I remember how it was -- JR
2 California Parents Fight Transgender Bills
As California lawmakers consider two sweeping bills on gender ideology, one California mom says she’s over this “extreme liberalism.”
“We’ve had enough of this extreme liberalism,” Erin Friday, a registered Democrat, told The Daily Signal in an interview.
Friday, 55, is the leader of a local Parents of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoric Kids chapter. For her, the transgender issue is personal.
Friday’s teenage daughter is what’s known as a desister, someone who is briefly socialized as the opposite sex but doesn’t go through with any surgeries or hormone treatments.
“After she said, ‘I want to be called by a male name,’ … every teacher and every student called her by a male name. This was kept from me,” said Friday.
In the ongoing debate surrounding gender ideology and medical intervention for children, California lawmakers are considering a pair of sweeping bills that critics claim will entice confused kids to the state and receive life-altering treatment.
If passed, SB 923 will require physicians and health insurance providers to receive training on how to deal with transgender and gender nonbinary people, as well as require insurance companies to include a list of providers that provide cross-sex hormones or perform gender surgeries in their network directories.
Friday sees the bill as “indoctrination.”
“It’s a forced curriculum that will be prepared by non-medical professionals and advocacy groups,” she said. “They are taking California state dollars and using them to advocate for gender interventions.”
SB 107 is being hailed as a transgender refuge bill that would prohibit state agents from complying with other states’ subpoenas for medical information and would prevent non-California courts from demanding the state remove children from homes where gender treatments are occurring.
The bills’ author, state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, tweeted in April, “SB 107 will be our legislation to provide refuge in CA for trans kids & their families from states that are criminalizing them & MDs & threatening to remove trans children from their homes.”
To Friday, the bill is nothing short of terrifying.
“It doesn’t just create a sanctuary state to go against those states that ban gender intervention, it creates a sanctuary against the other 49 states. Once [the minors] put their foot in California, the California courts are required to take jurisdiction over that child,” Friday said.
She continued, “That means the California courts will decide what is in the best interest of that child. We’ve seen it in California; taking that child away from those parents, because the parents refuse to involve their children in experimental sterilizing-causing treatments.”
As research by The Heritage Foundation indicates, studies cited to support the argument that gender therapy, like surgeries or hormones, improves the health for children who say they’re transgender are problematic. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Friday isn’t the only parent who has been impacted by the rise in transgender ideology across the country.
Ted Hudocko is a 56-year-old dad who lost custody of his son after the then-15-year-old claimed he was transgender. After researching the science behind gender transition processes, Hudocko expressed he was uncomfortable with his son transitioning.
Hudocko lost custody of his son to his ex-wife. If SB 107 is passed, Hudocko fears his story might become more common.
“It is absolutely going to encourage runaways to come to California. It’ll encourage parents in other states to abscond with their children,” he said in an interview with The Daily Signal. “As long as they get to California and claim a discordant gender identity, the California courts will assert jurisdiction.”
Hudocko continued, “It’s an Orwellian system. The family court system here is not to be trusted.”
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It’s back to school soon — but not to failing, woke public schools for many families
As parents prepare to send their children back to school, many will have made decisions about their kids’ education that will not only put them on a different trajectory but also impact the public-education system, which is being used in too many districts to indoctrinate more than educate.
Stories about drag queens in kindergarten, forcing students to use preferred pronouns, biological boys who say they are transgender using locker rooms and showers once reserved for girls, along with the pandemic, which convinced growing numbers of parents that homeschooling worked better — all of these are prompting an exodus of parents and now teachers from public schools.
The New York Times recently chronicled the trend: “In New York City, the nation’s largest school district has lost some 50,000 students over the past two years. In Michigan, enrollment remains more than 50,000 below pre-pandemic levels from big cities to the rural Upper Peninsula.
“In the suburbs of Orange County, California, where families have moved for generations to be part of the public school system, enrollment slid for the second consecutive year; statewide, more than a quarter-million public school students have dropped from California’s rolls since 2019.”
Not only kids are abandoning public schools. Many teachers have also checked out. The Washington Post reports: “The teacher shortage in America has hit crisis levels — and school officials everywhere are scrambling to ensure that, as students return to classrooms, someone will be there to educate them.”
Speaking about the shortage of teachers, Dan Domenech, executive director of the School Superintendent Association, told The Washington Post: “I have never seen it this bad.”
The question is: What kind of classroom will public-school kids return to? Will it be like classrooms in Portland, Ore., where children as young as 5 will be taught transgender ideology, sexual orientation and, reports The Washington Times, “the role of ‘white colonizers’ in marginalizing LGBTQ people”?
Darla Romfo, president of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, which offers scholarships to students in poorly performing inner-city schools, responds to this sweeping wokeism in an email: “When more than half of students can’t even read proficiently and the pandemic only exacerbated this learning loss, especially for our most vulnerable students, why do schools insist on diverting time and resources into non-academic, controversial subjects that are confusing at best and don’t align with many families values? Parents are tired of it and rightly so. And my advice is if your school doesn’t respond to your concerns, find another school that will. There are no do-overs when it comes to your child’s education.”
US students continue to lag behind other countries’ in reading, math and science. We appear to be No. 1 in costs, though, averaging $16,268 per student annually, well above the global average of $10,759.
Parents have a right to ask if the cost equals the benefit, since it’s their tax dollars.
With the proliferation of private schools, more readily available resources for homeschooling and school choice in growing numbers of states, more parents are withdrawing their children from public schools.
The public-school system, increasingly dominated by left-wing political and social ideology, has long been in need of reform — or burial. The trend seems to be headed in the burial direction, like with previous aging monopolies.
President Joe Biden has declared a “public health emergency” because of monkeypox. There is a vaccine to protect against monkeypox. The only protection from the public-school intellectual and moral “infection” of children is to remove them.
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Parents fighting schools to protect their kids are heroes, not book-banners
Across the country, librarians in schools and public libraries are stocking the shelves with material that is so pornographic that when parents have tried to read aloud and show the material at school board meetings, their microphones were cut off.
For progressives, the victim of the situation isn’t the children exposed to inappropriate content; the hero of the story isn’t the parents fighting for their kids’ innocence. No, the hero and victim of the coverage of these incidents are the librarians buying the sexually explicit content and recommending it to children.
Librarians are putting themselves on the front lines of a culture war, often shooting the first shots, and then bemoaning that they’ve found themselves under fire. But here’s the thing: Libraries have turned themselves into battlegrounds for these arguments, and librarians, one of the most radically progressive professions, have made them that way.
If you’re hosting drag queen story hour and stocking literal pornography on the shelves, you’ve surrendered the right to just ask for a quiet and respectful conversation about how you’re doing your job.
How libraries are functioning is an assault on our children, paid for by our tax dollars. It’s long past time for parents to fight back, even if they’re called book banners for doing so. Librarians turned themselves into political warriors and are trying to make our kids into their foot soldiers. They don’t get to do so without a fight.
Progressives have received their talking points on the matter. Efforts on the part of parents to make sure that inappropriate and pornographic materials aren’t available to their children is called "book banning." In April, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., chairman of the Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, held a hearing to examine what he called "the ongoing efforts across the country to ban books from schools and public libraries."
A single mother of a middle schooler in Raskin’s district, Marilyn (who asked to be anonymous for professional reasons), shared with me her own story. She told me,
"My daughter started asking to go to the school early so she could spend some time in the library and came home with 'George' by Alex Gino. I had not heard of this book, and have yet to meet the school librarian. I asked my daughter if she picked out the book and she told me that the librarian gave it to her and said she thought she would like it. I still have no idea why.
Murray slams school board for cutting off mom exposing graphic book: 'Any excuse other than accountability'Video
"The school librarian also apparently said the same things about 'Rick' by Alex Gino. 'The Art of Being Normal' by Lisa Williamson also came home from the school library. These three books are the only books that came home from the school library in Montgomery County in 2021-2022."
Gino’s book "George," which has since been renamed "Melissa," has been at the top of the American Library Association’s list of Top 10 Most Challenged Books for several years. The ALA, with its list, posit the book challenges are akin to censorship. Here’s a sample from "George," just to get an idea of what many parents objected to:
"George stopped. It was such a short little question, but she couldn’t make her mouth form the sounds.
"Mom, what if I’m a girl?
"George had seen an interview on television a few months ago with a beautiful woman named Tina. She had golden-brown skin, thick hair with blond highlights, and long, sparkling fingernails. The interviewer said that Tina had been born a boy, then asked her whether she’d had the surgery. The woman replied that she was a transgender woman and that what she had between her legs was nobody’s business but hers and her boyfriends.
"So George knew it could be done. A boy could become a girl. She had since read on the Internet you could take girl hormones that would change your body, and you could get a bunch of different surgeries if you wanted them and had the money. This was called transitioning. You could even start before you were 18 with pills called adrogen blockers that stopped the boy hormones already inside you from turning your body into a man’s. But for that, you needed your parents’ permission."
All you have to do is permanently mutiliate yourself with major surgery and hormone therapy; it’s as easy as taking antibiotics!
This is the message in a book marketed for ages 8-12; one that was the winner of the Stonewall Book award, Lambda Literary Award, E.B. White Honor, a best book of the year for Booklist, School Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews. It also won a New York Public Library Notable Book Award. It’s a book that librarians around the country are trying to push into the hands of its young patrons.
In 2021, Gino’s "George / Melissa" was finally getting knocked out of the top spot by a new book, "Gender Queer," by Maia Kobabe. In its coverage of the "book banning" wars in the its Sunday newsletter, the New York Times interviewed Alexandra Alter, a Times reporter covering the publishing industry on the subject, and in its graphics illustrating the newsletter item, "Gender Queer" was one of the books highlighted.
Alter was asked, "How are librarians responding?" And Alexandra laid it on, thick with her reply, "It’s heartbreaking for them. Librarians say they got into this field because of a love of reading and talking to people about books. Some have left their jobs; some have been fired for refusing to remove books. Others quit after being subject to a barrage of insults on social media."
Alter recently sounded a similar tone in a piece she wrote for the Times about the plight of the librarians facing backlash for their choices in purchasing and display choices,
"As highly visible and politicized book bans have exploded across the country, librarians – accustomed to being seen as dedicated public servants in their communities – have found themselves on the front lines of an acrimonious culture war, with their careers and their personal reputations at risk."
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/parents-fighting-protect-kids-heroes-not-book-banners
***********************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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