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In a revealing piece by Christopher Rufo which appeared in the September Hillsdale College Imprimis, Mr Rufo delves into the origins of the disturbing transgender insanity now infecting both our education and healthcare systems. Find here this extremely important article, presented in its entirety. Please read and share...
The transgender movement is pressing its agenda everywhere. Most publicly, activist teachers are using classrooms to propagandize on its behalf and activist health professionals are promoting the mutilation of children under the euphemistic banner of “gender-affirming care.” The sudden and pervasive rise of this movement provokes two questions: where did it come from, and how has it proved so successful? The story goes deeper than most Americans know.
In the late 1980s, a group of academics, including Judith Butler, Gayle Rubin, Sandy Stone, and Susan Stryker, established the disciplines of “queer theory” and “transgender studies.” These academics believed gender to be a “social construct” used to oppress racial and sexual minorities, and they denounced the traditional categories of man and woman as a false binary that was conceived to support the system of “heteronormativity”—i.e., the white, male, heterosexual power structure. This system, they argued, had to be ruthlessly deconstructed. And the best way to achieve this, they argued further, was to promote transgenderism. If men can become women, and women men, they believed, the natural structure of Creation could be toppled.
This is the great project of the transgender movement: to abolish the distinctions of man and woman, to transcend the limitations established by God and nature, and to connect the personal struggle of trans individuals to the political struggle to transform society in a radical way.
Susan Stryker, a male-to-female transgender professor currently at the University of Arizona, revealed the general thrust and tone of transgender ideology in his Kessler Award Lecture at the City University of New York in 2008, describing his work as “a secular sermon that unabashedly advocates embracing a disruptive and refigurative genderqueer or transgender power as a spiritual resource for social and environmental transformation.” In Stryker’s best-known essay, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” he contends that the “transsexual body” is a “technological construction” that represents a war against Western society. “I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster,” Stryker writes. And this monster, he continues, is destined to channel its “rage and revenge” against the “naturalized heterosexual order”; against “‘traditional family values’”; and against the “hegemonic oppression” of nature itself.
Dr. Blair Peters is a plastic surgeon (he uses he/they pronouns) who performs trans genital surgeries at the publicly-funded Oregon Health & Science University and whose specialty is creating artificial sex organs. “I think what we’re becoming very known for at OHSU is genital surgery,” he says. “A prime example of that is a procedure called phalloplasty, which is the creation of a penis. And we now have a robotic vaginoplasty program [that] has been a kind of game changer for patient care.”
It is clear from this and from other transgender scholarship that the transgender movement is inherently political. Its reconstruction of personal identity is meant to advance a collective political reconstruction or transformation. Some trans activists even view their movement as the future of Marxism. In a collection of essays titled Transgender Marxism, activist writer Rosa Lee argues that trans people can serve as the new vanguard of the proletariat, promising to abolish heteronormativity in the same way that orthodox Marxism promised to abolish capitalism.
“In a different era,” Lee writes,
Marxists spoke of the construction of a “new socialist man” as a crucial task in the broader process of socialist construction. Today, in a time of both rising fascism and an emergent socialist movement, our challenge is transsexualising our Marxism. We should think [of] the project of transition to communism in our time—communisation—as including the transition to new communist selves, new ways of being and relating to one another.
This is the great project of the transgender movement: to abolish the distinctions of man and woman, to transcend the limitations established by God and nature, and to connect the personal struggle of trans individuals to the political struggle to transform society in a radical way.
From the Fringes to the Center
The trans movement was hatched, then, on the fringes of American academia. But how did it move so quickly to the center of American public life? Like many other things, it began with a flood of cash, as some of the wealthiest people in the country began devoting enormous sums of money to promote transgenderism.
One of these people is Jennifer Pritzker, who was born James Pritzker in 1950. After serving several years in the U.S. Army, Pritzker went into business, having inherited a sizable part of the Hyatt hotel fortune. In 2013, he announced a male-to-female gender transition and was celebrated in the press as the “first trans billionaire.” Almost immediately, he began donating untold millions to universities, schools, hospitals, and activist organizations to promote queer theory and trans medical experiments.
This money was allied with political power, as Pritzker’s cousin, Illinois Democrat Governor J.B. Pritzker, signed legislation in 2019, his first year in office, to inject gender theory into the state education curriculum and to direct state Medicaid funds toward transgender surgeries. Speaking before an audience of trans activists, he proclaimed:
[O]ur state government is firmly on your side, on the side of every gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer person in the state of Illinois. . . . Those of you in this room know better than anyone that marriage equality was never the endgame. . . . We’re gonna make sure that all transgender Illinoisans are ensured their basic human rights and that healthcare services are provided to them so that they can thrive.
Here’s an example of how this combination of well-funded activism and political influence works in practice: Pritzker-funded activists at Lurie Children’s Hospital (the largest children’s hospital in Chicago) provide local schools with training, materials, and personnel who promote gender transitions for children, using the hospital’s reputation to give their ideology a scientific veneer. And the more one investigates, the worse it gets. Children are exposed, for instance, not only to trans ideology, but to concepts such as “kink” (unusual tastes in sexual behavior), “BDSM” (bondage, domination, submission, and masochism), binders to flatten breasts, and prosthetic penises.
Lurie Children’s Hospital, through its outreach presentations in Chicago public schools, encourages teachers and school administrators to support “gender diversity” in their districts, automatically “affirm” students who announce sexual transitions, and “communicate a non-binary understanding of gender” to children in the classroom. The objective, as one version of the presentation suggests, is to disrupt the “entrenched [gender] norms in western society” and facilitate the transition to a more “gender creative” world. School districts are encouraged to designate “Gender Support Coordinators” to help facilitate children’s sexual and gender transitions, which, under the recommended “confidentiality” policy, can be kept secret from parents and families.
In effect, this results in a sophisticated school-to-gender-clinic pipeline. Teachers, counselors, doctors, and activists on social media and elsewhere—many of whom are employed or subsidized by members of the Pritzker family—push children in the direction of what Chicago-area “detransitioner” Helena Kerschner, recalling her own experience, calls “the trans identity rabbit hole.” And despite frequent claims to the contrary, this is not a temporary or reversible process. Of the children who begin puberty blockers, the medical literature suggests that approximately 95 percent move on to cross-sex hormones, and that 50 percent of the females who begin cross-sex hormone treatments move on to “trans-affirming” surgeries.
The Synthesis of All Oppressions
Another place my investigation of the trans movement has taken me is Highland Park, Michigan, a city of roughly 9,000 residents located about six miles north of downtown Detroit. Highland Park has been plagued by poverty, violence, and crime for decades. Many of its homes and businesses have been abandoned or demolished. It is teetering on the edge of insolvency, yet it is home to one institution that is overflowing with funds: the Ruth Ellis Center, metro Detroit’s central laboratory for the synthesis of transgender science and politics.
The Ruth Ellis Center’s marketing pitch is an amalgam of all the usual euphemisms: “trauma-informed care,” “restorative justice,” “harm reduction,” “racial equity,” and “gender-affirming care.” In the name of these things, the Ellis Center and its partners conduct large-scale medical experiments on a population of predominantly poor black youths.
Dr. Maureen Connolly, a pediatrician at Henry Ford Health, leads the Ellis Center’s medical partnership, providing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical referrals to scores of Detroit kids. Here’s how she describes the child sex-change process:
Transitioning is an umbrella term to describe the process that someone goes through to bring their external self more closely into alignment with their gender identity. For some people that might mean changing their gender expression and the clothes that they wear or how they wear their hair. It might mean using a new name and different pronouns. And that’s wonderful. For others, it can involve taking medication to make their body more closely aligned with how they identify in terms of gender—typically, that’s masculinizing or feminizing medications or hormone therapy. People can also choose to pursue gender-affirming surgeries, which are surgical interventions to bring their body more closely in alignment with their gender identity.
Keep in mind, again, that in the context of her role at the Ellis Center, Connolly is not talking here about the affluent, educated, male-to-female trans individuals who serve as the public face of the trans movement. She is mostly talking about kids from the Detroit ghetto who suffer from high rates of family breakdown, substance abuse, mental illness, and self-destructive behavior. As such, one might suppose that they are especially vulnerable to the claim that gender transition will solve all their problems.
“My name is Righteous, first and foremost,” says an Ellis Center patient who now identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns:
I think I might have been about eight years old when I remembered or that I recall having any thought of being transgender or gender non-conforming. . . . It felt like I was an outsider to this whole world of America. On top of not being, you know, a European-American, I was black. . . . Most of my dysphoria comes from people misgendering me. With gender-affirming care, I could get the hormones I needed for free.
Righteous is thus a perfect example of the new synthesis of transgender science and politics. She works as an activist not only for the trans movement, but also for a broader intersectional coalition (i.e., a coalition of oppressed and marginalized groups), including, for instance, the movement to abolish the police. She represents the identity of the oppressed by both nature and nurture and marshals this unique “positionality” to advance the full suite of left-wing social policies.
Frankenstein Redux
In 1818, Mary Shelley wrote the famous novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The premise of the book is that modern science, stripped from the constraints of ethics and nature, will end up creating monsters. “Trans-affirming” doctors are the post-modern version of the book’s protagonist, Doctor Frankenstein.
According to a handbook published by OHSU, surgeons first cut off the head of the penis and remove the testicles. Then they turn the penile-scrotal skin inside out and, together with abdomen cavity tissue, fashion it into a crude, artificial vagina. “The robotic arms are put through small incisions around your belly button and the side of your belly,” the handbook reads. “They are used to create the space for your vaginal canal between your bladder and your rectum.”
This procedure is plagued with complications. OHSU warns of wound separation, tissue necrosis, graft failure, urine spraying, hematoma, blood clots, vaginal stenosis, rectal injury, fistula, and fecal accidents. Patients must stay in the hospital for a minimum of five days following the procedure, receiving treatment for surgical wounds and having fluid drained through plastic tubes. Once they are home, patients must continue transgender hormone treatments and manually dilate their surgically created “neo-vagina” in perpetuity; otherwise, the tissue will heal, and the cavity will close.
The castration business is booming. According to Peters, the gender clinic at OHSU has “the highest volume on the West Coast”—and with the help of the robot, his team can perform multiple vaginoplasties per day. The phalloplasty program has a 12-to-18-month waiting list for consultations and an additional three-to-six-month waiting list for surgical appointments.
A less common but more symbolically apt surgery performed by Peters and his colleagues is known as “nullification,” in which a smooth, continuous skin covering from the abdomen to the groin is created following a castration or vaginectomy. In other words, the genitalia are replaced by nothing. Nullification surgery is the perfect symbol for the ideology behind the trans movement: the pursuit of the Latin nullum, meaning “nothing”; or the related nihil, the root of the English word “nihilism.” Trans ideology is animated by a profound nihilism that denies human nature and enables barbarism in the name of progress.
***
The future of transgender medicine is in flux. Major American institutions have rallied to its support, with the major medical associations going so far as to call on the federal government to investigate and prosecute its critics. At the same time, some cracks are showing. Detransitioners, a group comprised of mostly young women who have accepted their biological sex after transitioning to various degrees, are going public about the dangers of gender medicine in deeply affecting personal terms. Organizations such as Do No Harm have filed lawsuits and launched advocacy campaigns to curb transgender procedures on minors. And increasing numbers of doctors, who had previously been cowed into silence, are beginning to speak out. State legislators have also taken notice. Earlier this year, I worked with whistleblowers at Texas Children’s Hospital to expose child sex-change procedures that were being conducted in secret. The exposé attracted the attention of Texas lawmakers, who immediately passed the final version of a bill to ban such procedures.
Jennifer Pritzker, Maureen Connolly, Blair Peters, and their ilk occupy the heights of power and prestige, but like Doctor Frankenstein they will not be able to escape the consequences of what they have created. They are condemning legions of children to a lifetime of sorrows and medical necessities, all based on dubious postmodern theories that do not meet the standard of Hippocrates’ injunction in his work Of the Epidemics: “First, do no harm.” Although individuals can be nullified, nature cannot. No matter how advanced trans pharmaceuticals and surgeries become, the biological reality of man and woman cannot be abolished; the natural limitations of God’s Creation cannot be transcended. The attempt to do so will elicit the same heartbreak and alienation captured in the final scene of Mary Shelley’s novel: the hulking monster, shunned by society and betrayed by his father, filled with despair and drifting off into the ice floes—a symbol of the consequence of Promethean hubris.
A doctor at a major children’s hospital had this to say about what puberty blockers do to a child’s mind, body, and soul:
This medication is called a “gonadotropin releasing hormone agonist” and it comes in the form of monthly injections or an implant. And because it simulates the activity of this hormone, it shuts down the activity of the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is this almond-sized structure in your brain, it’s one of the most primal structures we have, and it controls all the other hormonal structures in your body—your sexual development, your emotions, your fight-or-flight response, everything. . . . And I always think that if someone were to ask me, Where is it that you would look for the divine spark in each individual? I would say that it would be somewhere “beneath the inner chamber,” which is the Greek derivation of the term hypothalamus. To shut down that system is to shut down what makes us human.
This is why we must fight to put the transgender empire out of business forever.
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
- Genesis 1:27 (NIV)
Dr James Lindsay Takes a Look at
What's Happening to the Children
Dr. James Lindsay explains how the transgender lunacy is being pushed on the children, and why kids are extremely susceptible.
So what you're actually seeing is that people are being induced at a young age into the idea of questioning [their gender].
[Kids are] being told in their schools, they're being told, if you're uncomfortable with what's happening to your body during puberty, that might be a sign that you are in the wrong body, that you're the other gender. Like, I don't, you're not supposed to say, we're supposed to say "kids are smart" and all this stuff. No, kids are, we'll say, "impressionable". 'Cuz I was gonna call 'em dumb. They're very impressionable.
They're very impressionable. They're very curious. They're very open to explore these ideas. And so, like, I've told people a lot of times, I got published in the Washington Post saying this, that when I was five I wanted to be a fire truck. The idea of the possibilities of being or the potentialities of being were pretty wide open to me when I was five. The idea that there are certain limitations on what I can actually grow up to be, as in I cannot become a truck, didn't occur to me. My best friend at the time wanted to be an eagle when he grew up. Turns out that people can't grow up to be eagles. And it turns out that boys cannot grow up to be women. It just is how it is. You can't do it. But children can believe these things, and they can be kind of sucked into a path to try to affirm that. This is how we do that. "Did you know that gender is really complicated? Blah blah blah blah blah." And so I think that, I started calling them groomers last year for a reason. I don't think it's all sexual grooming. I think there's a lot of identity grooming (if people need a word for it), or cult grooming, into this, and I will say this religion of gender and sexual identity that they've constructed, where normalcy is kind of the fall of man, and that you have to overcome that and get back to the idyllic garden where there was no differentiation of sex, gender, and sexuality, and everybody could just do what they wanted and everything was great. Before, you know, we ate of the Tree of Knowledge and saw that we were naked and were embarassed.
If you share our concern over what has been taking place in our classrooms, please consider joining with us as we fight for families, for children, for education, for truth, and for common sense.
We continue to ask people whether they understand what is now taking place within our school systems. We continue to provide information and resources to help people, especially parents, gain some idea of what's being taught to kids (and why). And yes, we continue to ask people to get involved and help with the lifting.
We fight against children being taught to hate their country, to judge people based on the color of their skin, and to ignore the basic truths of biology. We fight against the sexualization in school of little ones and the destruction of the innocence of youth. Perhaps most importantly, we fight to ensure that the proper teaching of math, reading and writing remain at the forefront of a child's education.
The idea that it is parents who are responsible for raising, educating, and seeing to the well being of their kids, that is sacrosanct.
Join with us in preserving the attributes and ideals of this great nation.
Feel free to forward this newsletter to friends and family. Actually anyone who acknowledges the fundamental right of parents to raise, educate, and protect their children are invited to join with us. We are gathering a group of joyful warriors, folks who understands why (and for whom) we fight.
Sat December 2nd at 4pm: Monthly membership meeting. We will again be meeting in-person at The Starbucks in Argonaut Shopping Center. The meeting is open to anyone interested in learning more about what Moms for Liberty Santa Clara is currently up to.
Location: 12960 Saratoga Sunnyvale Rd, Saratoga, CA 95070
A reminder will be sent out Friday afternoon with agenda items. Please mark your calendar and plan to attend.
Thu December 7th at 4:30pm: All members national meeting. Learn about successes from around the country and catch the vision for 2024. This is a members only meeting; in order to participate, you must join Moms for Liberty and be logged into our website.
Sat December 9th at 10:30am: Holiday brunch gathering. Just a chance to get together over an omlette or coffee during this special time of year. RSVP by December 5th if you'll be joining.
Location: Hobees Restaurant, 800 W Ahwanee Ave, Sunnyvale, CA 94085-1409
A boy cannot be a girl. A girl cannot be a boy. It is not possible.
An Initiative for the California Ballot
Beginning in early December the California Moms for Liberty chapters will begin gathering signatures to get an initiative on the ballot here in California for 2024. Given what's been happening within the state legislature, the initiative process remains the last best hope for getting certain problems addressed.
The initiative has three parts to it, as follows:
Protect Children from Reproductive Harm - A section to prevent child sterilization using puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or transgender surgeries. Recent polling suggests 75% of California voters agree minors should be protected from puberty blockers, crosssex hormones and transgender surgeries.
School Transparency and Partnership - A section to require schools to notify parents when their child wants to socially transition. Recent polling suggests 68% of California voters support schools notifying parents of kids wanting to socially transition at school.
Protect Girls Sports and Spaces - A section to make certain girls have fair competition by ensuring athletic programs for girls are kept to females. Recent polling suggests 64% of California voters agree student athletes should only play on sports teams matching their biological sex.
We will be gathering signatures across the state. Please help spread the word. It is time for us to take back control and see to it that future generations of Californians enjoy the same blessings that we in this current generation have enjoyed.
Problem Books in Classroom Libraries
Back in January, a New York Times article reported that “Parents, activists, school board officials and lawmakers around the country are challenging books at a pace not seen in decades. The American Library Association said in a preliminary report that it received an ‘unprecedented’ 330 reports of book challenges, each of which can include multiple books, last fall.”
Moms for Liberty Santa Clara has been slowly determining which of the 31 school districts here in Santa Clara County have been making obscene, pornographic books available to students. We have done this through use of the California Public Records Act. We now have a fairly good idea of where the problem books are shelved. It is now time to move to doing the things necessary to see to it that these materials are removed from school libraries.
Parents have enough to worry about without having to wonder whether their young kids are going to stumble upon erotic literature in their classroom libraries. It is incumbent upon school board members to take better care that the books being allowed into schools and being made available to children are in fact age appropriate.
Kids should be allowed to be kids. The innocence of youth is precious and the world will have time enough to mess with these kids once they're a bit older.
If you would like to help us with this effort, please drop us an email.
While the U.S. Constitution does not expressly discuss parental rights, the right to protect, raise, and educate your own children has been described as the oldest of our fundamental liberties.
The history and culture of Western civilization embraces a strong tradition of parental rights, and the Supreme Court of these United States has described parental rights as being "established beyond debate as an enduring American tradition." See Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 US 205, 232 (1972).
Parents need to begin to recognize the rights they hold as parents, and make their voices heard. Only then can we hope to turn things around.
