Category Archives: Feminism and women’s rights

Virginia Democrats in the House of Representatives Vote Against Their Own Daughters

USA Women’s National Team 2019

by James C. Sherlock

Abigail Spanberger, (D) Va. – Voted against protections for girls and women in sports

Every Virginia Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives voted against a bill to amend Title IX to prohibit biological boys and men from competing against biological girls and women in K-12 and college sports.

Voting nay: Donald Beyer, Gerald Connolly, Jennifer McClellan, Bobby Scott, Abigail Spanberger and Jennifer Wexton.

H.R. 734 Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023 amends Title IX (“on the basis of sex”) by stating that the term “sex” in athletics shall be recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth.

Jennifer McClellan (D) Va. – Voted against protections for girls and women in sports

The consequences of a no vote. H.R. 734 protects the dreams and hard work of girls who wish to play college sports.

The ones who got up early and stayed late training for their sport. The ones whose parents ferried them to practice and games on weekends.

It protects girls and young women in contact sports such as soccer and field hockey from inevitable injury from bigger, stronger, faster men.

Indeed, it protects their ability to participate.

It prevents the biological male who never won a medal from deciding — no hormones or surgery required — he is female to mount the platform and be awarded the gold. To break records set by girls and women.

To get rich with the new NIL rule in college sports and richer yet in women’s professional sports.

Everyone who thinks that won’t happen, raise your hand. Continue reading

Five Questions: An Interview with Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears

by Shaun Kenney

Last week, The Republican Standard had the opportunity to follow Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears as she toured the Richmond Slave Trail — which included not only the site of the notorious Lumpkins Slave Jail but also the site where Gabriel Prosser was executed and presumably buried in 1800.

Winsome Earle-Sears brought a narrative rooted in the role of hope in human liberation, whether it was in her own tradition from Jamaica to the hopelessness that seems to infect so much of our political discourse today. TRS was able to sit down with the Lieutenant Governor in order to explore her thoughts on this topic and many others.

We just toured Lumpkin’s Slave Jail site. Clearly this is a place with a lot of hurt and anguish, but a little bit of courage and heroism. Where do you think that resilience — that hope — comes from given the experiences of the past?

People look at me and think that I have courage, but I don’t. I have no special store of courage more than the next guy, but I have counted the cost and what I say and do comes with consequences.
There are times when people believe that I am not willing to take that stand, but God comes along and tells me to pick up my cross. Many people attribute that to me being a Marine, but it is really not: it is attributable to my Christian Faith.
Continue reading

Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Virginia Public Schools – The Epidemic of Risky Behaviors and Experiences in Adolescents

Courtesy YouTube

by James C. Sherlock

The 2021 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) Data Summary & Trends Report: 2011–2021 , was released by the CDC on Monday, provides the most recent surveillance data, as well as 10-year trends, on health behaviors and experiences related to adolescent health and well-being among high school students in the United States.

The survey was completed in the Spring of 2021.

The report writes that teen girls are “engulfed in a growing wave of violence and trauma.”

 

Illustrations courtesy of CBS

This survey is brought to you by CDC, the national sponsors of school shutdowns. Who could have imagined?

The survey did not include middle- and grade-school students, but we can assess that such conditions did not spring up full grown in the 9th grade.

Where, exactly, are the feminists? Especially the ed-school feminists? Like Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) cheerleader Professor Catherine Bradshaw at the UVa School of Education and Human Development.

PBIS in place in most schools in Virginia and across the nation in that same 10-year period by design keeps violent and dangerous students in schools.

It is what PBIS is supposed to do. So those students can be socialized.

Or not.

That survey should, but will not, put to rest progressive insistence that out-of-control violence among students and fear in American schools because of violence are figments of conservative imaginations.

It confirms that increasing absenteeism is linked to fear. Which progressives will also continue to deny. Continue reading

Virginia Dems Refuse To Support Female Athletes

by Kerry Dougherty

I’m old.

Old enough to remember when there were sane members of Virginia’s Democrat Party.

They’ve apparently died or left the building and the party is under the complete control of woke loons. Like Del. Eileen Filler-Corn, the former Speaker of Virginia’s House of Delegates, who recently pretended not to understand why the Old Dominion needs a law prohibiting transgendered athletes from competing in female sports.

(Frankly, I have no problem with trans-men competing against males. Let ‘em try. Truth is, females are smaller and don’t have the strength of men and no amount of hormones and body hair will give them an unfair competitive advantage over biological males.)

Referring to HB1387, a bill introduced by Del. Karen Greenhalgh of Virginia Beach that would require athletes to compete in sports that comply with their biological gender, Filler-Corn voted against the bill and called it “mean-spirited,” sneering: “We have had transgender youth living in the commonwealth, and there has been no takeover of women’s sports,” she said. “I just don’t understand why this conversation continues.” Continue reading

Richmond’s Metzger Bar and Butchery Denies Service to Christian Non-Profit

by The Republican Standard Staff

On Wednesday evening, an hour and a half before a reserved Family Foundation gathering in a private room, Metzger Bar and Butchery denied entry and service to the pro-family group, solely based on their political opinions and religious beliefs.

“It is alarming and disgraceful that this restaurant has a political litmus test to get in the front door,” said Victoria Cobb, President of the Family Foundation. “All Virginians should be concerned about this extreme bigotry and intolerance of people of faith, irrespective of their own political or religious beliefs. Everyone should be concerned that Virginians are being denied access in the marketplace, solely based on their beliefs.”

Cobb continued, “We live in a free market and people have many choices of where to dine, so we took our business elsewhere. Metzger’s has now isolated a wide base of customers who would rather go elsewhere than patron a bigoted restaurant. Most Virginians are charitable and would not only serve people with differing political or religious viewpoints but would share a meal with them and enjoy the exchange of different viewpoints.” Continue reading

Blue on Blue: Richmond Progressive Attacks White Feminist Privilege

Photo credit: Reparations4slavery.com

by James A. Bacon

There’s big money in telling White people how racist they are. Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo have made millions of dollars doing it. Now Saira Rao, an Indian-American Richmond resident, has figured out how to cash in on the action.

Rao has written a book with Colorado co-author Regina Jackson, “White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better,” that berates White feminists. The title has been picked up by big-time publisher Penguin Random House. Peter Galuszka interviewed Rao for a friendly piece in Style Weekly

While the book is sure to rake in royalties, the author’s shtick generates loads of ancillary revenue. In a program called “Race2Dinner” Rao and Jackson direct two-hour cocktail-and-dinner sessions in which six to eight White women confront their racism. Based on one of those dinner conversations, Director Patty Ivins Specht produced a documentary, “Deconstructing Karen,” which highlights “the unwitting ways” in which White women uphold “everyday white supremacy.” A ticket to a Race2Lunch event in Toronto this summer set back attendees $495 each; a Race2Dinner event in Denver cost $625.

Rao takes no prisoners. As she and Jackson write in the book, “Privilege is power. By ignoring your white privilege, you ignore your white power. When you ignore your white power, you uphold white supremacy. This is white feminism. White feminism. Is. White Supremacy.” Continue reading

The “Occasional” Butchery of Children

By James C. Sherlock

Chloe Cole after childhood surgical transition to a boy (left) and de-transition to a girl (right) – Courtesy of Chloe Cole and the New York Post

The New York Post wrote recently:

At 12 years old, Chloe Cole decided she was transgender. At 13, she was put on puberty blockers and prescribed testosterone. At 15, she underwent a double mastectomy. Less than a year later, she realized she’d made a mistake.

Note the gracious acceptance of agency by this young woman, even though she made a “decision” at 12 that she was transgender.  Some clearly think that a child of twelve is mature enough to make such a decision.

We see no such agency proclaimed by her parents, pediatrician, endocrinologist or psychologist.  I am sure they were “supporting” that child.

No agency is apparently accepted by the state in which she lived.  The state in which her doctors were licensed.

Let’s examine the agency of the adult players in such matters in Virginia.

Continue reading

A Culture of Cowardice

by Kerry Dougherty

Where are the American men? Real men, not the soft-handed cellphone addicts with product in their hair and vagina hats on their heads.

Guys like my father, who once chased a pervert out of a crowded Manhattan movie theater for several blocks after a stranger took the seat next to mine and began touching my leg.

“If I hadn’t had my dress shoes on I would have caught him before he headed into the subway,” my father panted apologetically upon his return. “I would have beat him to a pulp.”

I believed him.

My dad wasn’t what you’d call a stereotypical tough guy, but he was the protector of our family. Mess with his daughter and he turned into the Incredible Hulk.

His willingness to defend me was enormously comforting to a frightened 10-year-old who’d been assaulted by a stranger.

I repeat, where are all the men? Continue reading

JMU: Where Not Only Are You Wrong, But How Dare You Ask?

Lia Thomas (left) and Emma Weyant (center) after notorious swimming event.

by James A. Bacon

Western Civilization went more than 2,000 years with people dividing the world between male and female. About 10 years ago, the idea gained traction in the United States that gender wasn’t based on biology — XX and XY chromosomes — but was a social construct. Within an extraordinarily short time, transgender ideology has cemented into an orthodoxy on college campuses. Indeed, the notion has become so deeply embedded that many now consider it bigoted to even question it.

At James Madison University, a faculty-run group called Ethical Reasoning in Action posed a hypothetical situation: Suppose a state was considering a law that requires transgender athletes at the high-school and college levels to compete against only those “with the same assigned sex at birth.”

“A transgender female swimmer competes at your university who, as a man in competition was not especially successful, but as a woman just two years later set school and conference records. While the university opposes the proposed law because it doesn’t align with their emphasis on diversity, inclusion and equity on campus, they ask students, faculty and staff to vote on the issue.

“Should transwomen be allowed to compete with other athletes?”

Madison Equality, a student LGBTQ organization, condemned the ethical scenario as “transphobic.” It wasn’t even a question fit to be asked.
Continue reading

The Enrollment Gap Colleges Don’t Like to Talk About

by James A. Bacon

While college administrators across Virginia and the United States fixate on the racial/ethnic makeup of their institutions, there’s a large and growing gender gap. Young women dominate enrollment at most higher-ed institutions these days. Fewer young men are applying, and even when they do, they’re dropping out more frequently. Administrators don’t like male-female imbalances because students don’t like it — colleges are mating markets as much as they’re centers of learning — but no one seems to be doing much about it.

There is no simple explanation for the large and growing mismatch. There is likely the same kind of “pipeline” problem we see with minorities — fewer males are applying for college because fewer are graduating from high school with college-ready skills. Additionally, males also may be more prone to substance abuse and mental illness, syndromes that are highly disruptive to academic performance.

There’s another possible reason, one that appeals to conservatives who see higher-ed institutions as dens of ideological inequity. In a higher-ed world dominated by the ideology of interesectionality — heterosexual white males are the O- of human society, universal oppressors — young men, especially young white men, experience college as a hostile environment. There may be some merit to this view, but it is only part of a larger story. Continue reading

VMI a Hell-hole for Women, Says… the Washington Post

by James A. Bacon

If you want a case study in why much of the public believes nothing emanating from the mainstream media, read The Washington Post’s latest smear job on the Virginia Military Institute. Staff muckraker Ian Shapira slams the Institute for the misogyny and sexual assault that he, like the Barnes & Thornburg report published in June, alleges to be pervasive there.

I shall delve into the particulars in a moment, but bear in mind a few key points. First, Shapira indicts an entire higher-ed institution on the basis of interviews with “more than a dozen women” who attend or attended VMI in the recent past and implies that their experience is typical. Second, he presents only their side of the story. Third, he does not quote a single woman who describes having had a positive experience at VMI, although there are many who would have gladly obliged. Fourth, he seeks to hold the VMI administration accountable for the fact that young adult males express misogynistic views — in other words, for the administration’s failure to function as thought police. Fifth, he omits statistical evidence showing that assault and rape are less prevalent at VMI than at other higher-ed institutions.

In short, Shapira’s article can be considered journalism only to the extent that he actually talked to some real people instead of making stuff up. His framing of a pre-determined narrative, his cherry picking of anecdotal evidence to support that narrative, and his exclusion of perspectives that would contradict his narrative (other than responses to specific allegations from VMI) can better be classified as propaganda. Continue reading

Contrary to Report, Women Are Safer from Sexual Assault at VMI

Kasey Meredith became VMI’s first Cadet Commander this year. Photo credit: AP

by James A. Bacon

Not only is the Virginia Military Institute a cauldron of racism, according to the recently published Barnes & Thornburg report, it is a bastion of sexism. As the executive summary puts it: “On gender, many respondents — including men — stated that VMI’s gender-equity issues are worse than its racial-equity issues.”

As evidence of the culture of sexism, the report cites from a survey in which 81 female cadets participated. Fourteen percent of those who responded reported having been sexually assaulted. Concludes the executive summary: “Sexual assault is prevalent at VMI yet it is inadequately addressed by the Institute.”

Here’s what Barnes & Thornburg never mentioned: According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, one in five women are “sexually assaulted” while attending college nationally. According to the 2019 AAU Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Misconduct, 25.9% of women undergraduates are subject to “nonconsensual sexual contact by force or inability to consent.”

In other words, using Barnes & Thornburg’s own metric, women are significantly safer at VMI than other four-year colleges. Continue reading