How's it going America,
Check out our latest episode of The Pod Millennial! I talk to the formerly incarcerated women's rights activist Amie Ichikawa about what it's like when men do time in women's prisons and college volleyball player Brooke Slusser on the blowback she got when she called out the injustice of having a man on her team. Brand new episodes drop every Tuesday! Listen, rate (5 stars, of course!), and subscribe!
Let's get into it:
California really wants to gender transition children and teens, and they'll go to great lengths to do it. Schools have been instructed to keep students' gender transitions secret from parents. Some schools provide gender transition closets where kids can come to school and get chest binders (for girls) or women's clothes (for boys) so that they can cosplay as the opposite sex at school where their parents can't see.
The state has also put in place a law banning so-called conversion therapy. This kind of practice was typically something where therapists or theologians would try to beat the gay out of a person. Not great. But in recent years, the concept of deleterious conversion therapy has been applied to trans people—only it's all gone sideways. California has banned therapists from telling a man who thinks he's a woman that he's actually a man. To tell a man he's a man, not a woman, is now considered conversion therapy.
State Senator Scott Wiener has banned it, so now, if a man walks into a therapist's office and says, "I'm a woman," the therapist is breaking the law if she says, "no, you're a man." The Supreme Court just struck down a similar law in California so Wiener is doing everything he can to make sure that California's law isn't struck down, too. He spoke in a committee hearing, saying:
"I'm here today to present Senate Bill 934, a bill to provide justice to survivors of conversion therapy by allowing them more ability to seek compensation through malpractice claims. Straight up, conversion therapy is quackery. It is psychological torture. You can't change someone who is LGBTQ into not being LGBTQ... Research shows that conversion therapy does not change a person's sexual orientation or gender identity, but that it is associated with serious harm, including increased likelihood of depression, suicidality, lower educational attainment, and economic insecurity."
Then a young man, Jonni Skinner, just 23-years-old, stood up to speak. And when he did, the minds of many of Wiener's colleagues were opened to the barbarism that has been taking place in their state under the guise of gender ideology. "When I was young, I was a feminine child, and I discovered trans influencers online. They said, 'Change your body and your life gets better, don't and it gets worse.' Or as my doctors told my mom, I would 'commit suicide.' The medical and mental health providers didn't bother to ask why I felt the way I did. They poisoned my body with blockers and hormones, arresting my puberty and messing with my development.
"The result, I am a 23-year-old gay man who has never had an orgasm and may never experience one. Let that sink in, I was rendered an orgasmic because once you say you could be trans. That's a full stop, no exploration as to why is allowed, even if you're a struggling kid.
"The former president of WPATH, Dr Marcy Bowers, the California surgeon who had performed the surgery for Jazz Jennings at 17, admitted on video that puberty blockers followed by cross sex hormones result in no orgasms and stunted genitals. SB, 934 guarantees that more people will end up like me, the walking but wounded.
"I could have been spared all of this if any of my therapists had explored why I felt dysphoric, but they never did. They only led me to hate my body more. The Supreme Court just ruled in a rare bipartisan decision that laws like this are unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. This bill is an attempted workaround that will be used to silence therapists who could have helped me avoid the irreversible harm to my body and the loss of my sexual function, as is the case for many others. So today I ask you to extend some empathy to survivors and vote no on this bill."
It's absolutely brutal. No one should have their sexuality voided by fetishistic ideology. And Skinner is right, Bowers did say that. It was captured on video during a Zoom call.
What followed was truly wild. Wiener's colleagues, older women who probably have no idea what's going on, were gobsmacked by Skinner's testimony. Anna Caballero said she thought she knew what conversion therapy was, but that now she's confused. "I thought I understood what this bill was doing..." Maria Elena Durazo sought to ask Wiener questions. And basically, he lied.
Durazo referenced a constituent's testimony, saying that they "said this bill would have, would require therapy to affirm what somebody comes in with, but that is with the identity they come in saying." Just the way she has trouble phrasing her question shows she has no idea what's going on and that she and Wiener are barely even speaking the same language."
"What the bill does is it applies, if a therapist says, 'you're coming in, you're saying you're gay, I am going to make you straight,' or 'You are telling me you identify as a woman. I am going to convert you to identify as a man.' That's what the bill that's what the bill addresses, the attempted conversion," said Wiener.
But it is not only unlikely but entirely implausible that Durazo understood Wiener to be saying "if a man comes into a therapist's office and says he is a woman, the conversion therapy ban means that the therapist cannot tell the man that he is a man." Wiener conveniently left out the part, in the second half of his answer, that his hypothetical patient IS a man. He is intentionally obfuscatory. This is how stuff like this gets through—the people who should know better than to vote to harm children are fooled by ideologues who will stop at nothing to jam their positions through.
Libby