Trump’s Threat to Women’s Rights & the ERA

The Equal Rights Amendment MUST Be Published Before Trump Takes Office!

In view of recent election results and, despite denials, the clear intention of the Trump Administration to implement Project 2025, which reads as a male supremacist manifesto, it is imperative that Biden reverse his obstructionism and instruct the National Archivist, Colleen Shogun, to publish the Equal Rights Amendment as the 28th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution.  The ERA has met all the legal requirements, having been ratified by ¾ of the states, the 38th of which, Virginia, ratified on January 27, 2020.  Women have been waiting for over a century for the ERA to first be passed by Congress, and then be ratified by the required number of states.

The National Archivist is a ministerial position under the Executive Branch, and Biden is the only person who can reverse the decision by the Trump Administration to unconstitutionally interfere with its automatic publication following ratification by the requisite states, and reverse his own administration’s continuation of the Trump obstructionism.  The ERA represents our best, and only, real bulwark against the tide of male supremacism Trump promises to deliver.

We acknowledge that biological women, as a sex class, have enemies on the Left and on the Right. The embrace and promotion of gender ideology on the Left and its erasure of women has been breathtaking, despite its utter lack of scientific evidence; its having been founded on junk science; its clear misogyny and homophobia in its exaltation of sexual stereotypes; its disregard for the safeguarding of children and legitimate concerns of parents; the willful blindness to the real harms of medicalization, and the corporate pharmaceutical money behind it; the pain of detransitioners and regretters; and total disregard of the infringement on the sex-based rights and safety of women and girls.

In addition, the cancel culture, McCarthyist repression of free speech and de-platforming of anyone questioning gender ideology and so-called “gender affirming care”, has exposed the authoritarian nature of this men’s rights movement, which has captured the Left, with rare exception.

Among other issues such as Gaza, the border, the disastrous handling of the exit from Afghanistan, concerns about the price of living, etc., the Biden Administration’s elevating the rights of trans-identified males over the rights of women and girls and the promotion of gender ideology was one of the reasons that the Presidential Democratic ticket lost the election to Trump.

In following the dictates of the TQ+ gender lobby, the Biden/Harris Administration and the Harris/Walz campaign ceded rational ground to the other enemies of women’s rights, the Christian nationalists and their MAGA allies, men’s rights activists, and other garden variety misogynists, who nevertheless know what a woman is and that there are only two sexes, observable at birth. Their adherence to this ideology contributed directly to Trump’s appeal and ultimate win, as this is an issue he plans to confront, some long-time Democrats even voting for him because they hope for some relative sanity to be restored in this regard.

The men’s rights activists insist that women are inferior, should cater to men, be subservient, and allow themselves to be sexually exploited. Some young incels and “bros” have been emboldened by Trump’s win to the extent that they are now exultantly proclaiming “Your body, MY choice!” in defiance of the abortion rights battle cry and women’s right to bodily autonomy and agency and in their zeal to dominate and control women’s lives and bodies.

The Christian Right, the other enemy of women’s sex-based rights, has embraced Trump as their champion and tirelessly devoted itself to his campaign, and has been greatly empowered by Trump’s win and takeover of Congress and the Supreme Court. It would like to not only turn women into handmaidens, but outlaw and criminalize abortion and also birth control, attempt to grant fetuses “personhood”, track women’s pregnancies and penalize miscarriages, do away with no-fault divorce, treat rapists with kid gloves and accuse victims of “false reporting”, end investigation of campus rape, penalize unmarried women, and generally return women to 1950’s America. The Christian Nationalists also take a very dim view of our federal government and welcome Trump’s plan to dismantle it.  The truth is, it aims to destroy our representative democracy, do away with the separation of church and state, and transform this country into a theocratic dictatorship. If you think this is an overstatement, please view the recently released documentary, “Bad Faith”, and prior to that, “The Family“. This is the enemy that will be in ascendance with Trump in power.

We call on all women and men who oppose tyranny and the destruction of the rights of natal women and girls to help us get the ERA finally published onto the Constitution in order to protect us from the twin threats of gender ideology and the religious right.  We have allies in Congress who have signed onto the resolutions, SJR 39 in the Senate, and HJR 82 in the House, which recognize that the only remaining step for the ERA to become law is publication, and that it is up to Joe Biden to finally take this step to ensure that all the hard-won rights women have fought for, including voting rights, abortion rights, contraception, equal pay, no-fault divorce, owning property, obtaining credit in one’s own name, safe spaces, sports, etc. are not rolled back. The ERA would ensure that women cease to be treated as second-class citizens before the law, and would have prevented Roe being overturned.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, the sponsor of SJR 39, is hosting a virtual Town Hall on the ERA on this coming Tuesday, December 3rd at 4 PM PDT, 7 PM EST and we need supporters of the ERA to register now and attend! We also need you to call these Senators and U.S. Representatives and direct them to apply pressure to Biden to publish and text Biden at 302-404-0880 and Harris at 310-861-2977.

The time is NOW!  We cannot let the efforts of our First Wave Feminist forebears like Alice Paul’s efforts to be in vain.  Sign up for the Town Hall and start calling and writing these representatives and the White House, remind them on social media, and don’t stop until Biden makes the call to the National Archivist and gets the ERA in the Constitution!

Update on SB 107 & 923

SB 107 and SB 923, the “Gender-Affirming” healthcare bills are both now in the California Assembly Appropriations Committee and are scheduled for a hearing on August 3rd.

Please call, write, fax, and tweet the members of the CA Assembly Appropriations Committee and urge them to Vote NO on #SB923. Contact info here. Sample tweets/posts here.

Please Submit a Statement! Regardless of where you reside, you can submit statements on the following website: https://calegislation.lc.ca.gov/Advocates/

For talking points and contact info for the Appropriations Committee, see: CA Appropriations Committee – SB 107 & 923.

#Save the Tomboys! Defeat SB 107!

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

Update on SB 923 – Hearing on Tuesday 6-21!!

The next step for SB 923 is the hearing in the California Assembly Health Committee on this coming Tuesday, June 21st, at 1:30 p.m. There will be no phone-in testimony for this hearing; in person only. If you are able to attend in person, go to California Assembly, 1021 O Street, Room 1100, Sacramento, California 95814-5704.  To livestream the hearing, go to: Assembly Health Committee hearing.

Please call all members of the health committee and urge them to vote NO on SB 923!  If you’re on Twitter, tweet @JimWoodAD2, @MarieWaldron75, @drarambulaAD31, @FrankBigelowCA, @AsmCarrillo, @HeathFloraCA, @BMaienschein, @ChadMayes, @AsmKevinMcCarty, @adrin_nazarian, @AsmLuzRivas, @AsmRodriguez52, @SantiagoAD53.

SB 923 Update 6-2-22

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!

SB 923 Passes in California Senate

In a vote along strict partisan lines, the Senate voted yesterday to pass the atrocious “Gender-Affirming Care” bill, SB 923, 28 to 7, with 2 Republicans, Senator Shannon Grove of District 16, and Senator Rosalicie Ochoa Bogh, and 3 Democrats not voting.

Per usual, the Democrats in the state legislature chose to endorse and codify gender ideology, junk science, sex denialism, and “affirmative care,” a euphemism for lifelong medicalization, sterilization, and mutilation of children and youth, heedless to pleas from feminists, detransitioners, parents, and medical professionals to vote NO.

We are particularly disappointed in the Democratic women legislators who voted for this bill, namely: Nancy Skinner of District 9; Maria Elena Durazo of District 24; Melissa Hurtado of District 14; Susan Rubio of District 22; Susan Talamantes Eggman of District 5; Monique Limon of District 19; Connie Leyva of District 20; Sydney Kamlager of District 30; Lena Gonzalez of District 33; and Toni Atkins of District 39.  We are also disappointed that the two Republican Senators, Grove and Ochoa Bogh, did not vote on this bill, as their votes almost certainly would have been in opposition, Grove having voted against SB 923 in the Senate Health Committee.

We invite anyone who cares about the First Amendment and the right to dissent, scientific reality, ethical medical and psychiatric treatment, responsible use of public funds, or women’s sex-based rights to contact your Senator and let her/him know how you feel about how s/he voted!

SB 923 is going to the Assembly next where we need to mount a fierce resistance to its passage.  Join us in this fight!

California’s Terrifying Indoctrination Bill

California’s Democratic legislators – the same group that has been consistently incapable of voting to approve single payer universal healthcare for all its residents – is poised to approve an Orwellian piece of legislation, that requires, on the taxpayers’ dime, the repeated indoctrination of everyone in the medical or mental health profession through “cultural competency training” for the stated purpose of providing “trans-inclusive healthcare.”   This bill, California Senate Bill 923, introduced by Senator Scott Wiener, SD 11, must be defeated.

While “trans-inclusive healthcare” sounds benign, what it means is indoctrination in sex denialism – the conflation of sex and gender, and the idea that sex doesn’t exist or has no significance and must be overridden by subjective “gender identity.”  It also means promoting “gender affirming services” -the medicalization of gender non-conformity or the idea that the body is “wrong” and must be modified through the ingestion of hormones and multiple surgeries if the personality fails to “match” sex stereotypes of how men and women, boys and girls, are supposed to act and behave, and who they are supposed to love.

The new acronym of groups for whose benefit this training is supposed to be conducted is “TGI” – “individuals who identify as transgender, gender non-conforming, or intersex.”  The “LGB” is gone from this acronym, subsumed no doubt in “transgender” and “gender non-conforming”, as indeed, medicalization often means “transing away the gay.”  The promoted “gender affirming services” include “feminizing mammoplasty, male chest reconstruction, mastectomy, facial feminization surgery, hysterectomy, oophorectomy, penectomy, orchiectomy, feminizing genitoplasty, metoidioplasty, palloplasty, scrotoplasty, voice masculinization or feminization” as well as hormone therapy.  Somehow, stopping children’s puberty, giving “wrong sex” hormones, removing healthy body parts of minors and adults alike, and rendering sterile those who do not conform to sex stereotypes is promoted as “progressive” rather than recognized as the 1950’s style sexism and homophobia that it truly is. And the medical and mental health profession is to be indoctrinated into this “treatment” with no dissenters or alternative non -invasive approaches to gender-role non-compliance and bodily unhappiness allowed.

The curriculum for this training is not being established by a representative group of gender non-conforming people, as many lesbians and feminists are gender non-conforming without denying their sex but whose perspective is uniformly disregarded.  Rather, it is a state recognized group of gender identity ideologues called the California Transgender Advisory Council made up of such organizations as Transgender Law Center, California TRANScends, and Equality California, the last the result of the forced marriage between the “LGB” and the “TQ”, in which gender identity ideology overrides everything else. 

Also unheard are the growing ranks of de-transitioners, mostly females and mostly lesbians, who are rejecting their “transition” and the medicalization of their non-compliance with sex stereotypes and have come to accept their bodies, their gender non-conformity, and/or their homosexuality.

Health practitioners in California will instead be “trained” in using “TGI-inclusive” terminology including “correct names and pronouns,” and instructed to avoid “making assumptions about gender identity by using gender neutral language.”  And the consequences for not complying can be dire.   If there is a complaint or grievance filed and a decision made in favor of the complainant, the practitioner may not only be subjected to submitting to another “training” but can have her or his name publicly posted by regulatory boards.  The bill provides that a willful violation of these requirements by a health care plan would be a crime.  We can just imagine how long health practitioners would be able remain in business and on referral lists for non-compliance.

Biological sex is highly relevant to health care.  Our patriarchal medical system has long ignored the specific bodily needs of women and important physical differences between the sexes beyond obvious difference in reproductive organs.  According to Sarah L. Berga, MD, Wake Forest Baptist Health’s chair of obstetrics and gynecology and Vice President for Women’s Health Service, in an article entitled, Medicine Looking Deeper into Vital Differences Between Women and Men, “We’re beginning to truly understand how men and women differ in very fundamental ways and how these differences affect disease risk, symptoms, diagnostic sensitivity and specificity, and responses to therapy.”  Women have traditionally been excluded from clinical trials and treated as merely smaller men, to our detriment.  Should SB 923, become law, will medical practitioners be penalized for recognizing the sex of their patients?

It is ironic that when other countries such as liberal Sweden and the UK are beginning to question the “affirmative care” medical model for addressing gender non-conformity and especially questioning the gender transitioning of children as in “Swedish U-Turn on Gender Transitioning for Children”, that California is trying to silence all dissenters. 

The solution to gender unhappiness is not engaging in extreme body modification, that only profits the pharmaceutical industry and cosmetic surgeons.  There is nothing wrong with being female or being gender non-conforming or lesbian or gay that requires “fixing the body.”  Rather it is our society, not our bodies, that is in need of repair.  As one female detransitioner put it:

For eight years I had thought I was transgender…the only way I had known to process the frightening, uncomfortable or disempowering aspects of being a woman had been to escape womanhood and see myself as something else…It’s been four years since I re-identified as a woman.  My gender dysphoria was real and often painful, but the way for me to resolve it wasn’t by becoming a man.  It was by questioning and rejecting the stories society had told me about what it means to be a woman.  

There are a number of professional organizations opposing this bill, among them the American College of Pediatricians, the California Chapter American College of Cardiology, the California Rheumatology Alliance, and the International Federation for Therapeutic and Counselling Choice.  Please help defeat SB 923 and join FIST in the struggle for women’s liberation from the tyranny of gender ideology and medical malpractice masquerading as “affirmative care” by contacting the members of the Appropriations Committee and demanding they vote NO.

Update on SB 923

SB 923 is now in the Senate Appropriations Committee and we need everyone to call the members of the committee and urge them to vote NO.  We oppose this bill because:

  • It pushes gender ideology, a dangerous belief system rooted in unreality that is seducing children, adolescents, and young adults into believing they were “born in the wrong body” and can alter their sex
  • It pushes “affirmative care” which is a profit-driven enterprise that creates lifelong medicalization and dependence on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery
  • It prevents medical professionals from using their judgment as to what constitutes appropriate treatment and places it in the hands of untrained political activists and trans lobbyists with no clinical background and who therefore are in no way qualified to recommend such life-altering interventions
  • It erodes parents’ ability to safeguard their children from irreversible harm from sterilization and mutilation and healthcare providers ability to “first do no harm,” putting patients at risk of misdiagnosis and providers at risk of malpractice
  • It is an egregious misuse of taxpayer funds by mandating repeated “cultural training” of all medical personnel, requiring MediCal and PACE, state, and partially-funded programs to spend millions of dollars annually on this spurious “training”, enriching lobbyist groups rather than spending funds on legitimate services
  • It is a violation of the First Amendment to compel medical personnel and providers to profess a belief in gender ideology and use inaccurate names and pronouns demanded by persons assuming a gender identity conflicting with his or her actual sex

URGE THE CALIFORNIA SENATE TO VOTE NO ON SB 923!!

California has introduced a bill, SB 923, that would require all medical personnel in California to subscribe to gender ideology and submit to cultural training by trans activists.
We are asking everyone to call all the members of the California Senate Health Committee and tell them to oppose SB 923. Contact information and a list of talking points can be found here
You can also tweet a message to the members of the Health Committee, with Twitter contact information in this link as well.

URGE THE CALIFORNIA SENATE TO VOTE NO ON SB 923!!

Senator Scott Wiener of California has introduced a bill, SB 923, “Gender Affirming Care” that would require all medical personnel in California to subscribe to gender ideology and submit to “cultural competency training” by trans activists.  It has now passed both the Health Committee and the Appropriations Committee and is headed to the floor for consideration on May 23rd, 2022!
We are asking everyone to call all the members of the California Senate and tell them to oppose SB 923. A list of talking points can be found here.