Category: Gender

LESBIAN DEVIL: A BOOK REVIEW

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By Ann Menasche

“Lesbian Devil to Straight Man Saint: a trip through trans hell and back” by Scott Newgent (2024)

Lesbian Devil is a gripping, no-holds-barred, finely crafted page turner that exposes the significant role of homophobia in “transing away the lesbian.” It chronicles Scott Nugent/Kellie King’s life including the myriad influences that conspired to convince a 42-year-old lesbian, successful career woman, and mother that she was born in the “wrong” body and needed to pursue medical transition.  After ingesting cross sex hormones and obtaining multiple drastic surgeries, Kellie emerged with a male appearance – though still a woman – and with her health severely compromised by constant pain and frequent life-threatening infections.  Tellingly, the acceptance and self-acceptance that she sought in a sexist and homophobic world through medical transition continued to elude her.

Kellie also emerged soon afterwards with a profound commitment to save gender non-conforming and lesbian/gay children and teens from a similar fate.

Kellie was a spirited and athletic child who grew into a woman who excelled in business, obtaining an executive position in sales.  Like many other women, including many lesbians, Kellie’s outspoken and competitive personality did not conform to the narrow sexist stereotypes of “femininity”, and she often felt it would have been easier being a man.  Yet, she dressed the part of a professional woman, wore make-up and heels, and did not appear “butch.”  This did not stop the first gender counselor she met with, a trans-identified male, from asking her, “how long have you been dressing as a man, Kellie?”

Though Kellie was not unloved as a child, she experienced significant trauma.  Her father was physically abusive, and her mother struggled with addiction.  As a teen, she was raped. A few years later, Kellie attempted suicide. But to the gender industry, this was irrelevant. All the counselors and doctors Kellie spoke to about transitioning “affirmed” her, led her down the conveyor belt of medical transition without ever asking any questions about her mental health history or even why she wanted to transition.

“Each medical professional I came across guaranteed a utopian paradise on the other side of the transition. I wanted finally to be accepted, loved and seen as straight in this fantasy land.”

The most compelling promise for Kellie was that once transitioned she would escape the stigma of being a lesbian. When Kellie first came out as a lesbian, her grandfather, the greatest source of emotional support in her life, her “guiding light” as she called him, disowned her for being a lesbian.   This was a major blow.

Then some years later, Kelli fell passionately in love with a co-worker, Jacqueline. Jacqueline came from a close knit religious Catholic family and was in a loveless marriage to a man.  What followed was a tumultuous on again, off again relationship where Jacqueline went back and forth with her abusive husband as she struggled to accept herself, and by extension, Kellie, as a lesbian.  Needless to say, Jacqueline’s parents did not accept Kellie and encouraged their daughter to return to her husband.

As Kellie explained, “The vitriol that Jacqueline’s family directed at her was unbearable to my ears.  Their pleas for her to be purified and cast out the so-called demons were incessant.  The yearning for acceptance and sense of belonging and an unconditional love devoid of violence was all I ever sought.  Yet (Jacqueline’s) family painted me as a pariah, undeserving of love from even God himself.”

Jacqueline was quick to embrace the idea that Kellie was really a man and encouraged her transition.

Later, in her transman “disguise,” Kellie got to know and became very close to Jacqueline’s family.  Except for their rabid homophobia, they turned out to be very fine, caring people. As a “man”, Kellie was totally accepted and welcomed into the family circle.  But this acceptance was based on a lie, and she found herself deeply troubled by this deception.  Kellie was still female, still a lesbian.

Much of the book describes Kellie’s struggles with severe medical complications from her surgery, complications that brought her close to death.  She worried about not living long enough to meet her grandchildren.

Finally, breaking it off with Jacqueline, she began to regret the path she had taken.

Yet, there was no going back for Kellie.  The physical changes carved onto her body are permanent.  Kellie graciously forgave Jacqueline and others who had hurt her.  She could forgive everyone but herself.  She writes, “…a more profound forgiveness still eludes me – self-forgiveness.  The mirror reflects a face I do not recognize, physically or spiritually and fills me with hate for myself that I fight daily; it’s my face.  Yet there might be a day when I look into my eyes and find redemption…Still after all these years, I miss Kellie horribly.”

I wish Scott/Kellie healing as she continues her essential work of saving future generations of gender non-conforming children, future generations of lesbians from the false promises and permanent harms of medicalization.

As she frequently proclaims in urging opposition to gender medicalization of children, “Scream louder.”

“Lesbian Devil to Straight Man Saint” can be purchased through Amazon or Barnes and Nobel.  Please purchase  a copy and support Kellie/Scott’s important work. https://www.scottnewgent.com/

Minority Statement on Missouri Senate bill Banning Child Transition

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Members of FIST voted to support the Missouri Senate bill banning so-called trans “affirming” care for minor children, as posted on this blog March 31.  However, that vote was quite close and those of us in the minority would like to put forward our arguments in the spirit of furthering the feminist debate on this important issue.

The Missouri bill does not “stand-alone” but is one of a tsunami of bills released recently sponsored by the Right, as part of a concerted build-up for the next presidential election—basically to get a far-right person elected president in 2024 (DeSantis or Trump).  The fact that some feminist groups joined the Right in promoting these bills has no influence on the Right’s culture war strategy.  Other rightwing bills that are part of this strategy include: the plethora of abortion bans in 13 states (including the recent attack on medication abortion); the erasure of actual US history from K-12 curricula, in the name of “protecting children” from knowing the truth about slavery (and civil rights and women’s rights); the attacks on affirmative action, Social Security and voting rights. We cannot separate all of these right wing attacks (even the one that we might agree with) from the general attack on everything progressive that is unfolding before our eyes—and we do not think FIST should play a part in what will play into that build-up by the Right despite our best efforts to separate ourselves as Leftists, lesbians, etc. .

A major argument in the fight for abortion has always been: “politicians should not be legislating healthcare—this is the province of medicine, not politics.”  “Bans off my body”  should be upheld for all adults, but minor children are often treated with additional care.  Any legislation on specific medical procedures can be used to strengthen the hand of politicians to adjudicate and police abortion care.

If state power is used to enforce “healthcare” bans at a time when there is so much sentimentalized propaganda FOR “gender affirming treatment”, it will make the parents seeking these procedures for their children into MARTYRS and will simply strengthen public sympathy FOR “gender affirming care.”

Even when the Right seems to be in agreement with us on transgender ideology, the way they see women and gender is very different  from a feminist perspective.  They want to preserve gender norms while feminists have always argued that the stereotypes associated with sex are confining and oppressive and should be eliminated.

A better strategy for us might be to put our energy into pressuring medical organizations (AMA, etc) or mounting a public service campaign to increase public understanding of the dangers of these “treatments.” Really putting on the pressure as to how their junk science is mutilating children, making them sterile, some unable to ever enjoy orgasm while simultaneously turning children into lifelong medical patients consuming the exact same powerful steroid hormones that the Women’s Health Movement of the 1970s worked so hard to warn us about. We could be spreading the word about the reasons Sweden, Finland and the UK have closed “gender clinics” and publicize the fact that even the US FDA has been forced to add the word “experimental” to its definition of sex hormones in “gender affirming treatment.”

FIST issues statement supporting Missouri Senate bill 843 banning child transition

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On March 25, 2023, FIST sent a statement to the Missouri legislature supporting a bill that would ban medicalized transition for children under 18.  The letter declared in part, “Child transition involving puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries that remove or modify healthy body parts are extremely sexist and homophobic practices.  They disproportionately harm a growing number of girls, most of whom are same sex attracted, i.e., are likely to become lesbians, and girls that don’t fit in with sex stereotypes of traditional “femininity” imposed on them by a sexist society.

Medical transition is experimental, cosmetic, and doesn’t cure anything.  Instead, it results in sterilization, prevents proper development of brains and bones, and causes other permanent physical disabilities and shortened life spans.  No child is born in the wrong body! As feminists solidly on the Left, we call for saving the tomboys and future lesbians and feminists as well as all children struggling with being different from these permanent medical harms.”

The bill passed the Missouri Senate and is now pending in the House. If it passes, it will join a number of other states that have passed similar laws. According to ABC News, “At least 11 states — Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee and Utah — have passed laws or policies that restrict gender-affirming care for people under the age of legal majority, which is the threshold for legal adulthood.”

FIST is highly appreciative of the work of Scott/Kellie Newgent who has been traveling all over the country working on bills to protect children and who encouraged our participation in this campaign.  Please support her work at trevoices.org.

Building Hope for the New Year

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It’s been a tough year for women’s rights.  We lost abortion rights (even though access had been eroded for years) when the decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health was issued this past June with our reactionary Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade and 50 years of precedent to give a green light to states to outlaw abortion.  Now 13 states ban all or virtually all abortions and only 17 states and the District of Columbia broadly protect abortion rights. No doubt, many women’s lives and liberty now hang in the balance.

Meanwhile, the Biden Administration has continued to fight in the courts against adding the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even though already ratified by the requisite 38 states. See Maura Casey’s article, Publish ERA, let skirmishes begin and watch Equal Means Equal’s video: Joe, Do It!

The ERA would establish sex as a protected category, with the same weight as race, which would make it far easier to challenge all kinds of discriminatory practices in every state in the union, including jobs discrimination, violence against women, and yes, abortion bans. See and share our Why We Need the ERA brochure.

And then the coordinated worldwide effort to deny the existence of sex, and to remove sex-based protections including the ability of women to organize against our oppression and to even have language to talk about ourselves, has continued apace in 2022.  California passed two horrific bills this year, SB 923 and SB107 and would respectively indoctrinate the medical and mental health professions in gender identity ideology and make the state a magnet for minors seeking sterilizing and mutilating so-called “gender affirming care.”  See our post about these dangerous bills.

Indoctrination in our schools and universities is endemic.  Feminists are losing jobs and livelihoods and facing civil rights complaints for refusing to deny the existence of two biological sexes. A lesbian in Norway was even facing criminal charges and up to three years in prison for supposed “hate speech” for stating that men could neither be lesbians or mothers.

And most recently, Scotland passed a gender self-ID law, the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, that will allow any male, including convicted sex offenders, to enter women’s spaces and programs simply on his say-so, disregarding concerns about women’s safety.

So, there is plenty of reason to despair.  But there is also reason to hope.

Women can and are fighting back.  Women in Scotland protested and sang a rendition of Auld Lang Syne outside of parliament during the vote, “women’s rights are human rights.”  Their struggle is not over.

Rise-Up for Abortion Rights has done amazing organizing in response to the overturning of Roe.

Two women who challenged their sacking in the UK for their gender critical views were vindicated in court:  Allison Bailey  and Maya Forstater.

Our Duty, a non-partisan group of parents opposing child medical transition, organized a successful “First Do No Harm Unity Rally” of 100 people in Anaheim California in front of a national convention of pediatricians.  The central organizer is a mother, lawyer, and liberal Democrat.  The Tavistock Gender Clinic in the UK has been shuttered following the investigation headed up by Dr. Hilary Cass revealing dangerous invasive procedures being recommended for gender dysphoric youth with little screening or oversight.

And then there are the women of Iran, who are leading a struggle against an extremely repressive and misogynist fundamentalist regime.  In response to the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, in custody of the morals police for not wearing her headscarf properly, and at great risk to themselves, our Iranian sisters have poured out into the streets again and again.

The song, Baraye, has been the anthem of the protests:

For the sake of dancing in the street

For the fear felt in the moment of kissing

For my sister your sister, our sisters

For changing the rotten minds

For shame, for pennilessness

For the yearning for an ordinary life

For the sake of the children that mine the garbage and their dreams…

For women, life, liberty

 

For women, life, liberty!  If they can do it, we can do it!

Happy New Year, sisters!

Report Back on WDI-USA national conference

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FIST members attended the the Women’s Declaration International – USA conference , which took place in Washington DC, September 23-25, 2022. The theme and title of the conference was “Reigniting the Women’s Liberation Movement”. The gathering lived up to its “national” title with women having traveled to the conference from across the country; we spoke to women from at least 11 states. Relative to the female population in the U.S., there was good representation of black and brown women (including in the leadership) and a large lesbian contingent. Some of us estimated that 2/3 of us were older and 1/3 were women in their mid-30s or younger. The feeling was very warm and welcoming, it was truly wonderful to share a weekend meeting 100 like-minded women (or so we assumed).
The conference was very well organized, there were back-to-back plenaries and breakouts for a full two days, in addition to the introductory plenary on Friday night, where members of the Board of WDI-USA introduced themselves and the conference–plenaries took place in the dining room so we were able to continue eating and have our dessert even as we took in all of the ideas presented. The food was good and plentiful. Everything ran on time. It took place in a swanky hotel and we sat in a ballroom complete with sparkly chandeliers and white tablecloths.  There were many good presentations with some time for questions afterwards but there was very little actual discussion. Very little exploration of how far our assumed like-mindedness went.
Plenaries included those on the Second Wave of the WLM, Radical Feminist Structural Analysis, Nonviolent mass Action as a strategy for Resistance, the history of feminists “trashing” each other in the women’s movement and strategies to combat it, Women’s writing, Grassroots Organizing, Women in Leadership, Women’s Community, Stories and Land, Ethical Communication, and finally “What Would Victory Look Like?”.

The plenaries were interspersed with smaller breakout sessions on Reproductive Rights, Opposition to the Sex Trade, the Value of Lesbian Only Spaces, Consciousness Raising, Gender and Feminism, Misogynoir (“Black Patriarchy”, facilitated by Black women) and Legislative Advocacy.

Some of our differences became evident during the last session of the conference. as all women in attendance were asked to present their visions of what “victory” would look like. Otherwise differences were not discussed at all; we never touched upon feminists taking money from Christian Nationalists, or the WDI-USA promotion of Women’s Bill of Rights, or their opposition (or at least WoLF’s) to the ERA (see our ERA-FIST brochure) or the WDI statement in opposition to the Inflation Reduction Act or their former work on their Equality for All Act which is a watered-down version of FIST’s Feminist Amendments to the Equality Act or the history of the right wing trying to co-opt feminism through groups such as the Independent Women’s Forum. Nor was there any discussion of how WDI/WDI-USA is funded or how the conference itself was funded.
 
The conference centered on the issue of gender and there was a great sense of relief in being at a large gathering where gender-critical views could be openly discussed. However, it did eclipse other crucial issues, such as the recent catastrophic loss of legal abortion in the U.S.  Reproductive rights and justice was not a major topic at any of the plenaries at which everyone in attendance was present. After the conference, FIST members and other attendees from NY had a discussion about what the place of gender should be in terms of women’s liberation as a whole (we reached no conclusion and consider this an ongoing discussion).
This one meeting might not reignite the Women’s Liberation Movement but it certainly demonstrated that the embers have not burned out. The great deal of warmth and openness—really great spirit—gives us hope for bringing the different “factions” of feminism together on mutually agreed upon campaigns.
Posts to our blog page by Feminist Writer are the opinions of individual FIST members and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Feminists in Struggle organization.  Official posts are authored by Feminist Struggle.

Title IX Proposed Rule to Include “Gender Identity” as a Protected Class

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Feminists in Struggle opposes the Department of Education’s proposed regulations to include “gender identity” as a protected class.  Here is our comment that we posted on the DOE site:

Agency: DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION (ED)
Document Type: Proposed Rule
Title: Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Sex in Education Programs or Activities Receiving Federal Financial Assistance
Document ID: ED-2021-OCR-0166-0001

Comment:
We concur with the points made by the Green Alliance for Sex-Based Rights, comment tracking #l7q-x20e-f2rc. “Gender identity” is an entirely subjective experience that has no objective reality, is based on the mistaken notion that one can change one’s sex, and militates against the rights of women and girls to define themselves as a class based on sex. Recognizing “gender identity” undermines the entire purpose of Title IX, to ensure parity and fairness in academics and sports for females. Allowing “gender identity” to be a protected category essentially allows males to “identify” their way into women’s and girls’ spaces and programs, defeating the purpose of addressing disparity between males and females, making females, the underclass, bow to the demands of the privileged class (males), and disregards females’ particular needs for safety, privacy, and dignity by allowing males to invade locker rooms, bathrooms, and other spaces women and girls need in order to be safe from the male gaze and from harassment and assault. It is unconscionable to put females in this position in order to appease the demands of a vocal minority.

For more information, see:  Senator Condemns Biden’s Proposed Title IX Rule and AG O’Connor opposes U.S. Dept. of Education’s proposed regulations redefining “sex”

FIST FORUM: SAVING THE TOMBOYS FROM THE MEDICAL ATROCITIES OF CHILD “TRANSITION”

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The medical “transition” of gender non-conforming, mostly lesbian, girls has increased exponentially.  How do we fight it?

JOIN US on AUGUST 13TH at 11:00 a.m.Pacific time, 1:00 p.m. Central, and 2:00 p.m. Eastern for this timely discussion of the harmful practice of medicalization of a growing number of gender non-conforming girls, a majority of whom are lesbian, through use of puberty blockers, wrong sex hormones, double mastectomies, and genital mutilating surgeries. Reserve your tickets now.

Girls are being taught that their non-conformity and same sex attraction mean they have been born in the “wrong” body, with the result that they pursue dangerous treatments before they even reach adulthood, causing permanent harm to their healthy developing bodies and turning them into life-long medical patients. Many of these girls will in a few years join the growing ranks of detransitioners and regretters. Is this the face of the new homophobia? How can we fight back and save new generations of tomboys, lesbians, and future feminists?

TICKETS ONLY $5 – SAVING THE TOMBOYS FROM THE MEDICAL ATROCITIES OF CHILD “TRANSITION” Tickets, Sat, Aug 13, 2022 at 11:00 AM | Eventbrite

SPEAKERS:

CAROL is an advisor for de-transitioned people, having gone through transition and de-transition herself. She is a co-founder of Detrans Voices: Detransition Stories, Resources, and Community and a member of LGB Alliance USA | Leading the Fight for Same-Sex Rights She currently co-facilitates a gender dysphoria support group for lesbian and bisexual women through LGB Alliance USA and continues to work on outreach and awareness around de-transition.

ERIN FRIDAY is a licensed attorney in California and the mom of a desister. She is co-leader of Our Duty, U.S. branch, a parent support group for parents of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoric kids.

T is the founder and national organizer of Lesbians United, a grassroots lesbian-only organization in the U.S. Lesbians United is creating public information campaigns both online and on the street to fight back against the anti-lesbian transgenderist movement.

ANN MENASCHE is a radical feminist, lesbian, socialist, political activist, and co-founder of Feminists in Struggle and Green Alliance for Sex-Based Rights. Growing up in the 1950’s and 60’s, she seriously thought about “transitioning” when she read about Christine Jorgensen, because she yearned for the career opportunities and authority only available to men. The advent of feminism helped her to accept herself for the first time as she dedicated herself to women’s liberation and radical social change.

FIST’s Feminist Forums series are interactive and organizing events. At our forums, women have an opportunity not only to hear interesting speakers on a variety of feminist topics but to meet each other, make comments, ask questions of the presenters and discuss feminist politics together. We also usually tape the events so they may be viewed later. Women in attendance are free to shut off their cameras and mute themselves, should they prefer to do so. If you prefer to remain anonymous within the group, or plan to sign in under a different name from the name you have used for registration and purchase of your ticket, please contact the organizer prior to the event. Thanks.

While some of our events are open to both men and women, THIS IS A FEMALE ONLY EVENT. We ask that our male allies respect our right to meet together as women.

HELP US STOP SB 923 & SB 107!

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California bill SB 923 is a blatant attempt to indoctrinate all medical personnel from clerks all the way up to M.D.s, therapists, and anyone in healthcare who has direct client contact, into gender ideology and so-called “gender-affirming care”.  It requires healthcare professionals to be “educated” by untrained transactivist lobbyist groups who would be the recipients of public funds for this purpose, and directs healthcare professionals’ governing boards to monitor and discipline their licensees’ compliance.

California bill SB 107 makes California a magnet for those seeking or providing “gender-affirming care”, a euphemism for radical interventions that causes infertility, inhibited bone and organ development, sexual dysfunction, and which sentences minors to a lifetime of medicalization and mutilating surgeries for the profit of pharmaceutical companies. SB 107 would not only shield those who enable minors to flee to California for such radical “healthcare”, but those medical doctors who prescribe and perform these treatments, even if outlawed in their home states, and it would bar law enforcement from cooperating with subpoenas or extradition orders.  For more background on SB 107, see: California Aspires to Become a Sanctuary State for Those Who Mutilate Children for Profit

Feminists in Struggle vigorously opposes these bills and calls for feminists and feminist allies in every state to help defeat them.  Both #SB923 and SB 107 have passed the California Senate and the California Assembly and now await Governor Newsom’s signature or veto.

Please call (916) 445-2841, Fax: (916) 558-3160, email, and tweet Governor Gavin Newsom @CAgovernor and @GavinNewsom and urge him to VETO both of these bills.

Here are some sample tweets:

I oppose #SB923 bc it pushes gender ideology, a dangerous belief system rooted in unreality that is seducing children, adolescents, & young adults into believing they were “born in the wrong body” and can alter their sex. VETO #SB923!

I oppose #SB923 bc it pushes “affirmative care” which is a profit-driven enterprise that creates lifelong medicalization and dependence on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery. VETO #SB923!

I oppose #SB923 bc it prevents medical professionals from using their judgment as to what constitutes appropriate treatment & places it in the hands of untrained political activists/trans lobbyists w/no clinical background. VETO #SB923!

I oppose #SB923 bc it erodes parents’ ability to protect their children from irreversible harm from sterilization, lifetime medicalization, and mutilation. VETO #SB923!

I oppose #SB923 bc it hampers healthcare providers’ ability to “first do no harm,” putting patients at risk of misdiagnosis and providers at risk of malpractice. VETO #SB923!

I oppose #SB923 bc it is an egregious misuse of taxpayer funds by mandating repeated “cultural training”of all medical personnel requiring MediCal, PACE, state, & partially-funded programs 2 spend millions of $$$ annually on re-education2 crush dissent. VETO #SB923!

I oppose #SB923 bc it is an egregious misuse of taxpayer funds to funnel $$ to lobbyist groups for politicized indoctrination, enriching political pacs rather than spending funds on legitimate services. VETO #SB923!

I oppose #SB923 bc it’s a violation of the 1st Amendment to compel medical personnel/providers to profess belief in gender ideology & use names/pronouns demanded by persons assuming a gender identity conflicting w/his/her sex VETO #SB923!

I oppose #SB107 bc it would sanction the aiding & abetting of criminal acts & the kidnapping & injuring of children by facilitating unscientific & untested experimentation on children by life-altering, irreversible & mutilating invasive procedures. VETO #SB107

I  oppose #SB107 bc it would sanction the aiding&abetting of kidnapping&injuring of children by usurping parental authority&substituting state authority over minors by empowering CA family courts 2assert jurisdiction&authority over children who come to CA. VETO #SB107

I oppose #SB107 bc it would sanction the aiding&abetting of criminal acts&the kidnapping&injuring of children by prohibiting CA law enforcement agencies from enforcing arrest warrants from states that restrict “gender-affirming health care,” for violations of those state’s laws&allows them 2flee2 CA2evade prosecution &receive full immunity from any&all legal responsibility 4their actions. VETO #SB107

I oppose #SB107 for violations of those state’s laws&allows them 2flee2 CA2evade prosecution &receive full immunity from any&all legal responsibility 4their actions. VETO #SB107

I oppose #SB107 bc it would sanction the aiding & abetting of criminal acts & the kidnapping & injuring of children by prohibiting CA law enforcement agencies from enforcing arrest warrants from states that restrict “gender-affirming health care” VETO #SB107!

I oppose #SB107 bc it would sanction the aiding&abetting of criminal acts&the kidnapping&injuring of children by preventing the prosecution of anyone who transports out-of-state minors into CA for “gender-affirming care”. VETO #SB107

I oppose #SB107 bc it would sanction med procedures w/o parental consent & allow parents to take their children out-of-state4these purposes w/o the other parent’s consent or in violation of custody & visitation orders, even refusing 2honor med subpoenas VETO #SB107

#Save the Tomboys! Defeat SB 107!

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STOP PROMOTING THE TRAVESTY OF SO-CALLED “GENDER AFFIRMING CARE” on CHILDREN!  We Urge a NO Vote on California’s SB 107!

 

California Senator Weiner is at it again. After sponsoring SB 923 that would indoctrinate the medical profession in gender identity ideology, he is now proposing another bill, SB 107 that would turn California into a haven for the medical experimentation on gender non-conforming children, shielding those seeking these interventions from prosecution based on the laws of their state.  There is nothing progressive about this bill; rather it is misogynist, homophobic, and reactionary to its core.

Gender non-conforming minor children and youth, mostly female, and many same-sex-attracted future lesbians and gay men, are being subjected to a ghastly medical experiment that will likely shock the consciences of future generations.   Though covered up by euphemisms like “gender affirming care”, these children are being taught that their gender non-conformity, same sex attractions, and/or unhappiness with their sexed bodies (how many girls hate their bodies growing up under patriarchy?) mean that they were born in the “wrong” body, and they are “transgender”.

Unlike being gay, lesbian, or bisexual, transgender is usually a medicalized identity with the end goal of turning children into a facsimile of the other sex.   Children must “treat” their condition not just by changing names, pronouns, and clothing choices and by denying their sex, but by taking puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones that prevent brain and bones from developing properly, and which result in sterilization, early onset osteoporosis, undeveloped lungs and hearts, and the inability to experience sexual pleasure.

Medicalized young people are also channeled into multiple surgeries, removing or modifying healthy body parts, such as double mastectomy at ages as young as 13, often followed by genitally mutilating surgeries with frequent and severe side effects.  In other words, we are destroying children in order to “save” them.

While other countries, including highly liberal, tolerant societies such as Sweden and Finland, move back from embracing this model of treating societal and emotional problems with major body modifications, California is moving full speed ahead.

As lesbians from the U.S. group, Lesbians United, stated in their recent campaign, #Save the Tomboys, “tomboys need shoes they can run in, not artificial hormones.”  Since 84% of girls diagnosed with “gender dysphoria” are same-sex attracted, the fear that this is indeed an insidious form of reparative conversion therapy targeting and disappearing the next generation of lesbians is a valid one.

Feminists in Struggle, as an organization composed of radical feminists and progressives, holds that children should be free to dress as they like, play with the toys and pursue the interests that they like, and express their personalities freely without sex stereotyping, rather than be medicalized for their gender non-conformity.  No one is born in the “wrong” body.  Children unhappy with their bodies due to sexism, homophobia, and related traumas need psychological support, and to be allowed to grow up whole, not be put under the knife.

We therefore urge the defeat of SB 107. #Save the Tomboys.

See also: LGB Alliance’s post: SB 107: Trans Refuge Legislation and Green Alliance for Sex-Based Rights’ post: California Aspires to Become a Sanctuary State for Those Who Mutilate Children for Profit

SB 923 Update 6-2-22

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The horrendous California “Gender-Affirming Care” bill attempting to indoctrinate caregivers in gender ideology, SB 923, has passed the Senate, and is now in the Health Committee in the California Assembly where it awaits being scheduled for a hearing.  Please call all members of the Assembly Health Committee and urge them to vote NO!