Category Archives: LGBQT

VCU Police Department Signals Its Wokeness

VCU Police Chief John Venuti

by James A. Bacon

A new “resource” will be available to the LGBTQIA+ community in Richmond. Virginia Commonwealth University — yes, the same institution that recently lost $470,000 in a cyber scam — has assigned two campus patrol officers as “campus LGBTQIA+ liaisons.”

A recent university announcement noted that VCU Police Chief John Venuti has designated the two liaisons as part of the department’s “culture of inclusive community outreach for officers and staff.”

It is not clear, either in the VCU announcement or a WRIC story, what the two officers actually will be doing… aside from liaising and collaborating. Nor is there indication why such liaising and collaborating is necessary.

VCU News said only this: “While the department mandates Safe Zone training for all staff, Officers Hakilah Hudson and Briana Jackson will actively collaborate with offices and groups for outreach and events on both campuses and will be the points of contact for groups on and off campus.”

The VCU page on LGBTQIA+ Liaisons adds this: Continue reading

Taking Food From Needy Children to Advance the Trans Agenda

by Kerry Dougherty

This ought to be the number one campaign issue in the U.S. right now: the Biden administration’s radical plan to starve the National School Lunch program unless states adopt far-left gender identity rules for schools that include allowing biological boys to compete in girls’ sports.

This outrageous federal blackmail leaves states struggling to choose between protecting girls and keeping needy children from going hungry.

And it’s just another case of a federal agency — this time the USDA — exceeding its authority. How many times will Biden’s out-of-control bureaucrats have to be smacked down by the U.S. Supreme Court before they stop illegally exercising powers not delegated to them by Congress?

Twenty-two Republican attorneys general sued Tuesday to block the Agriculture Department’s newly announced guidance making student-lunch funds contingent on enforcing the Biden administration’s gender-identity agenda. Continue reading

Virginia Must Ensure Transgender Medical Treatment Is Safe

by James C. Sherlock

Attorney Hans Bader and I in parallel articles have pointed out the serious questions posed by national and international experts about current medical practices in gender transitions for minors.

Those questions include both the ethics of the diagnosis and treatment processes in use and the safety of the puberty blockers and cross-gender hormones used in those treatments. Hormone treatments are administered to hundreds of minors annually in Virginia in the face of both new FDA warnings and other major open questions about their safety and long-term outcomes.

Virginia taxpayers pay for a lot of these treatments in state hospitals and clinics with state-funded private insurance plans and now Medicaid.

I will recommend the Virginia Secretary of Health and Human Resources organize and oversee practice and research networks in Virginia that mirror the recommendations of the Cass Review in the U.K. to make it safe.

Virginia has the assets necessary to carry out those recommendations and the state has the authority. It must demonstrate the will.

No new law appears necessary. Continue reading

“After all, we are not in Wonderland”

by Kerry Dougherty

Here’s a quaint idea: If you’re a trans person going through hormone treatment, don’t get involved with drug dealers. Definitely don’t help them in their illegal business.

If you do, you might get caught, convicted and sentenced to jail. And authorities might toss you in a facility housing others that match your biological sex.

Then again, you might get lucky.

Your case may be heard by a three-judge panel of woke federal judges who decide that the American’s With Disabilities Act suddenly covers people with “gender dysphoria.”

Never mind that when the ADA was passed in 1990 it explicitly said that “gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments” were not covered.

I’m talking, in case you missed it, about the case of Kesha Williams, a biological male from Fairfax County who’s lived as a woman for many years. Williams has not had surgery to remove his male organs, but takes female hormones. Continue reading

Schools Will Contribute to Suicides Under Current Virginia Transgender Student Guidelines

Virginia Department of Health

by James C. Sherlock

Teen suicide is a major problem in America and Virginia.

The Virginia Department of Health reported in 2021 that suicide is the second leading cause of death among Virginia’s youth.

I have talked around but not about teen suicide in previous articles about transgender adolescents.  

study published by the National Institutes of Heath indicates that 82% of transgender individuals have considered killing themselves and 40% have attempted suicide, with suicidal tendencies highest among transgender youth.

As directed by law, the Virginia Board of Education published in 2020 Suicide Prevention Guidelines in Virginia Schools (Suicide Prevention Guidelines).  I find it exemplary, and hope every school board has adopted it.

On the other hand, I find it dangerous that the same parental involvement strategies were not adopted in Model Policies for the Treatment of Transgender Students in Virginia’s Public Schools (Model Policies) published in 2021.

The writers of Model Policies had a different agenda and less support from medical professionals than the writers of Suicide Prevention Guidelines. As a result, students certainly will harm themselves and commit suicide at higher rates if schools follow Model Policies than if schools were to adhere to the notification procedures in the Suicide Prevention Guidelines. Continue reading

Governor Youngkin Can Restore Parental Rights in the Treatment of Transgender Children in Schools with the Stroke of a Pen

by James C. Sherlock

Gov. Youngkin criticized after calling on teachers with LGBTQ students to tell parents” is a headline in The Virginian-Pilot.

Apparently, “Gov. Youngkin calls on teachers with LGBTQ students to tell parents” did not make the cut.

Narrative shaping 101.

Now consider these statements of government opinion:

  • “If she has to tell her parents, they might beat or disown her.”
  • “If his parents find out, he might kill himself.”

These are judgments that not only can be made by public school personnel under current Virginia policy, but are actually encouraged by that policy.

Model Policies for the Treatment of Transgender Students in Virginia’s Public Schools (Model Policies) was written pursuant to the 2020 law § 22.1-23.3. Treatment of transgender students; policies. That law was written for action by the Superintendent of Public Instruction, who works for the governor. Read it.

Nothing in that law required the DOE to go nearly as far as it did in Model Policies. But it was drafted by a panel dominated by progressive activists who shared their pronouns.

You will note there is not a single word in that law about parents.

All the Governor needs to do is tell his superintendent to revoke that destructive policy document and re-rewrite it requiring parental involvement. (And new rules for bathrooms. You are welcome, Hanover County School Board.)

Elections matter. Continue reading

A Pedophile By Any Other Name

by Kerry Dougherty

Remember Allyn Walker, the ODU assistant professor who was indignant last fall because pedophiles get such a bad rap?

We wrote several posts about Walker, who prefers we use the much more pleasant euphemism “minor-attracted person” to describe perverts who are sexually attracted to children.

If you thought Walker was alone in this sort of twisted thinking, you were wrong.

Get a load of Miranda Galbreath, a licensed professional counselor who works with prisoners for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

Continue reading

VCU Seeking Prof to Teach Black Queer Antiracist Anticolonial Feminism

VCU Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies graduates

by James A. Bacon

Virginia Commonwealth University is hiring an assistant professor to teach “Race in Arts/Media, queer of color critique and Black feminist media studies.”

That’s quite the academic specialty. I can’t imagine there are many such scholars around. Once upon a time, I would have questioned whether there was any demand for graduates of such a program, but the national obsession with sexual/gender identity means someone is actually hiring people like that. According to CareerExplorer.com, the average salary for people with a B.A. degree in gender studies is only $27,300 yearly one year out, but it increases to almost $60,000 annually ten years out.

I shudder to think what employers are getting for their money. Consider the criteria VCU is looking for in a Black/queer/feminist professor, and then ask yourself if he/she/insert-your-preferred-pronoun will be more likely to help students gain independent, critical reasoning skills or turn out preprogrammed social-justice robots. Continue reading

Stop Erasing Women

by Kerry Dougherty

Keep it up, lefties. I’m begging you.

Keep spouting anti-science inanities and do it as loudly as possible until you drive every single normal person away from the Democratic Party.

Seriously, don’t stop.

What am I talking about? You have to see this to believe it:

https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1546906017589608449?s=20&t=86-z28K9EUhxklJFV_XAHQ

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

Federal Department of Education to Toss Virginia Schools a Live Grenade

by James C. Sherlock

The Office of Civil Rights of the Biden Department of Education has published a revised Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) data set. Some statistics:

  • Type of Review: A revision of an existing information collection.
  • Respondents/Affected Public: State, Local, or Tribal Governments.
  • Total Estimated Number of Annual Responses: 17,884.
  • Total Estimated Number of Annual Burden Hours: 2,175,866.

They consider a thousand man-years a small price to pay for the data they want. But that is just the beginning of the price that will be paid.

The new federal requirements include gender identity data collection and reporting for every child in Virginia public schools.

Multiple gender choices are specified to include male, female and non-binary. Another section requires school staff to determine whether a student “identifies as or is perceived to be transgender, cisgender, or nonbinary.”

Teachers and counselors presumably will have to make the call on how each student identifies. Think teachers are dissatisfied now? Wait until this hits. No guidelines on checking with parents. 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

UVa, Defend Your Women!

Letter to the University of Virginia Board of Visitors from Walter Smith.

Now that International Transgender Day of Visibility is behind us, it is safe to discuss your lack of visibility in the matter regarding UVa student Emma Weyant, who, in the world where reality and truth are valued, is the true women’s NCAA 500 freestyle swimming champion. None of you has spoken out regarding the injustice of her loss of the 1st-place trophy to a transgendered individual, Lia Thomas — a silence, I suspect, that arises from your terror of woke intersectionalists.

The only statement I have seen from any UVa official was a quote in The Jefferson Independent, in which President Jim Ryan bravely stated, “I’m not an expert on this and I haven’t been following it as closely as others… I have to say it seems unfair to me, at a very basic level.”

Wow! What clarity of thought! What bold leadership! I now see how Ryan was selected to lead Thomas Jefferson’s University — to make it Great and Good as only he can! Continue reading

The Relentless Push for Child Gender Transition

Dr. Rachel Levine, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Health

by James C. Sherlock

On the odd chance you missed it, the Biden administration announced a flurry of new measures today, designated the Transgender Day of Visibility. (I need to keep up.)

The Washington Post reported on the festivities. What that story did not report is the celebration’s most important “feature.”

HHS today announced Biden administration support for gender transition  for children.

For transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents, early gender-affirming care is crucial to overall health and well-being as it allows the child or adolescent to focus on social transitions and can increase their confidence while navigating the healthcare system.

Happy to know that HHS defines this as “gender-affirming” care — “affirming” and “care” are cute terms — “at any age or stage” of development. Continue reading

Deplatformed for “Hate” Speech: You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby

Reka Gyorgy, a Virginia Tech senior who missed the cut to compete in the NCAA swimming finals because she was displaced by transgender Lia Thomas, has had her Twitter account suspended.

“I’m a 5th year senior, I have been top 16 and top 8 before and I know how much of a privilege it is to make finals at a meet this big,” Gyorgy said in a letter reprinted on SwimSwam and Swimming World, which she subsequently tweeted. “This is my last college meet ever and I feel frustrated. It feels like that final spot was taken away from me because of the NCAA’s decision to let someone who is not a biological female compete.”

Thomas, a University of Pennsylvania senior won the 500, defeating three Olympic silver medalists, including 20-year-old University of Virginia swimmer Emma Weyant, who placed second. Continue reading