This was the result of a male student ‘self-id’ing into a female sport locker room. The female child that complained about having a male perv on them and her Father were both subject to censure and school disciplinary procedures, including attempting to compel their speech and actions. Thankfully that bullshit was stopped dead in its tracks.
I am the mother of the trans student in question and my [son] daughter did not make any comments at all. The entire team can back this up, other than the girl that made up the story for attention.
This is slander, defamation of character, and we have secured a lawyer….
Travis responded:
I am the father of the girl you claim “made up a story for attention.” The truth is your son watched my daughter and multiple other girls change in the locker room. While he got a free show they got violated.
You think this is fine and dandy. I wonder how you would feel if I watched you undress?
For that transgression school officials demanded that Travis apologize, and ended a contract it had with him as coach of the school’s girls’ soccer team.
Claimed the ADF in its lawsuit:
The First Amendment does not countenance this kind of government censorship, where a public school mandates that students and coaches refrain from expressing any view that offends its prescribed views, particularly on an issue as important as whether the school should permit males identifying as girls to undress, shower and change in the girls’ locker room.
Travis and Blake Allen were entitled to express their views on that issue and, in expressing those views, to support them with what is a biological fact — that a biological teenage male is, indeed, a male.
This case presents a textbook example of unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination, and Plaintiffs are entitled to all appropriate relief.
ADF summed up their argument:
By requiring Blake Allen to take part in a “restorative circle” to help her “understand the rights of students to access public accommodations … in a manner consistent with their gender identity” and “submit a reflective essay” that meets Defendants’ own standards in order to avoid additional out-of-school suspension, Defendants are seeking to compel her to speak in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
By requiring Travis Allen to issue a public apology for his September 29 Facebook post as a condition to be reinstated as a coach, Defendants are seeking to compel him to speak in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
The state of Vermont has created this problem by its willingness to buy into the current fad of “transgenderism.” It states that
All students have a gender identity which is self-determined;
All persons, including students attending school, have privacy rights.
Vermont defines “transgender” as “an individual whose gender identity or gender expression is different from the individual’s assigned sex at birth.”
Conflict is therefore inevitable, yet it never existed when the Genesis account was considered the basis of all law. Genesis 1:27, if Vermont state officials would follow it, eliminates the conflict: “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.”
After reviewing the lawsuit, school officials backed down. Said ADF: “Shortly after filing the lawsuit, counsel for the school officials notified ADF attorneys that the superintendent was rescinding the disciplinary actions.”
Question: How are the terms “man” and “woman” and “boy” and “girl” defined?
Kyle: “Oh wow, this question is going to be difficult to answer ‘cause it’s a bit philosophical.”
Jessie then answers:
Well that’s a great question. So I did an undergrad and a masters in Gender Studies, and like, I don‘t know if I could even tell you that, right? Like, because part of it, it’s, you cannot get away from social constructionism and language. So we define these terms based on many different things, but they’re always defined by the current context in which we live, like culture, time, all of these pieces, right? I think, and in that, we also define it by things like hormones, and things like anatomy, right? It’s like, how do we decide, um, you know, when we assign somebody male or female at birth, what is that based on? That’s based on anatomy, right? But there’s actually so many things, um, that are, that we’re not kind of looking at, right? That we also have to take into account. So, I mean, I honestly can’t answer those questions.
Um, you know, it’s, when we talk about gender identity, right, people, uh, say like ‘How do you know you’re trans?’ kind of almost like ‘How do you know you’re gay?’ It’s like, how do you know you’re straight? Right? It’s just kind of like, it’s often times like an internal feeling, but we define these things in terms of like biological factors, social factors, psychological factors, um, and they change from, like, different eras, different centuries, and mean different things at different times. I don’t know, that’s a hard one.
You read that correctly: Jessie did both an undergrad degree and completed a masters degree in Gender Studies, yet cannot even provide definitions for the two “genders” that children are identifying with and away from that serve as the basis for removing and modifying their body parts.
Kyle then adds:
We spoke a bit earlier about this idea of like labels and alphabet soup, and sometimes I think like yeah, these ideas of what is man and what is woman, what is boy what is girl? They’re just like arbitrary words to describe, you know, experiences and labels to put on people. And like who really knows what it means to be man, to be woman, to be masculine, to be feminine? I think it is what you say it is.
If “man” and “woman” and “boy” and “girl” are indeed only “arbitrary words to describe experiences,” then how can we possibly justify any medical interventions for children describing themselves in these terms? This concern leads to my next question.
Question: If we can’t understand these concepts, why do we think children can grasp them?
Kyle responds that’s because the real experts are the children themselves!
I think that we need to give way more credit like, when I’m, as I said when I’ve run these workshops it’s like students who are the ones being like “We don’t care that you’re trans and telling your story because, like, that’s fine, you be you.” I get asked so many times “Why were people ever mean to you for being trans? Like, it’s just you.” And it’s like, yeah, they get it way more, like I think it’s the unraveling that we are doing presently, the peeling of the onion, has already happened for them. They’re there with this fresh onion already, like crying away and being like “Cool,” like this radical acceptance of like this is how things are, and it is like an unlearning that has already been happening, um, and so we’re catching up, I think.
Jessie echoes Kyle’s sentiment about how children are the true experts because they’ve yet to be corrupted by socialization, whereas adults are perpetually engaged in a “process of unlearning” their biases, phobias, and preconceptions about what it means to be a man or woman.
These are challenging ideas, and we can get into philosophy and all these things, but you have to remember the way that we were all socially kind of, like, you know, taught about these concepts, and so we’re very much in a process of unlearning, where you know, there’s almost like a simplicity to kids, right? Like around, um, just being who they are, and being accepting, and loving of themselves and other people, and then, you know, and then bias kind of comes into play, and a lot of hat is taught, actually.
“Redesigning democracy for the digital age is far beyond my abilities, but I can suggest three categories of reforms––three goals that must be achieved if democracy is to remain viable in the post-Babel era. We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.
Harden Democratic Institutions
Political polarization is likely to increase for the foreseeable future. Thus, whatever else we do, we must reform key institutions so that they can continue to function even if levels of anger, misinformation, and violence increase far above those we have today.
For instance, the legislative branch was designed to require compromise, yet Congress, social media, and partisan cable news channels have co-evolved such that any legislator who reaches across the aisle may face outrage within hours from the extreme wing of her party, damaging her fundraising prospects and raising her risk of being primaried in the next election cycle.
Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average voter in their district. One example of such a reform is to end closed party primaries, replacing them with a single, nonpartisan, open primary from which the top several candidates advance to a general election that also uses ranked-choice voting. A version of this voting system has already been implemented in Alaska, and it seems to have given Senator Lisa Murkowski more latitude to oppose former President Trump, whose favored candidate would be a threat to Murkowski in a closed Republican primary but is not in an open one.
A second way to harden democratic institutions is to reduce the power of either political party to game the system in its favor, for example by drawing its preferred electoral districts or selecting the officials who will supervise elections. These jobs should all be done in a nonpartisan way. Research on procedural justice shows that when people perceive that a process is fair, they are more likely to accept the legitimacy of a decision that goes against their interests. Just think of the damage already done to the Supreme Court’s legitimacy by the Senate’s Republican leadership when it blocked consideration of Merrick Garland for a seat that opened up nine months before the 2016 election, and then rushed through the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett in 2020. A widely discussed reform would end this political gamesmanship by having justices serve staggered 18-year terms so that each president makes one appointment every two years.
Reform Social Media
A democracy cannot survive if its public squares are places where people fear speaking up and where no stable consensus can be reached. Social media’s empowerment of the far left, the far right, domestic trolls, and foreign agents is creating a system that looks less like democracy and more like rule by the most aggressive.
Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: The Arch Heretics, Gustave Doré, c. 1861.
But it is within our power to reduce social media’s ability to dissolve trust and foment structural stupidity. Reforms should limit the platforms’ amplification of the aggressive fringes while giving more voice to what More in Common calls “the exhausted majority.”
Those who oppose regulation of social media generally focus on the legitimate concern that government-mandated content restrictions will, in practice, devolve into censorship. But the main problem with social media is not that some people post fake or toxic stuff; it’s that fake and outrage-inducing content can now attain a level of reach and influence that was not possible before 2009. The Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen advocates for simple changes to the architecture of the platforms, rather than for massive and ultimately futile efforts to police all content. For example, she has suggested modifying the “Share” function on Facebook so that after any content has been shared twice, the third person in the chain must take the time to copy and paste the content into a new post. Reforms like this are not censorship; they are viewpoint-neutral and content-neutral, and they work equally well in all languages. They don’t stop anyone from saying anything; they just slow the spread of content that is, on average, less likely to be true.
Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers.
Banks and other industries have “know your customer” rules so that they can’t do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same. That does not mean users would have to post under their real names; they could still use a pseudonym. It just means that before a platform spreads your words to millions of people, it has an obligation to verify (perhaps through a third party or nonprofit) that you are a real human being, in a particular country, and are old enough to be using the platform. This one change would wipe out most of the hundreds of millions of bots and fake accounts that currently pollute the major platforms. It would also likely reduce the frequency of death threats, rape threats, racist nastiness, and trolling more generally. Research shows that antisocial behavior becomes more common online when people feel that their identity is unknown and untraceable.
In any case, the growing evidence that social media is damaging democracy is sufficient to warrant greater oversight by a regulatory body, such as the Federal Communications Commission or the Federal Trade Commission. One of the first orders of business should be compelling the platforms to share their data and their algorithms with academic researchers.
Prepare the Next Generation
The members of Gen Z––those born in and after 1997––bear none of the blame for the mess we are in, but they are going to inherit it, and the preliminary signs are that older generations have prevented them from learning how to handle it.
Childhood has become more tightly circumscribed in recent generations––with less opportunity for free, unstructured play; less unsupervised time outside; more time online. Whatever else the effects of these shifts, they have likely impeded the development of abilities needed for effective self-governance for many young adults. Unsupervised free play is nature’s way of teaching young mammals the skills they’ll need as adults, which for humans include the ability to cooperate, make and enforce rules, compromise, adjudicate conflicts, and accept defeat. A brilliant 2015 essay by the economist Steven Horwitz argued that free play prepares children for the “art of association” that Alexis de Tocqueville said was the key to the vibrancy of American democracy; he also argued that its loss posed “a serious threat to liberal societies.” A generation prevented from learning these social skills, Horwitz warned, would habitually appeal to authorities to resolve disputes and would suffer from a “coarsening of social interaction” that would “create a world of more conflict and violence.”
Depression makes people less likely to want to engage with new people, ideas, and experiences. Anxiety makes new things seem more threatening. As these conditions have risen and as the lessons on nuanced social behavior learned through free play have been delayed, tolerance for diverse viewpoints and the ability to work out disputes have diminished among many young people. For example, university communities that could tolerate a range of speakers as recently as 2010 arguably began to lose that ability in subsequent years, as Gen Z began to arrive on campus. Attempts to disinvite visiting speakers rose. Students did not just say that they disagreed with visiting speakers; some said that those lectures would be dangerous, emotionally devastating, a form of violence. Because rates of teen depression and anxiety have continued to rise into the 2020s, we should expect these views to continue in the generations to follow, and indeed to become more severe.
The most important change we can make to reduce the damaging effects of social media on children is to delay entry until they have passed through puberty. Congress should update the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which unwisely set the age of so-called internet adulthood (the age at which companies can collect personal information from children without parental consent) at 13 back in 1998, while making little provision for effective enforcement. The age should be raised to at least 16, and companies should be held responsible for enforcing it.
More generally, to prepare the members of the next generation for post-Babel democracy, perhaps the most important thing we can do is let them out to play. Stop starving children of the experiences they most need to become good citizens: free play in mixed-age groups of children with minimal adult supervision. Every state should follow the lead of Utah, Oklahoma, and Texas and pass a version of the Free-Range Parenting Law that helps assure parents that they will not be investigated for neglect if their 8- or 9-year-old children are spotted playing in a park. With such laws in place, schools, educators, and public-health authorities should then encourage parents to let their kids walk to school and play in groups outside, just as more kids used to do.”
You might be wondering why this is relevant here at a rally about ending child mutilation. Well, it’s actually extremely relevant, because the justifications given for performing these horrific surgeries on children are rooted in absurd, reality-denying pseudoscience about basic biology.
It’s a pseudoscience that denies the existence of males and females.
It’s a pseudoscience that says biological sex is just an arbitrary social construct.
It’s a pseudoscience that says a person’s identity determines their biology.
And it’s a pseudoscience that says that a person can be born in the wrong body, which is demonstrated by having preferences or behaviors that are typically associated with the opposite sex.
Most people don’t realize how much our major scientific and medical institutions have been captured by this pseudoscience literally claiming that girls who are tomboys, and boys who are effeminate, are transgender.
But the American Psychological Association, the Endocrine Society, the American Psychiatric Association, and even the CDC, to name only a few, all literally define “transgender” as “persons whose expression or behavior does not conform to that which is typically associated with their sex.”
That’s their definition. Go look it up for yourself if you don’t believe me.
It doesn’t get much clearer than that. If your daughter is not a feminine girl, she’s actually a boy. And if your son is not a masculine boy, according to them, he’s actually a girl. Or even something else entirely different altogether.
This is absurd in the extreme.
We know that if left alone, many of these extremely “nonconforming” children will grow up to be normal, healthy, gay adults.
But now, because of gender ideology, these children are being told they have a mismatch between their gender identity and their biological sex, which can then be “fixed” with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery.
In addition to these beliefs defying all we know to be scientifically true about basic biology, they are also grotesque and evil.
What is occurring at Vanderbilt Medical, and hospitals and clinics all over the country in the name of gender pseudoscience, is a medical scandal of horrifying proportions.
I can remember back when the notion that gender, being sex stereotypes were something to be avoided or at least treated skeptically. The recent transgender ideology throws these notions out and fully embraces the toxicity that comes with gendered stereotypes.
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