Trans issues

Friday

Cockburn

J.K. Rowling laughs all the way to the bank 

In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Ron Weasley uses a levitation spell to knock a troll unconscious. On Thursday evening, his creator J.K. Rowling repeated the feat on Twitter. The world's most highly paid author was asked how she slept at night, "knowing you’ve lost a whole audience from buying your books?" “I read my most recent royalty cheques and find the pain goes away pretty quickly,” she replied. https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1580639051774054404 Now, Cockburn has always been a fan of J.K. Rowling, but her recent years on the right side of the culture war has seen her find a new audience, consisting of people with common sense.

j.k. rowling

Monday

Amber Duke

Youngkin leads the way in defending parents’ rights

Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin is not backing down in the face of left-wing criticism of his new policy on parental rights in schools. During a Sunday interview on CNN's State of the Union, Youngkin rejected the push from teachers' unions and Democratic activists to supplant families as the most important arbiter of a child's upbringing. "[P]arents have a fundamental right to be engaged in their children’s lives,” Youngkin said. “And, oh, by the way, children have a right to have parents engaged in their life. And we needed to fix a wrong…children don’t belong to the state. They belong to families.

youngkin

Tuesday

Amber Duke

Glenn Youngkin’s transgender policy is just common sense

Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin has delivered a major win for the school board parents who helped propel him to victory in 2021. Starting in October, the state's public schools will be required to adhere to a new policy regarding transgender students. The updated guidance, first reported by the Daily Wire, is rooted in truth, parental rights, and plain ol' common sense. Transgender students are now only allowed to change their names on official documents with permission from their parents. Students must also demonstrate a "persistent and sincere belief" that they identify as a different gender. "Overnight travel accommodations, locker rooms and other intimate spaces used for school-related activities and events shall be based on sex,” the policy also says.

youngkin

Monday

Bruce Bawer

How Amsterdam ceased to be gay heaven

Last month, in preparation for an article about the growing gay backlash against trans ideology, I spoke with Bev Jackson, the co-founder of LGB Alliance, a gay and lesbian activist group that opposes the hijacking of the gay rights movement by transfolk. Bev told me about her background — fifty years in British gay activism, a resident of Amsterdam for four decades — and asked me about mine. I mentioned my 2006 book While Europe Slept, a cri de coeur about the Islamization of Europe. I heard in her voice a degree of disquiet about its topic. Nonetheless, she asked me to participate in the LGB Alliance’s forthcoming annual convention. I accepted, but when I hung up I told my partner: “I’ve been invited to a convention in London.

Monday

Jesse Singal

The trouble with Tavistock

"In July, Britain’s National Health Service announced a major revamp of its gender identity services for young people. The famed Tavistock clinic — officially named the Gender Identity Development Service, operated by the Tavistock and Portman Trust and a flashpoint for the country’s debate about gender, trans issues and hormone treatments — would be shuttered. As the New York Times reported, it would be replaced by “a more distributed and comprehensive network of medical care for adolescents seeking hormones and other gender treatments.” This outcome was strongly hinted at in the interim report of the Cass Review, an ongoing investigation into gender identity services for children, headed by the accomplished pediatrics expert Hilary Cass.

jessica yaniv tavistock

Friday

Marc Oestreich

Disney’s transgender tampon experts

I should have known when the Disney+ logo splashed across the screen. The last time I saw it, what followed was an impassable disclaimer warning me of the microaggressions I might endure watching a pair of Asian cats. I should have known when we landed again in San Fransokyo — the setting of Disney’s Big Hero 6 and new spinoff, Baymax! — and the cast looked like bad stock art from the Oberlin College DEI handbook. I should have known. But, there I was, two sick kids (two and six) running 102-degree fevers, upset and crying, nestled on either side of me on the couch. We just needed a break. Something wholesome; simple; happy. This was Disney’s sweet spot. Earlier this month Disney+ reported reaching 221.

baymax disney

Thursday

Bridget Phetasy

I regret my promiscuity

Upon opening Louise Perry’s new book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, I’m moved to tears by the dedication: For the women who learned it the hard way Unlike many other people who have read and reviewed Perry’s work, reading her book wouldn’t be some academic exercise in contemplating how liberal feminism has let women down. It wouldn’t be evaluating what those poor sluts over there have endured in the wake of the sexual revolution. Reading her book was personal. I’m one of those sluts. I’m a case study for her thesis. A cautionary tale. I knew this book was going to be difficult. And it made me realize it’s time to finish this essay — one I’ve been trying to write for four years.

slut promiscuity regret

Wednesday

Teresa Mull

Are genital checks inevitable?

Eighty-year-old Julie Jaman has been banned from her local YMCA swimming pool in Port Townsend, Washington, where she’s been a member for thirty-five years. Why? She “discriminated against” and “harassed” a transgender employee who was in the locker room by asking “Clementine Adams” “if he had a penis” and demanding he leave the ladies’ room. The disturbing incident has sparked a controversy and way more uproar than should ever exist over something so bizarre and perverse, leading one to wonder: are genital checks inevitable? Jaman recounted to the media: “I heard a man’s voice, very distinctive. I saw a man in a woman’s bathing suit where two toilets are and there were two little girls standing there taking down their suits to use the toilet.

genital checks

Thursday

Amber Duke

Friends creator falls victim to white guilt

Friends creator Marta Kauffman is very, very sorry. No, not for forcing us to endure the exhausting decades-long debate over whether Friends or Seinfeld is a better sitcom (the show about nothing wins without question, obviously). Instead, Kauffman apologized to the woke mob for not being nearly three decades ahead of her time. The fun-sucking left has for years complained that Friends is *problematic*. The show, they whine, lacked diversity and mocked and trivialized issues such as fat-shaming and transphobia. Kauffman says she finally took these concerns to heart after the death of George Floyd because the incident forced her to reckon with the way she "bought into systemic racism." Gag.

Friends

Monday

Michael Warren Davis

Conservatives are so gay

I just went for a stroll down Main Street here in our little blue-collar New Hampshire town, and noticed the telephone polls festooned with Pride flags.  This was odd enough, given that our town had never observed Pride Month (known as June on the Gregorian calendar) before. What was really shocking, though, is that the town is flying the plain old rainbow flags, not the new “Progress Pride” flags. Ours don’t have the new chevron honoring America’s two most hallowed minorities: trans people (white, pink and blue) and people of color (brown and black). Activists claim that the chevron specifically represents trans people of color. Maybe that’s true. What’s infinitely more likely, though, is that gays and lesbians have been passé since Obergefell v.

Sunday

Cockburn

NYT finally tackles gender therapy

Cockburn started his Sunday by spitting Darjeeling all over the pages of the New York Times magazine. The cause of alarm? A lengthy, nuanced, meaty analysis of gender therapy had found its way into the paper of record. In Pride month, no less! Feature writer Emily Bazelon spent eight months reporting out the story, speaking to “more than sixty clinicians, researchers, activists and historians, as well as more than two dozen young people and about the same number of parents.” Her over-10,000-word article is framed around the forthcoming release of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s new Standards of Care guidelines, which are likely to prove controversial among both the pro- and anti-trans lobbies. It’s well worth a read.

nyt gender therapy

Friday

Cockburn

Parenting writer: take your kid to a Pride parade!

Cockburn is not a parent, at least so far as his public records are concerned. However, even he knows that taking children to a Pride parade is not the best idea for a family field trip. Heather Tirado Gilligan, the author of this Fatherly article, disagrees. She writes, “Pride Parades and the Pride festivals that follow are noisy and crowded. They’re filled with sights that may be new to kids, like public nudity and kink.” If Gilligan wanted any chance at all for her point to succeed, why would she mention “public nudity” and “kink” in the first two sentences? Taking a kid to a sex parade is like bringing a baby to a gun range: it sounds just a bit like bad parenting.

pride

Thursday

Daniel McCarthy

Martyrs win the culture wars

The culture war is suddenly going well for conservatives. Ron DeSantis stripped Disney of some of the woke corporation’s privileges in Florida. Elon Musk is taking over Twitter. Roe v. Wade appears doomed. And a backlash against Critical Race Theory in schools and transsexuals in women’s sports looks set to benefit Republicans mightily in November’s midterm elections. These are crucial battles. But they are not the war. The war is between race and sexuality on one side and traditional religion on the other. At any rate, those are the great causes with which the cultural left and right tend to identify. The progress of the war is seen in the retreat of Christianity and the advance of racial and sexual agendas on all fronts.

martyrs
therapy
Jesse Singal

Who needs therapy?

If you pull up Twitter and search for “men will therapy,” you’ll find an endless scroll of jokes, many quite funny, about the things men will do before they go to therapy. There’s one for every current event: “men will buy twitter before going to therapy.” And after Samuel Alito’s draft Supreme Court decision was leaked: “Men will overturn roe v wade before going to therapy.” As with any ironic internet utterance, there are multiple layers here. The (genuinely useful!) website KnowYourMeme.com believes that Tweeter Zero for this meme is someone named @SpencerKlavan, who wrote “Men will literally defend an entire civilization from ruin in two world wars, start and provide for a family, produce masterworks of art and culture, and then just NOT go to therapy smdh.

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

Ricky Gervais, Netflix and clickbait controversy

Ricky Gervais has caused a stir. This is not, perhaps, the least expected thing you could hear about the sixty-year-old British comedian, but his new Netflix show, SuperNature, has attracted an unusual amount of opprobrium for what people have perceived as anti-trans jokes. In the show, Gervais makes a distinction between “the old-fashioned women, the ones with wombs” and “the new women... with beards and cocks.” He calls upon the latter to “lose the cock,” and the audience laughs along with him hysterically.

ricky gervais

Tuesday

Amber Duke

Sorry State Farm: we’re boycotting now

State Farm learned the hard way that you don't come for people's kids. A leaked email released by Consumers Research on Monday revealed that the insurance company planned to mobilize its agents to indoctrinate children as young as five into woke gender theory. State Farm agents in Florida were told by a "corporate responsibility analyst" that the company is partnering with the GenderCool Project, the goal of which is to "increase representation of LGBTQ+ books and support our communities in having challenging, important and empowering conversations with children 5+." The analyst, who helpfully put his pronouns in his email signature, asked for agents to donate LGBTQ books to local schools, libraries, and community centers.

state farm

Wednesday

Matt Purple

It’s only a culture war when the right does it

Having recently botched South African history, the New York Times is now turning its sights to Australia. Our friends Down Under are holding an election this week in which the Australian Labor Party is expected to beat the Liberal-National coalition for the first time since 2013. (For Americans in need of a guide, the capital-L Liberals in Canada stand for the left, in Australia for the right, and in the UK for nothing whatsoever.) It's the issue of trans rights in the Australian campaign that has the Times's unisex knickers in a twist. They're worried in particular about one candidate, Katherine Deves, a Liberal running for a seat in parliament. Deves has said that trans youths who undergo gender-transition surgeries are being "mutilated.

times

Thursday

Stephen L. Miller

When ‘words are violence’ turns to actual violence

In the wake of comedian Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special The Closer, activists both online and off warned that Chappelle’s jokes about the trans community would lead to real-world harm, even murder. Instead the trans community has struck first by attacking Chappelle onstage. In his special, Chappelle tells the story of a trans person and friend who defended his stand-up material. Chappelle offered his friend career help by having her open for him on stage. Yet after being bullied by the trans mob for supporting Chappelle, his friend committed suicide. Earlier this week, Chappelle himself was physically attacked at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, during a comedy set that saw many famous faces, including Elon Musk and Chris Rock, in the audience.

Monday

Alexander Larman

Standing with J.K. Rowling

When Roland Barthes wrote his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” he probably didn’t intend that, fifty-five years later, a major American news outlet would be provocatively suggesting that the world’s bestselling author should be de-personed, de-platformed or de-materialized from history. And yet that is exactly what has happened with the New York Times. They recently ran a series of advertisements on the subway featuring a reader named “Lianna” who is, as much of their subscriber base now are, “breaking the binary,” experiencing “queer love in color” and meditating on “heritage in rich cues.” So far, so predictable. But the ads took a grimmer turn when one suggested that Lianna was “imagining Harry Potter without its creator.

Rowling
parental rights
Madeleine Kearns

Children’s lives depend on parents’ rights

Yaeli Galdamez was a “girly girl,” her mother Abigail Martinez said in a recent interview. As a child growing up in El Salvador and California, she dressed in princess costumes and later had crushes on boys. But after she was bullied for her appearance in middle school, Yaeli began developing symptoms of depression. In eighth grade, she attempted suicide by overdosing on pills. Her mother was desperate to get her the help she needed. So as a sophomore Yaeli began regularly seeing the psychologist at her local high school. But the family says that her counseling for depression was accompanied by a focus Abigail knew nothing about: the school psychologist spent two years encouraging Yaeli in a male identity, Andy (sometimes Andrew).