Links - 4th March 2020 (2) (Trans Mania)

REPORT: Here's Why Planned Parenthood Booted Leana Wen As President. It's Unbelievable. - "the country’s largest abortion provider abruptly kicked president Leana Wen to the curb after just 10 months at the helm reportedly because Wen refused to say men can get pregnant and wasn’t aggressive enough pushing the life-ending procedure... "she believed talking about transgender issues would ‘isolate people in the Midwest"... Wen was not pushing abortion as aggressively as the taxpayer-funded abortion business would like... The reports concerning Wen’s departure fly in the face of overused Planned Parenthood talking points about the company being “so much more” than just providing abortion “care.” Turns out, averaging some 320,00 abortions annually is still not enough."

Leana Wen Refused Trans-Inclusive Language at Planned Parenthood: Report - "Wen had written that the best way to “protect abortion care” is to emphasize that it is not a “political issue but a healthcare one.” She went on to write that the organization could build “support for reproductive rights by finding common ground with the large majority of Americans who understand reproductive health care as the fundamental health care that it is.”"
Who benefits from increasing polarization and escalating conflict?

The Move to Erase Women from Periods, Pregnancy, and Parenting - "if reproductive health was a gender-neutral issue, it wouldn’t be up for debate. Men would never tolerate such state control over their bodily autonomy. Forced birth is sexualized violence against women and girls — and the most vulnerable among us, like poor women and women of color, suffer the most... A new battlefield to control women’s language and behavior has emerged in the past few years: the attempt to erase women entirely from any aspect of the female reproductive cycle. This push for “gender-neutral language” started in extreme activist communities, was forced onto non-profits with lifesaving funds withheld as blackmail, and has eventually moved into the corporate world. The new language policing includes areas such as periods, pregnancy, and motherhood — all exclusively female experiences. The stated goal of activists who push for “gender-neutral language” when discussing female reproduction is to be inclusive of “nonbinary” or trans-identifying females. Yet, it is clear this is just a continuation of Men’s Rights Activism to erode the rights of women and girls and hide the sexualized violence that we face because of our biology. Watching women’s organizations cave to this bullying is heartbreaking, a reminder that our “freedom” only comes at the will of men. The Executive Director of one women’s non-profit, which I won’t name for their protection, privately shared with me that she was concerned about this growing trend. However, she admitted, she was too afraid to say anything publicly, “We would lose all our funding”... Periods are an exclusively female experience. While, sure, not all women will ever get a period (like those with specific intersex conditions)— every human who does get a period is female. This is a biological fact... in privileged Western countries, middle-class young people who have never experienced period poverty are fighting to hide the reality of the discrimination that women and girls face when they menstruate... To imply that some females are no longer biologically female because of their gender identity is deeply misogynistic since it falsely implies that women and girls can simply opt-out of biology and therefore the discrimination, sexism, and violence that comes with this biology... Aunt Flow, who has claimed they are, “actively changing our language to create a gender-inclusive community,” has taken to calling women, specifically women and girls living in poverty “menstruators” — a deeply dehumanizing term... In her 1986 article, “If Men Could Menstruate,” feminist icon Gloria Steinem imagines what a world with menstruating men would look like... It’s exactly because periods are an exclusively female event, and we live in patriarchy, that “menstruators” suffer... Under patriarchy, our very system of pregnancy and birthing could be considered violence against women... While a tiny handful of female people wish to argue that they are not women, denying the reality of this deeply-gendered violence to satisfy a powerful and abusive minority is misogyny... A new push to eliminate breastfeeding in favor of “chestfeeding” has arisen, with real consequences for women. In 2015 the Supreme Court found in favor of Nationwide Insurance, who had fired Angela Ames for giving birth and looking to breastfeed at work. The ACLU reported that the court upheld the decision, claiming that breastfeeding is not sex-discrimination since, according to the ACLU, “men can lactate under certain circumstances.”"
Apparently male genital mutilation performed on infants doesn't violate bodily autonomy
Apparently trans activism is basically a men's rights movement
Too bad the author doesn't know that biology is transphobic

The problem with talking about “pregnant people” - "“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” Rarely has the hypocrisy surrounding abortion been captured as succinctly as in Florynce Kennedy’s 1971 quote... It’s a quote that still has resonance today, or rather, it would have, were it not for the fact that its basic premise has been proven false. Men can get pregnant; abortion, on the other hand, remains as stigmatised as ever. Just how many men do bear children is not especially clear. Last November it was reported that 54 Australian men had given birth over the past year... We know that reproduction is a feminist issue; we’re just no longer sure how, at least not if it has nothing to do with a class defined by assumed reproductive potential. So we’re left with a situation in which most of the things feminists write and say about reproduction would be classed as cissexist, yet if you pushed them on this issue, most would claim to support a more gender-neutral approach. But gender neutrality comes at a cost to the rhetorical punch achieved by quotes such as Kennedy’s. It shifts the focus away from gender as a means by which female bodies are controlled and problematises bodies themselves. Hence one witnesses an uneasy hovering between different linguistic options, between the desire to be all-encompassing and the need to say what one really means... “Biology,” writes Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, “came to be viewed by women as a field sown with mines, best avoided altogether.” Or, as Adrienne Rich put it, “the body has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit”. Except one cannot really do this when discussing conception, pregnancy and birth. Here, the difference between bodies starts to matter. Moreover, it’s a difference that is crucial to how gender operates. We cannot simply overlook it and hope for the best... To quote the philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards, “as a matter of logic, before you can justify a group’s activities by reference to its general characteristics, you first need a justification for its acting as a single group at all, rather than (say) joining with a larger group, splitting into smaller ones, or having everyone act as individuals.”...  If one looks at how gender functions, not as a means of self-definition, but as a class system, the gender-neutral pregnancy starts to feel akin to John Major’s “classless society”. It’s a way of using language to create the illusion of dismantling a hierarchy when what you really end up doing is ignoring it. Pregnancy is a gendered experience, not because pregnant individuals necessarily feel like women, but because the pregnant body is externally managed within the context of its subordinate sex class status"

Transgender Woman Too Humiliated by TSA Scanner to Keep Flying - "Cadence Baer will not be among the 27 million Americans flying this Thanksgiving to see family because she cannot deal with the humiliation of having her body scrutinized and laughed at in airport security.Baer, a trans woman, gave up flying after a Transportation Security Administration officer identified her as a woman for the body scanner, which then triggered an alarm because her groin did not match the machine’s version of the female body... “The [security officer] finally started laughing to himself and pressed the blue button so that the machine would stop registering my penis as a potential threat. The TSA agents were still laughing as I walked away.”... Trans travelers are often scrutinized at airports as their bodies and luggage – including prosthetics and chest binders – get flagged by body scanners for extra screening... Such problems have led to calls for a new law – the 2018 Screening With Dignity Act, which would require the TSA to develop new procedures for screening trans passengers, including assessing the cost of developing gender neutral equipment... Trans rights groups fear that the situation could worsen as the TSA is rolling out facial recognition software at airports across the United States.  Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder tested facial recognition systems from tech giants IBM, Amazon and Microsoft on photographs of trans men and found they were misidentified as women 38 percent of the time. The study suggested that the software relies on outdated gender stereotypes in its facial analysis, adding that the report’s lead author Morgan Klaus Scheuerman, who is male with long hair, was categorized as female half of the time. “Maybe you have socially transitioned, but it doesn’t necessarily match what your documentation says – there could be issues with TSA, immigration and customs”"
Apparently terrorists never use prosthetics and chest binders to smuggle explosives or weapons, so there's no need to check them

Parents Lose Custody Of Child For Refusing Gender Transition - "The parents moved to an undisclosed European Union country from Finland when their daughter was thirteen... When the girl’s parents denied her request to begin her transition, a criminal charge was filed against her parents.After watching footage of their daughter following a six-month course of male hormones, the father said: “Without over-dramatising, you can say that when the voice, appearance, and personality change, it is as if they had killed our child.”"
I remember liberals downplaying the possibility of parents losing custody for not supporting their children transitioning

Why Puberty Blockers Are A Clear Danger To Children's Health - "Citing guidelines issued by the political advocacy group World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), these physicians admit that the effects of cross-sex hormones are generally irreversible. Vulnerable patients who agree to this treatment are thus crossing the Rubicon into permanent bodily impairment... One of the puberty blockers frequently administered to girls who identify as boys (female-to-male, or FtM) is called Lupron... The first claim is that Lupron is safe. But thousands of patients who have been treated with Lupron for non-sex-related conditions would disagree... severe joint pain, osteoporosis, compromised immune systems, and mental health issues such as severe depression and even suicidal ideation. The FDA has received 24,000 reports of adverse reactions, about half of which the agency has deemed serious... there’s a serious added danger to using Lupron merely to stop normal puberty in a gender dysphoric child. Such treatment is “off label,” meaning the FDA hasn’t approved the drug for this purpose, nor is there reliable research showing the safety of such use... "62.5% of patients [treated with Lupron for endometriosis] had not regained baseline estrogen levels by one year after stopping Lupron.”In other words, the effect on the pituitary was not reversible for the majority of those patients. Endocrinologist Michael Laidlaw also warns that bone density may never recover from use of puberty blockers... “what parents should find truly terrifying is the psychological effect of this medication.” Under the traditional treatment for gender dysphoria, which involves “watchful waiting or pursuit of family and individual psychotherapy,” between 80 and 95 percent of adolescent patients outgrow their dysphoria naturally.In other words, only 5 to 10 percent of those children remain dysphoric and go on to request further treatments. But a major study of dysphoric children who were administered puberty blockers found that 100 percent went on to request cross-sex hormones... Laidlaw attributes this phenomenon to “a very strong psychologically addictive component to this medication, so that once children begin taking these blockers, they never leave the road of high-dose synthetic hormones and irreversible surgeries.”"

Why detransitioners frighten trans activists - "The ever-growing range of gender identities appealed to them, and many had histories of mental-health problems, sexual abuse and self-harm. In trans, they found a group in which they were accepted and even celebrated, especially so in the wider context of identity politics They felt powerful, often for the first time in their lives... The thing that has most disturbed me in all of this – apart from the way that Bath Spa University prevented crucial and important research from being done – has been the sheer scale of the denial, vilification, ignorance and, at best, silence that has come from trans-activist groups and their supporters on the subject of detransition. In any other field of medical practice, if evidence began to emerge of a practice that so many patients were saying had caused them harm there would be an inquiry into it. There is so little research into the long-term outcomes of gender reassignment – and most of it predates mass use of the internet, and the subsequent huge rise in young people presenting at sex-reassignment clinics. It is acknowledged by experienced clinicians that over 90 per cent of patients are lost to follow-up. We know that detransitioners very rarely go back to the clinics that treated them."

Neither male nor female: Why some nonbinary people are 'microdosing' hormones - "Hormone microdosing is of growing interest to some nonbinary people like Rivas who want to masculinize or feminize their bodies in subtle ways. There is little research on the technique’s prevalence, but doctors who treat transgender and nonbinary people say the medical community should consider the needs of those who want to change their bodies without medically transitioning fully to the opposite gender... For Rivas, the appeal is simple: a sense of control... In the 1980s and the ’90s, words such as “nonbinary,” “genderqueer” and “genderfluid,” which describe identities outside “male” and “female,” started to appear in academic and activist discourse, and have since made their way into mainstream culture"
Trans activists claim transgenderism is supported by science because of studies showing transgender people have brains resembling the other sex (pretending that hormones don't change the brain or that homosexuals don't have brains resembling the other sex). How will they justify nonbinarism?
This suggests that trans and similar people just want control
Another clear example of the slippery slope