I exited out of the Democratic Party as a voter about 2 months into the Biden administration when I saw what these extremists really had in store for us. I voted for Biden reluctantly, and I will regret that forever. There are many reasons I stopped voting blue, but the number one reason was what I keep calling “the gender cult junk”. I heard all the commentary on “gender affirming care”, read Helen Joyce’s book “Trans” and Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage “. When I finished and closed the book I was all done. I said to myself.... there is no way that I will ever ever vote for any democrat again. Their evil creepy obsession with power, even at the expense of our children, seems to know no bounds. I don’t care who the Republican candidate is, I will absolutely vote for them. I’m a straight republican ticket voter now. DeSantis is my top choice but I’ll vote for any of them. When my lefty friends and co workers talk about voting for democratic candidates I say “oh, you mean the ones that endorse, facilitate, fund, and promote the mutilation and sterilization of children? That’s the one you are voting for?” I just keep saying that over and over again.
It's about way more than that. These kids are just collateral damage in the larger war to fully cement the totalitarian cult into power. The "left" does not care about them *at all*. The "revolution" is an internal takeover. To the extent the kids function as Red Guard activists, they'll be cowed or eliminated once the revolution is complete, just like Mao did to the Red Guard.
The cult is attacking history and norms to destabilize the society. Crime, chaos, and conflict are promoted by them. For the cult, the trans thing is just a single vector of destabilization. They don't care about it at all, or who gets hurt in the process. They have a revolution to complete.
I have always voted Republican but have considered Democrats and actually considered Biden. Thank God I didn't! I didn't vote for the president in 2016 as I could not get behind Hillary and Trump I found appauling. After watching the covid shit show in 2020 and I saw how the media manipulated Trumps words and the lies they manufactured on him, I voted for him proudly. He's an ass and a bafoon but he's not straight up evil and I guess sometimes you have to vote for the lesser evil.
I feel the exact same way, it just took me a bit longer to walk down that road. I should have voted for Trump in his bid for re election but unfortunately I was still overly worried about the obnoxious and sometimes offensive nature of his behavior. There were so many red flags about what the democratic agenda had morphed into but the dems didn’t really unleash the batshit crazy component until they had actually gotten themselves moved into the White House. The damage that has been done in 3 short years is just stunning. Better late than never though, it’s all crystal clear to me now. I have learned important lessons from the whole experience. I’m grateful for that.
Well to come from a democrat voting for Biden to where you are is amazing! I must admit, I've never understood politics but voted red because I'm fiscally conservative. I'd like to think I'm socially liberal, however I see where that's taken us :(
I am concerend of what will become of this country if Trump gets in and it's less about him and ALL about the dems and what they will do. UGH
I found Hillary offensive and still do. You have to fight fire with fire. Trump would not have gotten any news if he wasn't offensive. He never offended me but I'm not a pearl clutching liberal. Screaming your abortions to the world is offensive. Saying if you don't get vaccinated you should be left to die is offensive. Saying Obama is a black man who can actually speak well is offensive. Never thought he said anything offensive. The liberals were pissed that they couldn't break Trump so now he must be arrested, bankrupted and if that doesn't work i guess it's concrete shoes and a lake.
You have to be 16 to drive a car, 18 to vote or join the military and 21 to buy alcohol & tobacco.
Yet the elites not only want to allow, but encourage, pre-pubescent children to irreparably mutilate the bodies. And punish parents who dare to interfere with the state-promoted medical hackery.
Actually, that’s incorrect. The vast majority of states allow gun ownership at 18 or 21 years of age; two states allow earlier possession (not purchase) of a firearm: Alaska, which has grizzly bears and a lot of wild land hunting, allows possession at 16; Louisiana (alligators and swamp hunting) at 17. Note that my source is the Giffords Law Center. https://giffords.org/lawcenter/gun-laws/policy-areas/who-can-have-a-gun/minimum-age/
I literally walked to my Junior High School carrying my .22 rifle as required for 7th-9th grade Rifle Club (basically marksmanship and gun safety class - highly encouraged as no wants the woods full of teenage deer hunters with bad aim) .. but that was in 1976, a few years before the "I Don't Like Mondays" gal introduced the enlightened era of mood altering prescriptions over butt bottom spankings (we had those too, all the way through 9th grade and yeah, mostly dealt by the teacher we all considered a pervert - everything's a trade-off.)
The age of 11 was chosen to officially learn gun safety and responsible parents educate them and the practice said safety. It has worked for a millennia.
Understood. We don't give custody to our kids until usage under our supervision, yet they understand the power and danger of them. That is part of the education process. Yes, there are the ignorant parents out there like there has always been; today it is much worse.
Thanks for another great piece. You are exactly right, we need to use accurate, forceful language to speak about what the left is doing to young people. It’s evil.
Our society is run by immature narcissists, and they have unleashed the worst of their ugly ideas on innocent children. They have taken childhood away, because they themselves want to be the children forever.
They have turned our schools into woke madrasas, where few learn to read but all are pushed into gender insanity. They forced little children to wear masks for years, to protect the adults from their own irrational fear. They believe having a pet is the same as having a child.
But the most unspeakable evil is allowing and encouraging children to be used as “trans trophies” in their never-ending quest to feel that they are the smartest, most virtuous people who ever lived.
Go ahead lefties- throw your pathetic, impotent accusations of “TRANSPHOBIA!” at me. I agree with Sasha, we need to use accurate words to describe exactly what you are doing. For me, that word is “evil”.
Puberty blockers are generally started at some stage of puberty, not earlier. They are followed by cross-sex hormones at some point, reported by some patients and some whistleblowers as within a year or two of the puberty blockers. Surgeries have been carried out on children in their early teens, as evidenced by some detransitioners who are filing law suits against the medical systems that did this to them.
An additional major problem that is being recognized by western European countries but not by the U.S., is that a large number of female adolescents have suddenly decided that they are "trans," "non-binary" or other nonsense. The percentage of adolescent girls who are claiming to have these problems is escalating progressively, and is now at least 5%. This may appear to be an insignificant number to you, but it means that sexual identity confusion is no longer a rare disorder. Mental health disorders generally affect very small percentages of the population.
The correct statistic, i.e., the one you should be looking at, pertains to how many of the adolescents or younger children who initially present incorrect beliefs about their biological sex or desperate longing to "change sex" are immediately assigned to a "transition" track by the healthcare professionals who "evaluate" them. In my opinion, the percentage should be 0%, but in reality it could be over 90%. Since many gender clinics have not been forthcoming or competent in their record keeping, their research or their disclosures, we actually have no idea what they are doing to children and adolescents at their clinics. All we know is that treating professionals in many states are no longer permitted to practice competently and ethically, because laws passed by Democrats require them to withhold the treatment that would be most helpful to these youngsters.
Regret is an appropriate statistic for people who are undertaking cosmetic surgery. Cosmetic surgery is not usually categorized as "medically necessary," unless the patient has been disfigured and needs to be restored to a normal appearance. Gender clinics as well as their advocates in politics consistently claim that medical transitions are "necessary medical care" for patients they call "transgender," "binary," etc. During the 1990's these medical interventions were said to be a treatment for gender identity disorder, which was an accepted psychiatric diagnosis at the time, but not a diagnosis that was accepted as reimbursable by medical insurance policies. One could argue that the insurers should have paid for sexual reassignment surgeries, but that is a separate issue involving cost containment by insurance companies.
Most healthcare researchers and providers believed during the Nineties that gender dysphoria is a psychiatric symptom that commonly accompanies a cross-sex identity disorder. I would guess that is still the case. Over the course of the last few years, however, the gender "treatment" activists have been stripping diagnostic labels away from the psychiatric conditions and symptoms presented by people who claim to be "trans" or "binary" or whatever their fantasy identity is. There is no valid medical or scientific basis for de-pathologizing these abnormal identities. Gender dysphoria is in fact a significant set of psychiatric symptoms, not to mention that these problems are usually accompanied by other significant psychiatric disorders. Most of the men who sought treatment during the Nineties had histories of transvestic fetishism that caused them to question their sexual identities, and many met criteria for diagnoses of major depressive disorder, personality disorders and/or substance abuse disorders.
There is a legitimate argument that if psychosocial treatments of the above patients were not effective, and the patients wanted to "pass" as the other sex, then it made sense to offer them access to cross sex hormones and surgeries to achieve those cosmetic changes. There is even a fair argument that insurance companies should pay for this type of cosmetic treatment.
In addition to medical necessity, however, there are two additional criteria that medical treatment has to meet, which is that it has been proven by research and clinical experience to be both "safe" and "effective." It is obviously not safe to remove healthy body parts, so that is a problem. It's not like we have to remove a breast to prevent the spread of cancer, and there are additional costs to breast removal that involve sexual and reproductive functioning. So "gender surgeries" are not safe at all, and in fact they amount to "doing harm," which is unethical in clinical practices.
Then there is the lack of evidence for the effectiveness of gender affirmative care. To begin with, we don't even know what the treatment is for, because activist gender clinicians contend that "transgender" and "non-binary" and "eunuch" are normal identities, not pathological. If there is no pathology, then why is anyone supporting elaborate, invasive cosmetic alterations in these patients. In fact, why are they patients at all?
During the Nineties there was the idea that "gender identity disorder" with its primary symptom of "gender dysphoria" was the target of treatment.
We don't know how effective the 1990's approaches were in relieving the gender dysphoria of the mostly middle-aged male patients. There is one study from Sweden that indicates a very high level of completed suicide in a population of post-transition patients who included men from the above cohort. Whether the suicides were related to gender dysphoria or another mental health condition that commonly accompanies it we don't know. We could hypothesize that the process of medical transition was not effective in relieving symptoms of depression that these patients had, but on the other hand, maybe the depression was even worse before transitioning. This is a question that requires an answer before going ahead with castrations for the purpose of treating depression. I mean, why not just bring out the leaches, if that is now the level of science in U.S. medicine?
We have not answered the question about the extent to which either the Nineties style of treatment or the more recent "gender affirmative" approach is "effective," or for what.
In addition, the safety of medical transition is in further doubt now, because of emerging evidence of cardiovascular events and associated early deaths in people who are maintained on cross-sex hormones.
The question of what is going on with recent cohorts of gender confused patients who are mostly adolescent girls has not been addressed scientifically within the gender treatment network in the U.S., so it has not been "debunked." It is well documented that girls in Gen Z are reporting symptoms of mental disorders at record levels, both in the U.S. and in some countries of Western Europe. Some of these symptoms are performative rather than real, and they have in fact been learned from social media influencers who coach people on how to act sick. Many serious mental disorders and some neurological disorders are now considered to be very cool things among Gen Z girls. Are you aware that some of them go around mimicking the symptoms of Tourette's Syndrome? On the psychiatric side, adolescent white girls and young women now enthusiastically advertise that they are diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, eating disorders, nonsuicidal self-harm (i.e., cutting on themselves, burning themselves with cigarettes and so on), suicide attempts with intent, complex PTSD and dissociative disorders. All of the above listed diagnoses are associated with identity confusion and instability, and a readiness in some patients to claim negative as well as positive identities, and to perform them to get corresponding reactions from others.
Adolescents with diagnoses from the above list are being seen at gender clinics, based on the very limited available data, and they may (or may not) represent the bulk of the female patients referred to gender clinics. The treatment of choice for these people is long term psychotherapy of various types, and changes in life habits, especially including decreasing social media use. We know very little as yet about what may be unique to the Gen Z epidemic of mental disorders in girls, but Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues have documented that it is highly correlated with the amount of time adolescent girls spend on social media.
The adolescents and younger children who have sought treatment at gender clinics are so poorly understood, that there is no justification for anyone to claim that medical transitions are appropriate treatments for them. They have not received sufficient professional evaluation at gender clinics, let along research attention by unbiased investigators. It is extremely abnormal in medical science and clinical practice for the professionals engaged in treatment to actively resist and suppress investigation of the syndromes and patients they are treating, but that is what activist gender clinics are doing in the U.S. This is unethical, as it indicates that personal biases of the treating professionals are being prioritized over the clinical needs of the patients and their safety.
I personally am completely willing to admit that I/we DO NOT KNOW much of anything about the current cohorts of children, adolescents and young adults who are being presented by themselves or their parents at gender clinics. People who assert on the basis of little or no evidence that they DO KNOW should immediately be suspected of ideological bias, as their position cannot be justified by science. There is clearly no basis for undertaking any "treatments" that result in permanent body modification on a major scale in the absence of a relevant physical (as opposed to psychiatric) diagnosis. And, there is no psychiatric diagnosis being offered to justify the position that gender affirmative care is necessary at all. Normal conditions call for no treatment. Removing healthy body parts of a normal person and calling it "medically necessary" is malpractice, but more basically it is nonsense.
We are of course aware that the medical interventions are mainly happening in the teen years. You seem to have an aversion to using the word children to describe young people still in high school. Clearly they are not adults.
The gender identity exploring activities promoted by LAUSD and others are damaging to children and clearly prep work for the later interventions.
Phil, I appreciate the attempt to find common ground, but there’s not much point in faking it. I’m pretty sure that we do not agree on anything. If you are going to defend the indefensible, at least be up front about it instead of hiding behind misleading statistics and semantics.
The only "psychological torment" in this situation is provided by the establishment--public school teachers, school psychologists, and local governments everywhere, on top of Munchausen-by-proxy mothers who put their children through this nightmare to inflate their esteem.
They blow on any ember of sexual confusion during adolescence or earlier until it glows sufficiently, then put the kid on the tranny train to Auschwitz to visit Dr. Mengele . . . uh, that is to see Dr. Bowers at the Seattle Polyclinic.
Our census bureau is producing problematic numbers. The standards of taking an accurate census have crumbled. Don’t try to use anything like that to measure this human tragedy. You must not be a parent and therefore this comment is lacking empathy, as many of your comments do. You must be an experiential learner and that will give you many hard years ahead. If I am wrong, I apologize.
There aren't yet enough trained "surgeons" to scale up the mutilation to statistics that would satisfy you. But help is on the way in the form of automated castration/vaginoplasty machines.https://www.city-journal.org/article/oregon-health-science-universitys-castration-machine The pink-haired "surgeon" inventor has bragged that the little guillotine has greatly increased the number of children who can be castrated. It took the Nazis a while to get gas chambers up and running, so you are probably right it would be best to wait for the actual numbers to come in before sounding the alarm. Trends should be ignored until they are full-blown catastrophes.
Not much I can say to convince a human monster like you that you are wrong. Don't you have some small animals to torture or children to mutilate? You lack all sense of right and wrong. Hitler was a sample size of one as well.
Life-affirming? Cutting off someone from being able to continue life--reproduce--is the opposite of life affirming. Cutting a person off from possibility having an orgasm or feeling pleasure is life n affirming. Feels like the opposite.
It’s a contagion and contagions spread, often rapidly. The numbers are not small - listen to Dr Miriam Grossman who details it all out https://www.miriamgrossmanmd.com/ — in my book even one child is too many. Where would you draw the line?
Wouldn’t that be the worse idea the socialists ever had--put all the pissed off, gun-toting critical thinkers all in one place. I think that’s called Boot Camp. Give us a few weeks together and see how that works out.
We have passed the point of peaceful reconciliation. There is no way out of this mess that doesn’t involve extreme violence. Maybe that’s what the lunatics on the left think they want, but as usual, hubris and equity hires have lead to severe miscalculations on their part.
Unfortunately, as you point out, the right is fracturing before our eyes. It has been a long time coming, with the the latest shunning of Speaker McCarthy acting as the final coup de gras. Although we agree on many of the same issues, such as our resistance to the mutilation of children and the ongoing war in the Ukraine, we are not, strictly speaking, Republicans. I do not align myself to the politics of McConnel or Graham. The traditional Republican Party, comprised of an assortment of Rino’s hell bent on expanding our conflict with Russia, is not where I aspire to be. If it means fracturing the Republican Party, so be it.
I’m with you, Keith, in regards to the fracturing. I’m voting R’s in the blue state I live in, but nationally I’m w/ Gaetz & Co. — and not the centrist free spending, war loving part of the R party. I don’t want to be any part of that Tent.
A vote for a D is a vote for chaos and one manufactured crisis after another. As Stone says in effect, any vote for a D is tacit support for their cultural revolution.
Although the "right" is not monolithic they share the MAGA vision and proudly claim the "deplorable" label. Unfortunately, we're stuck with the RP, but their internal squabbles don't matter. They have the massive responsibility of opposing the faction that's leading us to perdition. If opposing the regime and the D agenda requires some purging of wafflers or of anyone trying to be conciliatory with the Dems, so be it. Let's keep our eye on the ball.
In my world going back to my grandparents in the 1870’s to 1880’s (not a typo)
even if one was a Republican or Democrat , you split your ticket because in small communities there were families of like minded individuals that you would know
And feel comfortable voting for. Now we have candidates who are omitting facts and truth’s about themselves for years before they campaign.
Sasha, thank you for an excellent article and thank you for being honest about formerly being a strong leftest. It had to be hard to step away from your former beliefs and faith in the Democratic Party. I’m a life long conservative but have had quite a come to Jesus meeting in regards to how corrupt our country is and how our letter agencies can’t be trusted. It’s been a difficult 3 1/2 years. I know there must be some Democrats who know this trans movement for children is wrong and it amazes me that they don’t speak out. When I watch these young people regret their transitions, it breaks my heart. As a retired teacher, it never occurred to me to ever question whether a child was born into the wrong body. Not once in the 29 years I spent in the classroom! I spent five years on hormone blockers for breast cancer and these drugs are no joke. I aged ten years in five, had damage to my bones and still have regular hot flashes. I can’t imagine any doctor prescribing these drugs for children. Transing kids are the lobotomies of our time. They must stop now!
Thanks for a succinct reason to be and vote Republican. We may be chaotic, but at least we aren’t sterilizing children. There’s many reasons, but this is the best.
Great piece again, Sasha. Watching that montage on "deprogramming" was sad. What will happen when they "realize" Trump voters (all 70M of them) won't be willingly "deprogrammed"? Well, they will dehumanize them. Then, "maybe they don't belong in our utopian future" or "they're not really human and they should all be locked up"? Oh, I forgot the KGB, sorry, "FBI" is already on that mission. And just like that, all you morally superior (at least you think so) people will be the ones literally acting like Nazis, Stalinists, and Maoists. Not figuratively, but literally. Just for once, stop and think about the path you are heading down.
I wonder how long it will be until Animal Farm, 1984, Brave New World, It Can't Happen Here (worth a read as current President strongly resembles President Buzz Windrip), and other prescient classic books vanish in the U.S.
That video of several detransitioners is so tragic. I have a friend whose 20-something daughter had her breasts removed and calls herself asexual. She will not speak to her parents bc her Dad won't use her new pronouns. Very cult like.
I agree that anyone is better than the Ds but can a President really end this? Of course he or she can speak out against it, as the Rs are, and RFKJ said no boys should be on girls’ teams, I think he’s against these surgeries but I need to check. Maybe Presidents can influence insurance to stop covering it. But medicine is largely controlled by state boards. There would need to be some big use of executive power, which obviously gets abused.
Correct, it is the states who are either putting on the brakes or pushing the accelerator to the floor. They control what the age of consent is, and can even make it specific for gender transitions. States can and do require insurance companies to pay for whatever diagnoses are politically favored. My state even forces tax payers to foot the bill for medical transitions on kids whose parents won't authorize payment. In addition, states control licensing and regulation of health care providers, and are required to enforce any state laws regarding healthcare practices.
Two presidents,Obama and Biden have influenced the rise of this sterilization insanity.
We have woke elected school board members who posed as being what they were not.
This was taking place for about what?-five years? But, parent groups are digging out
on behalf of their children . Schools are our most basic local government and those parents are forming a hedge around their children. Support these parents because they
are first responders doing their work jobs, their parent jobs, and with what energy they
have left, putting a hedge around their children. What is cool is that they have the internet, with all of its conveniences wired into school systems. During the Pandemic
parents were able to observe how and what their children were being taught. Note
to be clear it was a multi-racial group watching. I know a story of one mother who,
after watching on zoom, went out and scratched the bumper sticker off her car that said
Man,I miss George Carlin. That particular riff on “soft language” is still as hilarious as when I first heard it...and it is even more appropriate. Carlin was a liberal, but I cannot imagine he would be down for the insanity gripping liberals.
C.K. Louis shared that his friend George Carlin was beginning to avoid college gigs for this reason, even before the era of safe spaces, which he found sadly ironic as college gigs were once the only place he could totally cut loose. Then they came after C.K.
Good one Sasha. One thing I like about Gaetz and Trump is that they make the Left think, "Wow! The Right is turning into some crazy-assed motherfuckers!" That's right sugar - I hope it scares the hell out of you 'cause you ain't seen nothing yet. Also, your early reference of Patton and Milley got me thinking about an encounter between the two. God, would I love to see that.
MAGA is slowly winning the culture war fights. Now even Biden is building Trumps wall. I liked Kevin McCarthy but he was still a moderate tilt MAGA lite. If the republicans move quickly to support a new speaker I think the damage will be minor. My hope is Jim Jordan will be new speaker and that would be very exciting for the MAGA movement. It may be messy but we have a party and a country to save. MAGA represents 70 percent of the republican party. We are on the march. It took years for the u.s. constitution to be ratified after we declared our independence. Democracy is slow and sometimes painful, but we are on the right side of history like Sasha stone says. Sometimes when you the Dems/socialists say and do their morally bankrupt dogma .......don't back down. Remember from 1942-1945 18 yr olds by the hundreds of thousands were sent to fight for our way of life. Many thousands died, many seen death and destruction none of us will ever experience. They didn't get to live the lives our 18 yr olds are now leisurely living. They never gave up. MAGA should never give up. We are winning this fight.
"Courage is not for the soft. And the only courage on display once again is on the Right. They have the stones and the fortitude to ban “gender-affirming care” in their states."
I am beginning to wonder if you would recognize courage if it bit you on the nose. Here is a hint; when someone sees what they believe to be evil, especially when that evil is directed at innocent and weaker people, and they risk their career, wealth, status, friendships, loves and family to defend those weaker; that is courage. Thus, Sasha Stone is courageous.
You should have your own site, then. You can build something for yourself rather than attempting to destroy mine. If you think I have no courage and you have such a low opinion of my writing, then you are wasting your time here and you are making it harder for me to do the job I have to do, which is not easy.
I exited out of the Democratic Party as a voter about 2 months into the Biden administration when I saw what these extremists really had in store for us. I voted for Biden reluctantly, and I will regret that forever. There are many reasons I stopped voting blue, but the number one reason was what I keep calling “the gender cult junk”. I heard all the commentary on “gender affirming care”, read Helen Joyce’s book “Trans” and Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage “. When I finished and closed the book I was all done. I said to myself.... there is no way that I will ever ever vote for any democrat again. Their evil creepy obsession with power, even at the expense of our children, seems to know no bounds. I don’t care who the Republican candidate is, I will absolutely vote for them. I’m a straight republican ticket voter now. DeSantis is my top choice but I’ll vote for any of them. When my lefty friends and co workers talk about voting for democratic candidates I say “oh, you mean the ones that endorse, facilitate, fund, and promote the mutilation and sterilization of children? That’s the one you are voting for?” I just keep saying that over and over again.
God bless you and we are grateful to have you join our community and our fight.
This is truly a defining issue for our age.
Rapid onset gender dysphoia is a social media contageon with over 100 clinics in the US and over a $1 billion indistry.
History will record who stood up to say, “No,” and who allowed this evil tragedy to continue.
Thank you Sasha
Amen. It’s about destroying the family unit.
It's about way more than that. These kids are just collateral damage in the larger war to fully cement the totalitarian cult into power. The "left" does not care about them *at all*. The "revolution" is an internal takeover. To the extent the kids function as Red Guard activists, they'll be cowed or eliminated once the revolution is complete, just like Mao did to the Red Guard.
The cult is attacking history and norms to destabilize the society. Crime, chaos, and conflict are promoted by them. For the cult, the trans thing is just a single vector of destabilization. They don't care about it at all, or who gets hurt in the process. They have a revolution to complete.
Power corrupts and attracts the corruptible.
Bless you and welcome.
I have always voted Republican but have considered Democrats and actually considered Biden. Thank God I didn't! I didn't vote for the president in 2016 as I could not get behind Hillary and Trump I found appauling. After watching the covid shit show in 2020 and I saw how the media manipulated Trumps words and the lies they manufactured on him, I voted for him proudly. He's an ass and a bafoon but he's not straight up evil and I guess sometimes you have to vote for the lesser evil.
I feel the exact same way, it just took me a bit longer to walk down that road. I should have voted for Trump in his bid for re election but unfortunately I was still overly worried about the obnoxious and sometimes offensive nature of his behavior. There were so many red flags about what the democratic agenda had morphed into but the dems didn’t really unleash the batshit crazy component until they had actually gotten themselves moved into the White House. The damage that has been done in 3 short years is just stunning. Better late than never though, it’s all crystal clear to me now. I have learned important lessons from the whole experience. I’m grateful for that.
Well to come from a democrat voting for Biden to where you are is amazing! I must admit, I've never understood politics but voted red because I'm fiscally conservative. I'd like to think I'm socially liberal, however I see where that's taken us :(
I am concerend of what will become of this country if Trump gets in and it's less about him and ALL about the dems and what they will do. UGH
I found Hillary offensive and still do. You have to fight fire with fire. Trump would not have gotten any news if he wasn't offensive. He never offended me but I'm not a pearl clutching liberal. Screaming your abortions to the world is offensive. Saying if you don't get vaccinated you should be left to die is offensive. Saying Obama is a black man who can actually speak well is offensive. Never thought he said anything offensive. The liberals were pissed that they couldn't break Trump so now he must be arrested, bankrupted and if that doesn't work i guess it's concrete shoes and a lake.
👏🏻👏🏻🥂
You have to be 16 to drive a car, 18 to vote or join the military and 21 to buy alcohol & tobacco.
Yet the elites not only want to allow, but encourage, pre-pubescent children to irreparably mutilate the bodies. And punish parents who dare to interfere with the state-promoted medical hackery.
23 to rent a car
In some places, a kid can’t get ears pierced without adult consent.
Actually, that’s incorrect. The vast majority of states allow gun ownership at 18 or 21 years of age; two states allow earlier possession (not purchase) of a firearm: Alaska, which has grizzly bears and a lot of wild land hunting, allows possession at 16; Louisiana (alligators and swamp hunting) at 17. Note that my source is the Giffords Law Center. https://giffords.org/lawcenter/gun-laws/policy-areas/who-can-have-a-gun/minimum-age/
Times they are a changing...
Had a .22, a 12 gauge and access to a 30-30 and various pistols at 11 or 12 in northeast Florida.
According to the chart, more than half of all states have specific ages for legal possession, and most of those are 18.
I literally walked to my Junior High School carrying my .22 rifle as required for 7th-9th grade Rifle Club (basically marksmanship and gun safety class - highly encouraged as no wants the woods full of teenage deer hunters with bad aim) .. but that was in 1976, a few years before the "I Don't Like Mondays" gal introduced the enlightened era of mood altering prescriptions over butt bottom spankings (we had those too, all the way through 9th grade and yeah, mostly dealt by the teacher we all considered a pervert - everything's a trade-off.)
How many 11 year old's are killing others?
The age of 11 was chosen to officially learn gun safety and responsible parents educate them and the practice said safety. It has worked for a millennia.
Understood. We don't give custody to our kids until usage under our supervision, yet they understand the power and danger of them. That is part of the education process. Yes, there are the ignorant parents out there like there has always been; today it is much worse.
Yes sir, I have told friends that my whole life.
Thanks for another great piece. You are exactly right, we need to use accurate, forceful language to speak about what the left is doing to young people. It’s evil.
Our society is run by immature narcissists, and they have unleashed the worst of their ugly ideas on innocent children. They have taken childhood away, because they themselves want to be the children forever.
They have turned our schools into woke madrasas, where few learn to read but all are pushed into gender insanity. They forced little children to wear masks for years, to protect the adults from their own irrational fear. They believe having a pet is the same as having a child.
But the most unspeakable evil is allowing and encouraging children to be used as “trans trophies” in their never-ending quest to feel that they are the smartest, most virtuous people who ever lived.
Go ahead lefties- throw your pathetic, impotent accusations of “TRANSPHOBIA!” at me. I agree with Sasha, we need to use accurate words to describe exactly what you are doing. For me, that word is “evil”.
So if it’s OK because the number is small, what is the number at which you might find sterilizing and mutilating children no longer acceptable?
If it happens to your child the numbers don’t matter. One child is too many.
Puberty blockers are generally started at some stage of puberty, not earlier. They are followed by cross-sex hormones at some point, reported by some patients and some whistleblowers as within a year or two of the puberty blockers. Surgeries have been carried out on children in their early teens, as evidenced by some detransitioners who are filing law suits against the medical systems that did this to them.
An additional major problem that is being recognized by western European countries but not by the U.S., is that a large number of female adolescents have suddenly decided that they are "trans," "non-binary" or other nonsense. The percentage of adolescent girls who are claiming to have these problems is escalating progressively, and is now at least 5%. This may appear to be an insignificant number to you, but it means that sexual identity confusion is no longer a rare disorder. Mental health disorders generally affect very small percentages of the population.
The correct statistic, i.e., the one you should be looking at, pertains to how many of the adolescents or younger children who initially present incorrect beliefs about their biological sex or desperate longing to "change sex" are immediately assigned to a "transition" track by the healthcare professionals who "evaluate" them. In my opinion, the percentage should be 0%, but in reality it could be over 90%. Since many gender clinics have not been forthcoming or competent in their record keeping, their research or their disclosures, we actually have no idea what they are doing to children and adolescents at their clinics. All we know is that treating professionals in many states are no longer permitted to practice competently and ethically, because laws passed by Democrats require them to withhold the treatment that would be most helpful to these youngsters.
Always appreciate the compelling arguments and insights you share.
Thanks Libertarian, I appreciate your support!
Regret is an appropriate statistic for people who are undertaking cosmetic surgery. Cosmetic surgery is not usually categorized as "medically necessary," unless the patient has been disfigured and needs to be restored to a normal appearance. Gender clinics as well as their advocates in politics consistently claim that medical transitions are "necessary medical care" for patients they call "transgender," "binary," etc. During the 1990's these medical interventions were said to be a treatment for gender identity disorder, which was an accepted psychiatric diagnosis at the time, but not a diagnosis that was accepted as reimbursable by medical insurance policies. One could argue that the insurers should have paid for sexual reassignment surgeries, but that is a separate issue involving cost containment by insurance companies.
Most healthcare researchers and providers believed during the Nineties that gender dysphoria is a psychiatric symptom that commonly accompanies a cross-sex identity disorder. I would guess that is still the case. Over the course of the last few years, however, the gender "treatment" activists have been stripping diagnostic labels away from the psychiatric conditions and symptoms presented by people who claim to be "trans" or "binary" or whatever their fantasy identity is. There is no valid medical or scientific basis for de-pathologizing these abnormal identities. Gender dysphoria is in fact a significant set of psychiatric symptoms, not to mention that these problems are usually accompanied by other significant psychiatric disorders. Most of the men who sought treatment during the Nineties had histories of transvestic fetishism that caused them to question their sexual identities, and many met criteria for diagnoses of major depressive disorder, personality disorders and/or substance abuse disorders.
There is a legitimate argument that if psychosocial treatments of the above patients were not effective, and the patients wanted to "pass" as the other sex, then it made sense to offer them access to cross sex hormones and surgeries to achieve those cosmetic changes. There is even a fair argument that insurance companies should pay for this type of cosmetic treatment.
In addition to medical necessity, however, there are two additional criteria that medical treatment has to meet, which is that it has been proven by research and clinical experience to be both "safe" and "effective." It is obviously not safe to remove healthy body parts, so that is a problem. It's not like we have to remove a breast to prevent the spread of cancer, and there are additional costs to breast removal that involve sexual and reproductive functioning. So "gender surgeries" are not safe at all, and in fact they amount to "doing harm," which is unethical in clinical practices.
Then there is the lack of evidence for the effectiveness of gender affirmative care. To begin with, we don't even know what the treatment is for, because activist gender clinicians contend that "transgender" and "non-binary" and "eunuch" are normal identities, not pathological. If there is no pathology, then why is anyone supporting elaborate, invasive cosmetic alterations in these patients. In fact, why are they patients at all?
During the Nineties there was the idea that "gender identity disorder" with its primary symptom of "gender dysphoria" was the target of treatment.
We don't know how effective the 1990's approaches were in relieving the gender dysphoria of the mostly middle-aged male patients. There is one study from Sweden that indicates a very high level of completed suicide in a population of post-transition patients who included men from the above cohort. Whether the suicides were related to gender dysphoria or another mental health condition that commonly accompanies it we don't know. We could hypothesize that the process of medical transition was not effective in relieving symptoms of depression that these patients had, but on the other hand, maybe the depression was even worse before transitioning. This is a question that requires an answer before going ahead with castrations for the purpose of treating depression. I mean, why not just bring out the leaches, if that is now the level of science in U.S. medicine?
We have not answered the question about the extent to which either the Nineties style of treatment or the more recent "gender affirmative" approach is "effective," or for what.
In addition, the safety of medical transition is in further doubt now, because of emerging evidence of cardiovascular events and associated early deaths in people who are maintained on cross-sex hormones.
The question of what is going on with recent cohorts of gender confused patients who are mostly adolescent girls has not been addressed scientifically within the gender treatment network in the U.S., so it has not been "debunked." It is well documented that girls in Gen Z are reporting symptoms of mental disorders at record levels, both in the U.S. and in some countries of Western Europe. Some of these symptoms are performative rather than real, and they have in fact been learned from social media influencers who coach people on how to act sick. Many serious mental disorders and some neurological disorders are now considered to be very cool things among Gen Z girls. Are you aware that some of them go around mimicking the symptoms of Tourette's Syndrome? On the psychiatric side, adolescent white girls and young women now enthusiastically advertise that they are diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, eating disorders, nonsuicidal self-harm (i.e., cutting on themselves, burning themselves with cigarettes and so on), suicide attempts with intent, complex PTSD and dissociative disorders. All of the above listed diagnoses are associated with identity confusion and instability, and a readiness in some patients to claim negative as well as positive identities, and to perform them to get corresponding reactions from others.
Adolescents with diagnoses from the above list are being seen at gender clinics, based on the very limited available data, and they may (or may not) represent the bulk of the female patients referred to gender clinics. The treatment of choice for these people is long term psychotherapy of various types, and changes in life habits, especially including decreasing social media use. We know very little as yet about what may be unique to the Gen Z epidemic of mental disorders in girls, but Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues have documented that it is highly correlated with the amount of time adolescent girls spend on social media.
The adolescents and younger children who have sought treatment at gender clinics are so poorly understood, that there is no justification for anyone to claim that medical transitions are appropriate treatments for them. They have not received sufficient professional evaluation at gender clinics, let along research attention by unbiased investigators. It is extremely abnormal in medical science and clinical practice for the professionals engaged in treatment to actively resist and suppress investigation of the syndromes and patients they are treating, but that is what activist gender clinics are doing in the U.S. This is unethical, as it indicates that personal biases of the treating professionals are being prioritized over the clinical needs of the patients and their safety.
I personally am completely willing to admit that I/we DO NOT KNOW much of anything about the current cohorts of children, adolescents and young adults who are being presented by themselves or their parents at gender clinics. People who assert on the basis of little or no evidence that they DO KNOW should immediately be suspected of ideological bias, as their position cannot be justified by science. There is clearly no basis for undertaking any "treatments" that result in permanent body modification on a major scale in the absence of a relevant physical (as opposed to psychiatric) diagnosis. And, there is no psychiatric diagnosis being offered to justify the position that gender affirmative care is necessary at all. Normal conditions call for no treatment. Removing healthy body parts of a normal person and calling it "medically necessary" is malpractice, but more basically it is nonsense.
We are of course aware that the medical interventions are mainly happening in the teen years. You seem to have an aversion to using the word children to describe young people still in high school. Clearly they are not adults.
The gender identity exploring activities promoted by LAUSD and others are damaging to children and clearly prep work for the later interventions.
Phil, I appreciate the attempt to find common ground, but there’s not much point in faking it. I’m pretty sure that we do not agree on anything. If you are going to defend the indefensible, at least be up front about it instead of hiding behind misleading statistics and semantics.
Are you really splitting hairs over the use of the world “children”?
Question for you:
Do you think it’s ok to let a 16 year old girl have her healthy breasts removed to treat a psychological disorder?
If so say it.
If not, then your only argument is that the article uses child when it should use teenager and that’s a pretty lame argument.
Why are you here?
The only "psychological torment" in this situation is provided by the establishment--public school teachers, school psychologists, and local governments everywhere, on top of Munchausen-by-proxy mothers who put their children through this nightmare to inflate their esteem.
They blow on any ember of sexual confusion during adolescence or earlier until it glows sufficiently, then put the kid on the tranny train to Auschwitz to visit Dr. Mengele . . . uh, that is to see Dr. Bowers at the Seattle Polyclinic.
Our census bureau is producing problematic numbers. The standards of taking an accurate census have crumbled. Don’t try to use anything like that to measure this human tragedy. You must not be a parent and therefore this comment is lacking empathy, as many of your comments do. You must be an experiential learner and that will give you many hard years ahead. If I am wrong, I apologize.
There aren't yet enough trained "surgeons" to scale up the mutilation to statistics that would satisfy you. But help is on the way in the form of automated castration/vaginoplasty machines.https://www.city-journal.org/article/oregon-health-science-universitys-castration-machine The pink-haired "surgeon" inventor has bragged that the little guillotine has greatly increased the number of children who can be castrated. It took the Nazis a while to get gas chambers up and running, so you are probably right it would be best to wait for the actual numbers to come in before sounding the alarm. Trends should be ignored until they are full-blown catastrophes.
Not much I can say to convince a human monster like you that you are wrong. Don't you have some small animals to torture or children to mutilate? You lack all sense of right and wrong. Hitler was a sample size of one as well.
Life-affirming? Cutting off someone from being able to continue life--reproduce--is the opposite of life affirming. Cutting a person off from possibility having an orgasm or feeling pleasure is life n affirming. Feels like the opposite.
It’s a contagion and contagions spread, often rapidly. The numbers are not small - listen to Dr Miriam Grossman who details it all out https://www.miriamgrossmanmd.com/ — in my book even one child is too many. Where would you draw the line?
Old saying: Tolerance is the last virtue of a depraved people. Also, Hillary wants gun control because people will not willingly get in the boxcars.
...or into the reeducation camps!
Of course I had the reeducation camps in mind.
Wouldn’t that be the worse idea the socialists ever had--put all the pissed off, gun-toting critical thinkers all in one place. I think that’s called Boot Camp. Give us a few weeks together and see how that works out.
We have passed the point of peaceful reconciliation. There is no way out of this mess that doesn’t involve extreme violence. Maybe that’s what the lunatics on the left think they want, but as usual, hubris and equity hires have lead to severe miscalculations on their part.
Unfortunately, as you point out, the right is fracturing before our eyes. It has been a long time coming, with the the latest shunning of Speaker McCarthy acting as the final coup de gras. Although we agree on many of the same issues, such as our resistance to the mutilation of children and the ongoing war in the Ukraine, we are not, strictly speaking, Republicans. I do not align myself to the politics of McConnel or Graham. The traditional Republican Party, comprised of an assortment of Rino’s hell bent on expanding our conflict with Russia, is not where I aspire to be. If it means fracturing the Republican Party, so be it.
I’m with you, Keith, in regards to the fracturing. I’m voting R’s in the blue state I live in, but nationally I’m w/ Gaetz & Co. — and not the centrist free spending, war loving part of the R party. I don’t want to be any part of that Tent.
A vote for a D is a vote for chaos and one manufactured crisis after another. As Stone says in effect, any vote for a D is tacit support for their cultural revolution.
Although the "right" is not monolithic they share the MAGA vision and proudly claim the "deplorable" label. Unfortunately, we're stuck with the RP, but their internal squabbles don't matter. They have the massive responsibility of opposing the faction that's leading us to perdition. If opposing the regime and the D agenda requires some purging of wafflers or of anyone trying to be conciliatory with the Dems, so be it. Let's keep our eye on the ball.
In my world going back to my grandparents in the 1870’s to 1880’s (not a typo)
even if one was a Republican or Democrat , you split your ticket because in small communities there were families of like minded individuals that you would know
And feel comfortable voting for. Now we have candidates who are omitting facts and truth’s about themselves for years before they campaign.
Dear Keith,
The expression is "coup de grace", the cut of grace, not "coup de gras" which translates to the cut of fat.
Merci, ma belle.
Cup of grass
Totally agree! As do a multitude of others I suspect.
Agreed!
Sasha, thank you for an excellent article and thank you for being honest about formerly being a strong leftest. It had to be hard to step away from your former beliefs and faith in the Democratic Party. I’m a life long conservative but have had quite a come to Jesus meeting in regards to how corrupt our country is and how our letter agencies can’t be trusted. It’s been a difficult 3 1/2 years. I know there must be some Democrats who know this trans movement for children is wrong and it amazes me that they don’t speak out. When I watch these young people regret their transitions, it breaks my heart. As a retired teacher, it never occurred to me to ever question whether a child was born into the wrong body. Not once in the 29 years I spent in the classroom! I spent five years on hormone blockers for breast cancer and these drugs are no joke. I aged ten years in five, had damage to my bones and still have regular hot flashes. I can’t imagine any doctor prescribing these drugs for children. Transing kids are the lobotomies of our time. They must stop now!
Thanks for a succinct reason to be and vote Republican. We may be chaotic, but at least we aren’t sterilizing children. There’s many reasons, but this is the best.
or obsessed with the ability to kill babies!
Exactly
Great piece again, Sasha. Watching that montage on "deprogramming" was sad. What will happen when they "realize" Trump voters (all 70M of them) won't be willingly "deprogrammed"? Well, they will dehumanize them. Then, "maybe they don't belong in our utopian future" or "they're not really human and they should all be locked up"? Oh, I forgot the KGB, sorry, "FBI" is already on that mission. And just like that, all you morally superior (at least you think so) people will be the ones literally acting like Nazis, Stalinists, and Maoists. Not figuratively, but literally. Just for once, stop and think about the path you are heading down.
I wonder how long it will be until Animal Farm, 1984, Brave New World, It Can't Happen Here (worth a read as current President strongly resembles President Buzz Windrip), and other prescient classic books vanish in the U.S.
That video of several detransitioners is so tragic. I have a friend whose 20-something daughter had her breasts removed and calls herself asexual. She will not speak to her parents bc her Dad won't use her new pronouns. Very cult like.
I agree that anyone is better than the Ds but can a President really end this? Of course he or she can speak out against it, as the Rs are, and RFKJ said no boys should be on girls’ teams, I think he’s against these surgeries but I need to check. Maybe Presidents can influence insurance to stop covering it. But medicine is largely controlled by state boards. There would need to be some big use of executive power, which obviously gets abused.
Correct, it is the states who are either putting on the brakes or pushing the accelerator to the floor. They control what the age of consent is, and can even make it specific for gender transitions. States can and do require insurance companies to pay for whatever diagnoses are politically favored. My state even forces tax payers to foot the bill for medical transitions on kids whose parents won't authorize payment. In addition, states control licensing and regulation of health care providers, and are required to enforce any state laws regarding healthcare practices.
At a minimum a President can stand neutral, and not promote this from the White House lawn, as Biden did, with minors on the stage w/ him:
https://youtu.be/8Vntm73zsWk?si=iCivXK7Uq_yHu0gQ
Two presidents,Obama and Biden have influenced the rise of this sterilization insanity.
We have woke elected school board members who posed as being what they were not.
This was taking place for about what?-five years? But, parent groups are digging out
on behalf of their children . Schools are our most basic local government and those parents are forming a hedge around their children. Support these parents because they
are first responders doing their work jobs, their parent jobs, and with what energy they
have left, putting a hedge around their children. What is cool is that they have the internet, with all of its conveniences wired into school systems. During the Pandemic
parents were able to observe how and what their children were being taught. Note
to be clear it was a multi-racial group watching. I know a story of one mother who,
after watching on zoom, went out and scratched the bumper sticker off her car that said
“MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT XXX SCHOOL”.
Man,I miss George Carlin. That particular riff on “soft language” is still as hilarious as when I first heard it...and it is even more appropriate. Carlin was a liberal, but I cannot imagine he would be down for the insanity gripping liberals.
C.K. Louis shared that his friend George Carlin was beginning to avoid college gigs for this reason, even before the era of safe spaces, which he found sadly ironic as college gigs were once the only place he could totally cut loose. Then they came after C.K.
I didn’t know that Carlin was starting to avoid college campuses. Boy that is both sad and ironic. 😥 Just a very small sample of what is being lost...
Good one Sasha. One thing I like about Gaetz and Trump is that they make the Left think, "Wow! The Right is turning into some crazy-assed motherfuckers!" That's right sugar - I hope it scares the hell out of you 'cause you ain't seen nothing yet. Also, your early reference of Patton and Milley got me thinking about an encounter between the two. God, would I love to see that.
Even a dead Patton would kick Milley’s fat ass.
MAGA is slowly winning the culture war fights. Now even Biden is building Trumps wall. I liked Kevin McCarthy but he was still a moderate tilt MAGA lite. If the republicans move quickly to support a new speaker I think the damage will be minor. My hope is Jim Jordan will be new speaker and that would be very exciting for the MAGA movement. It may be messy but we have a party and a country to save. MAGA represents 70 percent of the republican party. We are on the march. It took years for the u.s. constitution to be ratified after we declared our independence. Democracy is slow and sometimes painful, but we are on the right side of history like Sasha stone says. Sometimes when you the Dems/socialists say and do their morally bankrupt dogma .......don't back down. Remember from 1942-1945 18 yr olds by the hundreds of thousands were sent to fight for our way of life. Many thousands died, many seen death and destruction none of us will ever experience. They didn't get to live the lives our 18 yr olds are now leisurely living. They never gave up. MAGA should never give up. We are winning this fight.
"Courage is not for the soft. And the only courage on display once again is on the Right. They have the stones and the fortitude to ban “gender-affirming care” in their states."
Otherwise known as Sane States.
I am beginning to wonder if you would recognize courage if it bit you on the nose. Here is a hint; when someone sees what they believe to be evil, especially when that evil is directed at innocent and weaker people, and they risk their career, wealth, status, friendships, loves and family to defend those weaker; that is courage. Thus, Sasha Stone is courageous.
And yet here you are. Obsessively commenting on every single comment and post. The reason being...
You should have your own site, then. You can build something for yourself rather than attempting to destroy mine. If you think I have no courage and you have such a low opinion of my writing, then you are wasting your time here and you are making it harder for me to do the job I have to do, which is not easy.
Not 'chaotic' to end congressional insanity. They'll spend TRILLIONS on bills they haven't read but want details on how I spend $600?