy, who is just wrapping up his first term in the Assembly after being elected in 2022. He wanted to see the process by which ALEC drafts model legislation and distributes bill proposals through its member lawmakers to statehouses around the country.
Clancy said that in his first term in Madison he has seen a lot of legislation circulate that originated in ALEC proposals. Those included more than a dozen bills putting restrictions on trans and nonbinary people, such as preventing gender affirming medical care for people under 18, he said.
“My oldest child is trans,” Clancy said in an interview. “It was just horrific to have to bring together the community to push back on those. But it was also good to know about them in advance.”
Clancy said the anti-trans legislation points to priorities that he believes ALEC has beyond the talking points it makes about individual liberty, free markets and limited government.
“Even more economic-seeming policy discussions were often peppered with anti-trans and anti-DEI comments behind the scenes,” Clancy said.
While his attendance was cut short, he said, his time at the session offered a preview of ALEC-inspired legislation that he expects to see in the coming session of the state Legislature, and an opportunity for his fellow Democratic lawmakers to “figure out how we can push back on that.”
Democratic tradition
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ymail 12 24
Trump’s reelection has prompted many to wonder, How did we get here again? One under-discussed factor is the role identity politics played in his campaign.
This might sound counterintuitive. Pundits, after all, have attributed Kamala Harris’s loss to identity politics, accusing her campaign of being too “woke” — a term that refers to any position intended to specifically benefit marginalized people.
In reality, Harris went to painstaking lengths to avoid campaigning on identity issues, including downplaying the significance of her possibly becoming the first woman president. Trump, by contrast, ran a campaign that associated Harris with the outgroups his supporters are united in despising — among them migrants, trans people, and anyone who spends time thinking about their pronouns.
Trump kept his coalition together by stoking shared grievances. In this way, his presidential bid represented a type of inverted identity politics. He didn’t campaign on making life better for certain identity groups. He campaigned by mobilizing people against ones they loathe and fear.
Throughout his campaign, Trump proposed three core sets of policies that are steeped in this form of identity politics: mass deportation, law and order, and policing gender identity.
Kamala Harris’s hidden barrier](
https://substack.com/redirect/2a608ff8-144a-418c-ba22-db1929f67782?j=eyJ1IjoiN3ltancifQ.i0HJl3aVWG8sHp566T-pebMssFGKcgvxVOFLuZyEDpw)
First, Trump championed stricter immigration policies, including mass deportations and completing a wall along the US-Mexico border, framing them as essential for keeping America safe and protecting jobs. These policies appealed directly to voters, both white and non-white, who view immigration as a threat to their economic and cultural status — recall Trump regularly talking about migrants purportedly “taking Black jobs.” This relentless fear-mongering was not just about security or economic concerns, but also about the reality of changing demographics.
Generation Z is the last majority-white generation in US history, with Latinos and Hispanic people steadily increasing their representation over time. The right has weaponized this shift to stoke fears among voters who believe immigration jeopardizes their standing. These appeals were mainly aimed at white voters, but they were also successful with people of color to the extent that Trump won Latino men.
Second, Trump emphasized “law and order,” frequently calling for the reinstatement of “stop and frisk” policies and advocating for police immunity, particularly in response to protests against police brutality and incidents of “migrant crime” he sensationalized at every opportunity. These appeals were aimed at voters who view racial justice movements like Black Lives Matter as destabilizing and/or are fearful of Black and brown people. Once again, the goal was to generate hysteria around a perceived threat to an existing social order.
Finally, Trump's campaign focused on gender identity with crude transphobia and by portraying Harris as a radical advocate for trans causes, even as she avoided talking about them on the campaign trail. Notably, Trump blanketed the airwaves with TV ads claiming "Kamala Harris is for they/them. I am for you." He regularly mocked transgender athletes at his rallies and vowed to "get transgender insanity the hell out of our schools, and we will keep men out of women’s sports." Harris may have tried to avoid engaging on this issue, but Trump forced it upon her and made it seem as though she was the one playing identity politics.
The reality is that none of this was about actually improving life circumstances for Trump’s identity coalition, or anyone else for that matter. Mass deportations, for example, will disrupt key sectors like agriculture and construction where immigrants make up a significant portion of the workforce. These disruptions could increase the cost of food and housing, both of which were among the reasons Trump won in the first place.
A government by toxic men, for toxic men
Evidence also shows that Trump’s proposed “law and order” policies are ineffective. Stop-and-frisk policies do not reduce crime or make communities safer (neither does police immunity). Trump’s attempts to campaign as a crime-fighter were absurd for many reasons, not the least of which is that crime has actually fallen since he left office in January 2021.
Along similar lines, Trump’s talking points about the country being in the throes of an occupation by violent migrants are a dystopian fantasy. From 1850 to 2020, immigrants actually had similar orlower incarceration rates than white men born in the US. In places like Texas, where the border is a major issue, both documented and undocumented immigrants have lower rates of offenses compared to US-born individuals.
Lastly, in an era of evolving gender identity and expression, it’s important to note that despite the uproar about trans people, they make up only about one percent of the American population. Anecdotal evidence from Minnesota shows that efforts to introduce gender-neutral bathrooms have actually made students feel safer.
The panic around trans people ignores the facts. Trans people are four times more likely to be victims of violent crime and are at greater risk of experiencing sexual assault and suicidal ideation. Everything anti-trans advocates fear might happen to them and their communities is already happening — at alarming rates — to trans people. That’s why not protecting trans people opens up the floodgates for harm to be done to anyone else in the name of “safety,” including women the right does not deem sufficiently “feminine.”
Trump spoke to his coalition’s fears, not their realities. He successfully masked policies that will harm his voters with a negative brand of identity politics. He won’t solve actual problems, but he will validate grievances.
As Trump rolls out his nightmarish cabinet nominees and resumes his chaos machine method of governing, his rhetoric continues to define "American" identity in the narrowest way possible. His vow to carry out mass deportations now comes with “no price tag” and his incoming border czar is talking about arresting Democratic officials who refuse to comply. His attacks on trans people have emboldened Republicans to call for the abolition of marriage equality and to make bigoted attacks on the first transgender person to be elected to Congress.
The MAGA playbook will remain the same: dividing, conquering, and pitting one group against another. It’s a terrible way to run the country, but as Trump just demonstrated, it’s still an effective way to win elections.
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aha // bolster neg attack ads dark $
no lnx
:{alternet
Until there’s a liberal media apparatus, the Democrats will live in Trump’s America
Donald Trump gestures next to Patty Morin, whose daughter Rachel was killed in Maryland last year, during a campaign rally at Santander Arena in Reading, Pennsylvania, U.S., November 4, 2024. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
John Stoehr November 21, 2024
It takes time for things to stick properly, so please bear with me while I say again that Kamala Harris did not lose the election because of things she said. She lost because of things Donald Trump said she said.
So Democratic Party critics are basing their criticism not on what Harris said but on what Trump said she said, as they are accepting as true the allegations of the president-elect against the vice president.
By focusing on things that Trump said she said, rather than on things she said, these critics are missing the real lesson from the 2024 election – that her policies were not the determining factor in her defeat. It was the ear-splitting volume of the accusations against her and the absence of equal and opposite accusations against him.
In the final weeks of the election, the Trump campaign spent more than $29 million on television ads attacking Harris on trans rights. It was “by far, the biggest focal point when it comes to Trump’s ad spending — one of the best barometers of messaging priority there is,” wroteThe Bulwark’s Marc Caputo on October 24. “By contrast, the campaign has spent $5 million over that same time period on TV ads on the economy, making that topic their fifth-most emphasized.”
According to a new study by a Democratic pollster, Trump’s attack ads largely explain the outcome of the election. The report calculated the percentage of swing voters who voted for Trump in the belief that Harris supported federal funding of transgender surgeries on undocumented immigrants. It was a whopping 83 percent.
Conclusion:
“These voters — who remained open to persuasion until the very end — delivered not just a rejection of Harris but what they believed the Democratic Party stands for, absorbing rightwing narratives.”
Harris didn’t lose because of things she said.
She lost because of things Trump said she said.
Critics of the Democratic Party will point out that, ackshually, Harris did say she supported access to gender-transition care for undocumented immigrants. But that was once, in 2019, during her first run, and it wasn’t a campaign pledge. She wasn’t running on it. She gave an affirmative answer to an ACLU questionnaire. This year, her campaign explicitly rejected the questionnaire as having any bearing on her platform as the 2024 nominee. Indeed, she did what critics say she should do. She backed away from lefty woke things like trans rights.
And it didn’t matter.
It didn’t matter because what she said, the substance of her message wasn’t as important to the outcome of the election as the volume of it, which is to say, the substance of what she said could not be heard through the din of the rightwing media apparatus. As media expert Matthew Sheffield said today, nothing was going to get through that, not even the shared reality of the economy. “Through seven TV channels, more than 1,500 talk-radio stations, and millions of social media posts. Republicans sold a fictional narrative about the economy to unsuspecting Americans. Trump inherited a strong economy from Obama and then destroyed it. Democrats never told the story.”
They couldn’t. No one was listening, because no one could hear it. Trump’s attack ads worked in tandem with thousands of media sites, including the one formerly known as Twitter, that have been operating around the clock since 2020, often in parallel with the Washington press corps. They were able to take one small thing Harris said years ago and turn it into a caricature so ridiculous that a convicted felon like Donald Trump could look like a viable candidate by comparison.
It was so loud some voters didn’t know what the Democrats stand for.
And that includes some Democratic voters.
Harris won more votes than Trump did in 2020 (she now has 74.3 million to his 74.2), but she did not win as many as Joe Biden in 2020. (He won 81.3 million votes, the most ever, while Trump won 76.8 million this year, the second-most ever.) Where did they go?
You could say voter suppression laws, but I think a bigger source of “voter suppression” was lies and propaganda, directly or indirectly from rightwing media outlets or from anti-trans attack ads, or in the form of “false-flag efforts” funded by billionaires, including Twitter’s Elon Musk, to make Democratic voters feel like there’s no point in voting for Harris. “The entire goal of the campaign was to push her numbers down,” a top Trump adviser told the Post. Clearly, it worked.
The volume of the rightwing media apparatus, especially when it’s in sync with the Washington press corps, is so loud that it can feel like the ultimate arbiter of our political reality. As one CNN anchor put it this morning, this is Donald Trump’s America. We’re just living in it. Until there’s a liberal media apparatus, one that can meet bad info with good info, the Democrats will continue living in Trump’s America, too.
mma
October 24, 2024 edition of Fox News's The Five
JESSICA TARLOV, HOST: So Trump's message, which has admittedly been buried, I guess, over the last few days — he did give that speech yesterday at the Turning Point conference — but he has been talking about this "enemy within" stuff, he has talked about "women love me except for abortion" which is obvious the major issue in the election. Defending tariffs, talking about deporting illegals, and also that Kamala is terrible, and that will be the centerpiece of it.
But there was data I saw today that I found really interesting: the number one topic that Republicans are spending money on ads is about trans issues. So number five was the economy; number one, all of this anti-trans stuff, where they're saying Kamala is going to give sex changes to undocumented people in prison. That doesn't seem like the strongest message to end on, on a national campaign.
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an 10 24
Long before Donald Trump declared he would run for president, his first political adviser articulated the central idea that has come to define both candidate and campaign.
"Hate is a stronger motivator than love," said Roger Stone in 2008 -- and that corrosive outlook is obviously what still drives the Watergate-vintage dirty trickster and pardoned felon (although he now claims to be a born-again "Christian"). It is also what drives the man whose political persona Stone created.
The Trump campaign, and the MAGA movement at its core, embodies a malevolent spirit of hostility that endangers democracy, domestic tranquility and the very future of the nation. Both the candidate and his surrogates persistently spew out a noxious fog of deception and demonization, aimed at dehumanizing vulnerable populations that cannot fight back.
Sounding like a dollar-store knockoff of Hitler, Trump keeps intensifying his racist rants against migrants and minorities he describes as genetically inferior and predisposed to criminal conduct, from eating other people's pets to slitting the throats of young women. He has commenced a tour of cities supposedly overrun by these dark-skinned marauders, even as the local Republican officials have begged him to desist from his absurd lies and violent instigation.
But almost as toxic, and perhaps even more bizarre, is the Trump campaign's increasingly lurid, clamorous barrage of advertising aimed at trans people. So far, the Republicans and their allies have spent roughly $30 million on ads that aim to conflate trans people with murderers -- and persuading them that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is devoted to advancing the interests of those trans killers above all else. While it is true that Harris has supported gender-affirming health care, including for prisoners, it is also true that the federal prison system under Trump provided that same care -- as the law requires.
But what is so weird -- how else to put it? -- about the Trump anti-trans crusade is its hidden underwriter. Behind the spending on much of the MAGA hate propaganda, especially the messages dehumanizing trans people, is none other than billionaire troll Elon Musk. Hatred is a more powerful motivator than love for a twisted character like Musk too, even when the object of that revulsion is his own child.
Now Musk, a pompous proponent of "conservative family values," has often bragged about littering the world with his offspring, possibly too many to identify. But what we know for certain is that he has a trans daughter who has changed her name to Vivian Wilson and successfully petitioned the courts to dissociate herself from her father.
Rarely present for Vivian when she was growing up, Musk has gone so far as to proclaim that his erstwhile son is "dead, killed by the woke mind virus," and mock his own child publicly for being "gay and slightly autistic" from an early age. Vivian says Musk knows nothing about her and has lied about being "tricked" into approving the medical treatment she says saved her life.
It is worth noting here that this same troll, who has reportedly financed millions of dollars' worth of anti-immigrant vitriol online and on the airwaves, is himself a migrant from South Africa via Canada -- and has collected more money from government, both state and federal, than any 10 million working-class noncitizens. His reintroduction of Nazism, white supremacy and outrageous conspiracies and falsehoods on his social media platform X makes him a far greater menace to American communities than those who have crossed the southern border to escape violence and seek a better life for their kids. Before the mass deportation begins, perhaps we could have a more selective approach.
Ugliness and grievance suffuse the Trump movement. They are as visible as a pustulant sore, not only in the would-be president's threatening rhetoric but in the aggressive thrust of his backers. It protrudes in different directions, always exposing the internalized fury of those around him, from his adviser Stephen Miller's desire to destroy immigrant families, to JD Vance's undisguised anger at the unmarried women who remind him of his errant mother, to Musk's festering grudge against his daughter.
An American political campaign, especially for the presidency, would normally seek to promote a vision of the future, an inspiring call to patriotism, or even a platform of policies and proposals. What Trump and his coterie of billionaires offer instead is incitement and the prospect of bloodshed, all so they can profit and loot the Treasury at will. What they are delivering already is a hellscape of hatred -- just as Stone so gleefully warned us.
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October 9, 2024, edition of Fox News' Mornings with Maria Bartiromo
MARIA BARTIROMO (HOST): Just recently there were concerns about school boards telling kids, "Look, if you want to have transgender operations, just don't tell your parents."
LEE CARTER (GUEST): Well, it's a real thing.
BARTIROMO: It's a real thing, yeah.
CARTER: One of my daughter's very close friends, her older sister is in first grade, and they were read a book in school about crayons. Now, that sounds like nothing to be concerned about, except it was a red crayon who felt it was blue on the inside —
BARTIROMO: The crayon.
CARTER: The crayon. And it was okay that it was really a blue crayon even though on the outside, its label, was red. The answer was to go tell your teacher. Not to tell your parents. And this is what they're being read in school in first grade in a public school in Westchester County in New York. And that that scares me. I don't want the answer to be go to the teacher to have that conversation, I love teachers. I love my daughter's teacher. But I don't want her to be the one to have that kind of a conversation with my if daughter in the first grade.
BARTIROMO: You've got to be the last line of defense. The mother.
CARTER: Yeah. Absolutely. And that really, really does terrify me. And my husband and I have had conversations about this. If it ever gets to that point, would we keep them in public school, and that's, that's a terrifying thought because I believe in the public school system. I believe in public education. I believe in all of these, you know, access to opportunity for all. But I am very, very afraid that I'm not going to have the -- our family isn't going to have the decision making on how she's raised.
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September 13, 2024, edition of RedPill78, streamed on Rumble
ZAK PAINE (HOST): Well, thank you again, Joy, and, you're welcome back. For part two, you're going to have to do a book on trans acts of violence because, unfortunately, that's — you know what I mean? It sounds funny, but there are so many of them, trans shooters. I mean, it just seems like every time you hear about it —
JOY PULLMAN (THE FEDERALIST EXECUTIVE EDITOR): We have — for those interested at The Federalist, we have a t----- tracker — well, we call it the t----- tracker. Maybe I shouldn't be telling you that, but it's for transgender shootings. And so —
PAINE: That's the internal — that's what's on the spreadsheet.
PULLMAN: We also have one for corporations, you know, pledging large amounts of money for — to transgender causes.
PAINE: Yeah. OK. Well, worthwhile checking out. And, again, I love The Federalist.
judd ymail 9 24
Murderer whose life sentence was commuted by Trump convicted of domestic violence
Judd Legum
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Sep 3
Read full story
Major outlets change standards for hacked emails, protect Trump
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Sep 9
Read full story
Trump teams up with pickup artist for new crypto scheme
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Sep 10
megyn Kelly, formerly of NBC and Fox News, is enraged that Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for president. The global superstar endorsed Harris in an Instagram post on September 10, immediately after the debate between Harris and Donald Trump. Kelly was particularly incensed at the section of the endorsement where Swift praises Harris' selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) as her running mate. Swift wrote:
I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate @timwalz, who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.
I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice. Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make.
Kelly responded to Swift's endorsement that evening on YouTube, highlighting Swift's praise for Walz's endorsement of LGBTQ rights:
So this woman is fine with [Walz's] plan to take custody of the children from parents who don't want them to chop off their body parts and put them in Minnesota Court's custody so the body parts can be chopped off and they can be sterilized outside the custody of their parents. That's what led Taylor Swift to endorse her… I'm allowed to criticize Taylor Swift and I don't give a shit who gets upset. This is disgusting. If she wants to vote Harris/Walz she can do it all she wants. But to say the reason she is doing it is because of Tim Walz's on LGBTQ? F you Taylor Swift!... This is unbelievable. The left is losing its mind.
Kelly reprised the rant during an appearance on former Fox News host Tucker Carlson's live tour on September 13. "Screw you, Taylor Swift," Kelly said. "That is how I want to begin." Kelly then described the purported impact of Tim Walz's LGBTQ policy:
A little girl is going to find herself down a rabbit hole on Reddit. Reddit is going to tell her she is actually a boy and she's going to get sucked into this gender cult. And she's going to say, "Mom and Dad, I want puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones." Which will sterilize her. And they are going to say, "No, you’re a girl." And she's going to say, "I want top surgery." This benign thing. This double mastectomy where I'll have tubes coming out of me and I'll never breastfeed. "I want that too." And they're going to say, "no." And she's going to go to a judge in Minnesota. And because of Tim Walz, the court will take custody of her [and] use the Medicaid funds in Minnesota to provide her all of those things.
If this was accurate, it would be alarming. But while Swift has done her research, Kelly has not. Everything Kelly said about the LGBTQ legislation signed by Walz in 2023 is a lie.
Minnesota's law does not terminate parental rights — it protects parental rights
The lynchpin of Kelly's argument is that the Minnesota law signed by Walz allows for the termination of parental rights. The law, however, does the opposite.
The law protects the rights of parents in Minnesota if another state terminates custody rights for helping their child receive gender-affirming care. This is typically a situation where there is a dispute between two parents about how to care for a child. The law states that court orders “for the removal of a child issued in another state because the child’s parent or guardian assisted the child in receiving gender-affirming care in this state must not be enforced in this state.” The law was enacted around the same time that many nearby states, including North Dakota, South Dakota, and Iowa, adopted laws limiting access to gender-affirming care.
There is no provision of the law that allows Minnesota courts to terminate parental rights based on a parent's refusal to provide gender-affirming care.
Minnesota's law does not allow the state to take custody of children
There is also nothing in the law that allows the state to take custody of a child or provide gender-affirming care over the objection of a child's parents. Rather, the law allows for Minnesota courts to exercise “temporary emergency jurisdiction” over a custody dispute that crosses state lines. This means that courts have “the ability to resolve conflicts when parents disagree on whether their child should receive gender-affirming care,” but “it does not remove custody from parents who decline such care,” Kat Rohn, executive director of LGBTQ rights advocacy group OutFront, told the Washington Post.
The law allows the court to hear these cases, but this does not mean that courts will rule in favor of the parent seeking to help the child obtain gender-affirming care. Instead, the courts will decide based on "evidence about what is in children’s best interests."
There is no scenario under the law in which Minnesota can provide gender-affirming care to a minor over the objection of both parents.
The truth about gender-affirming care for trans children
Kelly is outraged about something that almost never happens: surgery for trans children. Gender-affirming surgeries for minors almost never occur, and “many health care providers do not offer them to minors.”
A study done by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that “gender-affirming surgeries are rarely performed for transgender minors.” The study found no cases of surgeries for children 12 and younger in 2019. Among teens, 97% of gender-affirming breast reduction surgeries involved cisgender males.
Kelly's misinformation spreads to Trump and Vance
Kelly has been spreading lies about Walz’s transgender rights policies since the day Harris selected him to be her running mate. “Tim Walz signed a bill that lets the State take away ur kids if you d/n/agree to sterilize them & chop off their body parts in the name of ‘gender affirming care.’ So if your 14-yr-old is sad but thinks it’s gender confusion & u object to castrating him, the St takes custody,” Kelly posted on X on August 6.
Shortly after her original post, Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance (R-OH), began amplifying Kelly’s falsehoods. At a campaign event in Montana on August 9, Trump said that Walz signed a law that lets “the state kidnap children to change their gender so that they go home.”
On August 7, at a campaign event in Wisconsin, Vance said, “I think it’s pretty weird to try to take children away from their parents if the parents don’t want to consent to sex changes. That’s something that Tim Walz did.” Vance repeated the claims in an interview with ABC News on August 11, calling the policy “kidnapping.”
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Where did Trump's false claim that schools are providing gender-affirming surgeries come from?
Trump’s campaign was unable to provide a single example supporting his claim, repeated at a rally over the weekend. Similar lies have been spread by right-wing media figures in the past.
Written by Ari Drennen & Alyssa Tirrell
Research contributions from Vesper Henry
Published 09/10/24
At a September 7 rally in Wisconsin, former President Donald Trump again repeated his baseless
that schools could be providing gender-affirming surgeries to minors without parental consent.
Mainstream outlets have debunked Trump's claim, assuring readers that “no children are going to school and receiving surgery there for gender dysphoria.” According to CNN, “Trump’s own presidential campaign could not provide a single example of this ever happening.”
But accusations that schools "groom" children into identifying as trans have circulated throughout right-wing media and politics in recent years. Some outlets and media figures have gone even further.
At a 2023 event, Rafael Cruz, father of Texas senator and onetime Trump primary opponent Ted Cruz, claimed that children were being “mutilated” by gender affirming care in public schools. Right-wing outlets including National Review, The Federalist, and The Daily Wire have all promoted claims that public schools are providing cross-sex hormones to children, leaving out of their headlines the important detail that parental consent is required to access this treatment.
The day before Trump made this claim, the account Libs of TikTok also appeared to make the same unsubstantiated accusation by implication.
The National Center for Youth Law notes that under the law in question, only very specific services can be provided for minors without parental consent, such as STD testing, abortion care, and treatment for sexual abuse. Those services do not include gender-affirming care, which cannot be provided to a minor without parental consent in the state of California.
Libs of TikTok has a documented history of posting misleading and false content. Chaya Raichik, the creator behind the account, has maintained a right to do so as recently as February 2024, asking an interviewer who questioned the policy, "Is there a law against lying?”
While conservative groups have similarly acknowledged that there is zero documented evidence of expensive gender-affirming surgeries being performed in cash-strapped public schools, their resident anti-trans obsessives say that accuracy isn’t the point.
“Are kids getting surgery in school? No they’re not,” Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice admitted to CNN, insisting, however, that Trump’s statement “grabbed your attention, and we’re talking about it now, and that makes me very happy.”
Thomas Jipping, a senior legal fellow at the Project 2025 partner Heritage Foundation, also defended the claim to CNN. “Just change a couple words,” he said, and the claim “is 100% accurate and correct” — a standard that could be applied to any lie ever told.
Right-wing activists appear to see Trump’s words not as statements to be evaluated for accuracy, but rather as non literal expressions of presidential priorities. And indeed, the former president has laid out a draconian set of policy proposals targeting the trans community in a hypothetical second term.
These proposals include targeting federal funding for hospitals providing gender-affirming care, creating a “new credentialing body” for teachers that promotes conservative ideas about the nuclear family, and asking “Congress to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female, and they are assigned at birth.”
When asked about these priorities at the Moms for Liberty event last Friday, Trump issued a chilling reply: “The President has such power.”
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September 10, 2024 rww
- Matt Keeley @ The New Civil Rights Movement: JD Vance Says in 2020 He Wouldn’t Certify Election: ‘Let the Country Have the Debate’
Ohio Senator JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential candidate, said Monday that if he were in former Vice President Mike Pence’s place, he would not have certified the election on January 6, 2021.
- Josh Kovensky @ Talking Points Memo: How JD Vance Turned The Conspiracy Machine On Haitians In A Small Ohio City
It’s been a surreal experience for Dorsainvil, but Vance’s tweet seized on a conspiracy theory that has been bouncing around the right-wing echo chamber. The core allegation that Haitians in Springfield had “abducted and eaten” pets followed a meandering path, from local Facebook groups to the online, right-wing influencers that Vance follows, and onwards to the current vice presidential candidate. It’s an example of the engine that drives modern right-wing politics: wild and false claims start off scattered across the internet, before being vacuumed up and boosted to mass audiences, sometimes by high-profile politicians whose status as public figures lends credence to what, only days before, had been random, unverified posts.
- Angry White Men: ‘He Can’t Go As Far As Naming The Jew’: Stew Peters Fumes After Being Removed From Tucker Carlson Event
On Saturday, Holocaust denier and Nazi sympathizer Stew Peters claimed that he had been denied entry at an event hosted by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. In a post on his X account, Peters wrote that he was “BANNED from entry to a ticketed VIP event” in Salt Lake City, UT which was part of Carlson’s ongoing “Live Tour.”
- Robert Jones @ Time: Trump’s Christian Nationalist Vision for America
The connection between Republican voters and their leaders was never primarily about abortion. Rather, as Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) transformation of the party reveals, Trump’s bond with his supporters is forged from different material: namely, his militant mission to return power to white Christian America.
- Hafiz Rashid @ The New Republic: Project 2025 Leader Confesses Deep Trump Ties in Damning Interview
Donald Trump is probably fuming about this interview with former Project 2025 director Paul Dans.
- David Gilbert @ Wired: He Worked for a Law Firm Consulting on an Anti-Trans Supreme Court Case. Then We Asked About These Racist Posts
Lawfair, founded by the well-known litigator Adam Mortara, is a boutique right-wing firm currently engaged by the state of Tennessee to provide counsel on a contentious Supreme Court case that could affect the availability of gender-affirming care for transgender minors across the country. Aside from Mortara, the only other lawyer known to have worked or done work for the firm is a project-based contract attorney named Christopher Roach. He no longer does so, after WIRED asked questions about his apparent ties—revealed exclusively in this story for the first time—to online accounts with a long history of posting white supremacist and antisemitic content.
- Alex Griffing @ Mediaite: Candace Owens Suspended From YouTube Over Kanye West Interview — She Immediately Blames ‘Zionists’
Candace Owens announced on X Monday that she was suspended from YouTube for a week following her recent interview with anti-Semitic rapper Kanye West, which YouTube said platformed anti-Semitic claims that “Jewish people control the media.”
- Russell Payne @ Salon: Pro-Trump group 99% short of its $108M get-out-the-vote scheme — so Republicans are getting creative
While swing state Republican officials, former Republican National Committee leaders and strategists are ringing alarm bells over the party’s lackluster get-out-the-vote effort, some pro-Trump organizers suggest that the GOP ground game is successfully targeting voters at the margins.
- Tim Alberta @ The Atlantic: Why Mike Lee Folded
In 2016, he tried to stop Trump from becoming president. By 2020, he was trying to help Trump overturn the election. Now he could become Trump’s attorney general.
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see normalizing
an 9 24
Dangerously misleading': How the beltway media sanitizes Trump’s 'unhinged' rambling
September 04, 2024
Former President Donald Trump often accuses the mainstream media of pushing "fake news" when they give him any type of negative coverage. The mainstream media, Trump argues, are hopelessly biased against him. And Trump has, at times, even accused right-wing Fox News and Fox Business of being unfair to him in their coverage.
But journalist Parker Molloy has a totally different perspective.
In an article published by The New Republic on September 4, Molloy argues that many mainstream media reporters are guilty of "sanitizing" Trump in their coverage and downplaying just how "unhinged" his "incoherent ramblings" are.
READ MORE:Deep-red states meet 'wall of hostility' in forcing Christian nationalism on public schools
Molloy previously addressed this topic in an article published by Media Matters on March 12, 2020. And the reporter believes the problem has "only worsened" since then.
"As Trump's statements grow increasingly unhinged in his old age," Molloy warns, "major news outlets continue to reframe his words, presenting a dangerously misleading picture to the public."
Molloy cites the New York Times' recent coverage of Trump's speech at Moms for Liberty's annual summit as an example.
"While speaking at an event put on by the extremist group Moms for Liberty," Molloy observes, "Trump spread a baseless conspiracy theory that 'your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation' — referring to transition-related surgeries for trans people. In their write-up of the event, a glowing piece about how Trump 'charmed' this group of 'conservative moms,' the Times didn't even mention the moment where he blathered on and on about a crazy conspiracy that has and will never happen."
READ MORE:'Gender chasm': GOP panics over huge Harris lead among women as Trump chases 'bro vote'
Molloy emphasizes that reporters do their audience a disservice when they treat Trump like a normal politician and fail to adequately report the more "unhinged" things he says.
"This 'sanewashing' of Trump's statements isn't just poor journalism; it's a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy," Molloy argues. "By continually reframing Trump's incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former — and potentially future — president."
Molloy continues, "The consequences of this journalistic malpractice extend far beyond misleading headlines. By laundering Trump's words in this fashion, the media is actively participating in the erosion of our shared reality."
READ MORE:'They all think you’re nuts': Latest Conway ad shows GOP voices in Trump’s head
*Read Parker Molloy's full article for The New Republic at this link.
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judd 7 24
Robby Starbuck on August 2, 2021, in Nashville, Tennessee. (Photo by Brett Carlsen/Getty Images)
In recent months, major companies have publicly announced that they are abandoning their diversity efforts. In at least two cases, companies were pressured into taking action by right-wing extremist and conspiracy theorist Robby Starbuck. He has succeeded in influencing corporate behavior through his social media account despite embracing racist conspiracy theories, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, and other fringe views. Following his recent successes, Starbuck has promised that he is just getting started.
Starbuck, a filmmaker whounsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2022, initially targeted Tractor Supply, a publicly traded agricultural supply company. At the beginning of June, he announced to his 520,000 followers on X that “[i]t’s time to expose Tractor Supply.” Starbuck’s post, with a video accompanying it, alleged that the company provides “LGBTQIA+ training for employees” and funds “pride/drag events.” Starbuck also attacked the company for displaying “Pride month decorations in the office,” creating a “DEI [diversity, equality, and inclusion] Council,” and engaging in “DEI hiring practices.”
Starbuck spoke at length about Tractor Supply’s involvement in Pride events. He argued that “[t]he kind of sex you like is not an appropriate topic for work” and that “[e]vents built around the kind of sex people like to have should not have kids at them and should not be funded with the money we spend at Tractor Supply.” Starbuck encouraged his followers to boycott Tractor Supply and to contact the company to complain. In the following weeks, Starbuck posted dozens of times about Tractor Supply.
In late June, Tractor Supply announced that all roles pertaining to DEI would be eliminated, that all corporate DEI goals would be retired, and that it would no longer sponsor any “nonbusiness activities” such as pride events. The company also stated that it would no longer be submitting data to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the most prominent LGBTQ rights organization in the United States, for its Corporate Equality Index.
The idea that, in 2024, a pride parade is a subversive event that requires discussing the “kind of sex you like” at work is a fringe belief. But Starbuck has a history of embracing fringe conspiracy theories.
On July 10, Starbuck promoted the racist great replacement theory on X. “There’s no sugarcoating it,” Starbuck wrote. “Democrats want illegal immigrants to vote. It’s why they let them in.” The great replacement theory is the claim that Democrats are trying to “replace” white Americans with immigrants. The theory is baseless, but has proved popular among white supremacists, and has motivated multiple mass shootings. Starbuck acknowledges that he is promoting the great replacement theory, but argues that it is not actually racist. “You can’t call replacement theory racist when it’s literally out in the open now. I’m Latino and I’m telling you that the left in the west is trying to replace existing citizens (mostly white) with migrants from 3rd world countries,” Starbuck posted on X in February.
Starbuck also promoted wild claims about the purported dangers of the COVID-19 vaccine. In October 2023, following the death of actor Matthew Perry after years of struggling with drug addiction, Starbuck suggested Perry's death was actually caused by the COVID-19 vaccine. Perry was, according to Starbuck, “a big supporter of the COVID vaccines.” Starbuck called for an investigation of the COVID-19 vaccine “as a potential cause of any cardiac issues.” Starbuck has also shown support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine non-profit, Children’s Health Defense, calling it “fantastic” and saying it does “great work.”
Starbuck has also promoted "chemtrails," a conspiracy theory that "governments or other parties are engaged in a secret program to add toxic chemicals to the atmosphere," which he claims are part of a government effort to control the weather. In April, Starbuck wrote that major flooding in Dubai was not caused by “climate change” but was instead caused by “the use of weather modification” and “[c]loud seeding where chemicals are sprayed in clouds to create rain.” In response to the post, an X user commented, “Colloquially known as ‘chemtrails,’’’ to which Starbuck responded, “Correct.” According to scientists, “there is no evidence for the existence of chemtrails.” (While the UAE has attempted to use geoengineering to increase rainfall, it was not a contributing factor to the floods, according to experts.)
Starbuck also pushed the false claim that there is cannibalism occurring in Haiti, stating that “the country is now effectively run by a warlord named Barbecue who has a ‘cannibal gang.’” This claim, based on a viral social media post, is false, according to Politifact. The State Department said “it has received no credible reports about cannibalism in Haiti.”
Starbuck was able to successfully pressure Tractor Supply without prompting any real scrutiny about his own extremist beliefs. Starbuck then repeated the process with farm equipment company Deere & Co., posting dozens of times about the company's diversity policies. On July 9, Starbuck criticized the company’s “LGBTQ & race based identity groups,” “total commitment to DEI policies,” and policy asking employees to list their “preferred pronouns.” Shortly after Starbuck began posting, the company announced it would be eliminating some of its diversity initiatives. Starbuck celebrated the partial win, but argued that the company should go further and eliminate all corporate diversity efforts.
Starbuck is now going after his next target. On July 23, Starbuck called for a boycott of Harley-Davidson on X, citing the company's hosting "LGBTQ+ events at the corporate office" and facilitating "LGBTQ+ & race based" affinity groups. Starbuck appears to be demanding that corporations not engage in any acknowledgment of LGBTQ employees or customers.
In an interview, Starbuck said “he and his researchers have identified 20 companies that could be ripe for a similar boycott.” Starbuck said that he “definitely proved a model” that involves targeting companies that appeal to a conservative clientele. In a post on X, Starbuck wrote, “DEI is poison and we won’t rest until the public knows how companies have strayed from American values.”
Starbuck’s anti-LGBTQ extremism
Earlier this year, Starbuck released a documentary called The War on Children.The documentary, which he created with his wife Landon Starbuck, centers around the idea that the LGBTQ movement is a sophisticated effort by the government, social media companies, and the medical community to corrupt and sexualize children. While promoting a trailer for the documentary, Starbuck said that the “war on children” is being waged by left-wing activists that “will stop at nothing to indoctrinate them, sexualize them, guilt them and punish them until they submit to their woke religion.”
In the documentary, which has 2 million views on X, Starbuck suggests that toxic chemicals are causing children to identify as LGBTQ. Starbuck claimed a study found that exposure to the pesticide atrazine in frogs purportedly turned them "gay” and caused them to mate with other male frogs. (An EPA review of the scientific literature found that this claim about the impact of atrazine on amphibians was false.) Starbuck says that no one wants to investigate the impact of atrazine and other chemicals on children. The theory was popularized by the notorious right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who claimed tap water was a "gay bomb." Jones asserted that the federal government was engaged in a "chemical warfare operation" designed to increase the LGBTQ population and lower birth rates. The idea that chemicals are impacting the sexuality of children, according to experts, is completely baseless.
The film includes interviews with conservative activist Riley Gaines, right-wing extremist Chaya Raichik (who runs the X account @LibsofTikTok), and a representative from The Heritage Foundation. The documentary also includes gotcha-style interviews with a drag queen and others. Rolling Stone reported that the Starbucks used “deceptive tactics” and “careful omissions” like “provid[ing] working titles for the film such asIdentity RisingandIt Takes a Village”to convince his targets to take part in interviews.
Starbuck frequently promotes anti-LGTBQ views to his social media followers. On X, Starbuck has said that “[p]ride events should be age restricted and only indoors.” Starbuck has also suggested that trans people want to assault women in public bathrooms and that displaying pride flags around children is “grooming and indoctrination.” In June 2023, Starbuck complained about book publisher McGraw Hill celebrating pride, calling the company “woke” and insinuating that those who support LGBTQ rights support pedophilia. “They say no matter how you identify, you should be accepted. That means a man can identify as a child,” Starbuck wrote.
Media ignores Starbuck’s extreme ideology
Mainstream media coverage of Starbuck’s campaigns against Tractor Supply and Deere & Co. do not mention his extreme beliefs or embrace of conspiracy theories. In an article about his boycott efforts, the Associated Press referred to Starbuck only as a “[c]onservative political commentator and filmmaker” and “a 35-year-old Cuban American.” NBC News referred to Starbuck as a “filmmaker.” The Wall Street Journal called Starbuck “a filmmaker turned conservative activist,” and Bloomberg described Starbuck as “a conservative commentator.”
Other publications that took a similar approach include USA Today (“conservative activist”), The Hill (“conservative activist”), and Newsweek (“[c]onservative political commentator and filmmaker”).
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04/03/24
4 24 mma
Newsweek, The Washington Post, and two of the largest TV station owners in the US fell prey to a PR campaign by anti-trans activists pushing to expand conservative states’ bans
WRITTEN BY MIA GINGERICH
PUBLISHED 04/03/24
Networks owned by the largest local TV station owners in the U.S., and mainstream outlets including The Washington Post and Newsweek, recently amplified a deeply flawed report by anti-trans activists. The outlets also failed to fact-check its misinformation or provide context for the extremists behind it.
The report was covered widely by anti-trans figures and outlets, and some Republican state legislators are already using the report to call for expanding restrictions on gender-affirming care.
On March 4, anti-woke blogger and former California gubernatorial candidate Michael Shellenberger announced the release of “The WPATH Files,” a collection of leaked forum posts from an internal message board for members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. The group is the leading body providing clinical guidance for medical professionals on gender-affirming care, and a frequent target of anti-trans activists.
The report included a loose collection of out-of-context clinical observations paired with inaccurate and editorialized commentary. An independent review from medical news outlet STAT described claims made in the report as false and oversimplified.
Specifically, as discussed by journalist and researcher Erin Reed, the report cites research that comes either from biased sources or is well over a decade old, with newer research refuting the claims. The report makes verifiably false claims about gender-affirming care and the commonality of detransition. Leaked material is inaccurately characterized throughout the report, and at other times, the content was presented without context, allowing readers to misinterpret what was said in the chat logs.
The report was
of behind-the-scenes collaboration between Shellenberger and Genspect, an anti-trans activist group that promotes conversion therapy and bans on transition care for adults. The report’s analysis was written by Mia Hughes, who has an extensive history as an anti-trans writer and acted as a spokesperson for an organization that supports conversion therapy for trans youth.
“The WPATH Files” are a part of a larger strategy by anti-trans extremists to push for broad gender-affirming care bans in blue states
Genspect has shadowed WPATH’s annual conference for the past few years, running its own conference in conjunction and promoting its anti-trans rhetoric to WPATH membership.
Last year, Genspect’s conference featured talks from far-right extremists including James Lindsay — who helped popularize on social media the practice of falsely accusing LGBTQ people of “grooming” — alongside mainstay anti-trans activists like Colin Wright and Chloe Cole.
The conference also featured figures more closely associated with other fringe movements targeting established science, such as anti-vaccine activist Heather Heying and Shellenberger, best known for his skepticism and misinformation around climate science.
Shellenberger, whose most recent book San Fransicko targets progressive policy on homelessness with a similar reliance on misleading and inaccurate information, laid out his plan in a speech at that conference (which Genspect has since
on YouTube).
“The name of my talk is ‘How WPATH ends,’” Shellenberger began, “and the idea here is that the obstacle is the opportunity, so when we think about the things that are getting in the way of us providing the care that people need rather than the care that they’re getting, let's think of that obstacle as the thing that's going to help us to achieve our goal.”
Shellenberger framed trans identity as one of a series of “foundational woke ideologies” alongside efforts to combat climate change and oppose racism. He also asserted repeatedly that trans identity is a mental illness, that gender-affirming care is comparable to lobotomies (a common right-wing trope), and that gender dysphoria is something that is being created and not “a natural thing.”
Shellenberger stated that he wants to end access to all gender-affirming surgeries and that he wants to use the report to target those “who are running for president, who are governors of major liberal states, because the conservatives, the Republican states, are just sort of — it’s happening,” seemingly referring to the sort of gender-affirming care bans in place in many conservative states.
Video
CitationFrom the first day of Genspect's "A Bigger Picture" conference held in Denver, Colorado, streamed on YouTube on November 4, 2023.
At the conference, Shellenberger also introduced the tool with which he hoped to accomplish these goals: the WPATH Files. He described the “obstacle” to which he alluded at the start of his talk, namely that WPATH’s credibility as a professional association replete with a peer-reviewed journal and scientific literature gave it enough authority for major medical organizations like the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics to follow its guidelines on supporting gender-affirming care.
“When WPATH ends,” Shellenberger said, “the basis for these medical mistreatments must come to an end as well.”
Shellenberger said he wants to use his report to earn coverage in news outlets “that think that everybody in this room [at the Genspect conference] is a transphobe,” which he said he hopes will help bring about the end of WPATH and access to gender-affirming care broadly, including by convincing Democrats that gender-affirming care is unscientific — an assertion that goes against a wealth of actual research.
The nation’s largest TV station owner gave the activists behind the report an uncritical platform to push misinformation
Shellenberger’s strategy of targeting outlets outside the far-right appeared to gain some traction, first with NewsNation, which ran an “exclusive” on the report.
NewsNation is the cable network for Nexstar, the largest owner of TV stations in the U.S., covering 68% of households. Launched in 2021, NewsNation billed itself as a supposedly centrist alternative to other cable networks, with Nexstar describing it as “the destination for fact-based, unbiased news.”
Prior to publishing the report on X, Shellenberger gave an interview to NewsNation’s *Elizabeth Vargas Reports
Video
CitationFrom the March 4, 2024, edition of NewsNation's Elizabeth Vargas Reports
During his interview, Shellenberger shifted from calling for an end to all gender-affirming care for trans youth to asserting that “the people that are getting these treatments must understand what’s happening to them,” claiming that “the files show very clearly that that’s not what’s happening.”
Video
CitationFrom the March 4, 2024, edition of NewsNation's Elizabeth Vargas Reports
The show also interviewed Mia Hughes, describing her simply as the “author of the report” but failing to disclose her long track record as an anti-trans writer and activist. Hughes characterized gender-affirming care as causing sterility, a piece of misinformation often repeated by anti-trans campaigners.
The outlet also interviewed Julia Mason, a pediatrician who belongs to the fringe Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. Mason’s group is working to pass anti-trans legislation and its flawed research has been used to justify Texas’ order declaring gender-affirming care child abuse, but the network’s correspondent identified her simply as a “pediatrician in Oregon who has been sounding the alarm on medical transition of minors for years.”
Along with failing to disclose its guests’ background, NewsNation provided no pushback to the claims made in the report or by its authors. The only voice of dissent was a short quote from WPATH President Marci Bowers read by the correspondent at the end of the segment.
This is not the first time Elizabeth Vargas Reports has jumped on shaky claims from biased sources to target trans rights. The show aired similarly uncritical coverage of contested claims about gender-affirming care that were made against a St. Louis hospital last year.
As the report gained traction in other outlets outside the right, coverage failed to provide context or pushback to the Shellenberger’s report
Sinclair, the nation’s fourth largest TV network conglomerate, published an article uncritically quoting the report (with one quote from WPATH) and interviewing Shellenberger through its own program, The National Desk. Sinclair also used its immense roster of local news outlets to distribute the article to websites for local news stations, including affiliates of ABC, CBS, and NBC.
The article ends by focusing on changes WPATH made to its standards of care two years ago, which were widely mischaracterized by right-wing media to attack the organization.
Newsweek also reported on the report, publishing an article titled “Transgender Hormone Drugs Linked to Cancer” — a headline so misleading it prompted condemnation from the National LGBT Cancer Network.
Additionally, Megan McArdle, a columnist for The Washington Post who previously used a biased anti-trans source to call for compromise between the rights of trans youth and the extremists targeting them, dedicated her March 8 column to Shellenberger’s report.
Following coverage of the report, WPATH’s website was the victim of a ransomware attack, and Shellenberger took the opportunity to announce “victory” and claim the organization had removed the latest standards of care from its website, suggesting his report was responsible. He removed his triumphant posts after his claims were shown to be false.
04/03/24
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06/25/24 mma
Candace Owens’ eponymous new show is only one week old, but the former Daily Wire personality has already returned to an old fixation: a conspiracy theory that the first lady of France is secretly a transgender woman. Similar false accusations, known informally as “transvestigations,” are raging everywhere on social media, targeting figures from Kyle Rittenhouse to Taylor Swift — an uncomfortable if inevitable evolution of a mass hysteria fixated on the bodies of trans people.
Prior to losing her jobat The Daily Wire, Owens proclaimed that she would stake her “entire professional reputation”” on the theory that Brigitte Macron, the longtime wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, was hiding the fact that she is a transgender woman. While heraccusation was met with derision, outrage, and concern, Owens made the claim in a new video on her YouTube channel, and then repeated it several days later.
Video
CitationFrom the June 13, 2024, edition of Candace
Two women in France are currently facing defamation charges for helping spread the claim. Macron’s husband has recently adopted strident anti-trans rhetoric in the run-up to new elections.
Accusations of a secret trans identity have been weaponized against women deemed insufficiently feminine or subversive for years. Lady Gaga was asked in multiple
about rumors about her genitalia, and similar claims pushed by Infowars host Alex Jones dogged Michelle Obama during her husband’s time in office. Although Jones recently announced that he would have to liquidate his assets to settle claims over a separate conspiracy theory about the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, accusations that the former U.S. first lady and mother of two children is secretly trans have refusedto go away.
“Transvestigations” have been hard to miss on social media in recent years, targeting basketballstars Britney Griner and Caitlin Clark, pop stars outspoken in their supportfor LGBTQ equality like Taylor Swift and Dua Lipa, Man of Steel star Henry Cavill, and even former President Lyndon B. Johnson.
These false accusations come amid a broader “trans panic” encouraged by right-wing media and politicians. And right-wing media stars are not immune to this scrutiny, with similar accusations lodged against Laura Loomer, Riley Gaines, Kyle Rittenhouse, and others.
While these accusations are, on their face, an extremely funny result of a deeply unfunny moment in LGBTQ history, they come with dark precedents. The “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s grew partly from a widely covered and since-debunked memoir detailing the occult sexual abuse of children, and it eventually led to a string of false convictions for offenses ranging from sexual abuse to homicide. One couple, wrongfully convictedin Texas at the height of the panic, spent more than two decades in prison.
Although the particulars of these accusations may have changed — though not as much as you might think, with trans people frequently accused of being either sexual predators or dangerous killers — public enthusiasm for the punishment of people seen as a threat to children has not vanished, making such claims disruptive or even dangerous for their targets. Confirmation bias means that people with negative opinions about transgender people who are prompted to suspect that somebody is transgender are likely to find evidence for their claim, whether or not it exists. The right’s present fixation on trans people has led to accusations of secret trans people everywhere not because men and women are so different, but rather because we have so much in common.
In recent years, the idea that trans people either do not exist as a meaningful category or are a recent invention has taken hold in right-wing media — especially among Owens’ former colleagues at The Daily Wire. Owens herself has previously argued that trans identity is “all made up”in the heads of trans people, an assertion that would be contradicted by the seeming existence of a secret class of trans celebrities, athletes, and politicians, if consistency were a core value of the anti-transition movement. In their own way, “tranvestigators” are living in the aspirational fantasies of the trans community of today: a world where we are known not for the messy spectacle of the metamorphosis, but rather for what we accomplish in the happily ever after.
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5/15/24 kpfa 7 am BET ucla gaza students coord attack threat 2 days before GUK ; leave our kids alone anti drag; kkk pol pro zion but anti-semite
4 Bruin student journo targeted /hurt
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May 13, 2024 rww
- Mario Murillo says that he will announce some big plans in June because “Pride Month has placed a curse on us”: “That is why I have selected June 1st to unveil the most comprehensive and widespread plan to harvest souls and move toward an awakening.”
- Hank Kunneman understands the desire to see God “wipe out all the queers” as well as “those that are confused with their gender” on the belief that “the world will be a better place,” but cautions that it is the goodness of God, not judgement, that brings repentance.
- Virulent antisemite Lucas Gage declares that it “would be an honor” to be the first American imprisoned jail for “offending these demons’ feelings.”
- Lauren Witzke has developed a habit of blaming anything that happens on DEI (diversity, equality, inclusion) hires, which is her way of saying “non-white people.”
- Finally, Stew Peters really just can’t wait to start executing people.
President Joe Biden expressed his belief that trans Americans deserve to live their lives in safety and dignity in a Friday proclamation and Sunday statement marking the Transgender Day of Visibility. But the right-wing demagogues at Fox News and Newsmax apparently disagree with that sentiment — they have spent the last few days furiously denouncing Biden’s statements, which they describe as an affront to Christians because Transgender Visibility Day, celebrated annually on March 31, happened to fall on Easter Sunday this year.
Fox News devoted 2 hours and 19 minutes, including 37 full segments, to freaking out over Transgender Visibility Day’s overlap with Easter Sunday as its propagandists slammed Biden for recognizing the former, according to a Media Matters review of the network’s programming from March 30 through April 1. Newsmax chimed in with another 1 hour and 45 minutes on the subject, including 40 segments, over the same period.
Stars at both networks used the time to warn Christians that they were under attack from Biden’s statements recognizing Transgender Day of Visibility. Fox’s Jesse Watters argued that Biden is “waging spiritual warfare against Christianity,” and complained that “the trans thing is over” because “we have accommodated the trans for quite some time.” His colleague Laura Ingraham said Biden had put “egg on his faith” by “commemorat[ing] godlessness” through his “demonic” actions. “Easter has now been replaced or at the very least, is now forced to share a day with a new holiday that the administration clearly prefers,” Sean Hannity declared. Over at Newsmax, Eric Bolling cited the situation as evidence of a “spiritual war” and an “all-out attack on Christian faith.”
It’s worth comparing the hateful bile spewed by the right-wing media to Biden’s actual message.
“On Transgender Day of Visibility, we honor the extraordinary courage and contributions of transgender Americans and reaffirm our Nation’s commitment to forming a more perfect Union — where all people are created equal and treated equally throughout their lives,” Biden’s Friday proclamation began. “Today, we send a message to all transgender Americans: You are loved. You are heard. You are understood. You belong. You are America, and my entire Administration and I have your back.”
The president added on Sunday that “transgender Americans deserve to be safe and supported in every community,” and denounced “MAGA extremists” for trying to pass “hateful and extreme state laws that target transgender kids and their families.” He termed such legislation “un-American,” highlighted mental health resources available to transgender youths, and promised that his administration will “never stop working to create a world where everyone can live without fear.”
“I want every member of the trans community to know that we see you,” he concluded. “You’re each made in the image of God, and deserve love, dignity, and respect. You make America stronger, and we’re with you.”
Biden’s message is in keeping with the traditional American creed, first set forth in the Declaration of Independence’s resolution “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” America’s greatness comes in part because its leaders have sought to expand that circle over time so that it brings in previously excluded groups like women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. Trans Americans, to Biden, deserve the same rights and privileges and should be treated with the same respect as any other citizen of this country.
This need not be a controversial sentiment or one which attracts a vitriolic response. Indeed, Fox News is going to great lengths to avoid acknowledging that its corporate cousins at Fox TV celebrated Transgender Visibility Day in 2021, tweeting, “Trans Day of Visibility is dedicated to celebrating transgender people, their contributions to society and raising awareness of discrimination they face. To all the transgender men, women and non-binary folx, we see you and stand with you.”
But Fox and Newsmax hosts, like their Trumpist media brethren, are the “MAGA extremists” Biden called out in his statement. They’ve spent years spreading hateful, bigoted attacks against transgender people and any person or entity associated with them. As propagandists for a movement that merges a cult of personality around Trump, blood-and-soil nationalism that mocks our civic tradition, and a theocratic brand of Christianity focused on perceived slights, they met Biden’s remarks with days of outrage.
That Biden also issued a Sunday statement celebrating Easter as a time to “remember Jesus’ sacrifice” and appeared Monday morning at the traditional White House Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn was apparently insufficient.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump, recently seen hawking his own line of Bibles and preparing for his upcoming trial over paying hush money to a porn star so she wouldn’t say they had an affair during his third and current marriage, marked the day of Christ’s resurrection by posting unhinged rants on Truth Social, including this gem nominally celebrating Easter:
That behavior, apparently, is just fine to his supporters at Fox and Newsmax.
Methodology....
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