Let’s be clear about what he is doing. Everything that has our hair standing on end are trial balloons and if he can get away with them uncontested he will do the exact and worse if allowed in WH. He is #45 on steroids
Just replace the word “woke” with “black people/women/immigrants/LGBT people/Jews” and you can hear what DeSantis is actually saying. This guy needs to be defeated in November. pic.twitter.com/tYPDmqPCGE
There is a reason that anti-trans people like Tildeb ignore the accepted US mainstream medical best practices that support supportive trans care and instead use misinformation from the UK is the UK has a lot of highly influential vocal maga type trans haters that have managed to force the government to change polices and have attacked trans health issues in court. They use misinformation, right wing media pushed lies, debunked science, and incorrect / incomplete fake studies. This article lays out the full information. I found this paragraph especally informatiove as I have heard these very things put in the comments of my posts. Hugs
The report found many actors “share a zerosum conception of rights” even though many seem to have “very different” or “even radically opposing” political agendas in many respects. This conception included the predominant belief “for one community’s rights to be respected and protected, another community must be excluded from rights protections”.
Right-wing figures are the “most influential group” mobilising the anti-trans movement, even without factoring in their “tremendous power to set the media agenda”. (Belinda Jiao/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty)
Right-wing figures are among the “most influential” groups pushing anti-trans agendas in the UK media, according to an eye-opening report.
The report, published by Global Action for Trans Equality (GATE), mapped how the anti-trans movement is mobilising the UK.
GATE said the report, part of the advocacy organisation’s broader mapping project, focused on the UK as one of the “global hotspots” where anti-trans movements have “enjoyed increased efficacy in the past few years”.
The project mapped 368 anti-trans and linked actors in the UK and internationally, including figures in the right-leaning media, UK religious right, US religious and neo-conservative right, trans-exclusionary feminists/LGB actors, and the alt/far-right.
These people were linked to campaigning groups, individuals, publishers, media organisations, commentators, authors, publications, political parties and groups, social media platforms and more.
The report analysed the 1,036 relationships between these figures and how they interacted with each other. Their relationships could be through activities such as employment, campaigning, interviews and panels, or co-authorship and collaborating in legal funds.
The report found anti-trans movements in the UK have become “significantly larger, more visible and more effective” since 2015/2016 to the present day. GATE said the organisation saw a “dramatic increase in anti-trans content and activity in UK media and politics” starting in 2015.
A report by Global Action for Trans Equality highlighted how the UK is one of the “global hotspots” where anti-trans sentiment has grown in recent years. (Belinda Jiao/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty)
It found there is an “important driving role played by right-wing groups” and that the actors in these groups “interlink with much of the UK media, commentariat, wider political class and traditional conservative groups”. They were also linked with “parts of the left-leaning media and political class”.
GATE saw there had been a “marked rise in anti-gender mobilisations” that coincided with efforts by trans and broader LGBTQ+ campaigners pushing for legal and policy reform. Notably, this included efforts to “prioritise advocacy around legal gender recognition” from 2015.
At the same time, GATE saw there was “rising influence and activities” within the right/media on trans rights and related issues in the UK.
People in these groups constituted a “large coalition of the right/media” that is the “most influential” block in the mapping of how the anti-trans movement has mobilised across the UK.
“This group is closely enmeshed with (and also constituted by) key conservative and centrist media, and a smaller range of left-wing media,” the report said. “[This group] is the most populous group on the map and has the highest density of social relations.”
The report continued: “They are by far the most influential group, even without factoring in their tremendous power to set the media agenda, reach audiences, and influence policy and legal change. Indeed, many of these actors actually are media, government, and wider policy-makers (eg key UK think tanks, NGOs, and foundations linked to policymaking).
“The vast majority of these actors were not producing content about trans issues prior to 2015.”
The report found many actors “share a zerosum conception of rights” even though many seem to have “very different” or “even radically opposing” political agendas in many respects. This conception included the predominant belief “for one community’s rights to be respected and protected, another community must be excluded from rights protections”.
The report found anti-trans mobilisations directly target the trans community and others, sending them into “often bruising battles”. (Getty/Hollie Adams)
GATE found all groups in the mapping were “generally, anti-intersectional” and “critical of younger social movements”. The report concluded many actors believe they are “true victims” of an “excessively liberal new status quo”.
“In this and other cases, we can also see that anti-gender mobilisations directly attack target communities – sending marginalised communities into localised, often bruising battles, and away from a focus on broader drivers and conditions for change,” the research found.
It added: “Indeed, oftentimes, anti-gender frames invoke a fearful, austere, and limiting world in which, apparently, rights are in short supply, dangerous characters and coercive industries lurk in the shadows, and ‘our’ most basic freedoms are under attack on all sides.”
GATE concluded few people benefit from “this way of understanding politics, society, culture and economics”. As such, the organisation said it “amounts to a race to the bottom”, which “places a wide range of rights at risk”.
The mapping highlighted an incentive for trans and allied groups to look beyond the current “limiting line of sight” and the “negative focus and effects of backlash” to potential new alliances.
The report also said a need to develop campaigning approaches which can “de-centre, disrupt” and speak past the “core messages of anti-gender actors” – which rely “strongly on fear based messaging and anger-based mobilisation”.
“This could include alternative agenda (and role) setting and framing approaches, considering a focus on hope-based communications, material needs of trans communities, and the importance of collaboration and solidarity,” GATE said.
Trans and allied groups should address the fearmongering and disinformation through “supporting fact-checking resources, effective rebuttal and improved standards” among reporters.
I keep posting on this subject of school officials outing kids for a reason. First this is not being pushed by teachers but instead by administrators, district level people, and school boards. All people that do not have daily contact with the students / kids and don’t know which ones have rough home lives or parents who would react badly to the news. The ones pushing this are really acting on misinformation and bigotry. This is going to get kids hurt and harmed. Some parents will throw the young kids out of the house, force some of them to live like hermits with no friends or social support, force some into conversion therapy which is simply torture to force a person to act differently because sexual orientation and gender identity cannot be changed even by torture. Or get the kids killed either by making them a target or by suicide. Look just a few years ago there was a college student who killed himself because his roommate recorded him having sex with another man and the gay student was terrified his parents and others would find out he was gay. Simple fact is if a kid who lives with these parents / people don’t think it is safe for them to come out to them, they are in the best position to know. It is a matter of personal rights that people should only come out to live openly as they feel comfortable doing. This mandatory reporting of an out kids to parents also destroys the students trust of their teachers and also denies the student resources they need to understand themselves and their world. Remember these laws that are implemented by maga republican governors also remove any books with information or characters that are LGBTQ+. It is plunging the LGBTQ+ back into the black hole void of the 1950s. Hugs
One teacher told her students not to come out to her: “I don’t want to come home every night and know that I may have contributed to one of my students being harmed.”
A June 12, 2022 protest of Don’t Say Gay law in New York City.Photo: Shutterstock
The Sarasota County School district adopted a new policy in the wake of the Don’t Say Gay law that requires teachers to out students to their parents if they identify as LGBTQ and to seek parental permission to refer to transgender students with the correct name or pronouns.
The new policy says: “If a student tells us that (they) are gay/gender questioning/trans, etc parent must be notified.”
A screenshot of a flow chart that illustrates the process a student must follow to be referred to with the correct name and pronouns was leaked to WUSF. It shows that a teacher must contact administration if a student asks the teacher to refer to them with a certain name or pronouns.
The administration will then contact the student’s parents to get consent for referring to the student correctly. If the parents don’t give consent, staff must deadname and misgender the student. If they do give consent, they have to meet with school administration to develop and sign a “gender support plan.”
School board member Bridget Ziegler, who supports the policy change, compared outing LGBTQ kids to informing parents that their child has been suspended.
“What if a child was saying, ‘Hey, my parents are really strict, I’m afraid to tell them that I got a suspension.’ Why is it different? It’s not,” she told the Herald-Tribune.
One teacher said that the plan changes how she interacts with students.
“I have several kids that are transgender that have preferred names,” said Gail Foreman of Booker High School. “And you know, we had to tell them, if you want to use your preferred name, I have got to call guidance, and they’re going to get a hold of your parents, and then your parents are going to meet with guidance. So guys, don’t say anything to me, if you’re not out at home.”
Foreman said that she doesn’t want to have to out students at all to their parents because of potential child abuse and suicide.
“If they get ahold of the parent, the parent comes into school, we believe everything’s all hunky dory, and that kid goes home,” she explained. “And then we get a call that the kid’s committed suicide, that kid’s in the hospital because the parent beat the snot out of them. I don’t want to come home every night and know that I may have contributed to one of my students being harmed.”
Derek Reich teaches history at Sarasota High School and said that the district told him he’s not even allowed to call students by nicknames without parental permission.
“This last week, our school district told us that look, Jonathan, whose government name is Jonathan, if you want to call him anything else — like his friends call him John, his parents call him John. If you want to call him by his nickname, John, you have to get a permission slip for him to call any student that wants to be called by something other than their official name on their birth certificate,” he said.
“So there are so many minor things that teachers are concerned about. If I can’t call Jonathan ‘John,’ when everyone in his family does without getting a permission slip signed, that’s a really difficult place to be as a teacher,” Reich added.
The Don’t Say Gay law was passed earlier this year and bans discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in younger grades and requires such discussions to be “developmentally appropriate” in older grades. The law has been criticized for being vague – instead of defining those terms, it simply allows parents to sue school districts if they feel that the law has been violated.
The law also prohibits schools from withholding certain information from parents.
A new study has found that the vast majority of people who come out as trans at a young age continue to identify as trans. (Envato/PinkNews)
A new study has fund that 97.5 per cent of children who come out as trans continue to identify as trans or non-binary after five years.
The research looked at the statistics of 317 early childhood social transitioners – 208 trans girls and 109 trans boys – and examined the rate at which these adolescents would “retransition” either to their gender assigned at birth or to a non-binary identity.
It found that over an average of five years after the beginning of their social transition, around 7.1 per cent had “retransitioned” at least once. Almost half of that figure – 3.5 per cent – began identifying as non-binary, rather than with a binary gender identity.
The percentage included a small group – around 1.3 per cent – of youths who had retransitioned to another identity before returning back to their original binary trans identity. Another 2.5 per cent of those who retransitioned went back to identifying as cisgender.
By the end of that period, around 94 per cent identified with a binary trans identity.
An activist raises a placard saying ‘protect trans kids’ during a protest. (Getty/Anatoliy Cherkasov)
Interestingly, the most common point where a child would choose to retransition occurred before the age of 10, while detransitions – where a person goes back to identifying with their assigned gender – occurred with kids whose social transition started before the age of six.
“The results suggest that retransitions are infrequent,” the article’s conclusion said. “More commonly, transgender youth who socially transitioned at early ages continued to identify that way.
“Nonetheless, understanding retransitions is crucial for clinicians and families to help make retransitions as smooth as possible.”
The sample of low retransition rates is consistent with a similar study that researchers cited, which spanned a seven-year period and found that most who had social transitioned did not retransition.
The introduction of the study includes a section on claims that the rise in trans youth seeking care is a direct result of social pressure caused by what anti-LGBTQ+ pundits typically call the “trans agenda”.
Groups that push this claim include the notorious gender-critical group Transgender Trend, which claims that youth who are “suffering from gender dysphoria” have been pressured by a trend of “the subjective idea of gender identity” to identify as trans.
Other organisations have also claimed that AFAB trans adolescents are disproportionately targeted by these pressures to become other trans men or non-binary in some capacity.
But, as the conclusion of the study conducted by Jack L. Turban, Brett Dolotina, Dana King, and Alex S. Keuroghlian stated, “there appears to be no disparity between trans youth”.
“The sex assigned at birth ratio of TGD (transgender and gender diverse) adolescents in the United States does not appear to favour AFAB adolescents and should not be used to argue against the provision of gender-affirming medical care for TGD adolescents,” it added.
It also found that rates of victimisation and suicidality were clearly higher among trans youth when compared to cis peers despite groups like Transgender Trend questioning the commonly used statistics showing the shockingly high number of suicides among transgender people.
Hundreds of dictionaries earmarked for donation from a Venice Rotary Club sit collecting dust, precluded from being given to Sarasota County students. Even dictionaries aren’t safe from the Sarasota Schools book freeze.
Ahead of the 2022-23 school year, the Sarasota County School District stopped all donations and purchases of books for school libraries while it waits for additional guidance from the Florida Department of Education about how to navigate the effects of new education laws.
The freeze comes as HB 1467 took effect July 1, requiring all reading material in schools to be selected by an employee with a valid education media specialist certificate. The district was still looking to hire three media specialists to vet books as of Friday.
Hundreds of dictionaries that the Venice Rotary Club has donated to the Sarasota school system for years, have been held up so they can be properly screened under Desantis’s new law to ensure they don’t contain any improper material. https://t.co/qasphO2h7Z
And as always, the right wing Cubans who scream about the horrors of Castro say nothing as someone else does all the same vile shit he did in controlling thoughts, media etc.
This is a smart move Florida is creating it’s own servant case of undereducated minorities to staff the hotels, parks and nursing homes. Florida thinking of the bleak future Floridians deserve!
DeSantis would, if he could, make all of his Florida “woke” nightmare national. If he gets into the White House, rest assured his Secretary of Education will institute “Don’t Say Gay” nationwide.
DeSantis is every bit as evil and malevolent as Trump — but with one big difference:
requiring all reading material in schools to be selected by an employee with a valid education media specialist certificate. The district was still looking to hire three media specialists to vet books as of Friday.
“Not our fault that your school has no books, there are no Florida Certified Specialists available to check that they’re okay! Because we haven’t hired them. But surely you can see that really this is all Biden’s fault, because CRT and BLM and wokeness are obviously the real problem here.” Does that about sum it up?
So if he become president, is going to screen the internet for things he does not like? Does anybody read books anymore, since most are on the internet?
Teachers were using the rainbow flag stickers to signal to kids a safe space / classroom they could go to for protection from bullies or if they had a question about being LGBTQ+ they did not feel they could ask their parents or adults. The right must make sure these safe space signals are gone and the kids who need that space are denied them. Right now the right are coming for the LGBTQ+ and the black minority communities. Then they will come for others they don’t like, the Jewish people will be targeted, the Muslims will be targeted, as will even other sects of Christianity the fundies don’t think are the right way to worship. Notice that most of the people wanted to get rid of the policy. They wanted the rainbow flags to stay. But the board has an agenda to push. Hugs
A Wisconsin school board has voted in favor of a policy that prohibits teachers and staff from displaying gay pride flags and other items that district officials consider political in nature
WALES, Wis. —A Wisconsin school board voted in favor of a policy that prohibits teachers and staff from displaying gay pride flags and other items that district officials consider political in nature.
The Kettle Moraine School Board voted Tuesday to keep a code of conduct in place that the superintendent recently interpreted as forbidding district employees from displaying political or religious messages, including pride flags, and Black Lives Matter and We Back the Badge signs. Staff also may not say in emails what their preferred pronouns are.
Superintendent Stephen Plum recently told the board that the district’s interpretation of a policy that prohibits staffers from using their positions to promote partisan politics, religious views and propaganda for personal, monetary or nonmonetary gain changed following a legal analysis.
Jim Romanowski was the only board member to vote against the ban, saying he changed his mind about the policy after hearing from students and staff.
Most of those who spoke at Tuesday’s packed board meeting opposed the policy. The public comment period was capped at an hour, despite a call from the crowd to extend it.
“If you have a policy that says ‘nothing political,’ does that mean you can’t have a sign up that says, ‘Support our Troops,’ or ‘Believe Women’ or ‘Save the Planet?’ By some people’s definitions, all of those things are political,” said Christine Donahoe, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin.
Donahoe said she’s looking closely at the policy and a similar one approved last fall by the school district in nearby Waukesha.
“It really looks like targeted attacks at specific viewpoints, like LGBT communities, or welcome and safe spaces to students of color,” said Donahoe.
More than 13,000 people have signed an online petition opposing the Kettle Moraine policy that was launched by two local high school students, Bethany Provan and Brit Farrar.
“Having a rainbow flag in your room isn’t pushing your beliefs on someone,” Provan told WITI-TV. “It’s just saying, ‘Hey, you’re welcome here, and we support you.’”
I am braced. I have opened up my job search to include jobs outside academia and outside music because I fear it’s not going to be safe to live or work where I currently live for much longer. We’ll see how the November election goes but I don’t have much hope that a Democrat can win in this state.
Pride 🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈 aren’t political, they’re pieces of cloth that save lives. The message that LGBTQ kids and teachers hear from this decision is: You don’t matter.
“Heather has two mommies” isn’t sexually explicit material either, but they still get books banned in libraries / school districts by pretending it is and riling up busybodies.
I could post 3 to5 of these stories a day. Most of them I must avoid reading as most of you can understand. But this one caught my eye because of the number of charges and the method. This is the real meaning of grooming; Grooming is a method used by offenders that involves building trust with a child to allow the perp more access and opportunity to abuse them. The republicans and right wing media are hammering that teachers are grooming the children by allowing them to come out in schools, using the correct pronouns / names of trans gender kids, and allowing age appropriate information / discussion of gender and LGBTQ+ content. The real intent of the right is an attempt to destroy both public education along with any tolerance / acceptance of the LGBTQ+ while creating a hostile environment for gay, lesbian, and trans kids. What this guy does works on kids that have been denied sex education and the ability to talk openly with adults about sexual issues. This guy would have failed with this if these kids were not made to feel so ashamed of their bodies that they would do anything to avoid a picture of their junk to be seen by friends or parents. This is what happens when kids are taught to just say no or are not taught how to address when they have desires / needs that have to be addressed. If you read the article the guy would claim to be a girl, boys desperate to see a nude girl would send him pictures of their dicks and balls. Girls do it also. Gay and lesbian kids fall pray to this also. So the perp then tells the kids they will send the nude pictures of their privates to their friends and parents unless the kid shows more and does sexual acts like masturbating or inserting something in themselves. Remember I posted about another youth pastor that would do this and then would arrange to be with the boy and mother when he sent the most explicit videos to the boy’s mother. He loved the mother’s reactions and took great enjoyment in the boy’s embarrassment and future punishments. Hugs
A Burlington County man who served as a youth pastor has been indicted on charges that he sexually exploited underage boys, deceiving them into sending him explicit images, then blackmailing them into performing lewd acts so he could watch and record them remotely, authorities said Friday.
Sean Higgins, 31, of Palmyra, has been in custody since he was arrested in October 2020. He is accused of victimizing 13 boys ages 12 to 17 who were living in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Alabama, Michigan, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Tennessee.
A grand jury this week indicted Higgins on 75 total counts that included charges of endangering the welfare of a child, aggravated sexual assault, criminal sexual contact, cyber harassment, and obscenity to a minor.
Higgins adopted the persona of a teenage girl he named Julie Miller and then used Snapchat and Instagram to start talking with underage boys, the prosecutor said.
After a bond was forged between ‘Julie Miller’ and each of the underage boys, Higgins “would suggest that they trade photos. Higgins would then send pictures” of an unidentified teenage girl, the prosecutor’s office stated.
Higgins would take a screenshot of the teenage boys’ friends who were listed on their phones, “send that screenshot back to the victim and threaten to send the nude photos he had just received to the list of the victim’s friends unless the victim did exactly what Higgins demanded,” the prosecutor’s office stated.
Daily News | Burlington County youth pastor charged with sexual exploitation of juveniles https://t.co/vQWX8UnkIi
I can imagine the terror those poor boys felt when they realized they were deceived and family and friends might find out. That sick pedo needs to do years of prison time.
A June 12, 2022 protest of Don’t Say Gay law in New York City.Photo: Shutterstock
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