When Doing Grievous Harm Becomes the Norm

The Factory of "Gender Change"

The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in the UK is increasingly becoming a place of controversy.  A long article has appeared in Spiked  detailing the arguments and counter arguments that are racking the GIDS.  It is worth a read.

Here are some striking paragraphs:

Unsurprisingly, GIDS’ activity at the Tavistock has been subject to increasing public attention, and, more recently, scrutiny. In 2018, an internal report, by then staff governor Dr David Bell, effectively accused GIDS of fast-tracking children and adolescents for gender transition. Featuring damning quotes from whistle-blowing clinicians and unhappy staff members, it reinforced the growing sense that GIDS has been a little too eager to encourage young people to transition and potentially undergo life-changing medical treatment. Indeed, since 2017, over 35 clinicians have quit GIDS because they are worried about ‘overdiagnoses’ of gender dysphoria. Sonia Appleby, who works at GIDS as its Named Professional for Safeguarding Children, is even bringing a case against the Tavistock on the grounds that it is failing in its duty to safeguard children, by encouraging staff not to report any child safety concerns to her. . . . 

Nevertheless, Marcus and Susan insist that hormone therapy and other treatments should be a last resort, and even then only in extraordinary cases. They should be something that takes place after all other avenues of therapy and mental-health treatment have been explored. But too many at the Tavistock, Marcus says, are simply ‘not interested in the downside of treatment’. ‘There’s all this sort of pressure to say, “Well, it’s not really a medical decision – is it any different from, you know, having plastic surgery?”‘

Yet it is very different from having your nose done or your ears pinned back. Hormone therapy, for instance, is a serious, life-altering treatment. ‘It should try to not be at all for children’, says Susan, citing the potential for future ‘sterility or infertility’. She points out how absurd it is that we are encouraging some young people to take a decision that could change their lives forever. ‘There’s a reason we don’t let children marry or have tattoos. And somehow we’ve unrolled this treatment!’ . . . . 

This problem has come to head in the case of Keira Bell. Bell underwent surgery and medication to transition to male during her teen years, and is now acting as a claimant, alongside Mother A, in a legal case being brought against the Tavistock, for which Susan is a witness. Bell claims she was given poor care. She alleges that instead of challenging her demands to transition, and taking into consideration her poor mental health at the time, doctors and nurses at the Tavistock allowed her to undergo life-altering treatment which she now regrets. ‘I was allowed to run with this idea that I had, almost like a fantasy, as a teenager’, Bell told the BBC, ‘and it has affected me in the long run as an adult’. When asked about the importance of listening to, and not questioning, children who are claiming to want to change genders, Bell told a BBC reporter ‘it’s up to institutions like the Tavistock to step in and make children reconsider what they’re saying’. . . . 

 Yet at the same time, it is not enough to ask questions of GIDS, or trans-activist charities like Mermaids. We need to ask ourselves searching questions, too. After all, what has happened to our society that means thousands of children are encouraged to feel estranged from their own bodies? Why is it that some feel so averse that they want to change those bodies? And what does it say about us as adults that instead of questioning these children’s demands we are all too willing to give in to them?

The Transgender Debate

It Pays to Hold Your Nerve . . . Always


Steve McAlpine
The Gospel Coalition/Australia


With the latest news out of the UK that a young woman is calling out the National Health Service’s gender clinic for not challenging her strongly enough when she was 16 and wanting to transition to male, it feels like the ground is shifting back to sanity.

And if you’ve been holding your nerve and saying, “Wait a minute—some of what we are doing in the name of the Sexular Age is deeply dangerous, and elevates ideology over science,” then maybe you might actually be on the right side of history. Fancy that!

So a young woman, Keira Bell, who went through a regime of puberty blockers and then surgery to remove her breasts, says that she “should have been challenged over my transition.” 

No Challenge

Clearly she wasn’t. And clearly a judge thinks there is a case for the NHS and Tavistock to answer, as a full hearing has been given the go-ahead.  The centre is, of course, denying any fault, and claims to have made strong scientific-based decisions, rather than ideological ones. And, for a while, it seemed like the whole world was going along with this.

Warning Bells Are Sounding

EXCLUSIVE: New UN Treaty May Put Gender Ideology in International Law

By Stefano Gennarini, J.D. | October 4, 2019

NEW YORK, October 4 (C-Fam) 

In a new treaty, the General Assembly may scrap the definition of gender as “male and female” currently in international law and endorse a definition of gender as “socially constructed.” The new definition would open the door to 100+ “genders” in binding law.

The International Law Commission has asked the General Assembly to discard the legal definition of gender in international law as “the two sexes, male and female, within the context of society.” That hard-fought definition was decided in the Rome Statues creating the International Criminal Court and excludes any “meaning different from the above.”

The left-leaning commission proposed the change in a new treaty on the prosecution of crimes against humanity that will be reviewed by the General Assembly’s legal experts later this month.

In making the recommendation, the commission cites “several developments in international human rights law and international criminal law.” As evidence, the commission lists the non-binding opinions of human rights bodies and other international law entities who promote gender as a social construct, including the notions of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”

The commission cites, for instance, the UN Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, who has written that gender is “each person’s deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth.”

The report also cites the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, according to whom gender is not a biological reality but a “social construction” related to the “accompanying roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes assigned to women and men, and girls and boys.”

The legal effect of discarding the Rome Statute’s definition of gender will be to enshrine gender as a social construct in international law. It wouldn’t merely leave the definition of gender open to each country’s national legislation to define, as some may believe. Far from it. Because of the elaborate rationale in the report of the commission, dropping the definition will have the legal effect of defining gender in international law very broadly.

The request is likely to attract controversy in the General Assembly. The Commission told the General Assembly in the last two years that it would not change any of the definitions from the Rome Statute in this new treaty. And it has gone back on its word because of intense lobbying from LGBT groups.

Moreover, the commission wholly overlooks the fact that a majority of countries do not consider gender as a social construct. Indeed, the UN entities and bodies cited by the commission go further than most countries’ laws.

Through 2019, only seven countries allow gender change based on self-identification alone, according to the pro-LGBT group Amnesty International.

Even in the roughly 40 other countries where individuals are allowed to legally assume an identity different from their biological sex, countries restrict who may do so and under what circumstance.

In most countries identity change is only permitted after a psychiatric determination of gender dysphoria or a surgical operation to mutate the sexual physiognomy of an individual. In addition, some countries require individuals to divorce their spouses and do not allow individuals with children to change their gender.

The sixth committee of the General Assembly is scheduled to review the report of the International Law Commission, where the new treaty is contained between October 28 and November 6.

Holy Myths and Gross Prejudices

Transgender Taboos: Don’t Question ... or Else

By John Stonestreet and Roberto Rivera, Op-Ed Contributors
The Christian Post


There are a growing number of people who transitioned from one gender to the other, only to regret it, and then try to reverse the process. Why aren’t we hearing their stories?

Here’s a fun fact: the word “taboo” came to the English language from natives on what is now the nation of Tonga. Believe it or not, when British explorer James Cook first visited the remote island, he noticed that certain things, in particular certain foods, were strictly off-limits. When he asked why, they replied these things were “taboo,” which meant “consecrated, inviolable, forbidden, unclean or cursed.”

Now in English parlance today, we tend to use the word “taboo” as a figure of speech or hyperbole. We don’t think of whatever is being referred to as literally being “consecrated,” “inviolable,” “uncleaned” or “cursed.”

Or do we?

A recent article in Canada’s National Post identified something it called the “new taboo.” It’s off-limits to even talk about the increasing number of people who, having undergone gender-reassignment surgery, now not only regret their decision, they want to reverse the procedure.

"Experts" Must Be Confronted With a Healthy Scepticism

Why Are Pediatrician Groups Conforming to Transgender Orthodoxy?

By Madeleine Kearns
National Review Online

In the same week that the U.K.’s “equalities minister” launched an inquiry into why there has been a 4,000 percent increase in girls seeking gender reassignment in the past ten years (from 40 in 2009–10 to 1,806 in 2017–18), the American Academy of Pediatrics [AAP] released its official policy statement on how to ensure “comprehensive care and support for transgender and gender diverse children and adolescents.”

All of this relates to a global child-welfare battle that is being fought in schools and surgeries across the English-speaking world. One of the most successful tactics used by the activists is to pathologize the debate; only “transphobes” question ostensibly pro-trans assumptions.

But whichever side of the transgender debate one falls on — from within the medical community — the following questions ought to be raised in relation to the AAP’s recent statement: (1) To what extent did activists and interested third parties influence this policy? (2) To what extent was the AAP able to hear from all stakeholders? (Especially parents who feel unable to speak up publicly due to concern for their relationship with their child, and professionals who fear animosity from an activist trans community.) And, related, (3) Is this official policy likely to be helpful or harmful to children?

One reason these questions matter so much is that the AAP is a trusted group of around 64,000 pediatricians. Their policy statement refers to an “integration of medical, mental health, and social services, including specific resources and supports for parents and families,” which is a commendable approach. However, in this instance there is more than meets the eye.

Family First on Gender Choice

Gender Bending Ignorance


Media Release 11 August 2018
Family First


Family First NZ says that politicians will vote on a law change which will further deem birth certificates meaningless. This comes as a result of a decision by the Government and Administration select committee to recommend that birth certificates be based on the choice of the person, including the fact that no medical evidence is required for the change.

“By choosing your own gender in your birth certificate, the certificates will become an object of unscientific gender ideology and effectively tell medical professionals that they got it wrong at time of birth. Circumstances may change but a historical document should not be able to be changed,” says Bob McCoskrie, National Director of Family First NZ.

“And just how many genders will be listed. Facebook have more than 70, and counting.”

“It is disturbing that politicians want to ignore biological reality and, in the process, bring about confusion and ambiguity. A birth certificate is a historical record based on fact – not a political tool to further an ideology.”

Family First says it is also concerning that the bill continues to allow the birth certificate of an ‘eligible child’ to be changed to the ‘nominated’ sex simply through an application of ‘the guardian’. It is well-established today that the overwhelming majority of such children – from 75% to 98% – who experience gender dysphoria grow out of it by the time they reach puberty. It is not inborn.

Welcome Allies

Distinct, Clear Trumpet Calls

We are engaged in spiritual war.  Our wrestling is not against flesh and blood.  It is against the principalities and powers of the Dark Lord.

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. [Ephesians 6:10]

These spiritual powers manifest themselves in and through some of the political rulers and governing powers, the lawmakers and judges. But these are mere tools, false flag slaves.  The real powers are invisible--what the Bible calls the "the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places".

When Christ's Church stands firm and does battle against these enemies, we rejoice.  Whoever is taking up arms against the devilish spiritual forces of our day commands the respect and thanks of all visible churches throughout the world.

The following piece, therefore, is cause for thanksgiving.

Biological Determinism, Not A Matter of Choice

Gender Fluidity A False Construct

Why Are Lesbian Teens Having Two To Seven Times As Many Babies As Their Heterosexual Peers?  The surprising statistic suggests that for many, LGBTQ sexual orientation is not a fixed identity, but rather something that fluctuates.

Glenn T. Stanton
The Federalist

One thing you would think lesbians wouldn’t have to deal with is pregnancy. Seems like a solid assumption, right? Not so much.

Remarkably, research shows teen who identify as lesbian have significantly higher pregnancy rates than their heterosexual peers. I know what you’re thinking, but it’s true. It’s also true for teen gay males: they are substantially more likely to impregnate their sexual partners than are heterosexual males. The dramatic disparities are explained in these graphs from the Minneapolis Star Tribune.






Numerous studies across many nations find that sexual-minority youth aged 14 to 19 have pregnancy rates two to seven times greater than their heterosexual peers. And their pregnancy rates continue to rise at a time when the overall teen pregnancy rate is declining in the United States.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow (About Christian Confusion)

Gayer Than the Kiwi Queen of the Fire Island Fruit Festival

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

Every once in a while you run across something that is a few parsecs beyond the utter frozen limit. What do you do then? Tim Bayly recently posted a video of an offertory performance done at Redeemer Downtown in Manhattan, along with his comments, and I have reposted the video below. You can watch the whole thing, or if you have a medical condition, you can watch 30 seconds of it and still get the drift. If confusion were beans, this would be a 9-layer dip, suitable for Super Bowl parties.

So here it is. Brace yourself.

Life Together from Redeemer Video on Vimeo.

What is the problem with this? Summed up, it is that this performance is gayer than the kiwi queen at the Fire Island Fruit Festival. This performance is gayer than an HR memo at Google headquarters. How gay was it? It was gayer than an NPR tote bag full of rainbows. It was gayer than a unicorn parade through the Castro District. It was gayer than a lavender sparkly pen.

And to top it all off, we live in an antinomian generation, where the only sins possible are those represented by something like the preceding paragraph. It is not okay to say “gayer than,” but it is beyond okay to be “gayer than.”

It is no sin to watch this video clip and not know what the particular problem is. Human self-deception can occupy the heart like a rabbit warren under a large meadow. The particular problems can be hard to identify and trace. But the general problem is screamingly obvious. If you can look at this clip and not know that there is a grievous problem somewhere, then the self-deception involved is truly profound.

I referred above to the problem of confusion.

Christianophobia

The Bible is to Blame

One of the fascinating aspects of public argument is that over time the truth often wills out.   And so it appears to be with the issue of homosexuality.  Finally, some homosexual advocates are confirming what Christians have argued all along: the Bible condemns homosexual beliefs, thoughts, and practices.

For a while the debate was muddied by some fellow travellers arguing that the Bible's condemnation upon homosexuality was not universal.  There were a variety of views proffered in the Scriptures on the matter, we were told.  Moreover, even if some passages condemned homosexuality, other teachings were "higher"--such as the command to love one's neighbour as oneself.  That command meant that one may not condemn homosexual ideology and practice, because after all that's who my neighbour is.  Just as one could not condemn my neighbour because he was of a certain race, so the higher command to love my neighbour forbade condemning him because he was homosexual.

But over time these equivocations wear thin.

Rebellion Gathers Strength and Pace

Do Not Touch The Unclean Thing

Gender bending is the next big stage as the West integrates into its own void.  Many people will doubtless be found amazed at the speed and velocity of this spontaneous movement and how quickly it has insinuated itself into the institutions of government, law, courts, and schools.  

We are not surprised at the velocity of the movement.  These things gather pace as the rebellion against God grows stronger.  Part of the consequence of God giving over a culture to its own destruction is that the resistance to evil attenuates; the lust for evil becomes more intense.  The common thread is the frenetic drive for more human autonomy.

Breitbart News has carried a piece on moves within the UK Conservative Party and the UK government to drive all gender distinctions out of UK society.

New York City Gets Serious

NYC Will Fine You $250,000 For ‘Misgendering’ A Transsexual

by ALLUM BOKHARI

Breitbart News

Did you call a transsexual person “he” or “she” when they preferred to be called “zhe?” According to a newly updated anti-discrimination law in New York City, you could be fined an eye-watering $250,000.

In the latest, astonishing act of draconian political correctness, the NYC Commission on Human Rights have updated a law on “Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Expression” to threaten staggering financial penalties against property owners who “misgender” employees or tenants.

Incidents that are deemed “wilful and malicious” will see property owners face up to $250,000 in fines, while standard violations of the law will result in a $125,000 fine. For small business owners, these sums are crippling.

It’s not as simple as referring to transmen “he” or transwomen as “she,” either. The legislation makes it clear that if an individual desires, property owners will have to make use of “zhe,” “hir” and any other preferred pronoun.

Jolly Good Fellows, Which Nobody Can Deny . . .

Disciples of The Shapeshifting Serpent

We have pointed out several times that when a hip-entity like Facebook offers subscribers 45 different options (and counting) to identify their gender, a major transformation of religion, philosophy, and culture is underway.  Behind it lies deeper beliefs which are not changing at all: they are becoming merely more consistent, more "outworked", more logically aligned.  The tectonic plates have just shifted, but the magma has been building up underneath for a long time.

Here are some of the evidences that the plates are moving and re-aligning.  Firstly, Houston, 2014--where we clearly have a problem.

After nearly nine hours of chanting and tears from seas of opponents and supporters in color-coded T-shirts, Houston City Council passed an ordinance on Wednesday extending equal rights protections to gay and transgender residents.  Despite weeks of discussion and dissent over the measure, the final vote was 11-6, a count that matched guesses made months ago, when Mayor Annise Parker — the first openly lesbian mayor of a major American city — said she planned to bring forward such a measure.

The approval was greeted with thunderous applause from the audience, largely full of supporters, and chants of "HERO," for the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance. "While much of the debate has centered around the gay and transgender section of the ordinance, it is a comprehensive ordinance," Parker said after the vote. "It is a good step forward for the city of Houston."

Note the neologism "transgender" to which we will return shortly.

Gender Inflation

Bonfire of the Vanities

Over the past few months the West has reached a new waypoint of absurdity in its acceptance of the notion that one's gender is a bender.  It has turned out that one's gender is whatever one identifies it as being.  Facebook, ever on the cutting edge of nihilism and narcissism, thoughtfully listed around thirty-five gender options for "clients" to choose as part of the lemming rush-to-the-cliff of gender identity.  But time and tide wait for no man, so now, in the latest iteration, Facebook in the UK has expanded the list of potential gender identities to seventy.  If you thought that 35 gender self-identities was an inflation to the nonsensical, what does a doubling indicate?

For our part, we are only just able to get up off the floor from rolling around laughing.  But we have not yet reached the limits of hilarity on this one.  Because the West is also insisting upon sexual and gender licentiousness as an absolute and irrevocable human right, it finds itself in a pickle.  Institutions of all kinds will have to change.  Take the humble prison.  Here the state is displayed in all its fearsome might.  But every prisoner must be treated with dignity, which of course means that each prisoner's gender identity must be reflected appropriately.  This from Stuff:

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Feminist Rape Constructs

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

January 21, 2015

Let us first review the facts.

Mount Holyoke College is an all-women’s college that recently began admitting male students who self-identify as female. And then, in a spasm of self-righteousness, there was a successful student-led effort to get a college performance of The Vagina Monologues cancelled because that play was insufficiently sensitive to those women who were vagina-less. We know that such creatures exist because we recently began admitting them to our college.

At American colleges, The Vagina Monologues is traditionally — ah, tradition! — performed on Valentine’s Day because, and this is important to note, American colleges generally don’t have a clue. But, and this is also important to note, if ever you think that this vapid cluelessness has disappeared down Alice’s rabbit hole forever, up it pops again later, right in your news feed, still chattering at us about gender constructs.

We need to recognize that some rapists self-identify as tender, sensitive, and thoughtful caregivers. What is more of a social construct than violence? We need to raise awareness of that, people.

So then, speaking of gender constructs, let us pursue the will of the sexual revolution all the way out to the end. Unless it is endless, of course, but we can still make some pretty good time. I think. After a while you lose track because the outer darkness doesn’t keep their mile markers maintained very well. And the roads are really bad.

The Vagina Monologues — that sexist throwback to earlier misogynistic times — was performed the way it was by the thoughtless feminist minions in order “to raise awareness of gender-based violence.” But if we have now gotten to the place in our absurdist theater review where we are laboring to avoid offending all the women-without-vaginas out there, I don’t know why we shouldn’t follow this to the utter frozen limit. We need to recognize that some rapists self-identify as tender, sensitive, and thoughtful caregivers. What is more of a social construct than violence? We need to raise awareness of that, people.

Video of the Week

Keeping Track

Integration Into the Void

Forthcoming Reformation

In his important essay, The End of Courtship, Leon Kass makes the following observations about love, courtship, and marriage as it now plays out in college campuses and universities across the United States.  His observations would hold true, we believe, pretty much everywhere throughout the West. 

Below is a summary of excerpts to enable us to get the flavour.  (We will draw some implications for Christians, churches, and the Kingdom at the end.)

I:

Here is a (partial) list of the recent changes that hamper courtship and marriage:

Pagan Wolves

 A New-Age Leader of the Pack

We read periodically of the return of the wolf to Europe--once feared extinct, now running hunting packs throughout northern Europe and Spain.  But metaphorical wolves are also returning to re-establish a once long thought extinct pagan culture in Europe and the West. 

The following is a call-to-action from an officer in the Anglican Church of New Zealand. 

The newly appointed vicar of Auckland's Anglican church St Matthew-in-the-City has called on the church to approve same-sex marriages and ordination of gay vicars.  Reverend Dr Helen Jacobi, in her sermon on Sunday, spoke to the church's two-yearly General Synod, being held this week.

Facebook's Effete "Revolution"

Get Real

Facebook has yet again missed the point.  In a starburst of creative genius it has decided to expand the gender assignment categories of the human race from just two to around fifty.  The idea is that people can self-identify not merely as male or female, but as Androgynous, Transgender and Genderqueer--or as Uncle Tom Cobbly for that matter.  

We applaud this enlightened move.  It helps institutionalise what has been asserted and assumed for a generation now.  Human beings are so wonderful, so creative, so evolving and emergent that it is no longer just a matter of who they were, but one of who they now are, and how they self-identity  and whom they aspire to be.  Self-identity and self-creation is not just to be occasionally expected in a world which believes in self-referent evolution, it is required.  It has to be.  It's a surprise that it has taken so long for Facebook to face up (excuse the pun) to this self-evident and necessary truth.

Gentile Madness

Gender Bender

When God gives a culture up to the ravages of its own sinfulness its mind becomes darkened (Romans 1:21).  The culture starts to do stupid, laughable things with all due solemnity and seriousness. 

Here is an example of Gentile madness:  US army solider, Private Manning stole state secrets.  He has been judged and found guilty, and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.  But Private Manning is taken in self-absorbed lust.  He wants to be a woman.  He has made application for medical intervention that would change him into a woman.  This is serious stuff.  It is serious because medical "experts" have discovered there is a bona-fide disease named Gender Identity Disorder ("GID").  Wow.  A disease.  But that means its treatable--using hormones, the surgeon's knife, counselling and a truckload of other medical interventions.  Hey presto, Manning can be turned into a woman. 

But wait, there's more.  The issue here is not just the perverted fixations of a lost proud soul.  The soul that is lost includes the United States medical establishment.