Kara Dansky's Blog

December 28, 2021

2021 was a big year for radical feminist advocacy, grass roots organizing, and campaigning in the U.S. Let’s look at a few developments. This list is, of course, not meant to be exhaustive. Countless women worked so hard throughout the year to bring an end to gender madness, and I look forward to working with all of them again in 2022.

January

The year started off on a grim note, as the incoming Administration blithely announced its intention to redefine sex to include “gender identity” throughout federal administrative law, thus signaling how little it cares about the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls, or about the material reality of sex. The President had previously announced that one of his top priorities was getting the so-called “Equality Act” enacted into law within 100 days of taking office (a goal that he would not achieve – skip to April and December for details).

February

In February alone, the U.S. chapter of the Women’s Human Rights Campaign (WHRC USA) submitted written testimony in support of bills to save women’s sports in seven separate states, including Texas. We also testified in support of a bill to prohibit pediatric “transition” in Utah. All of WHRC USA’s written testimony throughout 2021 can be found on its website.

WHRC USA also put out a statement opposing the confirmation of Rachel Levine to serve as Assistant Secretary of Health on the ground that he supports the off-label use puberty blockers for children.

March

The U.S. House passed the Equality Act, sending it to the Senate.

WHRC USA sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Schumer, signed by over 1500 women all over the world, explaining how dangerous the Equality Act would be for women and girls. WHRC USA Vice President Lauren Levey, a constituent of Senator Schumer, had worked to develop a relationship with one of his staff members. We had a meeting with her, and then sent the letter directly to that staff member, who confirmed receipt and assured us that she would deliver it to Senator Schumer personally.

WHRC USA also submitted written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in opposition to the bill and received confirmation that it had been received by every member of the Committee, on both sides of the political aisle.

Professor Nicholas Meriwether won his case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in a decision holding that teachers at public universities may not be punished for using accurate-sex pronouns and titles. The Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) had submitted an amicus brief in support of Professor Meriwether.

April

President Biden failed to reach his goal of getting the Equality Act passed within 100 days.

A new U.S.-based grassroots group called TERF Collective, which describes itself as a “syndicate of GCs and RadFems working to end the international campaign of female erasure,” hit the scene and has been growing in numbers and in visibility ever since. Jesika Gonzalez is heading up the effort.

May

On Mother’s Day, volunteers with WHRC USA took to the streets to educate people about WHRC USA’s mission and the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, and to support mothers everywhere. Thanks to Jennifer Thomas and others for organizing!

Women’s Liberation Radio News (WLRN) had its five-year anniversary of creating a monthly feminist podcast to break the sound barrier women are blocked by under the status quo rule of men. Congratulations to all the great women at WLRN!

June

Beth Stelzer at Save Women’s Sports has testified in countless states all over the country in her tireless pursuit to keep men out of women’s sports. In June, she testified before the Wisconsin state legislature: “There are two sexes … We have a dimorphic human species. That means there are two sexes and we cannot change them. You cannot make a male a woman by lowering their testosterone. Women are not a hormone level.”

July

A group of feminists held a protest in New York against the Olympics’ inclusion of men in women’s sports. Video and photos are available here and here and here, and Graham Linehan also covered the event.

RevFem Rebellion launched a campaign of boots on the ground resistance, trauma informed care, and feminist street activism, with Joy Gray and Jennifer Thomas leading the way.

August

Sovereign Women Speak held a series of events in Tacoma, including several days of workshops on a variety of topics, a protest at Purdy women’s prison, and a public panel event. The public panelists included Amy Sousa as MC, Dr. Suzanne Forbes-Vierling, myself, Beth Stelzer, and Kat Yang (The Deprogrammer). Massive congratulations to April Morrow for organizing.

Karen Davis has been killing it on her YouTube channel, “You’re Kiddin’ Right?” all year long. One of my favorites is her tune “This Guy Over Here,” out in August.

September

The 11th Hour Blog went global, expanding its reach and allowing it to cover the “gender identity” industry all around the world. Jennifer Bilek is changing the world with the work that she has done to launch and run the blog, to take a stand for the material reality of biological sex, and to expose the vicious and dangerous industry for what it is.

Feminist Thistle Pettersen was charged with a hate crime for allegedly placing a TERF Collective sticker on a public media box. Those charges were subsequently dismissed on First Amendment grounds.

October

WHRC USA filed an amicus brief before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee in a case called Tennessee v. Department of Education, where twenty states are suing the Biden administration over a series of orders and memos issued during the first half of 2021. I had previously written about many of those orders here. In our brief, we argued that redefining sex to include “gender identity” constitutes unlawful sex discrimination, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Thanks to Elisa Turner for her help in writing the brief.

WoLF held an event at the Austin Public Library called Women Against Gender. Video of the event is available here.

Thousands of women marched for abortion rights, in protest of an effective ban that Texas had enacted earlier in the year, and which the Supreme Court refused to stop. Many women marched in Austin, the epicenter of Roe v. Wade, carrying signs that said things like “OUR BODIES OUR TERF” and “ONLY WOMEN NEED ABORTIONS.” Many of us, myself included, did the same thing in Washington, D.C.

Several of us turned up in Loudoun County, Virginia, to stand up for the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls in schools there. We held signs that said things like “THIS DEMOCRAT SUPPORTS FEMALE-ONLY SPACES” and “THIS DEMOCRAT SAYS BOYS OUT OF GIRLS SPACES” and “PROTECT GIRLS NOT GENDER.” You can read about it here and here.

Comedian Dave Chappelle defended J.K. Rowling and stated that he is “Team TERF” in a Netflix comedy special. Subsequent efforts to have his special pulled from the streaming service were unsuccessful.

November

On November 8, I had the honor of publishing The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls. The global Women’s Human Rights Campaign hosted me in formally launching it later that month, as did Deep Green Resistance.

The Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) filed its complaint in Chandler v. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, complaining that California’s law mandating the housing of male convicted rapists and murderers in a women’s prison violates numerous provisions of the U.S. Constitution. Lauren Adams, Legal Director at WoLF, oversaw the effort. Amie Ichikawa, who founded Woman II Woman (an organizational plaintiff in the suit), connected WoLF with women inside who were willing to be named as individual plaintiffs.

December

Thousands of women attended an abortion rights rally outside the Supreme Court during oral arguments in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. Ten of us were there holding proud TERF signs and chanting things like “ONLY WOMEN NEED ABORTIONS!” Footage appears in this video, at around 7:57.

WHRC USA met its fundraising goal to send a copy of The Abolition of Sex to all 535 members of Congress.

I went on Tucker Carlson Tonight several times throughout the year. This particular appearance from December, titled “Feminist rips ‘gender identity’ as meaningless,” had over 1,366,000 views as of writing.

The U.S. Senate adjourned for the year, meaning that the entirety of 2021 has passed without enactment of the Equality Act. This is a huge loss for President Biden and for gender ideologues everywhere, and a win for feminism and sanity.

Nice work, U.S. terves.

I’m looking forward to TERFing it up with everyone in 2022!

The following was originally posted on the WHRC USA website on December 13, 2021. It was written by WHRC USA Vice President Lauren Levey, and I am sharing it here with permission of the author. This is critically important history for those of us too young to remember life before Roe v. Wade.

Reflections on Abortion Past and Present by a Second-Waver

By Lauren Levey

Here’s where we are:

In a 5-4 ruling Dec. 10, 2021, the Supreme Court left intact a Texas abortion law (S.B. 8) that prohibits abortion before most women even know they are pregnant; and allows it to be enforced through lawsuits by private citizens suing in civil court for money damages. While the ruling provides a path for abortion providers to pursue the case further in the lower courts, that path has been drawn so narrowly (by limiting which officials may be sued) that it may be illusory. Liberal Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that the Texas legislature had "substantially suspended a constitutional guarantee: a pregnant woman's right to control her own body. . . . The court should have put an end to this madness months ago . . . The Court clears the way for States to reprise and perfect Texas' scheme in the future to target the exercise of any right recognized by this Court with which they disagree."

On Dec. 1, 2021, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, which involves a Mississippi law that restricts abortion to the first 15 weeks of pregnancy, also in conflict with existing case law. At the hearing Dec.1, Justice Sotomayor urged her fellow Justices to follow established precedents, and not write new law simply because there are three new Justices nominated by Pres. Trump: "Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? I don't see how this is possible." She really said “stench” in open court as a sitting Supreme Court Justice.

She went on to accuse the Mississippi Solicitor General, who was defending the restrictive law, of using an argument that is "not one well-founded in science at all." Later she asked him "How is your interest anything but a religious view?" She noted that the Mississippi law would put poor women at particular risk of medical complications and death. “And now the state is saying to these women, we can choose . . .  to physically complicate your existence, put you at medical risk, make you poorer by the choice, because we believe what?"

Article 3, section (a) of the Declaration on Women's Sex-Based Rights states: "States should ensure that the full reproductive rights of women and girls, and unhindered access to comprehensive reproductive services, are upheld." As the Vice President of the U.S. chapter of the Women's Human Rights Campaign, I can state with confidence that this includes abortion on demand, without apology, for all women and girls.

Most women now living have no memory of what it was like to live in the United States as a woman of childbearing age prior to the ruling in Roe v Wade, the 1973 landmark Supreme Court case that gave women the right to choose to abort an unwanted fetus. But I do; and a few days ago I had the opportunity to talk personally about what it was like, and what it meant, in an interview for Green Flame, conducted by Jennifer Murnan. What follows here includes some of that conversation.

1950s American culture, which began around 1946, right after WWII, and ended fairly dramatically in the early to mid 1960s, coincided with my childhood. For girls and women, 1950s culture presented numerous types of restraints that worked together, producing widespread misery that was apparent whenever you were allowed to see beneath the forced smiles and pastel colors:

1. Abortion was illegal.

2. Virginity ideology (for girls) was the norm.

3. Birth control devices were generally not available to single young women.

4. Marriage laws were draconian for women; but you only found out when you divorced.

5. Discrimination against women in employment was generally considered reasonable.

6. Lesbians were criminals, but also invisible.

7. If you were a little girl, pretty much everything you were taught about how the culture worked was a lie.

 Virginity ideology meant that substantial social stigma and financial hardship resulted from giving birth to a child while unmarried. There were girls in high school with me who were expelled from school simply for becoming pregnant. Something about avoiding corrupting other girls, I was told. I was horrified. For me, education and career constituted the only path I could see to achieving control over my life; but pregnancy could disrupt a girl’s education even before high school graduation.

Under those cultural circumstances, employers would reasonably hesitate to hire or promote any woman, if they had an alternative. After all, women could without warning have their lives and careers disrupted by unplanned pregnancy, rendering them inherently unreliable employees.

Even though I had a strong suspicion from an early age that I was a lesbian, and therefore unlikely to experience a badly timed pregnancy, I was as affected by the cultural presumptions as heterosexual women. This is because lesbianism was paradoxically stigmatized, criminalized, and also made invisible. The message seemed to be that lesbians didn’t exist any more than Tinkerbell did; but just in case they did, they could be shunned and jailed. There was an overwhelming presumption of heterosexuality. So explaining to an employer that he didn’t need to worry about my having a career-disrupting pregnancy because I was a lesbian would not have enhanced my employment prospects.

Eventually it became clear to me that having free access to both birth control and abortion would be in the interest of every woman who wants even moderate control over the trajectory of her own life.

I entered Bennington College, a tiny, very liberal women’s college, in 1965. To my delight, the 1950s were suddenly over, as though a switch had flipped. My contemporaries were enraged, as I was, by the culture of lies and corruption and war and injustice, and determined to address all of it without delay. We were so done with the 1950s, and suddenly we were old enough to organize in opposition to it.

When a fellow student became pregnant, we passed the hat. There was a nearby OB-GYN, a woman, who would perform an illegal but medically safe abortion for $1200. That’s $1200 in 1965 currency. It seemed fair because the young doctor, if discovered, stood to lose her livelihood or even her liberty. We would pass the hat again and again until we had enough. I’m not aware of any student who needed an abortion who didn’t get one while I was at Bennington.

Roe v Wade was decided in 1973. It ruled that a woman’s right to abort existed, and that it diminished over the course of her pregnancy. My thoughts about the ruling were complicated. On one hand, it was a great relief. Abortion would be legal and accessible everywhere in the United States. On the other hand, some of us also felt angry and disappointed that the all-male Supreme Court had denied a woman’s right to absolute sovereignty over the interior of her own body; and that birth -- that is, emerging from the mother’s body -- is the natural and obvious time to give a person human rights -- and not one moment before. How does it make sense that a stranger wearing a judicial robe or a pastor’s robe has more interest in a fetus than the woman whose body protects it, the woman whose DNA it shares? It seemed a bad compromise, but a great relief nevertheless.

Immediately after Roe, abortion-related deaths dramatically plummeted. Not surprisingly, most of the prior preventable deaths were deaths of poor women and women of color. Even in the 1950s and 60s, women needed agency and control over their lives as they needed air and water. If safe abortion once again becomes unavailable, unsafe abortions will occur; it is inevitable because women will risk their lives for liberty and agency. And once again, the women who die will disproportionately be poor and women of color. This is not debatable, and also not a secret.

It is not hard to see that there is currently a global trend toward once again forcing women out of public life and back into the home. It can be seen in the move to remove all public opportunities for women to be only in the company of other women through the lie of “gender identity”; the attempts to re-stigmatize lesbians; the increased violence and subjugation of women by men in ordinary movies as well as in porn; the increased pornification of women’s fashion; and the erosion of women’s right to abortion.

The Women’s Liberation Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s was advanced by two crucial tools: women meeting in women-only spaces and talking together about the political class called “women”; and greatly increased options for controlling our reproduction. It is no accident that both of these rights are now being taken away, one by the Left, the other by the Right. Once again, women are going to die as a result, because women, like all people, will risk our lives for bodily autonomy; and once again, the burden will fall disproportionately on poor women and women of color. The 1950s have been summoned back, and the new version will be smarter. Women will need to respond accordingly.

December 8, 2021

This one was pretty fun.

December 5, 2021

On December 1, 2021, ten women stood outside the U.S. Supreme Court to take a stand for the right of women and girls to terminate pregnancies. The Court was hearing oral arguments in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health – a case that could very likely spell the end of Roe v. Wade (and, perhaps eventually, earlier cases that upheld women’s right to birth control).

To be clear, if the Court overturns Roe v. Wade (which most commentators think it will do), abortion will not automatically be illegal throughout the U.S. Instead, it will be up to individual states to decide whether women and girls ought to have autonomy over our own bodies. Many states will likely answer that question in the negative. The threat that this will pose to women’s autonomy and liberty could not be more dire.

Predictably, the lines were largely drawn between liberals, who were there to fight for abortion rights, and conservatives, who were there to oppose them.

But one group stood out – TERFs (“Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists” or, if you prefer, “Totally Excellent Radical Feminists” or “Tired of Explaining Reality to Fools”). The women who today are called “TERFs” (also known as second-wave feminists) have always been the only women who consistently prioritize women’s needs and interests. There are no other feminists.

The TERFs standing up for abortion rights at the Supreme Court on December 1 held signs that said things like this:

And this:

We chanted: 

Who are we?

TERFs!

Who do we fight for?

Women and girls!

And:

WE ARE ADULT HUMAN FEMALES!

WE WANT OUR SEX-BASED RIGHTS! 

We were all proud to stand up for the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls.

We got the typical reaction from conservatives – they surrounded us with chants of “HEY HEY, HO HO, ROE v. WADE HAS GOT TO GO!” Because they had bigger and louder microphones, their chants drowned us out and we had to retreat. No matter, we knew that our main purpose in being there was making a point not only that Roe v. Wade must remain good law, but also that abortion is a right that only women and girls need.

Interestingly, there were also people chanting things like “TRANS RIGHTS START AT CONCEPTION!” and “PRO-TRANS, PRO-VEGAN, PRO-LIFE!” It appears that the “gender identity” proponents are colonizing the right as well as the left. There is nothing that the “gender identity” industry won’t consume.

So we stuck mainly to the liberal side (Court police had separated the two groups from each other – those in favor of abortion rights and those opposed). And the liberal side was where things got interesting anyway. When we chanted “ONLY WOMEN NEED ABORTIONS!” a group of liberals got right up in our faces and screamed “TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN!”

This is how far down the post-modernist rabbit hole the left has gone today: Even when standing before the Supreme Court to fight for abortion rights, they COMPLETELY jettisoned their commitment to abortion rights in order to cape for men. Their commitment to abortion rights went right out the window so they could spew the typical lie that some men are women if they say they are. They, even more than the conservatives, are the reason that women are losing today.

But many women thanked us for saying what we said. We have no way of knowing for certain, but it is highly likely that we peaked more than a few liberal women that day.

The TERFs standing up for abortion rights were exclusively women. It should be widely understood that only women ought to have a say in what we do with our bodies. This should be obvious, despite the fact that Roe v. Wade was decided by nine male justices. Women’s bodies do not exist to serve the interests of men.

We didn’t get as much news coverage as we had hoped, but we got some. For example, we appear in this PBS segment for about two seconds, at 22 seconds in.

The title of this post is “TERFs Take Back” because we called our group “TERFs Take Back Abortion Rights,” and we think that “TERFs Take Back” is good framing for other issues too. Because we are going to have to keep doing this – until liberals wake up to the horror that is the “gender identity” industry, until liberals stop peddling lies about the material reality of sex, until women stop ceding our ground to men who want to colonize our sex and seize our existence, it is only TERFs who will truly have the backs of women and girls.

At this moment in time, TERFs are the only true feminists.

November 6, 2021

On November 3, 2021, it was announced that Republican Glenn Youngkin had pulled off a surprising victory over Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the race for Virginia Governor.

In response, virtually every mainstream media outlet offered their takes on what caused the outcome. Several have argued that Youngkin won due to his opposition to teaching Critical Race Theory (CRT) in schools. Take, for example, Slate’s take that “[Youngkin] provoked a backlash against CRT, and the backlash helped him win. But it wasn’t a backlash of parents. It was a backlash of white people.” Here is CNN’s Dana Bash claiming that McAuliffe tried to “nationalize” the election, whereas Youngkin kept it “very specific to Virginia.” The New York Times reported that the result was due to various weaknesses within the Democratic party and President Biden’s failure to deliver on some of his key campaign promises.

What none of these outlets will report is that the Loudoun County parents who rallied outside of the school district building one week before the election were expressing opposition to the district’s policy of allowing students to use the bathroom that aligns with their so-called “gender identity.” The district had adopted this policy in August of 2021, knowing that a girl had previously accused a boy who called himself “gender fluid” of assaulting her in the girls’ bathroom.

I was in Loudoun County on October 26, 2021, standing with parents who were expressing their opposition to this policy. These parents had gotten together and made a specific commitment to put politics aside and take a stand as parents who wanted to protect their children. They had agreed in advance not to discuss CRT during the rally. Their remarks were nearly all focused on the “gender identity” policy. One woman recounted the story of her daughter being sexually assaulted while at school. Those parents made it all about the district’s failure to protect girls from being sexually assaulted. They had one narrative that they kept emphasizing, and that was opposition to the “gender identity” policy. I know, because I was listening to them.

To be sure, several of those same parents also object to CRT. But that was not what the October rally was about. That rally was uncompromisingly about nonpartisan opposition to the “gender identity” policy.

I was proud to stand with a group of radical feminists and other Democrats in defense of female-only spaces. The Federalist covered our presence and quoted me:

Kara Dansky said she is a lifelong Democrat and self-described “radical feminist” from Washington, D.C. “We really want to see the school board rescind the policy, there is absolutely no justifiable reason to have a policy that allows boys into women’s bathrooms,” she said. “It’s just not acceptable, it’s anti-feminist, it’s misogynistic, it’s politically regressive.”

“All of the women standing behind me and near me are radical feminists, most of us are Democrats,” she told me, gesturing to about six other women standing beside her. “We are here because we are on the political left and we stand in support of female-only spaces.”

Dansky said she came to Loudoun in August for a rally the day before LCPS instituted its gender identity policy that allows co-ed bathrooms, after which a sexual assault by a “gender fluid” boy of a female teen in the girls’ bathroom was reported. “I was very proud to stand with Loudoun County parents and students and I’m very proud to stand with Loudoun County parents and students here today.”

That coverage got picked up in the U.K., via the Daily Mail.

Not a single mainstream U.S. media outlet will tell Americans the truth – that the Loudoun County parents who rallied outside the school district building were there to express their opposition to the district’s “gender identity” policy and nothing else. The mainstream American media does not want Americans to know the truth: that opposition to “gender identity” is not coming only from the political right.

I hear from U.S. Democrats every day. They are disgusted with the party leadership because of its stance on “gender identity.” Many have left the party. I asked my Twitter followers who are Democrats or ex-Democrats what they would tell party leadership if given the opportunity. Here are just a few examples of what they had to say:

None of this should come as a surprise to Democratic party leadership. Many of us have told them over and over and over again.

The truth is that there is a leftist critique of “gender identity” that played at least some part in Youngkin’s surprise victory. The U.S. mainstream media is engaged in a calculated and concerted effort to conceal that fact from Americans. We should all be asking why.

Photo credit: The Federalist

October 13, 2021

Joseph (excuse me, Grace) McCarthy (excuse me, Lavery) is going after academics who have the temerity to stand up for women and girls, specifically, University of Sussex philosophy professor Kathleen Stock. It’s like the McCarthy era all over again, except this time it’s coming from within the academy.

Stock is well known in the U.K. and among American radical feminists for taking a stand on the importance of acknowledging the material reality of biological sex. For that, she has been vilified and threatened. Stock is, for now, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex. Last week, the campus was littered with fliers and notices condemning her and calling for her firing.

In response, the University appeared to be standing up for Professor Stock’s academic freedom. Later, the union that is supposed to represent her interests, put out a statement condemning the University for supporting her. The union has a stated policy of “enabling members to self-identify, whether that is being black, disabled, LGBT+ or women.” According to that article, a Scottish college professor and commentator evidently thinks that it is inappropriate for college administrators to conduct work capability assessments with employees who present with disabilities before immediately granting that the employee is, in fact, disabled. Police officers advised her to hire private security. American feminists are watching all of this in horror, as institutions that ought to be taking a firm stand in favor of academic freedom are crumbling at the altar of “gender identity” and attacking women.

Enter Grace Lavery, an associate professor of English at the University of California Berkeley, and a U.K. native. Lavery joined the Berkeley faculty in 2013 as Joseph Lavery and announced in 2018 that he is a woman named Grace. Lavery appears to think that being a woman is fundamentally about eyeliner and lip stain, and also that it is possible to actually change biological sex. He thinks that tilting one’s head is a medical condition that is “empowering the trans world” and has a book forthcoming in 2022 called “Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis.” The adage that men really like to talk about their penises has never seemed more true.

But what does any of this have to do with Kathleen Stock? Stock does not think that it is possible for a person to change his or her biological sex, which is a perfectly sensible thing to think. In other words, she thinks that sex is immutable. Berkeley has a study abroad exchange program with the University of Sussex. Because Lavery objects to Stock’s belief in the immutability of sex, he has called on Berkeley administrators to cancel its affiliation with Sussex.

The Sharon referred to here is Sharon Inkelas, a professor of linguistics at Berkeley and also the Special Faculty Advisor to the Chancellor on Sexual Violence/Sexual Harassment ("SVSH Advisor") (she has she/her in her bio, please make a note of it). The baseless claims that Lavery makes in this letter should be astonishing, except that feminists have become accustomed to receiving these types of accusations. For example, he refers to Stock, without evidence, as a “reactionary bigot.” He says that she is a member of “leadership of hate groups,” without stating which supposed “hate groups” Stock allegedly leads. I am certainly not aware of any. He states that Stock’s presence on campus makes “LGBT students” not safe, without pointing to a single reason to think that this might be true – Stock is, herself, a lesbian after all. He concludes by encouraging Inkelas to terminate Berkeley’s relationship with Sussex.

Attacking academics for their views is not new, but in the past, professors and university administrators have typically come to the defense of academics who state controversial opinions. Lavery, while not calling for Stock’s firing, is calling on his own academic administrators to terminate a program that provides Berkeley students with an opportunity to study abroad in the U.K., simply because a professor (a lesbian) at the university there states openly that women are female and that sex cannot be changed.

Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on academics have been well-documented. David Gardner, who was, perhaps ironically, born in Berkeley, served as the President of the University of California between 1983 and 1992. He once referred to the late 1940s and early 1950s (“the McCarthy era”) as “the nadir in the history of American academic freedom.” Although rabid anti-communist sentiment didn’t fully take hold in the U.S. until after the end of the Second World War, it had already started gaining steam decades earlier and was temporarily contained by the U.S. and other western powers’ war-time alliance with the Soviet Union.

When the war ended in 1945 and the Cold War began, it was fully unleashed and academics were some of its primary targets (though not the only ones of course). Professors were terminated from universities all over the country, from Harvard to the University of Washington, for the alleged offense of harboring views that were sympathetic to Communism. The strategy worked. Adherence to communist views quickly became extremely unpopular and after a few years, very few academics were openly espousing it.

Yeshiva University history professor emerita Ellen Schrecker detailed all of this in a fascinating speech that she gave at the University of California in 1999 called “Political Tests for Professors: Academic Freedom during the McCarthy Years.”

Back then, the primary offense that got professors fired was actual (current or previous) membership in the Communist party. Today things look different. Stock is not being vilified because of her membership in any particular political party. Instead, she is being vilified for being, allegedly, a TERF (if that’s right, it would put her in the company of author J.K. Rowling and comedian Dave Chappelle, among others). Numerous professors have faced similar treatment all over the world (though few of these campaigns are as vicious as the one against Stock). Donna Hughes at the University of Rhode Island, Holly Lawford-Smith at the University of Melbourne, and Callie Burt at Georgia State University, have all received similar treatment. This phenomenon is nearly, though not exclusively, limited to female academics. One example of a man being vilified for insisting that sex is immutable is that of Nicholas Meriwether, who was disciplined by his public university employer for refusing to use wrong-sex pronouns and titles in the classroom and eventually vindicated in U.S. federal court.

Where will this end? Will today’s witch-hunters succeed in silencing female academics in the same way that yesterday’s communist-hunters succeeded in silencing support for Communism? Will women simply be ousted from the Academy entirely? Feminists all over the world often disagree on many things, from appropriate language to effective strategy. But we all agree, at a minimum, that women need to be able to advance the movement to liberate women and girls from male oppression. All feminists know that “gender identity” ideology is regressive, misogynistic, and homophobic.

Will we reach a time when women are ousted from the entire academy for holding and expressing that view? Will women and girls be permitted to teach at all? Will women and girls be permitted to learn? Just how far back in time is this movement going to be permitted to take our society?

September 30, 2021

U.S. Democrats, please do not give up on fighting from within. As we have seen with recent developments in the U.K., fighting from within the party is worth our time and energy. Rosie Duffield, who continues to fight for women and girls from within the Labour Party, in the face of a relentless (and quite silly) effort to erase women as a class, is an inspiration to us all.

If you are unfamiliar with Rosie Duffield and the recent dust-ups within the U.K. Labour Party about which category of human beings has a cervix, you can read up on the matter here and here and here. Watching her speak with the crew at The Mess We’re In is especially fun.

The reason not to give up now is not because we think the Democrats will come around, though it would be great if they did. The reason not to give up now is that if they don’t come around, we have to make sure that not a single one of them can say they weren’t warned.

On September 29, 2021, a delegation of the U.S. chapter of the Women’s Human Rights Campaign (WHRC USA) met with the staff of a state senator in New York State to oppose the redefinition of sex to include “gender identity and expression” in the state constitution. The delegation consisted of me and two New York residents, all of us signatories to the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights.

WHRC USA Vice President Lauren Levey, who lives in New York, initially reached out to request the meeting. The senator was quite receptive and scheduled the meeting promptly. We met with two young staff members, one woman and one man. Our aim was to explain why the redefinition of sex to include “gender identity and expression” harms everyone, but women and girls in particular, and to request a state-wide conversation about the impact that the new definition would have on women and girls. The other member of our delegation was Julie DeLisle, also a New York resident and WHRC NY state contact.

The senator in question is a Democrat in a mixed-party jurisdiction. She was elected in 2020, barely inching out a win over the Republican candidate, who won approximately 49% of the vote.

The bill we were discussing was the 2019 proposed amendments to the state constitution. The existing constitution provides for equal protection on the bases of race, color, creed, or religion. The amendments would add “ethnicity, national origin, age, disability, or “sex including pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression” (emphasis added) to the list of protected categories. The Senate passed these amendments in 2019, but the bill has stalled since then.

The concern of WHRC USA is solely with the proposed definition of sex to include “gender identity or expression.” Sex is grounded in material fact. “Gender identity” (whatever it means) has nothing to do with whether a human being is female or male.

This is what I said to open the meeting (read as much as you’d like, but you might want to pay particular attention to the final paragraph, which is really the point of this post):

First, thank you so much for meeting with us today. I would like to start the meeting by providing a general overview of our concerns with the redefinition of sex to include so-called “gender identity” in law and policy.

I sincerely do not think that our nation has seriously grappled with the consequences of redefining sex to include so-called “gender identity,” as this bill would do, as it is currently written.

Sex is grounded in material reality. It is a scientific fact that women are female and men are male. This is true regardless of anyone’s individual identity. It is also true that women have been discriminated against in the law and throughout society for thousands of years globally and for hundreds of years in this country precisely because we are women, not because we claim to “identify as” women.

What so many Americans do not understand is that the recent push to redefine sex to include “gender identity” is a men’s rights movement. What it means, as a practical matter, is that men are being permitted to be housed in women’s prisons in New York and across the country. It means that men are being permitted to reside in domestic violence shelters that are intended for women. Redefining sex to include “gender identity” is nothing other than a complete obliteration of spaces designed for women.

Democrats in positions of leadership either don’t know or don’t care that this is an extremely regressive and anti-woman movement. I say this as a life-long Democrat.

Now, I would like to talk about some ways in which redefining sex to include gender identity will affect society that most people haven’t even thought about yet.

For example, the FBI currently maintains crime statistics through the Uniform Crime Reporting program, or UCR. Table 42 of the UCR breaks down crime statistics by sex. It shows that in 2019, 88 percent of murders, 97 percent of rapes, 84 percent of robberies, 77 percent of aggravated assaults, and 79 percent of burglaries were committed by males. If our society is going to redefine sex to include gender identity, what will happen to our ability to track crime statistics by sex?

Second, according to the Cleveland Clinic, women and men experience different symptoms when they suffer a heart attack; and women do not recover at the same rate as men. This is important information. But it is only possible to collect information like this if health-related data collection is made on the basis of sex. What will happen to our country’s ability to track this kind of information if we redefine sex to include gender identity – again, this is the redefinition that is included in this bill.

I would like to bring your attention to something that has been referred to as The Staniland Question. Helen Staniland is a UK-based feminist who posed the following question on Twitter: “Do you believe that male-sexed people should have the right to undress and shower in a communal changing room with teenage girls?” Subsequently, any time anyone on social media expressed support for redefining sex to include gender identity, she would pose that question. This question makes supporters of gender identity quiver. If the person says yes, it shows that the person really does not care at all about the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls. If the person says no, the person is forced to confront his or her own support of gender identity ideology entirely. But, as punishment for asking this question, Helen was banned from Twitter, though her account has since been reinstated.

We are also grappling with the very serious problem of what it means to medically “transition” a child. There are over 300 so-called “gender clinics” in the U.S., many of which provide services to minors who are grappling with questions regarding their biological sex. Minor children are literally being referred to these clinics to receive hormones and surgeries that will permanently alter their bodies and minds before they have the ability to consent to these changes. This is a brewing scandal in the U.S. We want to make Senator Hinchey aware of it.

What this all boils down to is that our society has a lot to consider before enacting legislation that would redefine sex to include gender identity in the law, which this bill would do. All Americans deserve answers to these questions about the impact that redefining sex to include gender identity will have on their civil rights, religious freedoms, children’s health and safety, and on a broad array of social issues such as crime statistics and public health.

Before concluding, I would like to say one more thing on a slightly different topic. WHRC USA is a nonpartisan organization. We are Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and Greens. Having said that, the three women meeting with you today are all lifelong Democrats. I can tell you that there are countless rank and file Democrats in this country who are furious with party leadership because of what the party is doing on the topic of so-called “gender identity.” They are leaving in droves. I personally know one woman who lives in Rochester, New York, a life-long Democrat, who changed her party membership to Independent last year. I know a gay man in Vermont and a feminist in Maryland who did the same thing. I know a woman in Colorado, another life-long liberal and staunch defender of abortion rights, who is so angry that she left the Democratic party, registered as a Republican, and got active in her local Republican Women’s group. I know two women who are so angry that in November 2020, they did the unthinkable and voted for Donald Trump for President. These are DEMOCRATS. Democrats are angry because redefining the word sex to include “gender identity,” which this bill would do, is anti-woman, anti-gay, and anti-lesbian. In the U.K., women are also leaving the Labour party in droves. It has been documented that hundreds have left in the past three years. This is for all the same reasons that we are meeting with you today. They are disgusted by Labour’s embrace of “gender identity” ideology, which is sexist, homophobic, and anti-science. Our party leadership ignores us at their peril. I hope you will help us spread our message.

Thank you.

After I spoke, Lauren and Julie both added testimony. Julie included in her remarks the fact that the 300 “gender affirmation” clinics that I referred to have popped up within the past ten years or fewer. Lauren emphasized that the erasure of women, which results inevitably from the redefinition of sex to include “gender identity,” has resulted in the nearly complete destruction of the lesbian community, globally, which had previously thrived. She noted that virtually all public lesbian meeting places, including the last two remaining lesbian bars in Greenwich Village, now welcome males; and that young lesbians, instead of being encouraged to embrace their sexuality, are being told that they are actually men.

The young male staffer was nodding with us all along and taking notes. He didn’t speak, but he seemed to know exactly what we were talking about and appeared to be in complete agreement. The young female staffer seemed to be in the lead. She was a bit less enthusiastic, but open to listening to our concerns. She asked if there was any evidence that any state had done something similar and if there had been any consequences. This left the field wide open for us to talk about California law, the Wi Spa incident, convicted rapists and murderers being housed in women’s prisons across the country, men being given access to domestic violence shelters, the recent federal administrative orders, and a whole host of things that she had never heard of.

It is difficult for those of us fighting the gender wars to understand that there are still countless people out there who have no idea what is happening, but it’s true. I blame the media, but that’s a different story. The lead staffer seemed intrigued and encouraged us to send additional resources. She assured us that the senator would receive everything we sent.

Anyone can do this. If you haven’t, please look at what your state is doing on the topic of “gender identity.” You can easily search for this online. All you have to do is Google “[state] bill gender identity.” This will likely take you down several rabbit holes, but don’t give up. You’ll find it. Find your representatives in the state legislature. Reach out to them and request a meeting. You don’t have to be a lawyer or any kind of professional. You just have to be a concerned resident.

Anyone is welcome to take any portion of my remarks above and use them in your own state, to the extent that you think they are pertinent. Please share the link to the Declaration with all of your elected officials.

We may never get Democratic party leadership to come around. We may never persuade them that the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls are more important than whoever is paying them to peddle the lie that sex isn’t real. We need to be prepared for that. And, in the meantime, there is plenty of work to do to educate them. If they choose not to come around, that’s on them.

Let’s make sure we can truthfully say that they were warned about what’s coming.

This post originally appeared on the 11th Hour Blog, here. I am reposting it here with permission.

“Inclusivity is more than a social cause, it’s a business opportunity. It’s time to maximize your business growth.”

- dmi Consulting

Let me get this out of the way, because it seems more than a few people still need to hear this.

CORPORATIONS DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOU!

“Diversity and inclusion ”(D&I) comprise a new business mantra. Programs and language, based on the normalization of body dissociation, are being corporately cultivated, around the world. The programs being instituted appeal to our emotions, to entice us to believe that companies care about people and just want to create one big happy, diverse, work-family, which include marginalized sectors of society - most importantly, those who imagine they have a sex (gender is a euphemism) that is not male or female. The overlooked are finally being given a place at the table!

Or are they?

The new, new liberal left in America, the left that has emerged out of a traditional new left, which cared about the working class, blacks and women’s rights, who yearned for a more equal and just social order, is unrecognizable to many of us who’ve long been of the traditional left. That left, just a decade ago, sparked a potentially revolutionary movement on Wall street, calling out the financial industry and the monopolies ruining our lives and our planet. Emerging out of the carcass of that potentially revolutionary movement, is a left that has recently climbed into bed with those same big banks. Snuggled up in bed with them, fluffing their pillows, are Big Pharma and Big Tech. The left, are running around screaming at protests, get wide media coverage, voices in our universities and institutions, crying that people claiming their sex is not male or female, need human rights. These manufactured sexes are being supported by, promoted by, and advertised by Big Pharma, Big Tech and Big Banking. This new, unrecognizable left sees no irony at all in their behavior.

These purported new sexes, ostensibly requiring special human rights, depend on a narrative that sexual dimorphism isn’t real, that it exists on a spectrum of sexes. This is the gender industry and with projected profit margins reaching into the billions by 2026, for surgeries on healthy sex organs alone, and the amount of advertising curated to sell it, it is going to be very profitable indeed.

How has the left been so duped about new markets being manifested out of sex, that they scream liberation every time someone dares to mention the glaring inconsistency of human rights for corporate profiteering off of young adults and children’s bodies?

The left knows corporations do not care about the color of our skin, whether we are oppressed because of said color of our skin, whether we live in an igloo or a cardboard box, whether the icebergs are melting, or whether Fukushima nuclear plant is dumping millions of tons of radioactive waste into the oceans, externalizing the cost of doing business. How do they not understand that corporations do not give a fu*k about anybody’s identity? Unless those identities are opening markets.

The constant business-woke-posing (D&I), for Black Lives Matter (BLM), the LGBT Inc, and the often, corporate mixing of both under the “Black Trans Lives Matter” slogan, is about profit. Every little advertising slogan, every word, is carefully selected to appeal to an ever-increasing fragmentation of humanity, into subcategories, to be marketed to. It is all about the corporate bottom line. If they can convince us that the disembodiment movement of “gender identity” is akin to the civil rights movement for black Americans, or has anything at all to do with LGB, they’ve roped us into their narrative of care. Further, if they can convince more black Americans of their insane narrative of disembodiment-as-progress, it supports the illusion they are selling to all of us. Fortunately, that isn’t going well, so far. Despite their efforts to corral black youth, and the relentless corporate propaganda aimed at them, black youth are not crying about their “gender identities” or clamoring for cross sex hormones.

The left knows corporations don’t care. The working class knows this. It’s why the Occupy Wall Street movement evolved so quickly. I was there, a decade ago, at ground zero, with 40,000 people from every walk of life, as we traversed the Brooklyn Bridge, in protest of the choke hold the financial sector had on us. Now these same people are waving flags in traditional, baby-colored, pink, blue and white, screaming about human emancipation through medical identities, while many sew themselves to the techno-medical complex for life.

For a concise and readily comprehensible explanation of how capitalism functions, I urge you to examine the work of Stephanie McMillan, a life-long activist and an anti-capitalist. She explains, in language that is completely accessible, how corporations are set up to compete in the global marketplace: “To care about people over profits would jeopardize the corporatist’s position within that system, and their own livelihood.” Corporate heads, consist of those with the greatest wealth and depend on an exploited working class not just to function, but to suck wealth upward, from the bottom, creating ever more wealth for a few, leaving the masses at the bottom, with less and less. This is a worse crisis for women across the world, who, according to UN stats, put in 12.5 billion hours of unpaid care work each day — a contribution to the global economy of at least $10.8 trillion a year. The reporting of these statistics will no longer be a true measure of what is transpiring globally, since men will be included in the stats for women, under the new corporate gender regime.

We are living in an oligarchic gulag, one that isn’t very private. Our communities, as I addressed in an interview last year, are being opened to the acceptance and normalization of a male fetish based on disembodiment, creating a sexual psycho drama of our corporate and civil landscapes, for profit, while literally dismembering people and creating more identities to market to.

Because we are governed by corporate monopolies, and the billionaires behind them, driving a steady stream of propaganda through our media, we no longer know what fake news is and what is real news. We don’t know what men and women are (or we pretend not to know to fit in). We don’t know if people on social media or advertising are real or computer generated and our ability to speak about anything outside the corporately generated illusions plaguing us, are being penalized in myriad ways, not the least of which is controlled and censored speech. Yet suddenly, we are to believe, and many on the new, new liberal left do believe, these monstrous monopolies that have colonized the entire natural world, have suddenly changed their ways and care about people. They especially care about these new imaginary sexes being manufactured out of philanthropic funding, corporate cash, and the techno-medical complex.

Will Meyer, in a recent issue of Business Insider, gives us a look at the corporate woke hypocrisy, posing as care about the marginalized. “IBM and Microsoft,” he reports, “claimed they would no longer sell facial recognition software to law enforcement, signaling their alignment with Soros backed, BLM movement, despite the fact both corporations remaining deeply invested in punitive systems that continue to harm Black and brown lives.” The BLM movement has the same capitalists behind it as the gender industry.

Selling D&I to the public, is such big business, that there are corporations that teach other companies how to market it effectively. This fracturing of humanity, via the colonization of human sex, is how capitalism functions. It splits everything into smaller and smaller fragments to open markets. Where we once had a single-family physician to help us heal, we now have a plethora of specialists to treat everything from lung cancer to toenail fungus. Where we have had a sexually dimorphic species, we now have medical identities that deconstruct sex, being foisted upon us, to open markets.

Those with wealth create more wealth for themselves, while underlings, not having access to wealth, land or goods, are forced to sell their labor for less and less money. The wealth, goods and land are all siphoned off by the corporatists. Well now the corporatists, with little left to extract, have come for human sex and they are not leaving until they have it, or we rise in resistance and reclaim what is left after their ravaging.

September 9, 2021

The piece below originally appeared on Substack here. I am reposting it here with permission.

The piece comes from the fantastically named Parents with Inconvenient Truths About Trans (PITT) - a group of parents trying to get their voices out by writing about this ideology. Please subscribe to their newsletter here.

When my son came to me saying he felt he was trans, my first inclination, being a scientist, was to dive into the research. I wanted to understand, from a medical and scientific perspective, what was going on with my son. I figured the science was settled, there were evidence-based studies that I could reference. I thought that I was capable of understanding what my son was going through, if I could just understand the science. As his dad, I was determined to accomplish this, for him and for our family.

It didn’t take long for me to discover, however, that this was simply not going to be possible. I’m now convinced that trans is not based on science. It’s fundamentalist religious ideology disguised as science. And not only that, because the entire field is being represented as science when it is, in fact, a belief system, information about extremely harmful side effects is being suppressed, and research efforts are completely subverted, because the ultimate goal is to support the ideology at all costs.

What’s most despicable about the whole affair is that the science is out there showing that the risk/benefit balance is way off when it comes to transgender medical interventions, but medical professionals and researchers are not looking at the data. Because they don’t want to know. So, it’s left to parents like me to do the heavy lifting and become the experts. This is wrong.

From my own experience with my son, it’s clear to me that these children DO feel deeply that they have issues with their body. That is not in question. I know my young teen son feels deeply that he is a woman, or at least that’s what he tells me. I also know that there are likely other underpinning reasons why he feels this way other than that he is literally a woman trapped in a male body. And, I think he is aware that he is not actually a woman, a situation which causes inherent cognitive dissonance. But through today’s rigid ideological lens, that is the only possibility offered to him from the gurus online and, similarly, there is only one possible treatment - trans medicine. But, actually, the science says that one size cannot fit all. At a time when cancer care is based on genetically modifying individual DNA, transgender medicine is still in medieval age of one size fits all - Puberty Blockers, Cross Sex Hormones, and Surgery. Trans is the medical version of the Taliban.

This one-size-fits-all approach is a recent phenomenon. Even when transgenderism was mainly an adult medical field and quite rare in its presentation at clinics, studies have shown that, depending on the presentation, differential diagnosis led to different treatment pathways to produce the best possible outcome for the patient to relieve their symptoms. And these different options and paths were explored, over extended time periods, with each case. The results showed that action short of full sex reassignment (in a legal and medical sense) sometimes yielded positive results.

There was, for instance, the case of a physician who observed that, as they reduced the patients’ testosterone levels, their desire to identify as the opposite sex completely went away. Medically, this makes perfect sense. The brain is clearly impacted by hormonal changes in the body and that the brain is an endocrine organ. Would it not make sense then, to understand if there is a chemical basis for these feelings that can be addressed, short of “transition”. In other words, what are the impact of hormones on the brain?

There ARE studies available about the impacts of trans-medicalization (specifically wrong sex hormones) on the brain — and the results are not good at all. However, unfortunately, no one has made the effort to translate these studies into plain English. It’s far easier to say all gender identities are valid and hormones are no big deal, then to read a complex scientific paper.

As a scientific minded parent, I think it’s essential that we take the time to do just that—after all our children’s medical and mental health is at stake. Unfortunately, the results from the studies out there show that the effects of so-called transgender medicine are horrible.

Gender ideologues say that taking estrogen “feminizes” the brain. It does no such thing. What it appears to do is change blood flow, reduce the size of the brain, interfere with executive function, cause dangerously high build-ups of glutamate, and lead to early-onset dementia and high risk of stroke.

The summary of the effect of estrogen is as shown below, with associated long term risk factors linked to morphological changes or serum marker changes. In sum, estrogen introduced in male brain leads to high glutamate levels, reduction of the size of the brain, and increase in the size of ventricles. Long term, these studies are revealing that estrogen in males leads to reduction in grey matter and vastly increases the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease and psychopathology. These are serious brain changes with extremely serious long term side effects.

What’s worse, this research has been available to the medical community for decades with the first transgender brain morphology study published in 2006 by HeH Pol et al, and replicated by Zubiaurre-Elorza et al in 2014, Sieger et al, Mueller et al, and several others in subsequent years. In 2020, Gomez et al replicated the morphology studies (hippocampal volume reduction, ventricular volume expansion) in mice models and also showed high glutamate levels in the brain on Estradiol treated male mice. 

Mueller et al, observed in their structural MRI study of persons on wrong sex hormones, that “Ventricular enlargement has not only been associated with grey matter reduction due to aging , but has also been identified as a putative marker for progression of Alzheimer’s Disease or a risk factor for psychopathology. Hulshof Pol  observed a final 3rd ventricle size in transgender women on hormonal therapy that was larger after treatment than the ventricle size observed in both natal men and women. Although the mechanisms and clinical implications of such effects are unknown, they deserve further study given reports of physiological risk with hormonal treatment  and prevalence of psychopathology in transgender persons”.

Kraguljac et al,  observed in their study on the Pathophysiological Mechanisms of Schizophrenia “glutamatergic hyperactivity is hypothesized to be a key pathological feature in schizophrenia. Glutamate neurotransmitter flux, neuronal firing rate, and the blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) response are tightly coupled, and glutamate plays a role in long-range functional connections. In preclinical studies, excess glutamate has been shown to be associated with disorganized neuronal activity  and may result in increased synapse turnover as well as axonal or glial injury. We also conducted studies to examine the impact of glutamate (excess) on brain structures. In unmedicated chronic schizophrenia patients, we found that higher hippocampal glutamate was associated with lower hippocampal volumes, suggesting that glutamate related excitotoxicity (neurotransmitter excess related increased synapse turnover) might affect brain structure. 

These are all alarming effects on the brain that should be a reason for a pause on experimental therapies with estrogen on males. From a scientific basis, we should not be giving males estrogen. It’s as simple as that. It’s imperative that we prioritize other ways to address gender distress, because introducing wrong sex hormones is not safe.

Medically, exogenous estrogen isn’t safe for males (or for females for long term use). However, it’s not safe or effective for mental health either, it turns out. Apart from these cause-effect studies, several long range studies and transgender mental health surveys show significant mental health challenges in transgender identified persons. Pachankis et al, showed that, in a longitudinal study of over a decade of persons on hormonal or surgical “transition” treatment on data from the entire population with no drop-outs, mental health did not improve with such treatments. So, not only are the risks high, and the brain impacts severe, there is no evidence that they even help the patient with their original issue.

In 2020, ENIGI published a longitudinal study that showed a similar result in a deliberately tracked group over three years. 

A 2021 study presented at AIAC conference showed a substantially higher cognitive decline in transgender identified persons.

The higher cognitive decline (in the 12 months leading to the survey date) was observed at a statistically younger age.  As indicated by a study author in a tweet, the study could not determine whether the persons surveyed were ever on hormones, while agreeing this was an important factor to consider. 

In a 2019 survey of 25,233 transgender identified patients compared to Cisgender patients in a hospital discharge setting, B Hanna et al observed the following alarming statistics:

“The prevalence of mental disorder diagnoses was higher in transgender hospital encounters (77% vs. 37.8%, P < .001). The prevalence of each examined mental disorder diagnosis was significantly higher in transgender hospital encounters. A multivariable analysis demonstrated significantly higher odds of all mental disorder diagnoses (odds ratio [OR] = 7.94; confidence interval [CI], 7.63–8.26; P < .001). Transgender encounters with a mental disorder diagnosis had a higher prevalence of chronic medical co-morbid diagnoses as compared with transgender encounters without mental disorder diagnoses.”

Additionally, in a 2011 longitudinal study by Dhejne et al, over a 13 year period , with no loss to follow up, sexually reassigned males (on hormones and surgery) had psychiatric hospitalization at 2.5X the rate of control males and suicidality at 2X the control. In a study published this month 'Mortality trends over five decades in adult transgender people receiving hormone treatment: a report from the Amsterdam cohort of gender dysphoria’ the author's looked at a total follow-up time of 40,232 person-years for Males on wrong sex hormones. During follow-up, 10·8% transgender women died, which was higher than expected compared with general population men (Standardized Mortality Ratio -SMR 1·8, 95% CI 1·6–2·0) and general population women (SMR 2·8, 2·5–3·1). Cause-specific mortality in the hormone treated cohort was high for suicide, consistent with the Dhejne study . Importantly, No decreasing trend in mortality risk was observed over the five decades studied.

If you glean nothing else from these studies, it is at least clear that the balance of risk versus benefit for these serious medical interventions merits discussion and consideration.

Unfortunately, however, this is not the case. Debate has been stifled; these studies buried. Lacking public debate, it’s been left to parents like me, capable of reading dense scientific papers and studies, to try to interpret the details and make informed decisions. At the most charitable interpretation for this willful disregard of the science, the medical community simply assumes that these medical interventions must be safe, or they wouldn’t be trumpeted in the New York Times and other trusted publications. More likely, medical professionals continue to look the other way to continue to financially benefit from confused kids and young adults, and to avoid future legal liability by remaining in ignorance.

In a recent paper on the research gaps in medicalization of gender confused persons, over a hundred papers were surveyed, however not a single brain cause effect research was included in the study. The study authors simply concluded that hormonal treatments result in a transference of risk to the desired sex. Decades of neuro-imaging studies indicate that if these studies are included there is overwhelming evidence to show that the brain effects such as ventricular expansion are a significant risk factor for cognitive decline.

Even for women, the effects and risks of exogenous estrogen are serious. These effects of exogenous estrogen on ventricular volume expansion has been studied in a cohort of Natal women in the KEEPs study, by Mayo Clinic Researchers. Due to these risk factors and breast cancer risks that have been extensively studied in women due to exogenous estrogen combined with any form of progesterone (including Micronized progesterone),  the non profit USPSTF has recommended against Estrogen and Progesterone HRT for even limited periods of time, for post menopausal women. USPSTF stated in their recommendation that the risks outweigh any benefits. But yet, this is administered readily, for a lifetime’s use, to boys and young men?

The open disregard of scientific evidence of harmful effect of exogenous hormones on the brain, and other organs shows that at least in the US, Transgender medicine is more akin to a fundamentalist religious movement, than to a well debated, questioning, scientific research process. 

Sources:

Christel JM de Blok, MD

Chantal M Wiepjes, PhD

Daan M van Velzen, MD

Annemieke S Staphorsius, MSc

Nienke M Nota, PhD

Louis JG Gooren, PhD

Baudewijntje PC Kreukels, PhD

Prof Martin den Heijer, PhD 

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Published:September 02, 2021DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S2213-8587(21)00185-6

PlumX Metrics

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Kantarci K, Tosakulwong N, Lesnick TG, Zuk SM, Lowe VJ, Fields JA, Gunter JL, Senjem ML, Settell ML, Gleason CE, Shuster LT, Bailey KR, Dowling NM, Asthana S, Jack CR Jr, Rocca WA, Miller VM. Brain structure and cognition 3 years after the end of an early menopausal hormone therapy trial. Neurology. 2018 Apr 17;90(16):e1404-e1412. doi: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000005325. Epub 2018 Mar 21. PMID: 29661902; PMCID: PMC5902783. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29661902/

Kraguljac NV, Lahti AC. Neuroimaging as a Window Into the Pathophysiological Mechanisms of Schizophrenia. Front Psychiatry. 2021 Mar 11;12:613764. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2021.613764. PMID: 33776813; PMCID: PMC7991588. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33776813/

Kranz GS, Wadsak W, Kaufmann U, Savli M, Baldinger P, Gryglewski G, Haeusler D, Spies M, Mitterhauser M, Kasper S, Lanzenberger R. High-Dose Testosterone Treatment Increases Serotonin Transporter Binding in Transgender People. Biol Psychiatry. 2015 Oct 15;78(8):525-33. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2014.09.010. Epub 2014 Sep 23. PMID: 25497691; PMCID: PMC4585531. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25497691/

THE LANCET DIABETES & ENDOCRINOLOGY: Mortality risk in transgender people twice as high as cisgender people, data spanning five decades suggests https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(21)00185-6/fulltext

Lawrence, Anne A. Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism. New York, NY: Springer, 2013. Internet resource, p. 150. https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9781461451815

Matthys, Imke et al. “Positive and Negative Affect Changes during Gender-Affirming Hormonal Treatment: Results from the European Network for the Investigation of Gender Incongruence (ENIGI).” Journal of clinical medicine vol. 10,2 296. 14 Jan. 2021, doi:10.3390/jcm10020296 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7829763/

Mueller SC, Landré L, Wierckx K, T'Sjoen G. A Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study in Transgender Persons on Cross-Sex Hormone Therapy. Neuroendocrinology. 2017;105(2):123-130. doi: 10.1159/000448787. Epub 2016 Aug 5. PMID: 27490457. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27490457/

Mueller SC. Mental Health Treatment Utilization in Transgender Persons: What We Know and What We Don't Know. Am J Psychiatry. 2020 Aug 1;177(8):657-659. doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2019.19111151. PMID: 32741290. https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/epub/10.1176/appi.ajp.2019.19111151

Mueller SC. Mental Health Treatment Utilization in Transgender Persons: What We Know and What We Don't Know. Correction. https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2020.1778correction

Safer JD. Research gaps in medical treatment of transgender/nonbinary people. J Clin Invest. 2021 Feb 15;131(4):e142029. doi: 10.1172/JCI142029. PMID: 33586675; PMCID: PMC7880308. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33586675/

Seiger R, Hahn A, Hummer A, Kranz GS, Ganger S, Woletz M, Kraus C, Sladky R, Kautzky A, Kasper S, Windischberger C, Lanzenberger R. Subcortical gray matter changes in transgender subjects after long-term cross-sex hormone administration. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2016 Dec;74:371-379. doi: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2016.09.028. Epub 2016 Oct 5. PMID: 27744092. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27744092/

Stute P, Wildt L, Neulen J. The impact of micronized progesterone on breast cancer risk: a systematic review. Climacteric. 2018 Apr;21(2):111-122. doi: 10.1080/13697137.2017.1421925. Epub 2018 Jan 31. PMID: 29384406. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29384406/

U. S. Preventive Services Task Force Recommends Against Hormone Therapy for Preventing Chronic Conditions in Postmenopausal Women. For women who have gone through menopause, benefits do not outweigh harms of using hormone therapy to prevent chronic conditions. https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/sites/default/files/file/supporting_documents/hormone-therapy-finalrs-bulletin.pdf

Zubiaurre-Elorza L, Junque C, Gómez-Gil E, Guillamon A. Effects of cross-sex hormone treatment on cortical thickness in transsexual individuals. J Sex Med. 2014 May;11(5):1248-61. doi: 10.1111/jsm.12491. Epub 2014 Mar 11. PMID: 24617977. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24617977/

Note: The 100 reference article by the head or USPATH does not refer to brain morphology research at all.

September 3, 2021

It was announced today that the massively popular 11th Hour Blog is going global.

This is an outstanding development in the global fight to take down an industry that eats children for lunch, colonizes biological sex for profit, and tramples on the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls.

Those of us who are fighting this have to understand what we are up against, and we have to do everything in our power to help our friends, families, and neighbors understand what we are up against. We are at war.

As the blog states, “[t]his corporate colonization is an extension of the sexual exploitation of the female body in the sex and surrogacy industries and the corporate profiteering off identities based on same sex attraction. “Gender identity,” opens markets in sex expression by violating the boundary between male and female. This violation being framed as a human rights issue takes us from exploitation, the use of human sex, to its colonization, with an eye toward genetic engineering and replacing human reproduction with technology.”

In the U.S., male rapists and murderers are impregnating vulnerable female prisoners. Impregnation can only happen because sexual dimorphism is real. Prison officials are ignoring that fact across the country. In Spain, officials are working hard to allow anyone to claim to belong to any sex classification on the basis of self-identification.

In March, the global Women’s Human Rights Campaign (WHRC) was deplatformed from a meeting of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women. WHRC later released this statement in response to that body’s supposed “Affirmation of Feminist Principles.” WHRC said about the “affirmation”: “This document lies about feminism saying: ‘Feminists have established that gender, sex and sexuality are constructed categories of identity.’ Feminists have never been anti-science and have always recognized that sex is biological and immutable. The argument that sex is a social construction comes from gender identity ideology which uses this terminology to support the idea that people can change their sex.”

Today, the website for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights states this:

About gender equality and the human rights of women and LGBTI persons

Gender equality is at the very heart of human rights and United Nations values. Equality and non-discrimination are fundamental principles of the United Nations Charter, adopted by world leaders in 1945.

Yet millions of women and LGBTI persons around the world continue to experience discrimination in the enjoyment of civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights.

Moreover, many women, including transgender, gender diverse and intersex women, face compounded forms of discrimination—due to factors such as their age, race, ethnicity, disability, or socio-economic status—in addition to gender-based discrimination.

Effectively ensuring full enjoyment of human rights by women, girls, men, boys and people of diverse gender identities requires, first, a comprehensive understanding of the social structures, social norms and stereotyping, and power relations that frame not only laws and politics but also the economy, social dynamics, family life and community life.

Our international bodies have become as captured as our U.S. institutions have been.

All of this is happening NOW, and the launch of the 11th Hour Blog’s global arm could not come at a better time. There is no time to waste. Please follow and share the 11th Hour Blog as though all of our lives depended on it, because they do.

W: https://www.the11thhourblog.com/projects-2

FB: https://www.facebook.com/The11thHourBlog

T: https://twitter.com/11thBlog

Please sign the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights. If you are in the U.S., please check out our chapter to see what we are doing to push back nationally. All hands on deck.

*Thumbnail logo used with permission.