Free Republic

A relatively minor item in an announcement from the Prime Minister’s Office regarding funding for “gender-transformative mine action” in the war in Ukraine has raised eyebrows on social media. The press release that went out Saturday makes mention of $3.02 billion in financial and military support to Ukraine in 2024, but it also outlines a number of smaller, targeted initiatives. Article content One of these, listed as “Gender-inclusive demining for sustainable futures in Ukraine,” has a funding budget of $4 million. “This project from the HALO Trust aims to safeguard the lives and livelihoods of Ukrainians, including women and internally...

The global assault on free speech has gotten so widespread, that it's difficult anymore to find a country in the world where woke armies AREN'T trying to take it away. Here in North America, we see that being attacked every day (mostly accompanied by people fighting back, thankfully), and Canada ... well, Canada is just completely lost (for now, at least). But we hadn't heard much related to this issue from our neighbor on our southern border. Until now. This week, ADF International -- a group dedicated to defending basic rights and freedoms -- reported that former Mexican congressman Rodrigo...

The AR-15-toting female who opened fire on worshippers at Lakewood Church in Houston on Sunday before she was killed by two off-duty law enforcement officers used a male name, making her one of several gender-confused shooters in recent years. After what Houston Police Department Homicide Division Commander Chris Hassig called a rigorous investigation “talking with individuals” conducting “interviews” and scanning “documents,” the department confirmed that 36-year-old Genesse Ivonne Moreno is a Hispanic woman who sometimes masqueraded as “Jeffrey Escalante.” It's still unclear exactly why Moreno, who had a long rap sheet and, according to Moreno’s anti-Second Amendment mother-in-law, a history...

The American College of Pediatricians has released a new position paper outlining findings based on a review of dozens of studies to claim that providing gender transition procedures to minors with gender dysphoria does not lead to an improvement in mental health.The ACP, which describes itself as a 600-member “national organization of pediatricians and other healthcare professionals dedicated to the health and well-being of children,” released the report Monday titled “Mental Health in Adolescents with Incongruence of Gender Identity and Biological Sex.” The group has long expressed skepticism about surgical and hormonal interventions for children who say they identify as...

A review of 60 studies of the mental health of transgender-identifying youth found that “there is no long-term evidence that current ‘gender affirming’ medication and surgical protocols benefit their mental well-being,” according to a group representing pediatricians. The American College of Pediatricians issued a position statement on Wednesday opposing the gender transitioning of youth based on the literature review. It comes just after a watchdog group filed a scientific integrity complaint against Department of Health and Human Services official Rachel Levine for claiming that “there is no argument among medical professionals regarding “the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.”...

British law should be amended to allow for dead people to have their genders officially changed following their deaths, a Member of Parliament for the left-wing Labour Party has argued. In a written question posed to Parliament last month, Warrington North MP Charlotte Nichols suggested that the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) of 2004 should be updated to “allow transgender people who are deceased to be legally remembered by the gender they lived by”. The push follows a petition last year signed by nearly 14,000 people asking for a similar change to the law following the killing of Brianna Ghey, a...

In June 2022, two Centennial Elementary School students in Olympia, Wash., disappeared. Their parents, Indian immigrants, had quietly driven them out of state, to Oregon, before they eventually decided to fly back to their former home country. No one in Olympia has seen the children since. “My daughter mentioned that Tia had been gone from school for a couple of weeks,” said Jess Davis, whose daughter was a classmate of Tia’s, one of the family’s children. (I have changed most of the names in this report to respect requests for anonymity.) “We were at an ice cream social that our...

President Biden has opened up a 6 point lead in a hypothetical head-to-head match-up with former President Trump, new polling shows, amid signs of a growing gender gap in support for the two party front-runners. A new Quinnipiac University national poll found Biden with 50 percent support among registered voters, ahead of Trump’s 44 percent. That’s a shift in the incumbent’s favor from December, when Quinnipiac found the same Biden-Trump hypothetical “too close to call,” with Biden at 47 percent support and Trump at 46 percent. Biden also scored majority support among independents in the latest findings, with 52 percent...

Russian ‘sisters’ Tamara and Irina Press romped home to five gold medals and smashed lots of records. When gender testing came in, they retired. Rivals called them the ‘Press Brothers’.

A group of transgender veterans has sued the Department of Veteran Affairs to make them provide and pay for sex-change surgeries on the taxpayer's dime. The Transgender American Veterans Association (TAVA) wants VA Secretary Denis McDonough to come good on pledges to offer sex-reassignment procedures to former service members. The campaigners say they are 'essential and lifesaving medical care' for a suicide-prone group that suffers from high rates of depression and psychological distress. TAVA counts some 163,000 trans veterans. The suit could open the door to tens of thousands of claims for taxpayer-funded ops that cost more than $100,000 for...

A 20-year veteran NYPD detective is trying to restore his good name after becoming a victim of what his supporters claim is wokeness run amok. Bronx Homicide Detective Robert Klein was hit with a questionable complaint from a BLM protester who identifies as non-binary and alleged he was “discourteous,” according to documents and police sources. Klein, 44, was accused of mistreating Christine Brown, a non-binary person, as he arrested them for allegedly assaulting an NYPD inspector at a chaotic November 2020 protest in Greenwich Village, records show. Brown, who uses they/them pronouns, initially filed eight allegations against the officer, including...

As we look ahead to another year – and another presidential election, and another international Olympics, and all the other disparate opportunities for confusion that come with a new year in the modern world – it might be a pipe dream, but we should try to demand a return to honesty from our public figures. We can’t demand easy, painless answers; too many of the problems they’ve made for us will be painful to fix, no matter what course we take. But surely we can demand honesty, at least about the big picture. CARBON DIOXIDE One of the biggest lies...

An English course at the U.S. Naval Academy teaches officer candidates left-wing theories of gender and sexuality, along with elements of Critical Race Theory, according to syllabi obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The course description for HE 374, Topics In Gender & Sexuality in Literature, begins by tracing the history of gender and sexuality studies from its origin in the women’s studies discipline rooted in the Second Wave Feminism of the 1970’s and 1980’s, according to a syllabus the DCNF obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request. However, the English major course broadens to include studies for...

A teacher fired over her concern for a student’s welfare is not going down without a fight. Bonnie Manchester, whom MassResistance reported is a Christian, was sacked from a middle school in Ludlow, Massachusetts, back in 2021 after informing a female student’s father that the school was secretly referring to his daughter as a boy. Two years on, Manchester is filing a $10 million lawsuit against Ludlow, its school board, current and former school district superintendents, and several former school employees.

California retailers that refuse to incorporate “gender-neutral” toy sections could face hundreds of dollars in fines from the state under a new law that takes effect Jan. 1. Any California department store that has 500 or more employees and sells childcare items will be required to feature a “gender-neutral” section “regardless of whether [the toys] have been traditionally marketed for either girls or for boys,” thanks to a new law signed by Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom. Lawmakers claimed the new requirements are based on the state’s civil rights statutes.“Any department store that fails to create a gender-neutral section could face...

According to the Department of Education, “misgendering” a student could violate federal civil rights law. Last month, the Department’s Office for Civil Rights announced the resolution of its investigation of California’s Taft College for creating a hostile environment under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. OCR investigated the school after a male student was “misgendered” by his professors. The student, who did not notify university administrators that he identified as female, told his professors that he was “trans-femme” and preferred to be addressed by plural pronouns. (Because I’m not employed by a university and am therefore not legally...

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, could be under heavy fire for an audio recording of her alleged profanity-laced tirade towards a staffer because she is a woman of color, a new report suggests. The Houston Chronicle pondered if the representative is getting more backlash for the recording because she is a Black woman. The reporter quoted experts who said women of color have been held to higher standards than men, suggesting that if Jackson Lee was a man, she would not be on the receiving end of such backlash. Texas newspaper Current Revolt published audio it obtained of Jackson Lee...

A 23-year-old woman who had her uterus and breasts removed at UW Hospital after a self-diagnosis of gender dysphoria that she said was not confirmed by a doctor is suing the hospital and two UW surgeons, alleging they operated on her without proper informed consent. Dr. Jay Lick performed a hysterectomy when the patient was 19, and Dr. Katherine Gast did a double mastectomy when she was 21, as gender-affirming procedures at the hospital, according to the lawsuit filed Wednesday in Dane County Circuit Court. The patient, who lives in Chicago, identified as lesbian, explored if she was transgender and...

I’ve written about Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala before. She was one of the leading doctors who dealt with pediatric gender identity patients in Finland and recently she’s become a critic of the model known as gender-affirming care. Monday, the Free Press published a lengthy essay by Dr. Kaltiala in which she outlines her personal involvement in this issue and what she believes about it now.Her story really starts in 2011 when a group of Dutch doctors published a paper arguing that teens (primarily males) could be given hormones to prevent puberty and allow them to pass more easily as women. This...

Icelandic Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir has said that she will join tens of thousands of women walking off the job on Tuesday to protest the widely disputed gender wage gap. For the seventh time in the history of the country, female Icelanders will take part in the “Kvennafri,” translated into English as “Women’s Day Off”. The strike is intended to protest the supposed inequality faced by women in one of the most egalitarian societies in the world, as well as to protest against the supposed wage gap between men and women. Joining the tens of thousands of women, Prime Minister...