A Racist Training Program for The US Navy
By Capt Joseph R. John, June 26, 2021: Op Ed # 563
“Recent comments by General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, demonstrate his willingness to support the venom of leftist ideology, and particularly its “anti-white” bigotry, under the same guise of “Critical Race Theory.” Among the troops, is a disaster, destroying “Combat Effectiveness”, “Unite Cohesion”, creating dangerous racial fractions in the US Armed Forces, and destroying the once color blind military. Such upheavals within military ranks are untenable and will only undermine morale, gravely diminishing all military capabilities. Communist China, Marxist Russia, and Iran’s Islamic Terrorists are laughing while they expand their militaries.
What must be clearly understood about the enlistment oath, the every member of the US Armed Forces takes, is that the ultimate pledge is not to any person or cabal, but to the Constitution of the United States of America. It is not a vow of blind allegiance, negating any other law or premise of right and wrong, mindlessly doing the bidding of whoever claims to be in power at the time. First and foremost, American military personnel are swearing to never willingly engage in any activity that would do harm to the Republic they serve. Yet on an ever increasing basis, that is what is being demanded of those who take the oath, at the hands of the Biden, Harris, Obama cabal and its minions among the self-serving “political” class of military leaders in the Pentagon. What Milley, a truly corrupt and dishonest member of the deep state, is demanding of all military personnel, is that they violate their enlistment oath; a self-serving Milley realizes he either follows the Biden, Harris, and Obama Administration dictates that are destroying the color blind US military, or be removed from his high paying position.
Here’s a little insight for General Milley, and any of the other Joint Chiefs, like the woke Chief of Naval Operations referred to in the below listed article who align themselves with the ant-white racist Critical Race Theory. “Critical Race Theory” is the ultimate wolf in sheep’s clothing. It is not about promoting equality among all the differing ethnicities who comprise “We the People.” It is about presuming “total guilt” among “one” race, “White Americans”, and invoking that as justification for every form of unfettered bigotry and racial discord from leftist blacks and other minorities who are willing to pile on and vilify all whites.”
(Joint Chiefs Demand Military Personnel Violate Enlistment Oath; Christopher G. Adamo | Jun 25, 2021)
If you click on the below listed link, read the article by Daniel Greenfield, and watch the slanted video prepared by the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Michael Gilday, you will understand that the Domestic Enemies of the United States Constitutional Republic are now running the Department of Defense while destroying the “Combat Effectiveness” and “Unit Cohesion” of Obama’s new “Woke” Navy. The article that opens, when you click the link, outlines the Racist Training Program that US Domestic Enemies have put in place.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/racist-training-program-us-navy-daniel-greenfield/
The long term goals of the Racist Training Program, are outlined in the below listed article by Daniel John Sobieski, that follows the text of this Op Ed. The goal of the Racial Training Program is to drive highly qualified white Conservative, Christian, and Constitutionalists career members of the US Armed Forces who voted for President Trump out of the US Armed Forces. The Domestic Enemies of the United States have been recruiting non-white Progressives, Leftists, Socialists, Marxists, and Transgender/Gay recruits, to replace the highly qualified white Conservative, Christian, and Constitutionalist’s career members of the US Armed Forces who are being marginalized, so they will never be selected for promotion, and out of frustration, will be driven out of the US Armed Forces.
Why have Republicans, led by McConnell and McCarthy, done absolutely “nothing at all” to prevent Biden, Harris, Obama, Pelosi, and Schumer from destroying the “Combat Effectiveness and “Unit Cohesion” of every branch of the US Armed Forces? It is being done to the delight of Communist China, Marxist Russia, and the Iran’s Radical Islamic Terrorists. Those three countries are feverishly expanding their armies and navies in preparation to invade Taiwan, to destroy the US Navy, and to then take control of a weakened United States with the support of their Socialist allies, the US Domestic Enemies in the United States.
While the rapid buildup of the Chinese Communist and Russian Navies is underway, Biden, Harris, and Obama have just cut back the long-range plans, put in place by the Trump Administration, to expand the US Navy Fleet of combat ships. The growing Chinese Communist Navy currently has 350 ships. For the first time in history, the US Navy with 293 ships, is smaller than the Communist Chinese Navy. The Communist Chinese Navy is rapidly building a modernized and technical sophisticated fleet; it has its third aircraft carrier under construction, with plans to build four additional aircraft carriers.
Republicans in Congress, led by McConnell and McCarthy, are focused on raising donations to fund their 2022 mid-term Congressional campaigns, believing that will be the key to winning the 2022 mid-term Congressional elections. It appears, eight months after the 2020 election, that extraordinarily little action has been taken to eliminate the Communist Chinese owned Dominion Voting Machines installed in 31 states, that count the votes on election day. Failure to be involved in an all-consuming full court press, to remove the Communist Chinese voting machines, will be disastrous in the 2022 Congressional Mi-term elections. It leads one to believe that McConnell and McCarthy have learned little from the election theft that occurred in the 2020 election, when Communist Chinese Dominion Voting Machines vote totals were changed via the Internet, late on election night when most voters were sleeping, with the help of their Socialist US Domestic Enemies allied with Communist China.
On the 2022 election day, the Communist Chinese Dominion Voting Machines will, once again, be connected via the Internet directly to Communist Chinese operatives offshore, working with their Socialist US Domestic Enemies, who will allow Communist China to change the vote totals in each of the 31 states, at will, late on election night, to flip the vote totals once again, ensuring Socialist Democrats will steal the 2022 mid-term Congressional election. Massive voter fraud and Ballot Harvesting will once again be perpetrated by Pelosi and Schumer with Socialist Democrats in 50 states.
If in November 2022, the same Communist Chinese owned Dominion Voting Machines are used in the 31 states that employed those machines to count the vote totals on election night, then the result of that election will be a repeat of how Communist China and their US Socialist Democrat allies stole the 2020 presidential election, when state officials, not the state legislatures, also conducted the election in those battleground states in violation of Federal Election Laws and the US Constitution. American Citizens have 17 short months, to convince McConnell and McCarthy to “do something, do anything”, to remove the Communist Chinese owned Dominion Voting Machines from 31 states, or the US Constitutional Republic will become a Socialist State under the control of Communist China’s allies in the House and Senate.
Joseph R. John, USNA ‘62
Capt USN(Ret)/Former FBI
Chairman, Combat Veterans For Congress PAC
2307 Fenton Parkway, Suite 107-184
San Diego, CA 92108
https://www.CombatVeteransForCongress.org
https://www.facebook.com/combatveteransforcongress?ref=hl
Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!” -Isaiah 6:8
The Constitutional Conservatives
Chief Of Naval Operations: “I Have Not Yet Begun To Be Woke”
Daniel John Sobieski
June 18, 2021
Or should his title be chief of navel-gazing operations? Someone should tell Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday that he has just one job – to manage and deploy the ships of the United States Navy in such a way to guarantee our freedom of the seas and to deny the enemy the use of those seas to attack the United States, sending enemy fleets to the bottom of those seas if necessary in time of war.
He is a military warrior. He is not a social justice warrior. Diversity to him, if I may be so bold as to use a gender pronoun, should be the proper mix of aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers and submarines needed to fight America’s naval battles and project American power to defend our homeland and our allies. China and Russia don’t fear the diversity of our crews or the ethnicity and gender of the finger that launches that Tomahawk missile only their ability to fight and win battles.
But no, instead of preparing our fleets for battle, Admiral Gilday is damning the torpedoes and going full speed ahead on pushing Critical Race Theory on the Navy by putting a book espousing Critical Race Theory on the Navy’s reading list for sailors. His recent testimony before Congress shows us the trouble we’re in”
Adm. Michael M. Gilday, the Chief of Naval Operations, did not answer questions Tuesday about whether author-activist Ibram X. Kendi’s opposition to interracial adoption and capitalism is extreme.
But, Gilday did tell the House Armed Services Committee that Kendi’s controversial book “How to Be an Antiracist” would lead to “a better Navy” by promoting more discussion on racism in America.
Kendi is Director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, and his book contends that America is a fundamentally racist country.
At the hearing, Cong Jim Banks, Lt/USNR (R-IN-3), an endorsed Combat Veteran For Congress, teed up a question to Gilday by noting that “the Navy recently completed a one-day ‘stand-down’ to remove extremism from the ranks.”
“In my view, Kendi has espoused extremist beliefs that clearly violate the oath to the Constitution I took when I served in the Navy,” Banks said….
“Let me ask you again, Admiral: Do you expect that after sailors read this book that says that the United States Navy is racist, that we will increase or decrease morale or cohesion and recruiting rates into the United States Navy?”
Gilday replied: “I think we’ll be a better Navy from having open, honest conversations about racism.”
The U.S. military is in fact the greatest meritocracy in the world. In the best tradition of Martin Luther King it judges people on the content of their character and their ability to fight, not the color of their skin. This book Gilday is pushing on sailors does not improve military preparedness or morale. Who wants to fight and die for a fundamentally racist country?
Here’s some fact, not theory, for Admiral Gilday. The Chinese and Russians want to be our oppressors. They want us to be oppressed by them. Preparing for that end, Russia recently held naval exercises off Hawaii:
Russian ships are conducting the largest military exercises since the Cold War off the coast of Hawaii, sending the US Air Force scrambling hours before President Biden meets Wednesday with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The exercises, conducted by the Russian Navy in the Pacific Ocean 300 to 500 miles west of Hawaii, include long-range bombers, surface ships and anti-submarine aircraft.
The US Air Force scrambled F-22 stealth fighters from Hawaii in response to the exercises.
Russia has conducted joint naval exercises with China, which has built the world’s largest navy with the fruits of its theft of U.S. intellectual property and technology and trade imbalances. The Chinese are laughing at our wokeness as it prepares to do battle with and defeat the U.S. Navy and as it prepares to invade Taiwan. They are not concerned with diversity or the proportion of Muslim Uighurs on its ship as it moves to take command of the seas:
Take a look around. Russia recently conducted large naval drills around Ukraine. Chinese aircraft and warships are busily trying to intimidate Taiwan and bully Philippine fishermen in the South China Sea. All the while, Beijing assiduously has been expanding its navy at breakneck pace.
That pace is staggering as Beijing acquires port privileges and naval facilities around the globe. China’s new deep water navy is aimed at seizing Taiwan, kicking us out of the Western Pacific and neutering our nacal capabilities worldwide:
China has the largest navy in the world. And it’s not just big, but it’s getting better.
“The PRC [People’s Republic of China] has the largest navy in the world, with an overall battle force of approximately 350 ships and submarines including over 130 major surface combatants,” states the U.S. Department of Defense’s 2020 annual report to Congress on Chinese military power. “In comparison, the U.S. Navy’s battle force is approximately 293 ships as of early 2020.”
China’s Navy “is an increasingly modern and flexible force that has focused on replacing previous generations of platforms with limited capabilities in favor of larger, modern multi-role combatants,” the report says. “As of 2019, the PLAN is largely composed of modern multi-role platforms featuring advanced anti-ship, antiair, and anti-submarine weapons and sensors.”
China’s growing fleet of aircraft carriers has garnered the most attention. The PLAN has one decrepit ex-Soviet carrier, a newly commissioned carrier that is the first built in China, a third carrier under construction, and plans to build an additional four or more vessels. Fitted with advanced features like an electromagnetic launch system, a Chinese carrier fleet could provide air cover for an amphibious invasion of Taiwan, or even confront the U.S. Navy in the first carrier versus carriers battles since World War II.
An editorial in China’s The Global Times, a newspaper seen as a mouthpiece for hardline nationalists in Beijing warns of the consequences of resistance warns, “If the United States’ bottom line is that China has to halt these activities, then a U.S. China war is inevitable in the South China Sea.” As Investor’s Business Daily has noted:
Beijing has long declared the South China Sea to be its territorial waters and has laid claim to two disputed chains: the Paracel Islands, about 200 miles from the coast of Vietnam, and the Spratly Islands in the southeastern part of the South China Sea. China’s territorial ambitions include the Senkakus in the East China Sea, part of what Chinese military doctrine refers to as the “first island chain” that surrounds China.
In the South China Sea, as of February, China had finished construction on no less than six different island reefs from which to project its power in the South China Sea. Included in its military effort is the construction of a 3,000 meters (9,842 feet) long runway on the artificially expanded Fiery Cross Reef as a base for Chinese fighter aircraft. According to Reuters,
China’s creation of artificial islands in the South China Sea is happening so fast that Beijing will be able to extend the range of its navy, air force, coastguard and fishing fleets before long, much to the alarm of rival claimants to the contested waters.
Reclamation work is well advanced on six reefs in the Spratly archipelago, according to recently published satellite photographs and Philippine officials. In addition, Manila said this month that Chinese dredgers had started reclaiming a seventh.
A few years ago, naval commanders expressed concern that our ability to respond to such threats has been severely compromised by leaders more concerned about rising sea levels than rising threats on those seas. The Navy captains’ Congressional testimony came after the Chinese announcement that it was building its second aircraft to go along with a refurbished Soviet carrier, the Liaonng, commissioned by China in 2012 after extensive refitting of the 25-year-old vessel. As IBD has reported, the Liaoning is only the first step I the building of a blue-water navy capable of competing with our diminishing one, with Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, warning that the U.S. was losing its Pacific dominance to China:
China’s Communist Party-affiliated newspaper, Global Times, gloated over Locklear’s warning, noting his remarks in a story beneath the headline “U.S. losing grip on Pacific: PACOM.”
In the Times story, Jin Canrong, a deputy dean of the School of International Studies at Renmin University of China, said the American admiral’s comments recognize China as a rising military power. Indeed, it is. China has launched its first stealth drone, known as Sharp Sword, and is developing indigenous aircraft carriers. Its “two-ocean strategy” is based on the goal of building a fleet of five or six carrier battle groups.
China’s first battle group, led by its first carrier, the Liaoning, recently conducted a monthlong exercise that saw the refurbished Soviet-built flattop and her escorts sail south to the waters near Taiwan. During the exercise, a Chinese warship nearly collided with the guided missile cruiser USS Cowpens, which was shadowing the battle group.
China is preparing for a naval confrontation with the United States. We may lose that confrontation in the South China Sea because the U.S. Navy is focusing on “wokeness”, not readiness.
Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily and free-lance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.
Gender Ideology Run Amok, by Abigail Shrier
Gender Ideology Run Amok
• Volume 50, Number 6/7 • Abigail Shrier
Abigail Shrier
Author, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters
The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 27, 2021, in Franklin, Tennessee, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar.
In 2007, America had one pediatric gender clinic; today there are hundreds. Testosterone is readily available to adolescents from places like Planned Parenthood and Kaiser, often on a first visit—without even a therapist’s note.
How did we get to this point? How is it that we are all supposed to pretend that the only way you can know I’m a woman is if I tell you my pronouns? How did we get to an America in which a 13-year-old in the State of Washington can begin “gender affirming” therapy without her parents’ consent? How did we get to an America in which a 15-year-old in Oregon can undergo “top surgery”—elective double mastectomy—without her parents’ permission? And what can we do about it?
***
To understand how we got to this point, it is useful to begin by considering gender dysphoria—the feeling of severe discomfort in a person’s biological sex. Gender dysphoria is certainly real. It is also exceedingly rare. It afflicts about 0.01 percent of the population, most of whom are male.
For nearly 100 years of diagnostic history, gender dysphoria typically began in early childhood, between the ages of two and four, and usually involved a boy who insisted that he was not a boy but a girl. Children afflicted are insistent, consistent, and persistent in the feeling that they are in the wrong body. It is by all accounts excruciating—I’ve talked to many transgender adults, most of them biological males, who describe the relentless chafe of a body that feels all wrong.
Historically, this has been the classic presentation of gender dysphoria. When these children were left alone—when no one intervened medically or encouraged what we today call “social transition”—over 70 percent of them naturally outgrew their gender dysphoria. Most of those who outgrew it became gay men. Those who did not outgrow it became what used to be known as transsexuals. They did not believe they were women, but they felt most comfortable presenting themselves as females.
Today, however, we don’t leave these children alone. Instead, the moment children seem not to be perfectly feminine or perfectly masculine, we label them as “trans kids.” Teachers encourage them to reintroduce themselves to their classes with new names and new pronouns. We take them to therapists or doctors, nearly all of whom practice so-called affirmative care—meaning they think it is their job to affirm the diagnosis of gender dysphoria and help the children medically transition.
The typical first step in treatment administered to these kids is puberty blockers, which shut down the part of the pituitary gland that directs the release of hormones catalyzing puberty. The most common of these drugs is Lupron, whose original purpose was the chemical castration of sex offenders. To this day, the FDA has never approved this drug for halting healthy puberty.
One has to wonder why a parent or a doctor would take measures to stop a child’s puberty, given that even a child with genuine gender dysphoria would most likely outgrow that condition if left alone. Some argue that it is traumatizing to let children go through the puberty of the sex to which they do not wish to belong. But in many cases, puberty seems to have helped children overcome gender dysphoria. The truth is that there is no satisfying answer, given that scientists have no way of predicting which children will outgrow the dysphoria on their own and which won’t.
Proponents of “affirmative care” also argue that allowing puberty to occur is dangerous, because suicide rates for trans-identified youth and trans adults are very high. Therefore, they say, we need to start treating children with gender dysphoria as soon and as dramatically as possible.
Yet there are no good long-term studies indicating that puberty blockers cure suicidality or even improve mental health. Nor are there studies that show puberty blockers are safe or reversible when used in this manner.
What we do know is that puberty blockers prevent the development of secondary sex characteristics, sexual maturation, and bone density. Indeed, because of the inhibition of bone density and other risks, doctors don’t like to keep children on puberty blockers for more than two years.
We also know that in almost every case when a child’s healthy puberty is medically arrested, placing the child out of step with his or her peers, that child proceeds to cross-sex hormones. And when puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are administered to a girl, she becomes infertile. She may also have permanent sexual dysfunction given that her sex organs never reach adult maturity.
Given this, the claims made by so many doctors and gender activists today that these medical transition measures for children are safe and reversible—that they are a “pause button,” without serious downsides—are not only dishonest, but destructive. We would not accept this sort of glib salesmanship in any other area of medicine.
Trans Identification among Teenage Girls
As I mentioned, for the nearly 100-year history of scientific study of gender dysphoria, it has been diagnosed almost exclusively in young children, and mostly in boys. But over the last decade, large numbers of teenage girls have begun to claim they have gender dysphoria.
Prior to 2012, in fact, there was no scientific literature on gender dysphoria arising in teenage girls. Dr. Lisa Littman, then a Brown University public health researcher, used the phrase “rapid onset gender dysphoria” to refer to the subsequent sudden spike in transgender identification among teenage girls with no childhood history of gender dysphoria.
This spike is not unique to America—we see it across the Western world. To offer just one statistic, there has been a decade-to-decade increase of over 4,400 percent in the number of teenage girls seeking treatment at the United Kingdom’s national gender clinic. Across the West, teen girls are now the leading demographic claiming to have gender dysphoria.
What is behind this is social contagion—the spread of ideas, emotions, and behaviors through peer influence, one more instance of teenage girls sharing and spreading their pain. There is a long history of social contagion with this demographic—anorexia and bulimia are also spread this way. And we know that teen girls today are in the midst of the worst mental health crisis on record, with the highest rates of anxiety, self-harm, and clinical depression.
The teen girls susceptible to this social contagion are the same high-anxiety, depressive girls who struggle socially in adolescence and tend to hate their bodies. Add to that a school environment where you can achieve status and popularity by declaring a trans identity. Add to that the teenage temptation to stick it to mom. Also add the intoxicating influence of social media, where trans activists push the idea that identifying as trans and starting a course of testosterone will cure a girl’s problems. Put those together, and you have a fast-spreading social phenomenon.
I’ve spoken to families at top girls’ schools who attest that 15, 20, or in one case 30 percent of the girls in their daughter’s seventh grade class identify as trans. When you see figures like that, you’re witnessing a social contagion in action. There is no other reasonable explanation.
These teen girls are in a great deal of pain. Almost all of them have at some point dealt with an eating disorder, engaged in cutting, or been diagnosed with other mental health comorbidities. And now they’re being allowed to self-diagnose gender dysphoria by a medical establishment that has decided that its job is to affirm and agree with trans-identified adolescents.
Turning a Blind Eye
You may not know the name Keira Bell. She is a young woman in the U.K., very troubled in adolescence, who was rushed to transition in her teen years and came to regret it. She underwent double mastectomy and spent years on testosterone, only to realize that her problem had never been gender dysphoria. She sued the U.K.’s national gender clinic, and last December, after the High Court of Justice examined her case and the claims of similarly situated plaintiffs, she won.
The Court examined the medical protocols applied to Keira Bell—protocols identical to the ones we have in the United States—and was horrified that a young girl had been allowed to consent to begin a process of eliminating her future fertility and sexual function at an age, 15, when she could not possibly have gauged that loss.
Hailed as a “landmark case” by The Times of London, The Economist, and even The Guardian, Bell’s victory was widely viewed as a serious condemnation of the effort to fast-track teen girls to gender transition. One of the appalling things the Court noted was that the national gender clinic had been unable to show any psychological improvement in the adolescents it had treated with transitioning hormones.
If, as I suspect, you haven’t read or heard about the Keira Bell case, that’s because America’s legacy media decided to pretend the case didn’t happen. Similarly, they continue to ignore or dismiss the stories of the thousands of “detransitioners”—young women who underwent medical transition, later regretted it, and attempt to reverse course. A lot of the treatments these girls have undergone are permanent, but they do what they can to try to reverse some of the effects.
Thus it is that in the United States, this crisis among teenage girls gets treated as a political issue—a conservative issue—rather than a medical one. And so perhaps the greatest medical scandal of our time is dismissed as a conservative preoccupation.
The Assault on Women’s Sports and Safe Spaces
No discussion of gender ideology can ignore the ongoing movement to eradicate girls’ and women’s sports and protective spaces. Many or most of the people pushing this are not transgender themselves. But they are activists, they are energized, and they seem to be winning.
This movement promotes dangerous bills like the Equality Act, which would make it illegal ever to distinguish between biological men and women—and thus to exclude a biological male from a girls’ sports team or a women’s protective space, whether it be a restroom, locker room, or prison. We have these laws now in California and in the State of Washington—and as you might imagine, one result is that hundreds of biological male prisoners, many of them violent felons, have applied to transfer to women’s units.
For activists pushing this, it is not enough to create unisex bathrooms, a separate category for trans-identified athletes, or separate safe zones in prisons for trans-identified biological men. No, they are working to abolish all women’s-only spaces and they want to abolish them now.
***
The common thread running through these topics is that the truth is being obscured by gender ideology. Lies are told about the risks of the transition treatments administered to young children, both to play down the dangers of those treatments and to exaggerate the degree to which those treatments are known to be helpful. Lies are told about the researchers and journalists who attempt to report on the crisis of social contagion among teenage girls undergoing transition treatments. And lies are told about the movement to eradicate women’s protective spaces.
The gender ideology behind these lies is a sibling of critical race theory. While critical race activists are teaching kids that they are largely defined by their skin color, gender activists are teaching kids that there are a great many genders, and that only they know their true gender. And just as families who object to racial indoctrination in schools are told that their denials of racism are proof of racism, young women who object to biological males participating in girls’ sports are told that their objections are proof of transphobic bigotry.
These mendacious dogmas have corrupted our K-12 schools, our universities, and our legacy media, as well as our scientific journals and our medical accrediting organizations—the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, etc. To give you a sense of how far things have gone, I was informed late last year by a member of the National Association of Science Writers—an association of journalists with scientific backgrounds—that a member of the association’s online forum had been expelled for mentioning my book on the transgender social contagion among teenage girls. He hadn’t even read my book. He just mentioned that it sounded interesting, and for that he was banned as transphobic.
Similarly, endocrinologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, and researchers who are concerned about the risks of gender interventions report that they struggle today to get their research published. And public and private funding of research is almost entirely restricted to researchers who promote gender transition and downplay the risks.
There are phalanxes of young doctors now, many of them in pediatrics or child psychiatry, who are open about their belief that their primary job is “social justice.” They unreservedly celebrate the increase in transitioning treatment of young people and are inexcusably complacent about the risks of those treatments. The Washington Post recently quoted some of these doctors to the effect that puberty blockers are fully reversible—which is not something that any honest doctor can claim to know. We simply don’t have the data to know whether puberty blockers are fully physically reversible when applied to halt healthy puberty—and they are certainly not psychologically reversible. We’re seeing a startling politicization of medicine and science, which is symptomatic of a larger woke corruption of American society.
***
Now, there’s something I make a point of saying whenever I speak, and I say it for the simple reason that it is true: transgender adults are some of the soberest and kindest people I have met in my work as a journalist. Many of them seem to have been helped by transition, and they are leading admirable and productive lives. They have no desire to harm women or to push transition on children. The gender ideology activists do not represent them.
My understanding of freedom includes a belief that society should allow adults to make consequential decisions about their lives, which includes choosing to undergo sex reassignment surgery. And whenever I am asked by a transgender adult, I use his or her chosen name and pronouns. This seems to me the courteous and the right thing to do. But—and this is a big but—I never lie. This means I never say, and I will never say, that trans women are women. I think reciting this lie leads, as we are seeing, to unjust and dangerous consequences for women and girls. It is not courteous or right to parrot these lies. It is the cowardly surrender of women’s welfare to the woke gods. And it is wrong.
I’m also often asked why it is that the gender ideology activists are doing what they are doing. What possible justification could there be, for instance, for telling small boys that they might be girls and small girls that they might be boys? My best guess at an answer occurred to me while talking to detransitioners. I heard repeatedly from these young women that while they were transitioning, they were angry and politically radical. They often cut off relations with their families, having been coached to do so online by gender activists. Related to this, if you look, you’ll notice a disproportionate number of gender-confused people among the ranks of Antifa in cities like Portland.
In other words, chaos is the point, and these troubled girls become prey for those who seek to recruit revolutionaries. Just as the destructive objective of critical race theory is to divide Americans racially, that of gender ideology is to disrupt the formation of stable families, the building blocks of American life.
So what do we do about it? How do we push back? First and foremost, we must oppose the indoctrination of children in gender ideology. There is no good reason for it, and it does real harm. We can absolutely insist that all children treat each other kindly without indoctrinating an entire generation in gender confusion.
Second, we must overcome our squeamishness and speak the truth in public. Wherever we find ourselves, we must refuse to recite lies. And we must always clearly distinguish between transgender Americans, generally wonderful people, and the ideological transgender movement, which seeks to warp children and weaken families.
This is a movement that would turn our children against themselves because its advocates know there is no greater harm—no quicker way to bring America to its knees—than by driving our children to do themselves irreversible damage. The people pushing this ideology have gotten a head start on us by perhaps a decade. But now I think they have awakened a sleeping giant. The success of my book is one indication. The many state legislatures that are now debating these issues is another.
These are our kids and grandkids. Our future depends on our winning this fight.