Vulnerable Ohio Democrat's last-minute flip-flop on trans insanity has LGBT activists crying



Despite early recognition that their party's obsession with gender ideology contributed to its humiliating electoral losses in 2024, Democrats have largely spent the past two years draped in the LGBT flag, defending so-called "gender-affirming care" and cross-dressing men in women's sports.

With the midterm election just weeks away, Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio has joined other vulnerable Democrats in changing her tune on trans extremism.

'Your words create deep emotional harm.'

Kaptur was long a darling of the LGBT advocacy group Human Rights Campaign and like-minded activists. After all, she co-sponsored legislation that would prohibit public accommodations and federally funded programs from discriminating on the basis of so-called "gender identity" and voted in opposition to the Department of War's ban on military "dudes in dresses."

The congresswoman has, however, signaled a new approach in recent ads.

In one ad titled "Say No," Kaptur noted that she has "said no to gender ideology in schools." In a second ad pushed online late last month, she stated, "I voted with Republicans to keep transgender ideology out of our schools."

In both instances, she was referring to how she voted with Republicans in May to pass the Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act, which would require public elementary schools to obtain parental consent before changing a kid's pronouns or sex-based accommodations.

According to Blaze News' Poll Watch, Kaptur, the longest-serving woman in congressional history, is currently neck and neck with Republican Derek Merrin, whom she beat by only a few thousand votes in 2024.

RELATED: Trans radical who massacred kids in Canadian school allegedly had American support

Kaptur's late-stage flip-flop has, of course, enraged the usual suspects.

Upon seeing one of Kaptur's ads, Erin Reed, the romantic partner of cross-dressing Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr (D), wrote, "This is getting out of control," adding, "Do NOT vote for anti-transgender Democrats."

Former Kaptur intern Nick Fulton whined in the pages of the Buckeye Flame that "as a 27-year-old working journalist who challenges oppression and interrogates transphobia daily, I am embarrassed at Rep. Kaptur’s name on my resume. So much so that I removed it."

"Rep. Kaptur might win over some far-right transphobes with this ad, but she is losing her integrity — and every queer voter who thought that her democratic membership meant allyship," added Fulton.

The non-straight advocacy group Equality Ohio slapped Kaptur with a D-grade, noting that while she at one time "earned a 100% rating from the Human Rights Campaign," she "recently released anti-trans ads."

Lucas County Stonewall Democrats published a letter on Sept. 21 demanding that Kaptur take down her "transphobic ad" immediately, stating, "Not only do your words create deep emotional harm and place an unnecessary spotlight on our Trans community members, putting them in more danger than they already are given the current climate, but you have also now engaged in a race to the bottom with Republicans."

The Christopher Steele Project, a trans advocacy group, whined, "We can want Democrats to win and secure a Democratic majority while also recognizing that the queer community’s organized political power does not have to fund the first Democrats willing to abandon us."

Alienating her radical base may not have been worthwhile since Republicans have already framed Kaptur's about-face as little more than naked election-time opportunism.

Her opponent, Derek Merrin, said at his rally with President Donald Trump on Saturday, "Marcy Kaptur is desperate to hold onto power. She is resorting to the typical career politician handbook: slander your opponent, distort the facts, and hope voters don't check the record."

"Marcy Kaptur is claiming that she no longer wants men to be able to play in women's sports," said Merrin. "The problem is she's voted two times against a bill that would have prohibited that practice. She's also co-sponsored six times the radical Equality Act that would allow men to play women's sports and allow men into women's locker rooms."

National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Zach Bannon told Fox News Digital, "Lies from desperate Democrat Marcy Kaptur can't erase her radical record. Kaptur is in damage control, and she must remove herself as a co-sponsor of the Equality Act and disavow her previous votes or remove her lies from the airwaves."

Kaptur's change in messaging strategy comes months after Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton (D) was downgraded by Equality Ohio after she claimed that she does "not support boys playing in girls' sports"; weeks after Democrat U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico of Texas walked back his support for men in girls' sports "if it risks safety or fairness"; and days after North Carolina Rep. Don Davis (D) released a commercial in which he states that "there should always be a safe and fair space for women and girls in sports."

Pew Research Center surveys found last year that:

  • 73% of Americans are uncomfortable with trans-identifying athletes competing against members of the opposite sex;
  • 66% favored requiring athletes to compete against members of their sex;
  • 56% support making it illegal for health care professionals to provide minors with "medical care for a gender transition";
  • 49% support requiring trans-identifying people to use public bathrooms that match their sex; and
  • 47% favor or strongly favor making it illegal for public schools to push gender ideology in elementary schools.

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DOJ report details Biden admin's apparent conspiracy against parents who dared to defend their kids



The Justice Department published a damning report from the Weaponization Working Group on Monday detailing how elements of the Biden administration allegedly conspired during the pandemic to characterize concerned parents as domestic terrorists.

How it started

Parents around the country made their voices heard during the pandemic about various matters impacting their children, including COVID-19 restrictions, mask mandates, anti-white propaganda in the classroom, and the abuse that inevitably followed districts' embrace of gender ideology-formed school policies.

'Find a reason to suggest that such protests could be federal crimes regardless of the initial skepticism.'

This exertion of political agency by parents apparently enraged the powers that be.

On Sept. 29, 2021, the National School Boards Association claimed in a letter to then-President Joe Biden, "America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat. The National School Boards Association respectfully asks for federal law enforcement and other assistance to deal with the growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation occurring across the nation."

In addition to complaining about the alleged dissemination of "misinformation," the NSBA suggested in the letter that school officials and educators around the country were "susceptible to acts of violence" and faced threats over their role in pushing COVID-19 and leftist measures.

From the NSBA's Sept. 29, 2021, letter. Justice Department

The NSBA letter also asked the Biden administration to:

  • "investigate, intercept, and prevent the current threats and acts of violence against our public school officials";
  • consider treating alleged "acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials" as "a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes"; and
  • "examine appropriate enforceable actions" against the supposed crimes under the PATRIOT Act and other statutes.

The NSBA also insinuated that certain individuals who attended school board meetings were potential terrorists, the DOJ Weaponization Working Group noted in its report.

Among those referenced was Scott Smith of Virginia. Smith criticized Loudoun County Public Schools officials after his disabled daughter was anally raped by a trans-identifying man in the girls' restroom at Stone Bridge High School.

RELATED: Parents weren't asked. Many still don't know. Inside the new school surveillance nightmare.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The DOJ's new WWG report makes mince meat of the NSBA's letter, which was recognized at the time by Republican state attorneys general as a "massive fraud" and "designed to intimidate parents into giving up their constitutional rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children."

The WWG report claims, for instance, that the NSBA identified "numerous instances of constitutionally protected speech and protest as 'threats'"; implored the Biden administration to treat such protected speech as criminal; and falsely suggested that school boards generally faced "angry mobs" and disruptions.

In an Oct. 22, 2021, letter, the NSBA board of directors walked back some of the claims and admitted that "there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter." The damage was, however, done.

The NSBA did not immediately respond to Blaze News' request for comment.

Despite its political bent and inaccuracies, the NSBA's Sept. 29, 2021, letter set the stage for the October 4, 2021, memo sent from then-Attorney General Merrick Garland to relevant Biden officials in the FBI and the DOJ, treating the association's claims as fact and their concerns as warranted.

From Merrick Garland's Oct. 4, 2021, memo.

According documents reviewed by the WWG, Garland's subsequent memo "and its suggestion that such protests could constitute federal criminal activity, including domestic terrorism, was the product of pressure by the White House and high-ranking Department of Justice officials to find a reason to suggest that such protests could be federal crimes regardless of the initial skepticism."

Elements inside the Justice Department and the FBI strongly doubted whether school-directed protest and criticism from parents qualified as criminal conduct.

An attorney in the DOJ's Civil Rights Division noted in an Oct. 3, 2021, email, "I read the letter from NSBA, and looked at the links for a handful of the footnotes, and it appears to me that the vast, vast majority of the behavior cited cannot be reached by federal law."

Justice Department.

One attorney in the DOJ's Criminal Division reportedly noted that an early version of the Garland memo tied supposed school board threats to election threats and would therefore be regarded "as a partisan exercise aimed at those who do not support the Administration."

Notwithstanding such internal criticism, Garland apparently rushed out his memo. The Biden administration then took steps to implement it, subjecting multiple parents to federal investigation.

The FBI previously confirmed to congressional investigators that it had opened at least 25 counterterrorism "Guardian assessments" based on alleged school board threats. Six of these probes were run by the bureau's Counterterrorism Division.

How it's going

The WWG concluded that the Garland memo "was the product of pressure by senior leadership to support the NSBA and to bring federal pressure to bear on parents protesting school districts that had enacted certain policies."

The WWG emphasized that by suggesting that concerned parents were breaking federal law or on the verge of doing so had a chilling effect on First Amendment rights.

While the Trump DOJ cannot turn back the clock and undo the damage generated by the previous administration, it is offering several remedies.

It will, for instance, enable those Americans targeted by the Biden administration for their participation in school board meetings to see the FBI Guardian assessments that were created for them.

The DOJ will also add a disclaimer to every Guardian assessment associated with the Garland memo, noting that "the Garland Memorandum raised serious constitutional concerns, and so any Guardian assessment resulting from it should be read with caution."

Additionally, the department will review the files of all persons investigated pursuant to the Garland memo to determine if their constitutional rights were trampled.

"Parents are children's natural providers and protectors," stated Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon. "The Biden-Harris DOJ labeled concerned parents as threats for exercising their right to know what was happening at their kids' schools. This Civil Rights Division stands with parents, and we will continue to partner with the Department of Education to enforce parents' rights under federal law."

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The kids are all right: Identifying as lesbian, gay, or bisexual in 'free fall' among teens, CDC data analyst says



LGBT activists' moment in the sun appears to be at an end.

Public opinion has, for instance, soured on permitting cross-dressing men in women's sports and bathrooms; on the provision of sex-rejection mutilation surgeries and puberty blockers to minors; and on the promotion of gender ideology in schools. Public support is also slipping for homosexual "marriage."

'Groomers hardest hit.'

Major corporations have pumped the brakes on the rainbow flag and supporting LGBT indoctrination initiatives and events — or have at the very least felt the need to pretend they would.

It appears that LGBT activists are now also losing their grip on future generations. New data from the CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System reveals a dramatic decline in non-straight identification among high school-age Americans.

According to an analysis of the CDC data by San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge, the number of LGB-identifying students "plummeted" in 2025.

Whereas, for instance, CDC data showed that 17% of 9th-graders — Americans ages 14 and 15 — identified as non-straight in 2023, that number fell to 11% last year. There were also declines in non-straight identification in other grades, especially among 10th-graders.

There was also decline for 12th-graders, but only two percentage points, from 18% to 16%.

RELATED: Gay Atlantic writer whines to Bill Maher that LGBT extremism is blowing up support for homosexual 'marriage'

PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP/Getty Images

The psychology professor highlighted that this "free fall" was driven almost entirely by teenage girls, which makes sense given that the LGBT social contagion that was dismissed and/or downplayed in recent years by so-called experts predominantly impacted girls.

"Identifying as LGB dropped from 27% in 2023 to 22% in 2025 among girls and from 9% to 7% among boys," Twenge noted. "The previous increase in identifying as LGB was also larger among girls, with a 128% increase (more than doubling) from 2015 to 2021 among girls and a 99% increase (doubling) from 2015 to 2023 among boys."

Twenge noted that the greatest decline was observed among 9th-grade girls. Whereas 30% of the cohort identified as non-straight in 2021, the number had fallen to 17% last year.

Part of this decline in LGB identification among teenage girls can be attributed to the collapse of the "bisexual" fad. Last year, only 13% of 9th-grade girls identified as "bisexual" — down from 26% in 2021.

"The sharp turn downward in identifying (and acting) as LGB among Gen Alpha teens could be a harbinger of a coming wave of change, or it could be a blip — it’s hard to say," wrote Twenge.

Mary Rice Hasson, director of the Person and Identity Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, tweeted: "Looks like people aren't 'born that way.'"

Todd Erzen, the co-host of BlazeTV's "Steve Deace Show," said in response to the decline in teenage LGB identification, "Groomers hardest hit."

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Republican Senator Introduces Bill To Protect The Parent-Child Relationship From Trans Ideology

'Raising a child according to his or her sexis not abuse.'

Under guise of 'math help,' HS pushed girl's gender transition — and state took her away, says her Catholic parents' lawyer



Under the guise of "math help," a Massachusetts high school pushed for a girl's gender transition — and soon the state took her away, her Catholic parents' lawyer tells Blaze News.

Indeed, the Trump administration has launched an investigation into the girl's school district after reports that school officials "allegedly facilitated" her "gender transition" without her parents’ "knowledge or consent."

'Sophie should not only be returned to her parents, but there should be civil and criminal penalties for such misconduct by government agents.'

Joseph and Arlene Kutzko said their daughter Sophie has been in the custody of the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families since December 2024 — when she was 15 — after the Kutzkos refused to recognize her as a boy or call her by male names and pronouns, the Boston Herald reported, adding that the state also issued a permanent restraining order against the Kutzkos.

Vernadette Broyles, the Kutzkos' attorney, told Blaze News that the parents were kept in the dark and told that Sophie was getting "math help" at Algonquin Regional High School in Northborough while a counselor allegedly "socially transitioned" her — so the parents were "deceived, actually."

"They're a beautiful family," Broyles told Blaze News, adding that "it's been hell on earth" for the Kutzkos as they do battle with three separate courts in their quest to regain custody of her and are stretched to the limit financially.

Meanwhile, Democrat Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey told the Herald that the gender issue has nothing to do with why the Kutzkos' daughter was taken from them.

“Let me be clear about the facts in that matter," Healey said, according to the paper. "First of all, DCF did not remove the child because of a health issue or a gender-affirming care issue. DCF removed the child after there were criminal charges filed against the parents, including the father. As you know, DCF is responsible for the care and well-being of kids, and that’s what happened in this instance.”

But Broyles countered to the Herald that physical and sexual abuse charges against the parents were deemed unfounded in juvenile court, and there was no finding of guilt in criminal court following a non-guilty disposition with prosecutors: “It’s very dishonest, because there are no standing charges against them."

Meanwhile, as the Kutzkos' legal fees ballooned past $150,000, Broyles noted to the paper that an unidentified adult allegedly helped Sophie get a restraining order against her parents when she had been in state custody for nearly a year — and that the order still stands.

Broyles noted to Blaze News that the restraining order includes "no contact" and that "it's my understanding that [the Department of Children and Families] supported" the order.

What's more, an allegation of neglect against the Kutzkos still looms — and "it's never been explained to them," Broyles told Blaze News.

But Broyles said she has a good idea what it's all about.

Broyles told Blaze News the "implication" is that the neglect allegation has to do with the Kutzkos' refusal to agree to their daughter's desire for a medical gender transition — "but Massachusetts doesn't want to say that."

Meanwhile, despite no finding of guilt against the parents, the Kutzkos have "not been allowed to see or talk to their daughter or observe her for 20 months," Broyles told Blaze News.

"You've got to be kidding me," their attorney added to Blaze News. "How are these people so dangerous to her? ... I believe we have a state that, at its core, believes these parents are unsafe, [and] they are hiding behind a nebulous neglect. Nothing else adds up."

Despite Sophie having been a "very faithful Catholic girl" and "so active in the church," Broyles told Blaze News that "girls go down rabbit holes that suck them into this belief system" counter to parents' wishes, and that's "probably what happened to" Sophie, while those in custody of her are "championing" her gender transition. To wit: Broyles also told Blaze News that Sophie has been placed on birth control, is living in a male facility, and "now they want to give her testosterone," which her father — a scientist — is totally against.

"She's probably pretty manipulated by now," Broyles told Blaze News.

RELATED: Blaze News investigates: Democrats attack parents and parental rights in Colorado

C.J. Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, added to Blaze News that the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families "is an unelected and unaccountable government bureaucracy with a long and disreputable history of arbitrary, autocratic, and authoritarian behavior, hostile to both parental rights and religious freedom."

Doyle also told Blaze News that the DCF's actions against the Kutzkos amount to "nothing less than state-sponsored kidnapping and government-inflicted child abuse. It is a direct assault, by rogue state actors, on parental authority, family integrity, and constitutionally protected religious liberty."

Doyle also argued that "Sophie should not only be returned to her parents, but there should be civil and criminal penalties for such misconduct by government agents."

As for the Trump administration's involvement, the U.S. Department of Education’s Student Privacy Policy Office on Thursday launched an investigation into the Public Schools of Northborough and Southborough in Massachusetts to determine whether the school district violated the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act in relation to the Kutzkos' case.

“Parents have a right to know what is happening with their children at school, particularly when it concerns deeply personal matters involving their health and well-being,” said Frank Miller, director of the Student Privacy Policy Office. “These egregious allegations are not an isolated problem. Families deserve answers, and SPPO will thoroughly investigate reports like this and hold any educational institution that violates federal law accountable.”

Algonquin Regional High School and the Northborough-Southborough Regional School District denied all of the Kutzkos' allegations, calling them “baseless” and “grossly insensitive, intrusive, and dangerous toward the child," according to the Herald.

The paper said it has requested comment from the DCF.

The Kutzkos' next court appearance is scheduled for Oct. 29, the Herald said.

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How groupthink replaces truth



When did facts or verifiable evidence get replaced by consensus within a specific community that continually repeats collectively held ideas or feelings? And is this trend why, everywhere we look, demonstrable truth is becoming subservient to imagination? Do we now live in a world where truth-seeking is taking a back seat to groupthink?

As far back as the 1980s, when regular folks were confronted with mics and asked for their man-on-the-street opinions on everything from when life begins to tactical strategy for war, I remember thinking, “This practice is going to be a problem.”

What happens to the fabric of society if what one personally believes attains precedence over what is proven to be true?

Why?

Because for the past 40 years or so, subjective constructs have been elevated to the status of fact and given far more credibility than verifiable truth. As if fallible human feelings determine what is true — they do not.

Granted, opinions are relative; we all have them, and in America, we can still freely express our point of view. This is also true of individual preferences and judgments, which remain relative. But more and more, people treat fictional beliefs and unsubstantiated claims as factual simply because large, loud, and strongly opinionated groups adopt and agree upon them.

Thus culture has become a delusional world where definitions can be altered to protect belief and political identity determines what is considered true or false.

This penchant for self-determined reality makes healthy debate almost impossible because what’s considered correct becomes tainted by distinctions shaped by a consensus around feelings rather than by credible substantiation.

The perversion of truth is increasingly evident in definitions of male and female, as well as in criteria defining human life.

Contemporary progressives seem most culpable for elevating subjectivism, self-perceived identity, and personal opinion above facts. Partisans on the left are so committed to redefining everything that moral or political debate has devolved into a one-way assault of accusations, denial, and the exaltation of fantastical beliefs.

One skill set missing from the relativists’ playbook is logic.

Viewed logically, calling something “my truth” concedes that whatever you believe or promote is personal rather than universally established as a certainty. The fallacy of “my truth” becomes most heated around topics like the dignity of life in the womb, biological sex, and who should ultimately bear personal responsibility when an “oppressed” woman commits a criminal act.

RELATED: Did Lindsay Clancy lose her mind — or her free will?

David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

That is where we have witnessed the tendency to promote personal opinion over what is morally, biologically, historically, legally, and philosophically accepted.

This is especially true when pro-life and pro-choice opinions clash. One side aligns with 95% of 5,502 biologists who agreed that human life begins at fertilization. Despite biological assurance, however, one side insists that a woman’s choice supersedes truth.

The looming danger is that if moral relativism continues to gain credibility, right and wrong vanish and opinion rules. The bad news is that opinions change, which means that on a collective whim, every life at whatever stage could become justifiably disposable.

What happens to the fabric of society if what one personally believes attains precedence over what is proven to be true?

What we have seen lately is that morally relativistic people are so steeped in the certainty that their opinions are correct that they applaud themselves for exposing those they view as evil, which seems not only an estimable goal but also a justification for violence.

Societal relativism has reached a boiling point and has put innocent individuals in the literal crosshairs of vigilantes responding to sentiments widely accepted as true.

According to this moral barometer, a conservative influencer can be assassinated publicly, and some who feel morally convicted by his views on biblical matters, politics, and traditional male and female roles think it’s fitting to cheer his death.

And these are the people who fancy themselves kindness warriors?

RELATED: Campus free speech is alive — barely

Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

Among progressives, this pattern has evolved to the point that a devoted husband and father like Charlie Kirk is derided, while a woman who admitted to strangling her three children is defended and supported by female activists who have convinced themselves that children are disposable and women are an oppressed class.

Because of political differences, these same women feel justified in demonizing Kirk’s grieving widow merely because she holds the same conservative convictions as her dead husband.

These people have convinced themselves that, based on personal opinion alone, Patrick Clancy should be strung up, drawn, and quartered and that one black, male juror, who they have collectively concluded is also guilty by reason of maleness, deserves condemnation.

As if feelings and thoughts were evidence, some online defenders have made extraordinary accusations against Patrick Clancy, not on demonstrable proof but solely on a fairy tale they have concocted in their own toxic minds.

So the kind of psychosis that accompanies the delusional reality our culture is currently steeped in — especially in political debate — has now been deemed the authority to determine who is considered insane by the insane?

If carried to its logical conclusion, a relativistic mind meld can lead to mob rule, which is now depicted as “democracy,” a political system in which the potential exists to have an innocent individual dragged to the guillotine merely because the crowd believed he or she deserved it.

We see this now when evidentiary truth is automatically dismissed as coming from the wrong source. Yet the truth remains true even if no one believes it; reality cannot be reinvented to suit our fallible human proclivities.

As Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally,” a more than 70-year-old observation that supports the contemporary idea that the clash between human self-deception and moral reality is nothing new.

Portland schools turned one mom into a culture-war enemy



Although transgenderism has been on the retreat since its peak in 2023, it is still quite alive in blue states like Oregon. Last month, a Portland mother, Allison Roberts, filed a lawsuit against Portland Public Schools after receiving a trespass order because of her protests against gender ideology in her children’s elementary school.

According to reports, Roberts took issue with an assignment given to her 11-year-old that asked students to identify and discuss their gender identity with classmates and teachers, as well as the school’s decision to repaint its traditional rainbow Pride flag into an “Intersex-Inclusive Progress” variant. Roberts alleges that parents received no advance notice of the assignment or opportunity to opt their children out.

Schools exist to educate children, not to claim authority over their understanding of sex, identity, and morality.

When she tried to meet with the school’s principal, she got an unsatisfactory response. She then wrote an open letter opposing the school’s policies and passed it out to other parents outside the school. A clash with another parent followed, and eventually the district issued a one-year trespass order barring Roberts from school property.

It goes without saying that the school principal handled the matter badly. In my experience teaching in public schools, parents with concerns like Roberts’ are heard and usually accommodated. The principal could have asked the teacher to stop giving the assignment or simply allowed Roberts’ children to complete an alternative. Respectfully listening to her complaints about the flags would probably have de-escalated the situation.

Instead, the school treated Roberts like some deranged religious kook, dismissed her concerns, invoked the law, and idiotically made itself the center of a culture war.

On the bright side, the story presents an opportunity to reject transgenderism in schools by confronting the main arguments used to defend it.

The first and most obvious claim is that parents like Roberts are trying to impose their religion on others by rejecting transgender indoctrination. This has it completely backward: Portland Public Schools are imposing their religion by requiring children to discuss gender identity and surrounding them with symbols endorsing a particular understanding of sex and gender. This is the endorsement of a particular set of beliefs and values — what many people would recognize as functioning much like a religion.

RELATED: When government breaks the law, can you even sue?

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Of course, the usual follow-up is that leftist ideologies are not exclusive religions bound to dogmas and theories but inclusive agendas based on science and democratic values.

Again, Roberts’ case shows the problem with that framing. Some transgender activists describe disagreement with their ideology as a form of genocide. Claims that biological sex can be overridden by subjective gender identity remain fiercely contested, yet dissenters are routinely treated as though they reject established scientific fact. The result is an ideology that frequently marginalizes Christians and others who understand sex as fixed and binary.

Nevertheless, transgender advocates maintain that it is critical to welcome and affirm transgender children. Transgender young people report depression and anxiety at substantially higher rates than their peers, and advocates argue that acceptance is therefore essential.

This is where the argument becomes harder, not easier.

For those who have personally interacted with young people suffering from gender dysphoria, it is one thing to consider transgenderism in the abstract; it is another to watch a young person take cross-sex hormones and permanently alter a healthy body in pursuit of an identity that may itself change.

Young women can develop facial hair, lowered voices, and other permanent changes from testosterone. Young men who take estrogen undergo their own profound physical changes. Whatever one thinks about such treatments for adults, there is nothing trivial about medicalizing confused or distressed children.

And none of this belongs in a K-12 curriculum presented as though there were no serious moral, medical, or scientific dispute.

There have also been several highly publicized mass shootings committed by transgender perpetrators. Those cases do not demonstrate that transgender people as a class are dangerous, and pretending otherwise would be bad reasoning. They do, however, make especially foolish the insistence that every concern about gender ideology must arise from irrational hatred.

As Roberts’ experience shows, merely requesting the removal of such materials and imagery at a public school may not be enough. Restoring sanity requires removing transgender propaganda from classrooms and replacing ideological instruction with a moral framework that actually helps children flourish.

In practice, this would mean looking in part to my home state of Texas. Besides restricting certain LGBTQ teaching materials and accommodations for transgender identities, Texas lawmakers have banned students from using cell phones and other personal communication devices during the school day.

RELATED: Parents, not bureaucrats, should call the shots

The phone ban gets children off screens and forces them to interact with the people around them. They cannot as easily retreat into online worlds where anxieties and pathologies can be cultivated in isolation. They have to engage with reality.

Texas lawmakers have also required public school classrooms to post the Ten Commandments. The law has faced constitutional challenges, although the Fifth Circuit in April vacated an earlier preliminary injunction against it. Other litigation continues.

Unlike transgender flags, which signal allegiance to a contested secular ideology, the Ten Commandments clearly articulate a moral code centered on reverence, honesty, respect for others, and self-control. These are useful guidelines for any classroom.

Despite their roots in Judeo-Christian Scripture, many of the principles contained in the Ten Commandments can be understood and practiced by anyone. They provide a moral framework ordered toward human flourishing and are far more useful to children than slogans about gender identity.

At least Texas is moving in the opposite direction from Portland.

Allison Roberts should not have been treated as a threat merely for objecting to what her child was being taught. Her lawsuit will determine whether Portland Public Schools crossed a legal line. The larger argument belongs to every parent: Schools exist to educate children, not to claim authority over their understanding of sex, identity, and morality.

Gender Ideology Tied to Political Violence
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Gender Ideology Tied to Political Violence

The WNBA’s identity crisis is bigger than basketball



With the “Women’s” NBA twisting itself into knots rather than plainly defining woman, gender ideology is back in the news.

The first problem is linguistic. Using “gender” when one means sex invites confusion. Jay Richards has explained gender ideology as the view that the sex binary does not fully describe human identity and that a person may possess an internal “gender identity” incongruent with sex.

‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’

That framework helps explain a related question: Why can stating ordinary biological distinctions provoke such extraordinary hostility — even death threats — when the dispute concerns women’s sports and other sex-separated spaces?

One answer is that the argument is not only about biology. It also draws on an older revolutionary tradition that treats inherited institutions and categories as instruments of domination. Hence the old line: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

Start with Marx and Engels. In “The Communist Manifesto,” they called for “the most radical rupture with traditional relations” and “traditional ideas,” while attacking private property, religion, and the bourgeois family. Paul Kengor has written that later leftist movements continued this attack on traditional marriage and family.

The intellectual path from Marx to contemporary gender theory is not a straight line, however. Antonio Gramsci did not simply replace economics with culture; he broadened Marxist analysis by emphasizing culture, institutions, and “hegemony” as sources of social power. What is commonly called cultural Marxism grew from this shift in emphasis.

Herbert Marcuse likewise looked beyond the industrial working class to marginalized groups as possible agents of radical change. Rudi Dutschke popularized the idea of a “long march through the institutions,” while Mike Gonzalez has noted the Gramscian strategy of a long-term “war of position” aimed at reshaping culture before political victory.

Critical theory pushed the analysis further. Frankfurt School thinkers such as Marcuse and Max Horkheimer examined capitalism, authority, culture, and repression through a Marxist-Freudian lens. Other Frankfurt School theorists treated social structures — including family and sexuality — as possible mechanisms of domination.

Postmodern and deconstructionist thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida came from different traditions, but their work converged with critical theory on one crucial point: suspicion toward claims of neutral, universal truth. In this intellectual climate, truth itself was dismissed by some theorists as inseparable from power.

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As Bishop Robert Barron has written in a related discussion of deconstruction, “There is no final truth, no ultimate settling of a question. There is always something new.” Once inherited categories are treated principally as products of power, even apparently basic questions — “What is a woman?” — become open to endless renegotiation.

Judith Butler’s 1990 book “Gender Trouble” brought these currents directly into gender theory. Butler argued that gender is performative and challenged the stability of the sex/gender distinction and traditional sex roles.

This does not prove that every person who supports transgender rights is a Marxist, or that modern gender theory can be reduced to a single ideological source. It does show why the rhetoric so often sounds revolutionary rather than merely therapeutic.

When transgender discrimination is called the “civil rights issue of our time,” the claim places gender identity within a familiar oppressor-oppressed framework. Christopher Rufo has said that some trans activists explicitly describe their movement as a successor to Marxism, with transgender people cast as a new revolutionary vanguard.

That is the more defensible connection. Gender ideology did not simply fall out of “The Communist Manifesto.” It developed amid intellectual traditions that increasingly interpreted social categories through power, oppression, liberation, and the deconstruction of inherited norms.

Its political alliances reinforce the point. Gender politics routinely appears among the current things the activist left leverage as part of its war on capitalism and Western civilization generally. Jonathan Butcher has noted how intersectionality explicitly links “identity movements based on gender and racial liberation” through a common theory of social domination.

From Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors describing herself as a “trained Marxist” to the pro-Hamas red-green alliance that includes Queers for Palestine, the coalition repeatedly joins causes that appear unrelated on the surface but share a politics of oppression and liberation.

The issue is not always literally the issue. Increasingly, the issue is the revolution.

'Our results shocked us': HHS report confirms your darkest suspicions about trans ideology



Amid ruinous pro-trans policies advanced by Democrat lawmakers around the country and a seemingly interminable string of horrific attacks allegedly plotted and/or executed by trans-identifying radicals, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services commissioned a study on the connection between gender ideology and leftist authoritarian beliefs.

The findings in the study published on Wednesday are damning — but likely won't surprise anyone who has been paying attention.

'Greater political liberalism independently predicted higher justification of political violence as well.'

The new study commissioned by HHS, titled "Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left- Wing Authoritarian Psychology?," is the latest addition to the genre of scientific literature confirming what the right already knew.

The research team behind the study included Joel Finkelstein, chief science officer and co-founder of the Network Contagion Research Institute; Lee Jussim, head of the Social Perception Laboratory at Rutgers University; and Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist who serves as a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Together, they developed a "Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale," measuring endorsement of five positions related to gender ideology.

The five positions derive from official guidance issued by organizations that "represent the official scientific and clinical establishment on care for individuals who identify as transgender," according to the researchers.

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The five consensus positions with which respondents were asked to agree or disagree included:

  • "Failure to affirm a transgender person's gender identity increases the risk of serious psychological distress to the trans person."
  • "People should be supported in expressing their transgender identity."
  • "Using the name a person chooses as part of their gender transition is a necessary form of support."

'Biological-sex classifications and traditional parental or familial authority is seen as structures of harm.'

Using a questionnaire provided to over 1,200 majoritively Democrat-leaning Americans, the researchers tracked whether there was any correlation between endorsement of these organizations' consensus positions in the CGAS and left-wing authoritarianism.

"Our results shocked us," said Colin Wright.

"All correlations were substantial," said the study.

"The relationship was not merely descriptively correlational; endorsement of CGAS was a strong statistical predictor of left-wing authoritarianism."

The study noted that endorsements of both the CGAS and left-wing authoritarianism "were significantly positively correlated with justification for political violence" against President Donald Trump, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, wealthy Americans' property, the police, and two recent victims of assassination — Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, and Brian Thompson, the late CEO of UnitedHealthcare.

"CGAS was a consistent and statistically significant predictor of political violence justification," said the study. "... Political identity was also a significant predictor across all six outcomes, indicating that greater political liberalism independently predicted higher justification of political violence as well."

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Since the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and the American Academy of Pediatrics have supported the five positions at some point, the findings of the research "raise a question of scientific responsibility," continued the study.

The researchers cautioned, however, that gender ideology "was not simply standing in for being politically left-wing; it explained additional variation in political violence justification beyond political identity. Thus, its association with political violence cannot be reduced simply to ordinary left-right political identification."

According to the researchers, gender ideology appears to function as a framework through which left-wing authoritarian tendencies can be concentrated.

After all, it not only provides left-wing authoritarians with potential targets to go after — including straights, Republicans, conservative Christians, and law enforcement — but "mandates institutional norm enforcement" by way of compelling speech, crackdowns on parental resistance, and institutional discipline.

This framework also provides left-wing authoritarians with "a third form of ideological fuel: a conventional order to dismantle. As such, biological-sex classifications and traditional parental or familial authority is seen as structures of harm requiring a moralized project of institutional correction."

"This study raises important questions about what happens when ideology is given the authority of medicine," said Assistant Secretary for Health Adm. Brian Christine. "The association between sex-rejecting clinical beliefs, authoritarian attitudes, and the justification of political violence warrant[s] serious scientific scrutiny."

Christine noted further that "HHS will continue to pursue rigorous research that examines these relationships and gives the American people the evidence they deserve."

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