Gender
March 27, 2023 — Scott Johnson

Minnesota Democrats now control the political branches of state government and they have lost no time advancing the agenda of their crazed base. It is difficult to keep up with the madness. Most recently, they have made the national news with a “trans refuge” bill that is making its way through the legislature. The bill passed the Minnesota House early Friday morning last week. (John addressed the executive order that
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March 7, 2023 — Scott Johnson

You may have heard about the Minnesota state court decision ruling that USA Powerlifting must permit the male trans athlete JayCee Cooper to compete as a woman. The decision has been widely reported in the national press. NRO’s Ari Braff, for example, has a story on it here. It is a story that has been reported in outlets including the New York Post, Fox News, NBC News, and UnHerd. Cooper
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February 24, 2023 — John Hinderaker

Survey data indicate that a high percentage of people who underwent sex-change operations when they were young eventually regret it. The data also suggest that most minors who express gender dysphoria have a multitude of problems, including, in many cases, autism. Yet sex-change clinics around the world frequently hustle disturbed minors into permanent, life-altering chemical regimes and brutally invasive surgery. Most people, if asked, don’t support sex change operations on
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January 17, 2023 — John Hinderaker

The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos kicked off yesterday. For a long time I didn’t take the Davos elite-fest seriously, but it has gained steam: This WEF summit features a record turnout from many of the most powerful government and corporate officials. There will be 379 public officials attending, including 30 heads of state, 56 finance ministers, 19 central bank governors, 39 heads of global organizations, including the
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December 29, 2022 — John Hinderaker

The Centers for Disease Control is one of a number of formerly-respected federal agencies that now have fallen into disrepute. CDC has become a tool of the Left in general, and the Democratic Party in particular, and it seems that the people who run the Centers are more interested in political activism than in disease control. Thus CDC’s latest initiative: a self-assessment tool for “LGBTQ Inclusivity in Schools.” (Via Breitbart.)
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September 15, 2022 — Steven Hayward

Apparently there could be. Herewith the opening of an article just out in Nature magazine: The fraught quest to account for sex in biology research In 2016, pharmacologist Susan Howlett wrote up a study on how hormone levels during pregnancy affect heart function and sent it off to a journal. When the reviewers’ comments came back, two of the three had asked an unexpected question: where were the tissues from male
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July 5, 2022 — Steven Hayward

Jordan Peterson has been banned from Twitter for dissenting from gender ideology in the case of actress Ellen Page who decided to become Elliot Page, and submit to extensive surgery to remove her breasts and become as manly-appearing as possible. I notice Page hasn’t been cast in many film roles lately, after a number of excellent performances over the last 20 years. The banning has gone beyond Peterson: Here’s my
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June 2, 2022 — Steven Hayward

It has long been supposed (mostly tongue-in-cheek, except for Freudians) that the great unanswerable question of all time is, “What do women want?” Forget that. Today the unanswerable question—not tongue-in-cheek—is, “What is a woman?” Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire has produced a documentary about this question which is out late this week. I haven’t see it yet, but I have seen some excerpts, and this short trailer makes one
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May 31, 2022 — Steven Hayward

Surveys over the last several years have found an increasing number of young people “identify” themselves as transgender or “non-binary,” with some surveys finding the number as high as 30 percent. (Most report it around 20 percent.) Some of this may be peer pressure and wanting to be part of the latest trend, the way every Oxford or Cambridge student used to become a Communist for a week or two.
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April 5, 2022 — Scott Johnson

We somehow overlooked the Biden administration’s observation of International Transgender Day of Visibility last week (March 31). In case you missed it: “Trans Day of Visibility is an annual awareness day celebrated around the world. The day is dedicated to celebrating the accomplishments of transgender and gender nonconforming people while raising awareness of the work that still needs to be done to achieve trans justice.” Not to put a damper
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February 8, 2022 — John Hinderaker

During the covid epidemic there was a serious labor shortage, in part because of massively increased unemployment compensation that made staying home a desirable option for many. But that boondoggle ended, most of the world reopened, and yet, the labor shortage continued. Why? For one thing, quite a few women, having been at home with their families through the height of the epidemic, decided not to return to the labor
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October 27, 2021 — Scott Johnson

Democratic orthodoxy is inconsistent with the preservation of the United States or even of civilized society. As for destruction of the United States, consider the erasure of our southern border that the Biden administration has promoted. As for the destruction of civilized society, consider the news broken by Joe Simonson in his Free Beacon story “White House ‘Gender Equity’ Plan Calls for Elimination of Cash Bail.” Simonson quotes the 42-page
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August 22, 2021 — Steven Hayward

Everyone used to ridicule the foolish “win hearts and minds” sentimentalism of the liberals who planned and ran the Vietnam War, but our foreign policy establishment never learned a thing from that debacle. (Aside: How do you win “hearts and minds” in a place like South Vietnam circa 1965 or Afghanistan, circa now: you kill the enemy in large numbers.) Here are a few choice excerpts from a CIA report
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June 22, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff

Kristen Clarke, now the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, has filed a brief on behalf of the United States arguing that a West Virginia law barring boys from participating on girls’ sports teams violates Title VI and the Equal Protection Clause. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia cast a key vote confirming Clarke. Ed Whelan aptly calls this a case of no naïve deed going unpunished. Clarke’s
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May 25, 2021 — Scott Johnson

We continue our preview of the new (Spring) issue of the Claremont Review Books with Mary Eberstadt’s review/essay “Girls will be boys.” Subhead: “The trans-kid craze must be stopped.” The left’s war on nature has manifested and taken root in the transgender movement with astonishing speed and success. Eberstadt takes up the new books by Abigail Shrier and Debra Soh that challenge it in its trans kids aspect (“specifically, minor
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May 9, 2021 — Steven Hayward

For normal people, today is Mother’s Day. It may be a marketing conspiracy between flower-mongers, Hallmark Cards, and the premium restaurant industry, but it’s pretty straightforward and celebrates something intelligible. Unless you are a leftist Democrat in thrall to the Pronoun Police, in which case the world needs to be made unintelligible. The left’s war on human nature, which is the main thing that stands between them and their fever
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May 8, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff

The U.S. Army apparently has decided to gender-norm scores on the test it administers for combat fitness. As I understand this report in the Washington Post, rather than comparing men’s and women’s scores, women will be judged based on how they perform in relation to other women. This radical change is a response to the unsurprising fact that women are failing the Army’s combat fitness test to a disproportionate extent.
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