The right-wing is dominating the discourse on trans rights and they’re doing it in the worst way possible. They are going after parents and medical professionals who try to help trans kids. But the facts and statistics are not on their side.
Good morning everyone, all you grand people who come to my playtime. I slept last night, the entire night. Yes! That is great news because it has been three days of sleepless nights. Bad news is I have MRIs on my spine this morning. Now I don’t mind MRIs, the machines don’t bother me. However I have gotten to where I don’t like to leave the house. The drive to get to the MRI place is miserable first thing in the morning this time of year. There are people going to work and that has swelled during season. The MRI place is just above on the other side of the road from a school and hospital outpatient center. I will have to leave a lot early just to get there. It is driving my anxiety over the top. I never used to be this way I would jump in the truck and drive anywhere without even looking at a map. But now I get upset to simply go anywhere. As I told Ron everything I want is right here at / in my home. But I have to go this morning so I will. I will see everyone when I get back. Hugs
OT. The last time I had an MRI I had private insurance from Ron’s employer. Then it cost me out of pocket either 600 or 800 I forget. But it was very costly, and I was having them every two years. So I have been putting off having them because of cost. This time I have to have it, so I was willing to bite the bullet and pay the costs. Yet when I found out the out of pocket cost for a person on Medicare I was stunned. For two MRIs my entire out of pocket cost will be … $84 dollars. Yes only $84 dollars. We need Medicare for all now! Hugs
A second Indiana judge on Friday blocked the state from enforcing its law banning most abortions after Jewish, Muslim and other non-Christian women challenged it in a lawsuit.
Marion County Superior Court Judge Heather Welch issued a preliminary injunction against the Republican-backed law, which prohibits abortions with limited exceptions for rape, incest, lethal fetal abnormalities or a serious health risk to the mother. The plaintiffs have argued that the measure infringes on religious freedom protected by another state law.
The law had already been on hold, as another judge in September blocked Indiana from enforcing it while Planned Parenthood and other healthcare providers challenge it in court.
Indiana became the first state to pass a new law banning abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court in June overturned its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that had legalized the procedure nationwide. Other Republican-led states quickly began enforcing older bans.
Welch issued her injunction after a group called Hoosier Jews for Choice and five individual women challenged the abortion law under Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU said the plaintiffs represented religions including Judaism and Islam as well as “independent spiritual belief systems.”
“The Court finds that S.E.A. 1 substantially burdens the religious exercise of the Plaintiffs,” Welch wrote, using the formal name of the law, in granting the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction while the challenge to its legality proceeds.
“Although some religions believe that human life begins at conception, this is not an opinion shared by all religions or all religious people,” the ACLU said in a statement.
A giant WTF! Seriously what the religious right thinks is going on in schools is so Qanon over the top it is hard to take them seriously, except they are managing to use their fantasies to wipe the LGBTQI+ out of the schools and society. Kids / students need sexual education that not only covers the body parts, but also healthy ways to take care of those parts, ways to avoid pregnancy and STDs which includes proper use of condoms, and also the social aspects of sexuality such as how to date, porn is unrealistic, consent, and more. Yes that includes what happens when aroused to the sexual areas. It also includes teaching the concept of no shaming for those who have different kinks. That doesn’t mean giving full on demonstrations. What the hell do these school board members think is happening, the kids getting a porn hub four day pass? Dogs that love gravy these religious right are so repressed it is scary. Any kid with a phone and an interest in these kinks already understand how it works, they just need to know how to be safe, what is dangerous, and to understand boundaries. The teachers seem to think it is just a way to outrage the public to erase any mention or acceptance of gays, trans, and the rest of the LGBTQI+. Hugs
School board meetings have become the theater of the absurd.
A Virginia school board has been at the center of the nationwide controversy over including LGBTQ students in the curriculum. Now, the debate – and the school board’s response – has become theater of the absurd.
After Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) rode the frenzy to ban books, fire teachers, and muzzle students all the way to the top and muscled through new laws, the board has come up with a policy that covers “sexually explicit content.”
While religious right activists and politicians have made outrageous claims about students identifying as cats and using litter boxes, the school board took it a step further – in the dog direction. They expressly forbade educators from teaching students how to eat poop.
The new policy also forbids teaching about sadomasochism, bestiality, or pee play. Because while educators are worried about ensuring educational access for LGBTQ students, that’s what the religious right thinks they are being taught in schools.
Loudoun’s policy defines sexually explicit content as “descriptions, pictures, photographs, drawings, films or other visual representations” of “sexual bestiality, a lewd exhibition of nudity … sexual excitement, sexual conduct or sadomasochistic abuse … coprophilia, urophilia, or fetishism.”
So no learning about latex or leather either.
Loudoun will publish “a current list of instructional materials with sexually explicit content intended to be used in classroom instruction, by grade and subject on the LCPS public website.”
One would think that would be an incredibly short list, but the policy “is a guise of using parental notification to erase LGBTQ students,” middle school teacher Andrea Weiskopf told the Washington Post. “This is allowing individual parents to individualize a curriculum for their own worldview.”
Death threats against teachers and school board members over fears of pro-trans policies and “critical race theory” in schools compelled U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to ask the FBI and U.S. attorney’s offices to meet with federal and local law enforcement to “discuss strategies for addressing…the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel.”
In response, Youngkin, then running for Virginia governor, claimed that “the FBI is trying to silence parents” and centered his campaign around parents who wish to shut down progressive policies in public schools.
Members of the board received death threats from conservatives before the recent election.
“It is too bad that your Mama is an ugly communist whore,” read one letter addressed to the child of school board member Brenda Sheridan. “If she doesn’t quit or resign before the end of the year, we will kill her, but first, we will kill you!”
The letter came after rightwing media reported a story where they claimed that a girl was sexually assaulted by a boy in a Loudoun County school restroom. They claimed that it was a result of the district’s policy on transgender students, even though the policy hadn’t even been passed at the time of the sexual assault and the assailant was a cisgender boy.
The Recount’s Steve Morris compiled the reactions from multiple CNN correspondents and anchors covering the impending rail workers strike. The coverage focused almost entirely on how expensive it might be for consumers and businesses if the rail workers end up striking, how disruptive it’ll be for the economy, and how it could upend Christmas shopping just a month before the holidays.
This article is about the Covid mask controversy DeathSantis stirred up and pushed. He was trying hard to keep tourism up and working poor parents at their jobs by making sure their kids had a place to go while the parents worked. In places like Florida too many see school as a place to park their kids while they work, when the schools went to remote learning workers had to stay home. Rather than make large spaces available like wealthy areas did to have the kids go to and be spread out leaving the parents free to work, poor people had to have one parent stay home. DeathSantis felt the pain of the employers and business overlords and did everything he could to force schools to stay open with in person classroom learning with no Covid precautions. That would have cost the state money besides DeathSantis and the wealthy parents send their kids to private schools who do use the precautions so what do they care if your kids get sick, your elderly poor get sick and die. So this is the first nail in following science in Florida schools. What will die in Florida schools next? Biology? Chemistry? History most certainly, along with social studies. But enforced right wing Christian ideology will flourish. Hugs
New board members in two GOP-leaning counties essentially sacked their school superintendents over the span of one week.
Conservative school board candidates are in office — and are purging some educational leaders who enforced Covid-19 mandates.| Lynne Sladky/AP Photo
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis put his weight behind dozens of conservative school board candidates across Florida during the midterms. Now they’re in office — and are purging some educational leaders who enforced Covid-19 mandates.
New board members in two GOP-leaning counties essentially sacked their school superintendents over the span of one week. The ousters were spurred by how the superintendents carried out local policies like efforts to support the rights of parents, an issue inflamed by schools imposing student mask mandates last fall in defiance of DeSantis.
And while not tied to the 2022 election, the school board in Broward County earlier this month fired its superintendent through an effort led by five members appointed by DeSantis. All combined, school boards with ties to DeSantis pushed out three superintendents in November alone — and each of them served over districts that implemented student mask mandates.
“We had a wave in school districts that spit in parents’ faces,” said state Rep. Randy Fine (R-Palm Bay), who earlier this year sought to punish schools with mask mandates. “And now the people who did that are gone.”
In Brevard and Sarasota counties, embattled school leaders have faced immediate pressure from newly-installed board members and offered to leave voluntarily rather than risk a vote on their terminations.
The boards in both counties now have conservative majorities who sought a change in leadership immediately after the midterms. Although school boards are nonpartisan posts, lines between Democratic and Republican candidates were drawn in many counties through endorsements from each party as well as outside groups. The newly-elected board members in these cases support parental rights while opposing critical race theory and teaching gender orientation in schools.
DeSantis in particular used his clout to endorse more than two dozen school board candidates during the 2022 election cycle, a rare move for a Florida governor that came with $1,000 cash contributions from DeSantis and other GOP lawmakers. Most of the candidates DeSantis endorsed won their elections and are now transforming the make-up of school district leadership and will have huge influence over policies affecting hundreds of thousands of students in the state.
Both Sarasota and Brevard’s school boards put the superintendents on the chopping block the same day that new members endorsed by DeSantis and conservative organizations like Moms for Liberty were sworn into office.
Sarasota board members called Superintendent Brennan Asplen’s job into question at a meeting Tuesday night specially called to discuss his contract. After fielding about four hours of public comment, mostly in support of the superintendent, board members vented criticisms over student performance in reading, how he handled masking students and a perceived lack of transparency from Asplen.
Understanding he may not have a job much longer, Asplen offered up his resignation on Monday night — the day before the board met to weigh his ouster. But the superintendent also fought at the meeting to keep his job by attempting to punch holes in the critiques from board members.
“I have a feeling I’m going to be fired after tonight because I just can’t hold this back,” Asplentold the board from as a preface.
Asplensaid that some of the board’s comments were “ridiculous” given that he had been at the school since 2020, a timeframe that included the Covid-19 pandemic. And yet despite the coronavirus uprooting education, Sarasota earned “A” grades from the state both years. The superintendent also claimed he was being shut out by board members since the election and noted that he enacted a mandatory student masking policy for only three weeks, and that was due to Sarasota’s board voting 3-2 in favor of the mandate.
“You have to get the politics out of this school district,” Asplentold the board. “This school district could be No. 1, but we shoot ourselves in the foot every single time. We are getting in our own way all the time.”
It was clear after Asplenaddressed the board that a separation would be imminent. Board members said they felt the relationship with the schools chief was “adversarial” and beyond repair. Many of the claims by Asplenwere “not accurate,” according to new board chair Bridget Ziegler.
“I am very concerned,” said Zeigler, who was endorsed by DeSantis and co-founded Moms for Liberty. “I don’t know how respectfully we build a relationship where we are functioning together for the right reasons with mutual respect.”
One Sarasota board member, Thomas Edwards, noted the similarity between the pushes to remove school leaders in Florida and elsewhere in the country, including in Berkley County, South Carolina, where a newly-elected school board fired a superintendent. Edwards suggested a possible political motive behind the move and lobbied for Asplen to be granted a chance to fix issues spelled out by the board.
“Whatever rationales I’m going to hear tonight, I really have to throw out the window. Because we just have to — all of as a community — look at the tealeaves,” Edwards said.
But Edwards fell short of reaching the majority of the board, including the members endorsed by DeSantis and other conservatives, who voted 4-1 to move forward with negotiating a separation agreement with the schools chief.
The local teachers union in Sarasota planned a rally in support of Asplen ahead of the meeting Tuesday and dozens lined up to speak on his behalf. But local organizers in Brevard County didn’t demonstrate when its superintendent, Mark Mullins, was pushed out last week.
Instead, the Brevard Federation of Teachers contented that Mullins’ ouster could lead to positive changes within local schools. Union leaders claim that district officials did too little to quell student discipline issues and lingering teacher vacancies facing the county.
“Students verbally and physically abuse teachers and staff, and there will be no end in sight unless meaningful systemic changes are made,” union leaders wrote in a statement Monday on social media.
Similar to Sarasota, the leadership shift in Brevard was aided by new board members. Discussions to split with Mullins came at the suggestion of Megan Wright, who was backed in her race by DeSantis and installed on the board and elected vice chair about four hours before triggering the change.
Elsewhere in Florida, new board members endorsed by DeSantis are also scoring leadership roles. In Lee County, for example, new board members Armor Persons and Sam Fisher, both endorsed by DeSantis, were elected as chair and vice chair of the school board, as reported by the Fort Myers News-Press.
With at least three superintendent jobs opening in Florida, these new-look school boards are now facing the critical task of finding new leaders.
Teachers union leaders are staying optimistic that these board members will be focused on supporting educators and staff in local schools, said Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union. And in choosing a new superintendent, they hope board members will pick candidates who are aligned with the community and not only DeSantis.
“Firing is the easy part,” Spar said. “The hard part is finding the right person.”
The NHS is consulting on a new service specification for trans youth healthcare. (Getty)
Under new proposals from NHS commissioners, trans children could face impossible barriers to healthcare.
The NHS is replacing its sole dedicated gender clinic for young people, GIDS (Gender Identity Development Service), with two new regional pilot services as part of an ongoing process to reduce the spiralling wait times.
Although the LGBTQ+ community welcomes plans to expand services, recently released proposals have introduced gatekeeping measures that could make gender identity services harder to access for many young people, and which have been compared to conversion practices. The service seems to have been designed to reduce the number of young people transitioning as much as possible.
The Trans Learning Partnership together with Gendered Intelligence has produced an explanation of how we got here – and how you can help the trans community today.
How did we get here?
As pressure from the media and the government has fuelled anti-trans movements over the last few years, access to transition-related healthcare for children and adolescents has become a battleground.
Misinformation and fearmongering about gender identity services is rife, with the mainstream press claiming that gender-affirming care is too quick or too easy, or that young people have instant access to puberty delaying treatments and hormone therapies.
The Telegraph has published a number of scaremongering articles around puberty blockers. (The Telegraph/Getty)
This is a fantasy. It takes at least three years to get a first appointment at GIDS, and many more to receive further care. Young people who enter the services in their teens age out without a single appointment and are thrown straight back on a waiting list – for how long, no one knows. The reality is that gender identity services in the UK, particularly for young people, have been in freefall for years.
After GIDS came under fire for inadequate care, the NHS commissioned the Cass review. This independent review led by Dr Hilary Cass published an interim report in February 2022, which found a number of challenges to GIDS’ ability to deliver good care.
The NHS has since decided to close GIDS and replace it with two new regional hubs. In theory, these regional hubs should allow for more patients to be seen, and to be seen closer to home.
However, the proposals as written could end up hurting hundreds of trans children and their families.
What are the proposals?
There are a number of changes that the NHS is proposing. Some of these could be positive. For instance, expanding the teams that work with children and young people and improving integration with local services could provide more extensive support for service users.
But many of the changes point towards gatekeeping. The list of professionals who can make referrals to the service is being cut down. New referrals will require an assessment just to be put on the waiting list, extending wait times even further.
The proposals even go so far as to encourage doctors to intervene in social transition.
Protestors defending trans rights. (UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty/ Michael Siluk)
Under the new service, doctors could discourage prepubescent children from socially transitioning, or restrict adolescents from transition unless they meet certain criteria.
Social transition is not a medical intervention; it involves the social expression of gender such as changing name, pronouns, haircuts, and clothing choices, making intervention by doctors absurd and unenforceable in practice. Are doctors expected to police the clothing, haircuts, and behaviour of their young patients?
This approach runs counter to all the evidence and best practice recommendations by global experts. Supporting children to socially transition leads to depression and anxiety levels that are the same as their cis peers as teenagers – this is really significant, as trans teenagers often have elevated levels of depression and anxiety compared to their peers.
The evidence doesn’t lie, trans children who are supported in social transition continue to hold their identity, and are much happier and healthier for it. There is no evidence that social transition is harmful.
Restricting social transition could arguably amount to a form of conversion practices.
Trans youth have often found their lives reduced to a culture war by politicians. (Belinda Jlao/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
While the UK government continues to delay bringing forward a ban on conversion practices, over 25 health, counselling, and psychotherapy organisations have created a Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy, providing a definition of conversion practices in the UK.
This definition recognises that conversion practices are “any model… [which] seeks to suppress an individual’s expression of sexual orientation or gender identity” on the basis that one orientation or identity is preferable to others.
Restricting social transition would be tantamount to suppressing an individual’s gender identity and expression, and suggesting that a cisgender identity is preferable.
Puberty blockers
Under the proposals, puberty blockers will only be accessible via the NHS with mandatory enrolment onto long-term research programmes. This would require children and young people to be part of a clinical trial to access essential care that is clinically indicated for them (and is not in line with ethical standards for healthcare research).
There are also serious concerns for those who access puberty blockers or hormones from sources other than the NHS. The proposals state that anyone accessing the service who is using medications “from unregulated sources or from on-line providers that are not regulated by UK regulatory bodies” will be discouraged from doing so, the NHS will not enter into any shared care agreements, and “will advise the GP to initiate local safeguarding protocols”.
The NHS has a duty to reduce avoidable harm. Like many medications, taking unmanaged puberty delaying or hormonal drugs can be unsafe, and regular blood tests are needed to monitor health and adjust doses as needed. In refusing to do this, the NHS is putting children and young people at risk of avoidable harm, when instead they could ensure that these children and young people are being properly prescribed and monitored.
The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) clinic at Tavistock and Portman is set to close after the Cass review criticised wait times. (Getty)
In fact, if the NHS refuses to take over a young person’s care, and at the same time advises them to stop taking medications, they could forcibly detransition vulnerable young people, causing serious psychological harm and leaving them without medical support.
The proposals conflate three sources that they imply are all dangerous to receive medications from: unregulated sources online such as pharmacies and distributors, private practitioners and overseas care are all treated as “unregulated”. These range so much that they cannot reasonably all be treated as unsafe. In fact, gender specialists working in NHS clinics often have their own private practices too.
Threatening desperate families with unnecessary interventions from social services, just for supporting their own children, is not going to make anyone safe. No explanation has been given for these safeguarding concerns.
Not only does this punish families for turning to alternative services to meet their children’s needs, it also risks an influx of unnecessary safeguarding reports that will overwhelm the already-stretched social care sector. This will take time away from families who are in genuine need of support.
We aren’t alone in these worries. This weekend, the Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) released a damning statement, highlighting that in their advised approach – which the NHS is not taking – the benefits outweigh the risks, “when transgender and cisgender people are correctly regarded as equal”. It is clear from this statement that the NHS commissioners are travelling in the opposite direction to the global best practice on trans healthcare.
Click here to read Gendered Intelligence’s full guide to the NHS consultation and to find more about how you can respond.
Dr Kris Taylor has spent years studying the relationship between men and porn, including those in the NoFap community who’ve sworn off porn and masturbation altogether. He tells Don Rowe what he’s learnt.
There’s an old (and sadly false) urban legend that Kellogg’s corn flakes were created as the ideal breakfast to prevent masturbatory urges. Less true still are dark prophecies of hairy palms, irreversible blindness and severe mental illnesses on the horizon for the self-pleasurer. For the most part we all know by now that masturbation is a natural part of growing up, totally normal and generally a pretty good time.
But similarly ominous stories about the consequences of viewing pornography profligate like crusty socks on a bedroom floor: addiction, impotence, sex-crazed teenagers running amok. According to the University of Auckland’s Dr Kris Taylor, though, a lot of the fear is predicated on the same flimsy hypotheses and hysteria that had Mr Kellogg warning of gluttony’s effect on chastity. The evidence, he says, just isn’t there.
“It’s hard to get people to give an honest response when you’re talking about where they get their sexual ideas from,” he says. “But pornography has become a bit of a scapegoat for the larger problem of masculine entitlement, sexism and misogyny.”
Taylor’s PhD examined the concept of pornography addiction in men, surveying more than 200 people across Aotearoa between the ages of 15 and 83. He has since published widely on perceptions of reality in porn more broadly. Much of the more rigorous work in the academic field focuses on women, he says, and there is a lack of complexity in studies of the ways in which men and teenage boys navigate porn. Taylor’s work suggests that while some men struggled with their porn use, actual addiction (in the diagnostic sense) to porn is itself a fiction.
“It’s not recognised by large diagnostic bodies in psychology and mental health classifications,” he says. “What I was really interested in was, if we don’t have an official diagnosis, then how are people using that label?” Taylor says the language of addiction is often used by viewers of pornography to diminish feelings of moral, ethical and even religious conflict. Masturbation can induce a sense of shame, and compulsive sexual behaviours can then be explained away as an addiction.
Dr Kris Taylor appears in Chris and Eli’s Porn Revolution (Photo: Hex Work Productions)
There is also an assumption, Taylor says, that ubiquitous smartphone ownership has opened the floodgates to porn consumption. That behind every door is a teenage boy drinking in the most extreme content on the internet. And that this consumption is creating a generation of dangerous perverts, simultaneously unable to perform in bed and more frequently drawn to high risk sexual behaviour. But a lack of data means researchers struggle to predict the true rate of change, and the chain of behavioural causality goes both ways: a viewer already interested in more extreme sexual acts will likely seek out porn that reflects that.
“For me, the question of whether pornography is causing [that behaviour] is redundant because the real issue are the underlying questions as to why people don’t seek consent, why they might be more attracted to violence,” says Taylor. “Those are the more sticky questions as opposed to a ‘monkey-see, monkey-do’ hypothesis which is too simple for my liking.”
But whether clinically recognised as a harmful habit or not, some viewers of porn gravitate towards online communities that preach abstinence as both desirable and advantageous. NoFap (“fap” being onomatopoeic slang for the act of male masturbating) is something akin to Alcoholics Anonymous, a support group with strikingly similar overtones of mysticism. There are one million members on Reddit’s r/NoFap forum and another 300,000 on NoFap’s standalone website, the vast majority of which Taylor says are men.
Adherents believe refraining from watching porn is a form of self-mastery and cite a since-retracted study showing spikes in testosterone for the abstinent. There is little evidence to back up many of the group’s claims and some academics believe the movement perpetuates harmful and reductionist views on porn and masturbation. Worrying, too, is a current of chauvinism which flows through the community.
The official NoFap logo
Taylor began researching the community in 2016 and says that while members of the community often see the benefits of self-discipline flowing into other areas of their life, the emphasis on pseudoscience and flawed perceptions of human sexuality sets some up for failure. “Instead of saying that they want to abstain because they think that pornography is sexist, one of the main thing that comes through is that they tend to abstain for reasons that tend to do with gaining what they describe as ‘superpowers’.”
By giving up on masturbation, the theory goes, men will become more attractive to women, more focused, more aggressive. The community has its own vocabulary: the abstinent are “fapstronauts”, refraining is to “reboot”. There is a lot of despair, says Taylor, and an undeniable level of camaraderie in overcoming what the afflicted see as a real problem. The framework is overwhelmingly heterosexual in its presentation and positions pornography as fundamentally unmasculine. Real men, the community seems to think, have dominant, penetrative sex.
“A lot of it is to do with this fear of real achievement in men coming down to being able to attract partners to have sex with, which is generally the main goal,” says Taylor. “That overlaps quite problematically with incel and other communities online, where the idea is that your life will become better if you have sex with a woman.”
While NoFap is ostensibly secular, the idea of semen retention does have a proud monastic history. Everyone from Buddhists to Gnostics have a tradition of self-denial as a method of self-mastery. But Taylor says that modern solutions like NoFap are a response to a lack of education around pornography and sexuality rather than any sort of ascetic pursuit. “Abstinence itself is a very masculine way to deal with your issues, it’s very cut and dried, as opposed to being a little more introspective and reflective. It puts a massive amount of importance on penises and semen as key factors in how human relations are supposed to operate.”
The real problem, he says, is much deeper. “We have a very poor understanding generally as a society around things like consent and a reliance on ‘just say no’ language, which doesn’t work.”
Episode one: Understanding our porn past and present.
Special session debating on banning abortion, in Indianapolis© Thomson Reuters
FILE PHOTO: Special session to debate banning abortion in Indianapolis© Thomson Reuters
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Scottie's Playtime 