Barend Vlaardingerbroek: The pot calling the kettle black – the ‘State of Emergency’ for LGBTQ+ in the US

Today, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) - the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) civil rights organization - officially declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States for the first time in its more than 40-year history, following an unprecedented and dangerous spike in anti-LGBTQ+ legislative assaults sweeping state houses this year.
- Press release, Human Rights Campaign, 6 June 2023

The report goes on to list the three areas into which these ‘legislative assaults’ fall: transgender sports bans, gender-affirming care bans, and bathroom bans.

With regard to the sports bans, the report claims that “30% of high school transgender youth … are living in states where they are unable to simply play alongside their friends.” What they are not telling you is that it is M-to-F transgenders who are being banned from competing in girls’ events because the development of masculine musculature during puberty gives those kids an advantage over girls. The level of opposition from women’s groups, including well-known feminists, to allowing M-to-F trannies to compete as girls/women has been indicative of the gender-bender lobby pushing their luck too hard this time. I smile at the thought of hard-line feminists and transsexuals at one another’s throats.

Re: “Gender-affirming care bans” - the smile gets rapidly wiped off my face. The report weepily goes on to note that “30.9% of all transgender youth age 13-17 are living in states where they can no longer access life-saving, best practices medical care”. ‘Gender-affirming’ treatment is actually ‘gender-denying’ – it is pumping kids full of hormones that suppress secondary sexual characteristics and undertaking surgery to remove the breasts and the primary sex organs with a view to replacing them with fake ones. Thank goodness that a 15-year-old who thinks s/he is the opposite sex is stopped from acting on that delusion in at least some states!

Re: bathroom bans and the smile is back. The report states that over 32,000 transgender youth can’t use toilet facilities in accordance with their gender identity, i.e. a girl who thinks she is a boy will just have to go to the girls’ loo when nature calls. Isn’t life sheer hell.

Personally, I can’t see any ‘emergency’ here. I don’t see any pressing human rights issues at all when it comes to children and teenagers, at least not the way the writers of this report do. A 7-year-old is only just starting to develop a conceptual framework relating to sex/gender and needs protection from adults who try to instil delusions into that little head for their very own purposes, ideological or otherwise. A 15-year-old should be well on the way to having worked out what masculinity and femininity are about but tends to engage in stereotyping that magnifies and standardises the differences. That kid too should be protected from predatory adults seeking to impart those dangerous delusions. Society has failed in its duty of care towards its younger members in this respect. It is good news to me at least that some states in the US appear to be realising this and starting to address the shortcoming.

The real ‘emergency’ in my opinion is the way in which critics of gender-bender ideology are hammered by statutory instruments, particularly Title IX which operates in educational institutions. This 1972 amendment to the Education Act forbids discrimination and harassment on the basis of sex. That’s fine and well, except for the ‘mission creep’ that has occurred over the past 50 years. For one thing, the definition of ‘sex’ has been changed to that for ‘gender’, and in such a way that sex no longer necessarily determines gender. For another, ‘harassment’ now includes voicing politically incorrect opinions about sex and gender issues in the presence of someone who does not agree with those views.

Title IX has drawn increasingly fierce criticism from various right-wing quarters. Once an informer has dobbed someone in, the poor sod has the option of confessing and resigning (this is called an ‘informal resolution’) or going through a ‘formal resolution’ which is an ‘investigation’ in which he (it is a ‘he’ 98% of the time) has no right to cross-examine or to present a rebuttal. There is no appeals process. These proceedings are reminiscent of the Soviet purges under Stalin.

Title IX encourages students who have a bone to pick with a lecturer to turn informer and make accusations that may be largely false. It often comes down to microdissecting personal conversations and attributing meanings to words and phrases used that were not intended. It creates an atmosphere of fear and distrust in which people talk in whispers while glancing nervously around for would-be informers. It is totalitarianism pure and simple and should have no place whatsoever in the institutions of a democratic society.

There is indeed a human rights crisis in Western society and it is a very fundamental one. Freedom of speech and expression in relation to social issues is not an optional extra for a society that calls itself democratic. The totalitarians in our midst have criminalised all opposition to their social engineering projects. This must be reversed.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek is a retired academic who spent many years at universities in PNG, Botswana and Lebanon. Feedback welcome at bv_54@hotmail.com