Scott Nugent, mother, lesbian and trans man, giving an impassioned scolding to a room filled with reporters. Scott is challenging them to ask real questions about the claims of profit-seekers to help struggling children instead of naively accepting the rhetoric of trans activists.
The NYT has finally crawled out of its cave to acknowledge a festering problem: The Political Left is shitting on women. Members of the Political Left are doing this through their words but also though their silence.
Why now, NYT? Is it because there are more and more of us creeping out into public to ask obvious questions and to state the problems we are seeing and hearing? Is it because Matt Walsh recently released his hard-hitting documentary (with which I find much merit, though I have my disagreements too): "What is a Woman?" Is it because one of the main missions of the NYT is to elect democrats and they have decided that NOW is the time to save the democrats from themselves by calling out bullshit on gender ideology? Maybe all of the above? Whatever the reason, an article like this was long overdue. I'm glad the NYT has published Pamela Paul's article. Maybe we can now have more real conversations on this topic of the mistreatment of women by the Political Left.
Here's an excerpt from "The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count.":
[T]he far right and the far left have found the one thing they can agree on: Women don’t count.The right’s position here is the better known, the movement having aggressively dedicated itself to stripping women of fundamental rights for decades. . . .
Far more bewildering has been the fringe left jumping in with its own perhaps unintentionally but effectively misogynist agenda. There was a time when campus groups and activist organizations advocated strenuously on behalf of women. . . .But today, a number of academics, uber-progressives, transgender activists, civil liberties organizations and medical organizations are working toward an opposite end: to deny women their humanity, reducing them to a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes.
As reported by my colleague Michael Powell, even the word “women” has become verboten. Previously a commonly understood term for half the world’s population, the word had a specific meaning tied to genetics, biology, history, politics and culture. No longer. In its place are unwieldy terms like “pregnant people,” “menstruators” and “bodies with vaginas.”
Planned Parenthood, once a stalwart defender of women’s rights, omits the word “women” from its home page. NARAL Pro-Choice America has used “birthing people” in lieu of “women.” The American Civil Liberties Union, a longtime defender of women’s rights, last month tweeted its outrage over the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade as a threat to several groups: “Black, Indigenous and other people of color, the L.G.B.T.Q. community, immigrants, young people.” It left out those threatened most of all: women.
Excerpt from new article by Suzy Weiss (writing at Common Sense, the Substack of her sister, Bari Weiss). The article is titled "The Testosterone Hangover: The Biden administration says transgender kids are entitled to ‘gender-affirming’ medical care. These girls disagree. ‘I have this intense rage in me over the harm that was done to me.’"
Gender-affirming care, the president’s spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, explained at a recent press conference, was “best practice and potentially lifesaving.” The point was: If trans kids weren’t able to transition, not just socially, but medically with cross sex hormones, puberty blockers, and surgeries, they might well kill themselves.The Biden policy was presented as commonsensical, but it is out of step with many progressive countries and some leading experts. Countries that have gone down the “gender affirming” road—like Norway, Sweden, France—are now reversing course in the absence of evidence that such care actually improves mental health outcomes for dysphoric children. Pioneering doctors, like Erica Anderson of the University of California San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic—herself a transwoman who has helped hundreds of teens through their transitions—are warning of the dangers of this policy. Critics say that even the phrase "gender-affirming" is misleading—a euphemism for something closer to medical malpractice. When else do we trust children to self-diagnose and make lifelong medical decisions?
And then there is the growing chorus of young people, including Chloe, who had come to regret—deeply—the decisions they had made and the gender-affirming care they had received.
In the middle of this story are teenagers who are largely going unheard by a government and a medical establishment that’s plowing ahead. “I don’t think gender affirming care helps kids like me,” says Chloe. “There should be more regard to alternatives in treating dysphoria, especially when it comes to kids.”
The State of Missouri is about to force the closure of Missouri's last remaining abortion provider, a Planned Parenthood clinic in the City of St. Louis. Here is the article by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Excerpt:
Planned Parenthood officials said Tuesday the facility's license was in jeopardy after the state sought to "interrogate" doctors as part of an annual license renewal process. Officials said the move was an "intimidation" tactic by the Department of Health and Senior Services.The Missouri State Government wouldn't force this closure without having a plan to address the resulting large increase of unplanned pregnancies, would it? Or is this a plan to fill the cities of Missouri with thousands of unwanted children? If the plan is to encourage people to use birth control to avoid unwanted pregnancies, then why does Missouri support (with generous tax credits) fraudulent "crisis pregnancy clinics" that lie about birth control options? See this Naral report (p. 4) listing the prevalence of lies by these dishonest tax-supported clinics. See also, John Oliver's investigation of these fake clinics. Perhaps the people who have been protesting Planned Parenthood will now occupy their time in other ways. Maybe each of them will be adopting and raising hundreds unplanned unwanted babies each year. Or maybe this is really a plan to help fill the coffers of private prisons. See the Dubner post here. The closure of this Planned Parenthood clinic would be an immense problem for all residents of Missouri (as detailed by this Guttmacher report), even for those whose instinct is to put a band-aid on an issue that gives them discomfort, with the assumption that the underlying complex problem will just go away.
If life begins at conception, why aren't conservatives attacking fertility clinics? Good question. Here's one disturbing possibility:
As it stands, IVF patients are primarily wealthy and white, while women who seek abortions are disproportionately poor and women of color, you know, “the least of these” that the Republican anti-choice crowd has always had a penchant for regulating and condemning. These women bear the brunt of abortion restrictions far more than wealthy whites. They are more likely to use Medicaid for health expenses, which federal law prohibits from covering abortion. Travel expenses and lost wages due to time away from low paying jobs are the results of mandatory wait periods. Kaplan says.