The government will tell you what to think.
That is increasingly the position of the US government. The quotation in the title comes from Alex Roque, who runs the Ali Forney Center for homeless LGBTQ+/- youth in New York City. He made that judgement at a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) webinar last fall.
In less than three minutes, he cast a vision for completely transforming child protective systems nationwide. Family rejection of a child’s gender identity cannot be dismissed as a personal view, he argued. Non-affirmation must be treated as abuse. “If they were denying them food or denying them access to school or denying other things, there would be headlines,” Roque continued. “There would be prosecution.”
What if the food they were denying them was poisoned?
The Biden-Harris government is following through on Roque’s rogue thinking by coming to its own legal determination that, if you oppose your own child’s transition to another gender, you are an abusive parent. Those who beg to differ may lose their children.
While crafting its foster care rule finalized in April, HHS officials took inspiration from social workers in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, who spent years pioneering a program that strong-arms parents into affirming whatever confused beliefs children express about their gender. Parents who decline risk losing a voice in their child’s life.
New federal rules require states to place foster children who are LGBTQ+ in gender-change-affirming homes. If you have a foster child who starts considering the change and you counsel them on the downsides of physical mutilation of the sexuality of their bodies that will last forever, should they decide later the change was a mistake, you may find them stripped away from you in order to put them in homes that will automatically rubber-stamp their inquiries about gender change as being good for them.
These “designated placements” must commit to creating an environment that supports a child’s “status or identity,” including through access to age-appropriate “resources, services, and activities.” To gender activists consulted by the Biden administration, being “affirming” means assuming the child knows best about his or her identity — even if what he or she claims to want is life-altering medical procedures like hormone blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries to appear more like the opposite sex.
Certainly a child would know better, after ten years of life, what the risks are and what it means to become a man if they started as a girl. The government now believes it is immoral for a foster parent (and ultimately this will become the way all parents are dealt with) to present negative possibilities that the child should consider. There was a time when we, as a society, believed that competing views and pros and cons when considering an important decision were valuable. That is no longer so if they are designated as the wrong views.
Liberals no longer believe in a liberal education
A stunning example of that (though really it is not at all surprising now that we live daily inside a Wonderland where the year is perpetually 1984) can be found in stories today about the University of California.
Progressive Democrats clearly believe it is their right to control your thoughts or, at least, control your right to speak your thoughts if they think those thoughts are a risk to society. They have no issue with the fact that they’ve turned themselves into the Thought Police of Orwell’s novel because things are different in this case: The safety of society and of individuals is at stake. (It doesn’t occur to them that this was the concern of the government in 1984, too, and they have become the people they once thought of as villains during the earlier days of their liberal education (by which I mean “liberal” in the old-fashioned collegiate sense or broad and free-thinking).
The transformation in what it means to be “liberal” can be seen in a recent 1,200-page batch of UC documents brought to light by a FOIA request:
In it, UC faculty members are so angry about academics defying Covid-19 consensus, they start to re-think academic freedom. They single out Hoover Institute fellow Scott Atlas at Stanford for questioning consensus on lockdowns, social distancing, masking, and other policies. Atlas was described as someone who’d “hit us very hard… in the area of public health,” being on the “wrong” side of a “clear ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’” One UC San Francisco medical professor raised a question pitting “‘academic freedom’ vs. institutions passing on their obligation to deal with faculty who say and do things with significant chance to harm the public,” asking, “What is freedom of speech in this context?” In other words, how much can freedom can we really tolerate?
Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, another of the Murthy plaintiffs, was the director of UC-Irvine’s medical ethics program and a professor of psychiatry and human behavior who also worked in person with COVID patients every day at the UCI Medical Center. He was fired roughly a year after the meeting referenced in this FOIA document for opposing vaccine mandates, guilty of the identical crime Atlas is charged with in the docs: being a “threat to the health and safety of the community.” The Los Angeles Times used scare quotes to describe Kheriaty as someone who “refused to get vaccinated, citing ‘natural immunity,’”
You have total academic freedom at UC so long as you stay within the bounds of academic freedom; i.e., “You’re free to say anything you want so long as it is not any of the things we don’t believe and don’t want you to say.” (I was told last year at the school where I work that, “So long as you say what we tell you to say about a child’s choice of gender, you have total freedom of speech.” They actually said that, though I quote it from memory; so, it’s likely not a perfect direct quote, but as close as I can recall.)
One would think rigorous debate on the rollout of a global vaccination experiment might have been encouraged in liberal discourse … just like one would think any parent would have the right to warn their child or foster child of the permanent impacts that gender-changing surgery can have … and the extreme pain … and the right they would have to encourage the child to think through the pros and cons and not just take counsel from someone who fully supports such change because of their own LGBTQ status that they want to make mainstream. It’s life changing, so maybe alternative views—even opposing views—might be considered reasonable precaution in a reasonable society.
Sometimes opposing thoughts, it turns out are hard-hitting:
Suneil Koliwad, a medical professor at UC San Francisco, who argued that Atlas had “hit us very hard as scientists in the area of public health, from basic to clinical to epidemiological.”
But isn’t that the whole idea of liberal, vigorous academic debate (using the broader academic definition of a liberal education)? Clearly not anymore. In woke society, it is more important that nothing is hard-hitting. The problem in ruling out dangerous behavior is that sometimes the beliefs that are considered dangerous are countering the true dangerous behavior that has been assumed in a herd mentality:
In the years since the pandemic, experts have acknowledged both the negligible effects of the lockdowns on mortality rates and the deleterious effects of COVID-19 policy on childhood development. Given everything we know now, was Atlas’ perspective really deserving of institutional rebuke?
Too bad we weren’t allowed to vigorously debate the effect of such social changes on children before and while making them. Just like it will be too bad people are shut down from debating the effect of LGBTQuestioning policies on such young questioning minds, who are shaping up their identities, before they make drastic painful changes to their bodies. It turns out measures taken with children by those who thought they knew better than the rest of us were, themselves, harmful.
Given that we were all new at this subject (COVID) even the academics should have had some humility about the state of their own knowledge and the need to debate the pros and cons of global policy before and while enacting it … as well as in reviewing the pros and cons afterward. But scientists are often like that—shutting out unorthodox opinions just like bad religion. Thus …
According to Atlas:
“I am proud to be an outlier — happily proven right when the inliers are so wrong. All judgment of the US response lies at the hands of the lockdowners. Unfortunately, my advice — “targeted protection” —was [sic] rejected, with rare exceptions, like Florida.”
Affirmation sounds so kind
Coming back to the subject at hand, we find the same forced thinking rapidly taking over society where only the “correct” are allowed to freely express their beliefs to children so long as they affirm each child’s choice to change gender (as if ANYONE has actually even accomplished such a thing). Simply put, the only allowable view is to be affirming of the child’s choice … even before the choice is finalized.
How can people not see pure political activism in those demands from LGBTQ people given power in the Biden administration?
To Cuyahoga County child protective services, being affirming often means providing kids access to items like chest binders or prosthetic packers that mimic a penis, according to an information sheet for caregivers on the Cuyahoga County Division of Children & Family Services (DCFS) website….
ACF [the US government’s Administration for Children and Families] senior advisor for LGBTQI Initiatives Julie Kruse, who celebrated the Cuyahoga County team as “trailblazers,” reached out to dozens of other activists to weigh in on the agency’s efforts, emails obtained by the DCNF show.
It’s far from neutral. The changes are clearly pushing an agenda to create a much broader number of LBBTQ+++? people throughout society. They would argue that they don’t “create” them; they just give room for those that already exist to express themselves. But, in fact, gender reassignment does create a new person by any longtime standard way of defining what a person is. We are body, mind, and spirit all rolled into one. We are integrated, and you cannot change the chemistry without changing the person, just as you cannot change their life experiences, as a gender choice certainly does, without changing the person.
The application of government power to force decisions in the direction the LGBTQ people within government want—even without rigorous policy debate—has been abrupt and extreme:
In states like Washington and Vermont, Christian couples have lost their foster care licenses due to similar state regulations…. Parents in a handful of states have already sounded the alarm, claiming local authorities deemed them unfit guardians for refusing to allow their children to undergo a gender transition.
This is a full-frontal effort to railroad society through the biggest transition in human history—the dismantling of what it even means to be male or female and re-engineering of human beings while they are children. Yet, if you’re on the wrong side of the debate, you are cut off … because there is no debate allowed. Debate is declared transphobic and is child abuse. Society is being re-envisioned, and the “wrong” side is being cut out of the discussion with their own children or foster children via the immense threat of taking them away with the powers of government.
Vernadette Broyles, president and general counsel of the Child and Parental Rights Campaign, told the DCNF there has absolutely been “an uptick in families that are having their custody of their child taken away, investigated or disrupted” because they believe in “biological reality.”
Something as basic as that. Biological reality. All humans took it for granted for thousands of years. That is suddenly to be changed, and anyone questioning that social transformation when physical transformation is encouraged by schools upon children or foster children may be stripped of those children. Don’t think it stops with foster-care placement:
“The underlying premise of the rule is that it is mistreatment and abuse if you do not affirm a child’s self-selected identity,” Rachel N. Morrison, director of the HHS Accountability Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told the DCNF. “This premise is dangerous and could extend outside the foster care context to adoption, custody disputes, and schools.”
Do children never make a wrong choice? Especially on something they know so little about? Those adult who know everything better than you do have determined it is their right to decide. As with the UC Irvine decision, the fact that their own view may be the one that is most dangerous to children is not up for allowable debate. They have decided they know the truth, and you do not: Mask them up so they cannot learn from human faces, isolate them from direct human contact to keep them germ free and feeling less physically loved by keeping six feet between them at all times, tell them scary stories about the deadly pandemic that requires these changes, and now affirm any choice they make to cut off/out body parts and change their body chemistry, little as they know about anything medical. Don’t abide by all of that as a parent, and have them taken away from you.
More importantly, your views are dangerous, and it does not occur to them that their views, if wrong (which is inconceivable to them) might be the truly dangerous views. It is foreign to their thought that they could be wrong and that AFFIRMING ALL CHILDREN WHO CHOOSE TO HAVE MAJOR SURGERIES TO CHANGE THEIR GENDERS MIGHT BE THE MOST VIOLENT AND HARMFUL THING EVER DONE TO THESE CHILDREN.
We have already heard from people who had gender-change surgery who said the surgery did nothing to help them with their identity crisis and actual made it worse and that transitioning back was even more painful and less successful than the original transition, leaving them even more messed up.
But you are the dangerous one—not those who believe it is their social obligation to silence you.