Colorado parents will lose custody for 'deadnaming'
Four new bills focused on protecting abortion care and “gender-affirming health care” are currently working their way through the Colorado legislature.
One such bill, H.B. 25, is focused on protecting “access” to this gender-affirming health care.
“Whenever you see that word 'access' used by progressives, what they mean is that they are forcing you to pay for something. They’re forcing the taxpayer to pay for something, to pay for transition so-called or to pay for abortion, and this grants access to people who maybe wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford it without the help of taxpayer dollars,” Allie Beth Stuckey of “Relatable” explains.
"This bill codifies protections for gender-affirming health care in state law. It mandates that all health insurance plans in Colorado cover 'medically necessary gender-affirming care,'" she adds.
“No gender-affirming care is medically necessary,” Stuckey says.
However, while concerning to begin with, there’s another part of H.B. 25 that puts parents and their custody of their children in jeopardy.
One part of the bill, known as the Kelly Loving Act, was passed by the Colorado House on April 6 and now awaits review in the Colorado Senate.
“This is a very scary part of this bill,” Stuckey says. “The courts must consider deadnaming, all these euphemisms, misgendering, threats to publish material related to gender-affirming care — so like outing someone — as coercive control when determining parenting time and child custody.”
“They must look at all of these things when they are determining parental custody, like a divorce custody battle, when it comes to how these parents treat their children,” she explains.
“So, they could accuse a parent of coercive control if a parent, for example, threatens to publish the individual's sensitive personal information, including sexually explicit material or material related to gender-affirming health care services or make reports to the police or authorities or deadnaming or misgendering the individual or individual’s child,” she continues.
An example Stuckey uses is a woman who is in a custody battle and is getting divorced from her husband who has now declared that he’s a woman. If she continues to call him Frank when he wants to be called Sally, the judge has to consider this in the custody battle when awarding custody to parents.
“So, the parent who acknowledges reality, acknowledges the reality of their ex-spouse’s gender or acknowledges the reality of their child, refuses to affirm these newfound identities, then that parent could be punished and should be punished, really,” Stuckey explains.
“Basically, the state will steal your child from you, will take away your custody rights from your child, if you affirm biological reality,” she adds.
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VA will no longer offer fake breasts, dilators, other sex-change ‘prosthetics’ to end gender ideology
The Department of Veterans Affairs announced on Monday that it would "phase out" offering "gender-affirming prosthetics" and cross-sex hormones, citing President Donald Trump's executive order directing the federal government to eradicate gender ideology.
The executive action, "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government," recognized two sexes that are "not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality."
'They can do so on their own dime.'
The VA's Monday announcement explained that the department is "adjusting its policies to fully comply with the EO," which includes no longer providing veterans with "cross-sex hormone therapy" or "any other medical or surgical therapy for gender dysphoria to any patients in any circumstance."
The VA stated that it never provided "sex-change surgeries." However, in addition to cross-sex hormones, it has offered voice training and "so-called gender-affirming prosthetics, including breast forms, chest binders, dilator sets for post-vaginoplasty, packers, surgical compression vests, and wigs."
Veterans already receiving cross-sex hormones will not be impacted by the change.
The VA noted that those with gender dysphoria can continue to receive preventive and mental health care.
"Any and all savings VA achieves by stopping specific medical treatments for gender dysphoria will be redirected to help severely injured VA beneficiaries — such as paralyzed Veterans and amputees — regain their independence," the press release read.
VA Secretary Doug Collins stated, "I mean no disrespect to anyone, but VA should not be focused on helping Veterans attempt to change their sex. The vast majority of Veterans and Americans agree, and that is why this is the right decision."
"All eligible Veterans — including trans-identified Veterans — will always be welcome at VA and will always receive the benefits and services they've earned under the law. But if Veterans want to attempt to change their sex, they can do so on their own dime," he added.
Over the weekend, Collins was questioned about the Department of Government Efficiency's efforts to trim waste and bureaucracy within the VA.
"At the end of the day, I'm gonna make decisions best for my employees and best for the veterans, and they're giving us some good advice, looking with fresh eyes," Collins stated.
"We're going to do everything we possibly can to make sure that the veteran experience gets better," Collins said, noting that it is the "biggest issue" the VA faces.
Since Trump took office, the VA has already opened four new clinics.
"As government union bosses, the legacy media, and some in Congress have been spreading false rumors of health care and benefits cuts at VA, we've opened multiple brand-new clinics that will serve tens of thousands of veterans," Collins remarked.
"Don't believe the fake news," he added.
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Detrans Awareness Day Heralds A Reckoning For Transgender ‘Medicine’ Fraudsters
The ‘conservative’ 5th Circuit just shielded Biden’s radical gender agenda
How does Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination, justify forcing doctors to violate the Hippocratic Oath and perform castrations to accommodate transgender ideology? No rational legal mind could reach that conclusion.
Yet the judiciary has become so politically compromised that even the supposedly conservative Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an interpretation of the law that forces doctors to perform these procedures — or risk losing Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements.
If doctors must wait until they are punished to challenge a rule, why don’t Trump’s directives get the same deference? What happened to legal consistency?
As part of the Biden administration’s relentless effort to impose transgender ideology nationwide, the president issued an order last year interpreting Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act as a mandate for doctors to perform irreversible castrations. Originally designed to prohibit sex-based discrimination under the 1972 law, Section 1557 has now been twisted into the prior administration’s legal justification for these procedures.
Yes, the deeply flawed Bostock v. Clayton County decision — thanks to Justice Neil Gorsuch — expanded the 1972 law to include protections for transgender individuals. But on what basis does an anti-discrimination law create a right to force doctors to perform procedures they believe cause harm?
Bostock involved an employee fired for cross-dressing at work. Biden’s order, by contrast, does not merely prohibit discrimination — it compels employers to provide not just dresses but irreversible medical procedures.
Questions of standing — and bad precedent
For any Republican-appointed judge, this should have been an easy decision. In 2022, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee in the Northern District of Texas, ruled in favor of the physician plaintiffs. He issued a declaratory judgment stating that the administration had completely misinterpreted the Affordable Care Act’s anti-discrimination provision. He also affirmed that physicians had clear standing to sue over the order.
In December, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit, including two Republican appointees, ruled that doctors lacked standing to sue the Biden administration.
“The plaintiffs do not consider their actions to be gender-identity discrimination, nor do they provide evidence that HHS would view them as such,” the court stated.
“Plaintiffs have failed to show they are actually violating the Notification, much less facing a credible threat of enforcement," Judges Edith Jones, Catharina Haynes, and Dana Douglas wrote in their per curiam opinion.
Last week, despite a 12-5 Republican-appointed majority, all but one judge — James Ho — refused to hear the case en banc, allowing this precedent to stand.
This case highlights how judges selectively apply standing based on political considerations. The left rarely struggles with standing. During Trump’s presidency, his executive orders faced immediate legal challenges, and liberal judges routinely granted standing.
For instance, blue states successfully sued over Trump’s order on anchor-baby citizenship, yet red states were repeatedly denied standing to challenge Biden’s immigration law violations.
The inconsistency is blatant. Doctors facing potential loss of Medicaid reimbursements supposedly do not have a “justiciable case,” but Trump’s executive orders were routinely enjoined before they even took effect.
The idea that doctors cannot sue over a regulation that threatens their Medicaid reimbursements until after they suffer consequences defies legal precedent.
A terrible double standard
Meanwhile, Trump’s executive orders have been blocked before even appearing in the federal register. How can courts enjoin a presidential directive before it becomes an official regulation?
If doctors must wait until they are punished to challenge a rule, why don’t Trump’s directives get the same deference? What happened to legal consistency?
The idea that doctors who have not yet faced punishment but could lose Medicaid reimbursements for refusing to perform castrations lack a ripe, justiciable claim is absurd given what happens in the courts daily.
I’m all for a minimalist judicial approach, but why does that never apply to those suing Republican presidents? Indeed, the courts have become a one-way ratchet for the left.
In a spirited dissent from his 16 colleagues — something he has grown accustomed to — Judge Ho argued that refusing to provide sex hormone therapy is not the same as categorical discrimination. A doctor who declines to prescribe hormones for gender dysphoria is not refusing to treat a transgender patient for a broken bone.
The Supreme Court already ruled in Geduldig v. Aiello (1974) that denying coverage for pregnancy does not constitute sex-based discrimination. “While it is true that only women can become pregnant, it does not follow that every legislative classification concerning pregnancy is a sex-based classification,” the justices ruled.
On the question of standing, Judge Ho criticized the majority for basing its argument on the notion that a podiatrist wouldn’t offer “transition” services anyway, so not every doctor should have standing to sue. He called this absurd, pointing out that Dr. Susan Neese, the plaintiff in this case, practices general internal medicine.
“She is fully capable of providing such services to minors,” Ho wrote. “She just thinks it’s wrong to do so.”
“If there’s a plausible basis for theorizing that it’s somehow outside of Dr. Neese’s specialty to simply make a referral of a minor patient to another doctor who specializes in the field, the United States has not offered one,” he concluded.
Trump is likely to overturn this policy anyway, but as Ho warned, the Fifth Circuit’s decision allows a bad precedent to remain in place for future cases.
“By denying rehearing en banc, our court today leaves on the books a published, precedential ruling that overturns the district court’s dutiful efforts and validates administrative overreach in an area of profound sensitivity,” he wrote in a footnote.
One can only speculate, but given the left-wing political attacks on the Fifth Circuit, some worry that the judges are softening their stance to avoid appearing too conservative. Whether that’s better or worse than siding with the ideological left outright is debatable. Either way, Trump should make a point of appointing more judges like James Ho in his second term — jurists who not only hold sound legal principles but also have the courage to rule accordingly.
Planned Parenthood Pennsylvania Takes Aim At Local School Board Races
Biden's case to BLOCK Tennessee's child sex-change ban EXPLAINED
The Supreme Court spent last week hearing arguments over a Tennessee law that bans doctors from providing transgender puberty blockers or hormone treatments to minors. It’s a logical law that protects against the mutilation of children, but of course, the left is upset that kids won’t be given what it euphemistically calls “gender affirming care.”
Despite being a state-level case, the Biden administration has intervened, apparently deciding that this will be the battle that concludes its disastrous term.
Josh Hammer, senior editor at large for Newsweek, joins Jill Savage and Blaze News editor in chief Matthew Peterson on “Blaze News Tonight” to discuss the situation.
“Does the Biden administration actually have grounds right now to intervene in a state policy like this?” Jill asks.
Hammer explains that the Department of Justice filed what is called a writ of certiorari — a legal document that requires the Supreme Court to review a lower court’s decision, granted four SCOTUS judges agree to hear the case.
“This case is styled U.S. vs. Skrmetti, which means that the United States is the lead plaintiff here,” Hammer says. “That actually has a very concrete, practical application when it comes to Donald Trump and JD Vance and Pam Bondi, assuming that she's going to be the AG pick come January 20.”
“They can move to withdraw this case, and specifically, they should make a motion to ... dismiss it as ‘improvidently granted,’” meaning that SCOTUS should never have accepted the case for review in the first place, he adds. “There's no reason why the United States should be in the procedural posture of suing Tennessee for a common sensical, civilizationally sound law.”
However, even if the Trump administration moves to “dig this case” and motion is denied, Hammer predicts the outcome will still be favorable.
“I was pretty happy with the way this argument went,” he says.
Peterson, who also watched the hearing, says that “the discrepancy between the two sides” was “astounding.”
“On the one side, you have the ACLU lawyer claiming that less than 1% of minors who undergo this surgery have regrets, and then you have Tennessee and the attorney general saying, ‘No, no, actually 85% desists from transition,”’ he recounts. “You really do have two sides talking in completely different universes.”
Hammer agrees: “What you saw at SCOTUS on Wednesday, I think, are two diametrically opposed conceptions of the human person. You saw two diametrically opposed conceptions of anthropology — of what it means to be human in the first place.”
“On the one hand, you have the ACLU left-wing argument, which is that human life is basically a pick-your-own adventure. ... On the other hand, you have the old-fashioned view — the view of Genesis 1:27: ‘Male and female, God created them,”’ he adds.
Because of the radically opposed viewpoints, “Neutrality here is just not an option.”
“You actually have to put a thumb on the scale from both a political perspective and indeed from a judicial and a jurisprudential perspective here. At some point, you actually have to say that the moral heart of the issue in this particular case dictates that there is male and female and that we are not going to arbitrarily concoct some sort of pseudo classification based on alleged ‘transgender status,’” says Hammer. “I am hopeful that in the majority opinion, or at least in one of the concurrences there, that we will get some morally forthright language.”
To hear more on the case, including Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson likening transgender surgeries on minors to interracial marriage, watch the clip above.
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Memo to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson: Sterilizing children is not ‘loving’
It seems that in addition to being a U.S. senator, Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn is also a prophet. The conservative from the Volunteer State asked Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson to define the word “woman” during her confirmation hearing in 2022, but the judge who was celebrated as the first black woman to be nominated to the nation’s highest court said she couldn’t define her sex because she is not a biologist.
Skip ahead two years, and Justice Jackson is hearing arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, a case that will determine whether states can prohibit “gender-affirming care” for minors, the progressive euphemism for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical procedures for children who “identify” as the opposite sex. At one point, Jackson drew a comparison between Tennessee banning medical treatments that can sterilize children to the ban on interracial marriage that was eventually overturned in Loving v. Virginia.
The color line determined the society our ancestors endured. The gender binary will determine the society our descendants inherit.
Tennessee’s solicitor general had to inform the justice that giving “testosterone to a boy with a deficiency is not the same treatment as giving it to a girl who has psychological distress with her body.” He correctly noted that the former helps a boy develop according to his sex while the latter renders a girl infertile.
The entire exchange should be the stake in the heart of superficial identity politics. Joe Biden appointed Jackson to the Supreme Court because he pledged to make history by putting a black woman on the bench. His black supporters — especially women — celebrated her nomination at the time. To them, her appointment was another milestone in America’s quest to become a more inclusive and tolerant nation.
W.E.B. DuBois famously said that the problem of the 20th century was “the problem of the color line.” To the people who think in superficial identity categories, putting a black woman on the highest court in the land was another step in destroying that barrier. But the fight of the 21st century will be preserving the sex binary, and only a racial idolater would consider legalizing child sterilization progress if a black woman casts the deciding vote.
The color line determined the society our ancestors endured. The gender binary will determine the society our descendants inherit.
The future will be painful for the children failed by parents, doctors, journalists, activists, and politicians who refuse to tell them the truth about who they are. The Biden administration and its progressive allies believe that counseling gender-confused children to accept their bodies as they were created is “conversion therapy” but puberty-blocking drugs, mastectomies, and hysterectomies constitute “gender-affirming care.” Denying basic biology is now required to be in good standing on the left, which is precisely why Ketanji Brown Jackson’s refusal to define “woman” during her hearing was so telling.
Unfortunately, the politics of racial allegiance blinded even the black Christians who otherwise hold to biblical sexual ethics. One pastor in Chicago whose church was formerly part of the Southern Baptist Convention said Justice Brown Jackson’s confirmation was a moment to be “celebrated” and a “gift of grace.” But I’m not sure how any preacher can attribute God’s goodness to a judge who refuses to affirm Genesis 1:27 or gives legal support to child sterilizations done in the name of civil rights.
In a sane world, the Tennessee case would result in a unanimous decision with a short summary clearly stating that men cannot become women (or vice versa), therefore, any hormonal and surgical treatments done under the guise of “transitioning” a person promises a medical outcome that can never be achieved.
Every man who has ever purchased an engagement ring knows that calling a cubic zirconia a diamond — regardless of its cut, clarity, or color — doesn’t change it into one. Composition and presentation are not the same thing.
This same principle applies to sex. A cross-dressing male doesn’t switch sexes by taking pills and putting on makeup. The reason why is quite simple: Women are born, not worn. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson needs to know that mutilating and sterilizing children in the name of civil rights is not loving.
Doctors Performing Trans Experiments On Kids Should Prepare To Be Sued In Texas And Elsewhere
Pro-Trans Doctors Hide Results Of Taxpayer-Funded Study Because It Shows ‘Transitioning’ Kids Is Harmful
[rebelmouse-proxy-image https://thefederalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-2024-10-24-at-2.09.58 PM-1200x675.png crop_info="%7B%22image%22%3A%20%22https%3A//thefederalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-2024-10-24-at-2.09.58%5Cu202fPM-1200x675.png%22%7D" expand=1]Johanna Olson-Kennedy refuses to publish the results of a study on puberty blockers for trans-identifying kids because 'I do not want our work to be weaponized.'
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