LGBT conversion therapy: Religious leaders call for ban to 'abhorrent' practice

Over 300 religious leaders have called for a worldwide clampdown on conversion therapy for LGBT+ people. Germany is one of the few countries to have introduced a ban. DW spoke to two survivors of the practice.

"We recognize with sadness that certain religious teachings have often, throughout the ages, caused and continue to cause deep pain and offense to those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex."

This was a rare admission from members of the clergy, but that is one of the key statements in a declaration signed by 370 interfaith religious leaders from around the world.

They came together this week for a conference calling for a global ban on the practice of "conversion therapy" — the practice by which LGBT+ people are subjected to psychological or physical efforts to "cure" them of their sexual or gender identity. It is based on the belief that cisgender heterosexuality is the norm and anything else is an illness or abnormality — a belief that the World Health Organization (WHO) has rejected.

Among the signatories to the declaration organized by the UK's Ozanne Foundation were high-ranking representatives of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Sikh faiths, including South African former archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu, and England's Bishop of Liverpool.

Germany became the fifth country to introduce an outright ban on the practice for minors in 2020, following Ecuador, Brazil, Taiwan and Malta as well as several US states and Canadian provinces, according to rights group OutRight International. Bans have since been introduced in Albania, Switzerland and the Australian province of Victoria and have been proposed in many more countries, including France and the UK, where Prime Minister Boris Johnson described the practice as "abhorrent."

But many countries are yet to introduce legislation, despite widespread condemnation of the practice by Western governments and human rights organizations.

It is difficult to determine if the law in Germany has made a difference, as there are no statistics but activists hope that it has set an example.

"We can be confident that the new law has created a lot of uncertainty among those who offer these 'therapies.' But no one knows for sure if there is actually less going on in Germany," Markus Ulrich, spokesman for the Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany (LSVD) explained.

Two survivors of the practice told DW that wider bans around the world may be slow to materialize — and that Germany's rules do not go far enough.

Growing up in Cairo, Egypt, in a conservative Muslim family, Ahmed El Hady knew he was gay from a young age. He decided to come out to his family while an undergraduate at university as he no longer wanted to live a "double life."

"They were so angry. They took me to a psychiatrist to cure me of being 'deviant,'" El Hady explained. He was also encouraged by fellow students and professors to seek a "cure," and was questioned by campus police. When he refused to renounce his sexuality, he began to receive death threats.

Read more:

https://www.dw.com/en/lgbt-conversion-therapy-religious-leaders-call-for-ban-to-abhorrent-practice/a-55976691

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One 21-year-old woman who reached out to Evans said gender reassignment did not help her gender dysphoria and that she has therefore also detransitioned.

"She said she felt shunned by the LGBT community for being a traitor. So I felt I had to do something," Evans said.

The woman had identified as male since the age of 13. After taking testosterone therapy, her voice deepened, she grew facial hair and her body started to change. She was due to undergo breast-removal surgery this summer, but started to change her mind in May and decided to stop taking her hormones and to identify as female again.

Read more:

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20191007/Hundreds-of-trans-people-regret-changing-their-gender-says-trans-activist.aspx

Puberty blockers give transgender children time to understand who they are, writes Simona Giordano.

In light of the British High Court’s decision that children under 16 are unlikely to be able to consent to puberty blockers, questions are being asked about the standards of care for transgender children, and the extent to which health services encourage transgender identity and transition.

Transgender children are not a recent phenomenon, nor are the therapies provided to them. The first standards of care were published in 1979, and the eighth revision is on its way. Clinical practice internationally has evolved in this time, from initial psychoanalytic or behavioural therapy that tried to fix the ‘‘mismatch’’ between ‘‘the body and mind’’, to today’s approach, where established gender identity clinics try to help children find out their identity in a non-judgmental way.

Children are seen by a multidisciplinary team. Intervention includes psychotherapy, social intervention and family work; puberty blockers are only recommended to those whose gender dysphoria is significant after the onset of puberty. They are not recommended for gender non-conforming adolescents, only for those who experience significant distress because of pubertal development, after careful consideration of the alternatives and in most cases with parental involvement and support.

Intervention at this stage is not ‘‘gender affirming’’: if anything, it is ‘‘gender nonaffirming’’. The masculinisation or feminisation is paused and will restart as treatment is interrupted; the child gains time to explore their gender without the stress of the developing body, and there is robust evidence, based on more than 20 years of clinical practice, that this intervention reduces distress and improves psychosocial adaptation. Only older adolescents who are highly likely to transition (partly or fully) may be offered testosterone or oestrogens.

If someone is tempted to see the provision of this clinical care as risky or dangerous, we must remember how risky life was for transgender youth before the establishment of child gender identity services. Many would buy hormones from friends or on the street, because remaining without medical treatment was not an option. Injecting hormones without medical supervision at unregulated dosages exposed them to serious health risks.

Facing employment discrimination and unable to access healthcare services, trans people found sex work was often the only way to raise money for treatment. Violence, trauma, HIV, sexually transmitted infection and entanglement in the justice system were all too common.

Denying healthcare to gender-diverse youth is not being cautious; it is leaving them without recourse. Those who question whether adolescents can give consent to treatment must remember they do not consent to their developing bodies either. While many gender nonconforming children do not transition, others find pubertal development distressing. Trans boys may not tolerate breast development, and binding is painful and harmful; they often experience the appearance of menarche as humiliating. Trans girls may not tolerate the growth of facial and bodily hair, the masculinisation of their bodies, the spontaneous erections, the deepening of their voices.

These experiences might cause psychological disintegration and are a well-known risk for these young people. Suicide attempts are very high in this group, even in those with supportive families, and evidence shows that suicide attempts are reduced significantly when clinical care is provided.

Omitting treatment at the right time is neither a ‘‘cautious’’ nor a neutral choice: it means exposure to predictable, serious and preventable risk. Limiting the clinicians’ rights to provide treatment is forcing them to violate their duties towards their patients, and is to deny gender minorities the fundamental human right to identity and to health.

The biggest threat to the health of gender diverse people is not the provision of medical care

– thinking it is borders on absurd. As the World Health Organisation, the Council of Europe and the UN have repeatedly stressed, the biggest threat to the health of gender diverse people is the barriers to medical care.

In Australia those barriers are high. Only Melbourne has a fairly well resourced gender service for young people, and it can barely meet demand. In most areas in the country, young people do not have any access to gender care. In NSW, there is one small regional service doing its best and a tiny clinic at Westmead Children’s Hospital in Sydney with a huge wait list.

Growing numbers of referrals are not the sign of a problem but a sign of success. It is to be welcomed that young people feel safe enough to express how they feel, and we should take pride in the fact that young people can access medications more safely than ever and that these are prescribed by specialists who can offer quality assurance and follow-up. We should be careful not to do anything to prejudice that safety.

Simona Giordano is a professor of bioethics at the Centre for Social Ethics and Policy at the University of Manchester Law School.

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SMH 20/12/2020

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Why I had to leave The Guardian

If you were bullied by 338 colleagues, what would you do?

BY SUZANNE MOORE

It is March 2020. For several months now I have been trying to write something — anything — about the so-called “trans debate” in my Guardian column. But if I ever slip a line in about female experience belonging to people with female bodies, and the significance of this, it is always subbed out. It is disappeared. Somehow, this very idea is being blocked, not explicitly, but it certainly isn’t being published. My editors say things like: “It didn’t really add to the argument”, or it is a “distraction” from the argument.

Distraction has always been a triggering word for me. In a good way. My PhD supervisor told me I was “a woman of too many distractions”. This was because I was venturing into journalism, frustrated by the dead language of academia. She also asked me whether having a grant made any difference. It turns out that my distractions were paying the rent, as they have been ever since.

Even though I’d been writing for them for decades, editors consistently try to steer me towards “lifestyle” subjects for my column. One even suggests that I shouldn’t touch politics at all. And yet I won the Orwell Prize for political journalism the year before. This was for articles on Brexit and war remembrance, among other things.

Maybe they were steering me away from certain subjects because they thought they were dealing with some mad old bint, or maybe they were scared and had been indoctrinated into the cult of righteousness that the Guardian embodies. At its best, the paper deserves to see itself as a beacon of the Left, but lately it has been hard to define what the Left consists of beyond smug affirmation. During the Corbyn years the paper had a difficult job to do: support Labour but to be honest about Corbyn and his cronies’ monstrous failings.

Of course, not every editor is nervous; but the anxiety around certain issues remains tangible. It has often been this way and none of this is new to me. Bad columns don’t come from bad opinions, they come from a lack of conviction. Readers know that instinctively, so to steer writers away from what they want to write about is a strange thing for an editor to do.

But, then, journalism has been in a strange place lately, unsure of itself and what it should be doing and giving itself away for free. A case of low self-esteem one might say, but not in my paper which makes journalists redundant even as it pays moderators to delete comments calling me a cunt under one of my columns about Scottish independence. Have I got issues? More than enough to go round.

My relationship with the paper has always been slightly odd, I guess.

So, I finally get to write a piece on trans issues. And 338 “colleagues” write a letter of complaint to the editor, alluding to that column.

Strung out to cry

Now, six months on, I have resigned. And I am still trying to work out why I have been treated so appallingly.

My hurt is obviously minuscule compared to so much of what has happened in the world. It’s a flesh wound and I shouldn’t make a fuss. But, do I look like a doormat with Welcome written on it?

There were no such upset letters organised regarding the various hot Tory takes about difficult subjects that we sometimes publish. Seumas Milne even reprinted a sermon by Osama Bin Laden. What about that? Not a word. So what did I do that was so terrible? I stepped outside the orthodoxy.

Perhaps I need to put my denunciation into a larger context. At the end of the year one reflects, right?

When I was first at the paper, in the 1990s, there were no women on the Comment pages. My column featured in the “Women’s pages”, which was seen as Features. The editor at the time, Peter Preston, took me out for an awkward lunch after I won Columnist of the Year at the British Press Awards and said: “It must be nice to be a lady columnist. You can write about painting your toenails.”

I had been meaning to raise the idea of an actual pay rise, but I had no idea how to do it. I don’t understand middle-class people and money (not that Preston was middle class but certainly his environment was totally bourgeois). So when he asked if there was anything he could do to make me happier, I just blurted out: “Give me more money.”

Preston’s power lay in silence. He had, after all, spent time in an iron lung. His ability to not speak was quite something, and I admired his refusal to make others comfortable. In one way. But I may as well have just farted loudly. I had made some awful faux pas: asking to be paid the same as men who were not as good as me. That was the end of the meal.

The thing is, I had found out I was being paid less than half what my male counterparts were earning. So I got an agent. She wore very short skirts and had a way of rattling her BMW keys that seemed to unnerve men. The one and only time Preston ever called me was to frantically beg — no uncomfortable silences — that he would never have to see her again. Result.

Another part of not knowing my place was that I also asked to be moved from the Women’s pages to the Comment pages. They offered a Monday slot which would mean I had to work on Sundays. As the only woman in the section, and single parent to boot, I asked them if they had ever heard of equal opportunities. Again I was not only unclubbable but unspeakable. No movement was possible. Madly, I suggested that Hugo Young be moved. I didn’t even realise he was Jesus in the hierarchy, floating above us all.

Read more:

https://unherd.com/2020/11/why-i-had-to-leave-the-guardian/

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By Joanna Williams, the founder of the think tank Cieo. She is the author of Women vs Feminism, Why We All Need Liberating From the Gender Wars and is a regular columnist for Spiked. Follow her on Twitter @jowilliams293

Back in January 2017, just one day after the inauguration of President Trump, millions of women in countries all around the world took to the streets to protest against the incoming administration. Although Trump had not yet passed a single piece of legislation, the pink pussy-hat marchers were adamant his regime would harm women’s rights.

Fast forward to this weekend. The knitted hats will remain boxed up and the feminists will stay at home. With Joe Biden in the White House and – even better – Kamala Harris as the first elected black/South Asian woman vice president, the sisters no longer feel any need to protest. They got their wish.

And yet, within hours of taking up the post, Biden has done more to set back women’s rights in the US than Trump did in his entire four years in office. One of his first acts was to sign an Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation.

The pink pussy-hat brigade purr at the order’s mention of “respect” and “dignity.” They swoon at talk of the right for all people to “be able to live without fear, no matter who they are or whom they love.” This is a far cry from Trump’s crude and offensive locker room remarks. But make no mistake. Combating discrimination on the basis of gender identity is disastrous for women and girls.

Unlike sex, gender identity is a made-up concept. It’s the bizarre notion that regardless of the biological reality of our bodies, we all have a feeling, deep down inside, about whether we are really male or female. This feeling, the gender identity champions tell us, overrides our hormones, chromosomes, and genitalia. How we feel about our gender is more important than whether or not we have a beard, breasts, penis, or ovaries, when it comes to defining us as men or women. Anyone can now be a man or a woman, and the onus is on the world to accept us for who we say we are.

The language of Biden’s executive order is warm and inclusive. It is hard to argue against statements like: “Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.” But when gender identity overrides sex, what’s being said here is that children should be able to use changing rooms and join sports teams depending upon whether they feel like a boy or a girl. For young children this is unlikely to make any difference whatsoever. But for adolescents it matters enormously.

You don’t need to assume the worst of teenage boys to acknowledge that teenage girls might want privacy when using the toilets or getting dressed after sport. Puberty changes both male and female bodies. Boys become, on average, taller, heavier, stronger, and faster than girls. Biology never claimed to be fair. But what’s really unfair is to allow these stronger, faster boys to compete alongside and against girls on the running track and on the football pitch. Biden’s executive order might sound nice, but it signals the end of girls’ participation in sports.

Sad day for women’s sports. Women must compete against biological males at the risk of injury and loss of title, thanks to a new Biden executive order. Don’t ever tell me this is “pro-woman.” It’s not. It’s destructive and malicious.

When it comes to adults, outlawing discrimination on the basis of gender identity is just as dangerous. There are good reasons why prisons, domestic violence refuges, certain health services and even some beauty salons are exclusively for females. This is not to discriminate irrationally against transgender people but to protect women who, in these specific circumstances, are particularly vulnerable.

Biden’s executive order opens the door for men to access women’s private spaces. It makes it more difficult for medical professionals to direct advice about cervical smear tests, contraception and abortion provision, or breast cancer checks, at the women they are intended to help. It puts low-paid women who offer intimate beauty services at risk. And it makes it far more difficult to measure accurately whether there are sex-based differences in rates of pay or access to employment.

That the new president has moved so quickly to place the rights of transgender people above women should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone. Today it has been announced that visitors to the White House website will be allowed to specify their pronouns. Kamala Harris and other progressives within the Democratic Party have long since taken to declaring their pronouns at every available opportunity.

The obsession with pronouns shows that modern feminism is so caught up in virtue signalling inclusivity, it fails completely to defend women’s rights – which should surely be its primary objective. And, tragically, far too many campaigners were so single-minded in their desire to see the back of Trump, they turned a blind eye to the problems with Team Biden.

We are now being bombarded with gushing news stories swooning over the new vice president’s fashion choices and women, apparently, wearing pearls and Converse sneakers in honour of Queen Kamala. Meanwhile, stories of the girl who pulls out of the athletics team, or refuses to use the school toilets, or the woman who misses a medical appointment because she didn’t realise she was a ‘cervix-haver’, or the woman attacked while incarcerated, go untold.

I did not join in with the women’s march against Trump four years ago. But with the Biden regime there is already something to protest against. Just forgive me if I don’t wear a pink pussy hat.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/513336-bidens-executive-order-transgender/

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In a statement released on Tuesday, the bookstore apologized for “any hurt caused by highlighting the work of an author whose current stance is to divide our community,” and said it “regrets programming Julie Bindel in 2018.”

Bindel is an English feminist, a researcher and long-time campaigner for women’s rights, who makes a particular focus on protecting sex workers from abuse. She authored several books on the topic, and one of them, ‘The Pimping of Prostitution’, was the subject of her July 2018 appearance at Readings.

The event drew criticism at the time from people unhappy with Bindel’s anti-prostitution stance or her views on gender reassignment surgery, which she sees as a modern version of ‘gay conversion therapy’.

we are disgusted & disappointed to learn that @ReadingsBooks is actively giving a platform to Islamophobia, transphobia, biphobia, whorephobia by hosting an event with Julie Bindel tomorrow. we implore publishers to pull their books & readers to boycott Readings

— Subbed In (subbedin) July 25, 2018

Her controversial politics were widely known by the time Readings hosted her and didn’t prevent the event from happening – which even won the bookstore some praise for bravery in the face of online critics. But now the retailer evidently believes the invitation was wrong.

Thanks to some misogynist whinging on Twitter, I discovered this was on and had the chance to go and see the fabulous Julie Bindel at Readings. And max respect to Readings for not being bullied out of hosting a important writer on a critical subject. pic.twitter.com/3NY6DG1AyT

— jo smith (Trottydog) July 26, 2018

The statement appears to come in response to a complaint from Alison Evans, who restricted viewership of their tweets, making their words unavailable to the public. Evans, a queer young adult fiction author, is a self-described genderqueer, who “wrote” themself “into existence.”

Apologies, here's our public statement regarding the event: Readings prides itself on ensuring everyone in our community feels safe, respected and considered. We apologise for any hurt caused by highlighting the work of an author whose current stance is to divide our community.

— Readings (ReadingsBooks) February 9, 2021

The apology angered Bindel, who went on Twitter to demand an explanation. She described her recollection of the “packed” event at Readings and the wide representation of members of minority communities attending it.

Thread: During a book tour in Australia I was invited to do one of those 'an evening with' events during which I read from my book (on the horrors of the global sex trade) and conversed with the women and men in the audience. Almost three years later......https://t.co/QLpk9S52NJ

— Julie Bindel (bindelj) February 9, 2021

“There were loads of feminists at that event, on account of it being about the hideous abuse of women and girls world-wide, and in particular, in Australia, NZ & across Canada, indigenous females. Many of those feminists are lesbians, on account of the fact that we have done much of the heavy lifting when it comes to countering male violence,” she said.

Please would @ReadingsBooks tell me where they fit in your vision of ‘community’? Shame on you.

A later tweet from Bindel apparently shows a screen-saved post by Evans conditioning her appearance at a scheduled Readings event on the bookstore apologizing.

Wonder if this is anything to do with Reading's apology? Scratches head... pic.twitter.com/E1DtlZ3yS0

— Julie Bindel (bindelj) February 9, 2021

Judging by the reaction to Readings’ statement, its belated cancellation attempt didn’t go over well with the public.

If you are attempting to "cancel" an author three years after they did a book launch at your shop because of commercial pressure, this does not help "everyone" in your community feel safe. It shows a lack of commitment to academic and intellectual freedom, and a lack of courage.

— Rachel Rowles Davis (RowlesDavis) February 9, 2021

Who demands an apology from a bookseller for a talk three years after the fact. Are people coming out of the woodwork who had their lives ruined by these readings? What in the fresh hell?

— Medium Mye (scarletwalking) February 9, 2021

I went to one of those events and was glad to do so. I go to Readings all the time. No more. It is not Julie Bindel creating division, it is actions like this - discouraging the free flow of information and discussion. What are you afraid of?

— Alex K (AlexK_pondering) February 9, 2021

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/515034-bookstore-cancels-radical-femenist/

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As a man, should I have no idea about what's going on in the @realvagina? Or the #babybumpers? Unless we move on a notch to "goatsaremything" which would offend everyone, or read only blank porn magazines, as to not offend anyone? Should everyone learn how to knit?

Readings managing director Mark Rubbo acknowledged he’d made a mistake in hurrying to apologize for Bindel’s event three years ago, telling the UK Times that “bookshops should be homes to all ideas.”

While he admitted that “Julie Bindel has done amazing work for the women’s movement particularly in the area of violence against women,” he nevertheless insisted that “her views on transgender people are particularly controversial and have caused distress in that community.” 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/515304-australia-bookstore-feminist-author-cancel/

Read from top (especially above)... Note that transgenders are causing distress in the @realwomen community... Take a deep breath, accept each other but don't run against each others at the Olympics.

By Graham Dockery, RT

UPDATE: Twitch reverts back to ‘women’ after tweet celebrating ‘Womxn’s History Month’ savaged online

March is Women’s History Month, and Twitch wants its users to celebrate. It’s putting female streamers on its front page, showcasing female musicians, and dishing out thousand-dollar grants to deserving female students and entrepreneurs. Oh, and it’s also spelling “Women’s History Month” as “Womxn’s History Month.”

Unlike women, who have been around as long as men, the word “Womxn” has been around for ten years or so, with the “x” denoting transgender, non-binary and other deviations from the standard “woman.” Its predecessor, “womyn,” is a word cooked up by radical feminists in the 1970s to eliminate the words “man”and “men” from their gender.

Twitch’s embrace of woke twaddle was slated online, first by feminists who saw the word as “some woke attempt to erase the unique characteristics of biological females.”

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/516923-twitch-womxn-history-month/

The organization said Dawkins had recently implied that “the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient,” noting he would be stripped of an award granted to him some 25 years ago. It declined to specify the offending comment.

“Regrettably, Richard Dawkins has over the past several years accumulated a history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalized groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values,” the AHA said on Monday.

Consequently, the AHA Board has concluded that Richard Dawkins is no longer deserving of being honored by the AHA, and has voted to withdraw, effective immediately, the 1996 Humanist of the Year award.

Today the American Humanist Association Board voted to withdraw, effective immediately, the 1996 Humanist of the Year award it bestowed on Richard Dawkins. Tap the preview below to read the board's statement explaining why. https://t.co/VfxMgbISh5

While the Humanist Association gave few other details and offered no examples of Dawkins’ “accumulated history” of inflammatory remarks, an April 10 tweet from the biologist drawing comparisons between transgenderism and the self-described “trans-black” activist Rachel Dolezal is a likely culprit. 

“In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as,” Dawkins wrote, calling on his followers to “discuss” the apparent contradiction.

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as.Discuss.

He followed up with another post days later, presumably in response to netizens outraged over the first missive, saying he did not “intend to disparage trans people.”

“I see that my academic ‘Discuss’ question has been misconstrued as such and I deplore this. It was also not my intent to ally in any way with Republican bigots in US now exploiting this issue,”Dawkins added.

I do not intend to disparage trans people. I see that my academic “Discuss” question has been misconstrued as such and I deplore this. It was also not my intent to ally in any way with Republican bigots in US now exploiting this issue .

The later post apparently did nothing to appease the AHA, which said that Dawkins’ “subsequent attempts at clarification” were “inadequate” and did not convey “sensitivity” or “sincerity.” 

While some observers said rescinding Dawkins’ award was a “good call,” the move also triggered an outpouring of criticism online, with many suggesting the atheist org had become beholden to “woke gods” and adopted a “pseudo-religious” devotion to political correctness.

“Identity politics is the new religion. We can be good without it,” one user wrote, putting a spin on the AHA’s slogan, “Good Without a God.”

The American Humanist Association is using the guise of secularism to enact religious zealotry; offering Dawkins up as a sacrifice to appease their woke gods.

They have quite explicitly placed their political orthodoxy above science, above rational discussion, above reason. The feelings of approved minority groups trump that. Fair enough, AHA, take that position. It's your party. But it's not humanist in any way. It's pseudoreligious

One self-avowed humanist and Dawkins critic called on AHA members to terminate their ties with the association over its decision, which other users deemed an overreaction to the biologist’s “reasonable” call for discussion.

I’m a humanist, and not a fan of, Dawkins, but if I were a member of @americnhumanistassociation, this action would lead me to terminate my membership and withdraw financial support. Enough of this nonsense.

Jesus. Disavowed over a tweet. I read the tweet. It was reasonable. These people are not. They have lost their minds.#richarddawkins#humanismhttps://t.co/ehcYW94zdG

This is a very bad call. Many well-intentioned people believe transracialism should be more accepted. That he broached the issue doesn't mean he thinks trans people are fraudulent.

Dawkins’ April 10 tweet is far from his first controversial post, stoking a wave of condemnation in February after suggesting that eugenics could “work in practice,” while also indicating that he “deplore[d]” the idea on “ideological, political [and] moral grounds.” Before that, he was accused of racism in 2018 after tweeting that the bells of England’s Winchester Cathedral were “so much nicer than the aggressive-sounding ‘Allahu Akhbar’” heard at Muslim mosques, one among several hot-button posts about Islam over the years.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/521540-dawkins-stripped-humanist-award/

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Gus knows some transgender people who have regretted the switch, thus we should be concerned that not all cut and snip operations are necessary and/or successful. That one identifies being of the opposite sex isn’t a new concept. I have mentioned the centuries-old story of this Chinese monk (then a nun) travelling from village to village carrying his former block and tackle, dried up and shrivelled, in a small jar. Homosexuality was rife in Roman and Greek antiquity. 

But psychology and manipulative social pressures, including peer pressure and self-esteem can be confusing. In the last few decades, the discovery of chemical-actors in the differentiation of female and male — and of the chromosome configurations — plus the skill of surgeons have been able to help those who feel nature gave them the wrong body. 

And this is what Richard Dawkins wants to explore. I do not think he wants to prevent switching, but prevent switching at all cost, especially at a young age. We know of the power of propaganda and that of psychological manipulations. I think that it is well known that, at puberty, males might not feel comfortable becoming “male” and have dreams of being “female”. It’s complex and our uncertainty of choice is never obvious. Not all transgenders are thus happy, but are confused. Some are elated with the switch. Nothing wrong with this. 

But what Dawkins could be pointing out, without explicitly saying so, so far, is to the possibility of mistakes done by experts. We know that psychology isn’t an exact science because, as mentioned, of the power of propaganda and that of psychological manipulations — plus our ability to lie to ourselves. We can convince ourselves that we are right: easy as pissing standing up.  Lying is one of the main centrepiece to homo sapiens' success as a “weak”, somewhat still evolving, species. We invent reasons and create excuses beyond the natural world of decisions which apart from a few domestic species, tend to make sure we stay clear of each other. The pigeon that is too cocky — or busy eating from the road — is going get killed by the incoming car, the driver of which has no intent to kill the pigeon but to get through (though some louts might try to kill the pigeon). 

Trying to get answers from kids about their genderisation is borderline. Kids under the age of seven have no clue. Kids between seven and 12 years in the age of reasonable obedience. Passed the age of 12, kids are confused till they reach the good old mature 25. Some fads and fancies can come and go. 

Psychologist will say that their study of the subject has been done and dusted. Nothing to add to their wonderful work. Everyone who is a scientist would know that science is never settled — and questions need to be asked to refine the knowledge. It’s like a computer chip. The product is never 100 per cent “pure” — and there are algorithms to bypass the impurity/degradation of the chips. (https://www.princeton.edu/~carch/kaisopos/papers/HERMES_ICCD_2014.pdf). 

What Dawkins is seemingly recommending in this, would be a better understanding to minimise the making of “mistakes” which can be regretted by a certain number of transgender people. The proportion of change-regrets is said to be between 0.4  and 8 per cent — which is a lot of uncertainty from such a process. When you go to hospital for a routine op, you might have to sign a consent form in which you acknowledge you have a one in 1000 chance of dying during the procedure. 

At this stage, transgenderisation is psychological, in appearance, in behaviour and in acceptance, but not yet in the genetic gamut, apart from very rare cases from bigender at birth. For some fish species, transgenderism is part of their life. Dawkins is trying to raise a discussion about this disparity in homo sapiens without malice, nor lack of sensitivity, but as usual for our “modern”, “progressive” woke western world, it is insensitive to ask any questions to the woke dogma, that is far from being scientific.

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Kataluna Enriquez, who was crowned Miss Nevada USA on Sunday, will become the first openly transgender woman to compete in the Miss USA pageant.

With a platform centered on transgender awareness and mental health, Enriquez, 27, beat out 21 other contestants at the South Point Hotel Casino in Las Vegas. 

“I didn’t have the easiest journey in life,” she said, according to KVVU-TV. “I struggled with physical and sexual abuse. I struggled with mental health. I didn’t have much growing up. I didn’t have support. But I’m still able to thrive, and I’m still able to survive and become a trailblazer for many.” 

After her win, Enriquez thanked the LGBTQ community on Instagram, writing, “My win is our win. We just made history. Happy Pride.” 

The Miss Nevada USA organization congratulated Enriquez for her historic win on social media and shared the hashtag #bevisible.

Read more:

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/nevada-pageant-winner-become-1st-transgender-miss-usa-contestant-rcna1298

MEANWHILE:

New Zealand's Laurel Hubbard has become the first ever transgender athlete picked to compete at an Olympics, in a controversial decision.

Officials have selected her for the women's weightlifting team for Tokyo 2020, after qualifying requirements were recently modified.

She had competed in men's events before coming out as transgender in 2013.

Critics say Hubbard has an unfair advantage, but others have argued for more inclusion at the Games.

"I am grateful and humbled by the kindness and support that has been given to me by so many New Zealanders," Hubbard said in a statement issued by the New Zealand Olympic Committee on Monday.

She will compete in the women's 87-kg weightlifting category.

The 43-year-old became eligible to compete at the Olympics when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 2015 changed its rules allowing transgender athletes to compete as a woman if their testosterone levels are below a certain threshold. 

Testosterone is a hormone that increases muscle mass.

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57549653

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Congratulations....

assangex

How the Hungarian LGBTQI+ are instrumentalized by the European Union

by Thierry Meyssan

Everyone agrees to put an end to legal discriminations. However, some Europeans accuse others of wanting on the contrary to create some. This is the case of Brussels against Hungary. But on closer inspection, this argument is dishonest and hides unavowable interests.

On June 15, the Hungarian Parliament adopted a law prohibiting the promotion of homosexuality among minors.

At the meeting of EU home affairs ministers on June 21, 2021, it was decided to launch a procedure against Hungary not for "clear risk of violation of the rule of law" but for "clear risk of violation of the values on which the Union is founded" (12266/1/18REV 1 COR 1).

17 out of 27 member states asked the president of the Council of European Heads of State and Government, Charles Michel, to put the issue of LGBTQI+ rights in Hungary on the agenda of the June 24-25 summit. At this meeting, the 17 accused Hungary of homophobia.

On the 25th, Commission President Ursula von der Layen strongly condemned the Hungarian law and asked her commissioners, Belgium’s Didier Reynders (Justice) and France’s Thierry Breton (Internal Market), to write to the Hungarian government to "enforce the law. This they did without delay (Ares S(2021) 4587976).

Let’s not get too carried away and examine what is behind these positions.

The issue of LGBTQI+ rights has never been part of European values. Simply because the Union was created by the Treaty of Rome, in 1957, and at that time, there were no LGBTQI+. There were, however, homosexuals, although they themselves did not exist until 1868, when the Hungarian writer Karl-Maria Kertbeny invented the concept. Until the adoption of "Paragraph 175" in Germany in 1871 and the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 in the United Kingdom, no one had ever had the idea of penalizing same-sex sexual relations.

There had indeed been laws in Europe prohibiting sodomy, but they applied to both same-sex and different-sex relationships, and "homosexuals" have many other practices. We make a mistake in believing that LGBTQI+ people were persecuted in the past and are not persecuted today in "modern" countries. In reality, the way we understand sexuality and the prohibitions we set for ourselves vary according to time and place, but the distinction between different-sex and same-sex partners is recent.

The LGBTQI+ concept does not come from the French thinking of the 60’s as it is often claimed, but from American puritanical thinking. It is a kind of intellectual catch-all that amalgamates concepts related to sex (anatomical), sexual orientation (biological) and gender (psychological). Thus, this acronym designates : 
 L: Lesbian (lesbian), i.e. a woman having sexual relations with another woman ; 
 G: Gay, i.e. a man having sexual relations with another man; 
 B: Bisexual, i.e., a person who has sex with others of the same or different sex; 
 T: Transgender. We are not talking about individuals whose genetic sex is neither male (XY chromosomes) nor female (XX chromosomes), and who therefore do not recognize themselves in their anatomical sex (statistically less than 1 per 1000) [1]. No, we are talking about people who define themselves intellectually in a different social role from that attached to their anatomical sex. While transsexuals can make their chromosomal particularity correspond to their biological sex by very heavy and irreversible operations, transgender people do not aspire to operations and can change their gender several times during their life. 
 Q: Queer. This term refers to the provocative culture of people whose sexuality does not fit into the social norm. It is in this sense that I had created with others, at the beginning of the Nineties, the House of the homosexualities in Paris. 
 I: Intersex (intersexual): Refers to people in general whose genetic sex does not correspond to the binary classification male/female. Some of them can be transsexuals. 
 + : More (others). Since this litany is endless [2], U.S. lawyers have closed it with a + that summarizes all the other options identified and to come.

In Washington, D.C., the Biden Administration pledged during "Gay Pride Month" to promote LGBTQI+ rights, not only in the U.S., but around the world [3]. Thus, US federal buildings, with the exception of the Pentagon, have raised the rainbow flag on their facades for the month of June. This is the framework in which the Commission and the European Council are acting, not the pseudo-defense of "European values" which have nothing to do with it.

Already in the 1980s, the Clinton Administration financed the AIDS issue in order to instrumentalize gay associations, all over the world, to exert pressure on governments and sell them US treatments.

No one doubts that President Biden is sincere about ending discrimination against people based on their skin color. However, as I have shown in a previous article [4], what he is doing is the direct opposite. He thinks he is fighting racism, but he is pursuing a segregationist policy. My words shocked those of my readers who considered them a minority opinion. But today it is not an opinion, but an analysis shared by the greatest black intellectuals in the United States [5]. Similarly, no one thinks that Joe Biden is insincere when he intends to fight discrimination against people based on their sexual orientation. But this does not prevent him from doing the opposite.

Internationally, the Biden Administration is using the homosexual issue as it has used religious freedom or racism. Thus, it accuses Russia of being homophobic, whereas homosexuality is decriminalized there (it had been heavily penalized by Joseph Stalin as part of his fight against the homosexual soviets and was legalized again by Mikhail Gorbachev [6]).

The Western confusion is rooted in the institutionalization of homosexual marriage by the Scandinavian countries. It is important to be aware that marriage does not have the same meaning in different periods and civilizations. When the Scandinavian countries invented same-sex marriage, they were not seeking to create an equivalence with heterosexual marriage, but to give all citizens access to a public service of the state church. These countries have state churches whose pastors are civil servants, and they reserved one of their public services - marriage - for heterosexuals only.

By the way, I remember very well a lunch with a parliamentarian who was the rapporteur of the first law instituting gay marriage. She assured me that this law would put an end to the "sexual vagrancy" of this community. When I asked her what her country had planned for transsexuals, she told me that there were no people "like that" in her country.

Let’s get back to the topic at hand. As president of the largest European gay political association, the Ornicar Project, I have opposed gay marriage in Latin countries. That is why the German environmentalist Claudia Roth, when she wrote her report to the European Parliament on the homosexual question in 1994, did not advise to introduce gay marriage everywhere, but only to end discrimination based on heterosexual marriage [7]

One can only regret the adoption of gay marriage by Spain, Portugal, France and Malta, whereas heterosexual marriage is a contract to govern the inheritance of children. Equality could have been achieved, not by opening marriage to infertile couples, but by ending the legal privileges of heterosexual married couples. This was the solution I negotiated with Bishop Joseph Duval, President of the French Episcopal Conference, who supported it.

It is generally considered that during puberty, one discovers one’s sexuality and therefore one’s sexual orientation. Most societies refrain from guiding adolescents in one direction or another. From this point of view, it is legitimate for Hungary to prohibit the promotion of homosexual orientation in schools as well as heterosexual orientation. This does not violate any human right as long as both sexual orientations are legal for adults.

For the same reasons, France adopted the Jolibois amendment in 1994, which penalized, among other things, pornography "likely to be seen or perceived by minors. Some groups intended to use this text to censor all kinds of films, books and magazines. The Voltaire Network was created to clarify this text so that it does not limit freedom of expression. It succeeded in doing so, and this is what should only be done in Hungary.

The fact that the European Union is interfering with the sovereign choice of the Hungarian people shows its willingness to impose itself as a supranational bureaucracy above national democracies.

By supporting the EU on this issue, European LGBTQI+ people are taking a stand in a conflict that is not theirs. They are taking the risk of a backlash when the People defeat the EU bureaucracy, which is inevitable.

It is interesting to note that the European Union has abandoned the argument of "clear risk of violation of the rule of law" for that of "clear risk of violation of the values on which the Union is founded". Everyone agrees that the Hungarian law does not violate the legal principles of the Union. The values argument is clarified by Commissioners Didier Reynders and Thierry Breton in their letter to the Hungarian Minister of Justice.

While they refer to Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union (Maastricht 1992) and Article 21 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000), they do not insist because they fail to establish discrimination. They devote most of their letter to the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) and the E-Commerce Directive. The idea is that the Hungarian law would be contrary to the commercial law of the European Common Market because it prohibits the distribution in Hungary of products that are legal in the rest of the Union. If this argument were to be supported in the long term by Brussels, the "clear risk of violation of the values on which the Union is based" would be limited to the risk of not being able to sell anything anywhere.

Clearly, the Union is misdirecting a fight for justice. It mocks homosexuals and their equality in Law.

Thierry Meyssan

Translation 
Roger Lagassé

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https://www.voltairenet.org/article213494.html

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