Free Republic

A bill that passed the California state senate and is now moving through the Assembly could threaten jail time for anyone who refuses to use a transgender person’s preferred pronoun. The law is currently limited in its effects to nursing homes and intermediate-care facilities, but if passed, those who “willfully and repeatedly” refuse “to use a transgender resident’s preferred name or pronouns” could be slapped with a $1,000 fine and up to one year in prison, according to the California Heath and Safety code. The state senate passed the bill 26-12 at the end of May. Since then, the Assembly...

Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain decried President Trump's Friday order for the Pentagon to ban transgender people from entering the military. "It would be a step in the wrong direction to force currently serving transgender individuals to leave the military solely on the basis of their gender identity rather than medical and readiness standards that should always be at the heart of Department of Defense personnel policy," McCain, R-Ariz., said in a statement late Friday. "The Pentagon's ongoing study on this issue should be completed before any decisions are made with regard to accession. The Senate Armed Services Committee...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday ripped President Trump's presidential memorandum banning transgender individuals from serving in the military. "The commander-in-chief is ordering the Pentagon to hurt and humiliate thousands of Americans who serve in our military with strength and courage," Pelosi said in a statement. "Prejudice, not the national defense, is behind President Trump's cruel decision to kick transgender troops out of the military," she said. "The President of the United States should have more respect for the transgender men and women who had the patriotism and bravery to serve our country in uniform." Pelosi's comments come...

Angry parents stampeded a California charter school board meeting Monday after a teacher read her kindergarten class picture books about transgenderism to affirm a gender dysphoric classmate. During the class, parents say, the gender dysphoric boy also switched clothes to look more like a girl in a “gender reveal.” Parents were not notified beforehand of the discussion or the classmate’s psychological condition, and learned about it when their confused kindergarteners arrived home from school that day. “The kindergartners came home very confused, about whether or not you can pick your gender, whether or not they really were a boy or...

Parents in Rocklin, California were horrified to discover that a teacher led a kindergarten-age classroom discussion on transgenderism that included introducing a five-year-old who was transitioning from male to female. Children at Rocklin Academy were subjected to readings from two storybooks about transgenderism. At some point, the teacher introduced a classmate who changed clothes for the big gender reveal. "These parents feel betrayed by the school district that they were not notified," Capitol Resource Institute's Karen England told CBS News in Sacramento. "The kindergartners came home very confused, about whether or not you can pick your gender, whether or not...

This week's question: Should transgender people be allowed to serve in the Canadian military? On Friday former premier Christy Clark resigned as leader of the B.C. Liberal Party and Kelowna MLA. Her downfall at the polls and subsequent departure from politics is largely a result of her abandoning long articulated principles. Many on the Left relished demonizing her and would never have voted for her. Yet, over the course of the 18 months preceding the May election Clark began pandering to the Left. Just before Vancouver’s annual Pride Parade in 2016 Clark suddenly abandoned the government’s principled position, which refused...

Lawyers from two prominent LGBTQ advocacy organizations have filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of five transgender service members with almost 60 years of combined military service. The National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) and GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) filed the suit, Doe v. Trump, in response to President Donald Trump’s recent tweets calling for a full ban on transgender people serving in the United States military. The ACLU filed a separate lawsuit on Wednesday. “Trump’s directive to exclude transgender people from military service has created a tidal wave...

Hillary Clinton might be a little late to the Wonder Woman party, but she definitely made up for it at her special screening of the blockbuster film this weekend. On Sunday, the Alamo Drafthouse's Brooklyn location tweeted a photo of a smiling Bill and Hillary Clinton with some of the theater's employees, writing, "Honored to have hosted @HillaryClinton & @billclinton last night for a special screening of WONDER WOMAN!" The screening has been a long time coming: In a video message at the Women in Film Crystal + Lucy Awards in Los Angeles in June, Hillz expressed her desire to...

This week, famous millennial journaler Lena Dunham was strolling through an airport eavesdropping on a couple of flight attendants. There she was, just a right-thinking individual with fluency in approved language and a desire for a kind and compassionate society, when she heard a conversation that violated her sense of an ideal society. Then, as any individual principally interested in kindness and empathy would do, she reported the flight attendants’ conversation to their bosses at American Airlines. Then, filled once more with the compassion and humility that are her hallmarks, Dunham broadcast this conversation, and her reporting of it, to...

Civil rights groups on Saturday announced their intent to file suit against Donald Trump’s “mean-spirited and discriminatory” attempt to ban transgender people from serving in the US armed forces. Trump announced the ban on Twitter in July. Top US military leaders have not implemented it, since no formal guidance was provided. But after a report published late on Friday said the White House had approved guidance on the ban, Lambda Legal and OutServe-Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (Outserve-SLDN) announced an intent to file suit. Sasha Buchert, a Lambda Legal staff attorney and transgender military veteran, said the ban was “capricious, irrational...

In a letter to the Palm Center issued today, 56 retired generals and admirals released the following statement as a PC, trendy rebuttal to the President’s recent transgender ban in the armed forces. “The Commander in Chief has tweeted a total ban of honorably serving transgender troops. This proposed ban, if implemented, would cause significant disruptions, deprive the military of mission-critical talent, and compromise the integrity of transgender troops who would be forced to live a lie, as well as non-transgender peers who would be forced to choose between reporting their comrades or disobeying policy. As a result, the proposed...

More than a dozen retired generals and admirals have signed a letter to President Trump thanking him for his announced policy to ban transgender people from the armed forces. “We write today to express our gratitude to you for making the extremely courageous decision to reverse President Obama’s transgender social experiment,” the conservative retired flag officers wrote. “There may be an enormous amount of vitriol directed at you for making this policy correction, but please know that overturning this policy may have done more in the long-term to save the culture and war-fighting capacity of the U.S. military than perhaps...

Princeton to students: Be any gender or genders you want Princeton University is giving its students the option of picking a gender or, reportedly, several genders. The Ivy League’s student services interface, known as TigerHub, allows -- but does not require -- students to select one or more of the following: “Cisgender," "Genderqueer/gender non-conform[ing]," "Trans/transgender," "Man," "Woman," and "Other”. “Students use TigerHub to provide the University with personal information on a confidential basis,” a university spokesman told Fox News. “This information includes emergency contacts, their preferred name, and, if they wish to provide it in response to an optional question,...

<p>A Pennsylvania school district will allow students to use restrooms corresponding to their "consistently and uniformly asserted gender identity" in settling a federal lawsuit brought last year by three transgender students.</p> <p>Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund announced the settlement Tuesday in Pittsburgh.</p>

Like a lot of stand-up comedians, Lil Duval trades in crude, provocative humor that riffs on social issues. But was he joking when he told an immensely popular radio show over the weekend that he would kill a sexual partner if he found out she was a transgender woman? It sure didn’t seem that way. And now he and his interviewers are facing backlash from critics who say he encouraged violence against transgender women. On Friday, Lil Duval — aka Roland Powell, who grew up in Jacksonville and attended First Coast High School — sat down with the “Breakfast Club,”...

Chelsea Manning, a transgender activist and former Army intelligence analyst who was imprisoned for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. documents, showed up to the White House on Thursday morning to protest President Donald Trump’s decision to ban transgender people from serving in the military. Trump announced his decision to ban transgender service members on Wednesday via Twitter, spurring Manning to appear at the White House the following day to protest the policy change, the Washington Examiner reported. Manning, a transgender woman who was formerly known as Bradley, posted a photo to Instagram in which she referred to the...

The breakdown of American social norms is advancing at a lightning pace. Just five years ago if you were told a woman doesn’t necessarily have a vagina, and may instead have a penis, you might have called that insanity. Today, you’re a hateful bigot if you don’t subscribe to this kind of thinking. Not only are adults being told this, but children are also being taught this in schools. Parents are receiving guidance from Planned Parenthood and other liberal bastions on how to talk to preschoolers about transgenderism and masturbation. Yes, you read that right: preschoolers. The Daily Wire reported...

A former secretary of Defense on Friday blasted President Trump for his ban on transgender Americans serving in the armed forces and said that he would have threatened to resign over the order. Former President Clinton Secretary of Defense William Cohen, who previously served as a Republican House lawmaker from Maine, told Sirius XM's "The Joe Madison Show" that Trump abused his power as president when he went around his Defense secretary, James Mattis. "If you were the secretary of Defense and that tweet came out, what would you have done the next morning — or the next day?" host...

That will just make it easier for Trump to win re-election. The other day, Bill Kristol, sounding like a spokesman for the ACLU, decried the theism of Donald Trump. “In America the president doesn’t tell us who or what or whether to worship,” he harrumphed on Twitter after Trump merely said that Americans worship God above government. To these Americans, the Dems lift up their middle finger and declare them “intolerant.” This gives Trump an enormous political advantage. With very little effort, he can pick off uneasy religious voters in the center while pulling down almost all of them on...

With three tweets, the leader of the largest employer in the country just tried to lay off all trans people in the military. Many service members who were just told “we want you” are suddenly being told “go away.” The sudden reversal by the administration, from allowing trans people to serve openly in the military to outright banning us, is a devastating blow to our livelihoods, our basic humanity, our survival. It is also a devastating blow to the entire credibility of the United States military for years to come. This is all painfully familiar. Once upon a time, I...