No more boys or girls? America’s oldest medical journal says birth cert sex designations ‘harmful for trans’ and must be abolished
17 Dec 2020 20:24
© REUTERS/Brendan McDermid (file photo)
An article published in the New England Journal of Medicine argues that having birth certificates display gender could harm “intersex and transgender people,” leading to concerns that the NEJM could have been pranked or hacked.
“Sex designations on birth certificates offer no clinical utility, and they can be harmful for intersex and transgender people,” says the abstract of the article, authored by doctors Vadim M. Shteyler and Eli Y. Adashi, and lawyer Jessica A. Clarke, and tweeted out by NEJM on Thursday.
“Moving such designations below the line of demarcation would not compromise the birth certificate’s public health function but could avoid harm,” the trio argue in the article, titled ‘Failed Assignments’ and published on December 12.
Shteyler and Adashi are affiliated with Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, while Clarke lists as her affiliation the Vanderbilt University Law School in Nashville, Tennessee.
Dating back to 1812 and operating under its current name since 1928, the NEJM is the oldest continuously published medical journal in the world, and is considered one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed publications in the US.
That hasn’t prevented it from wading deep into controversial political waters, however. In October, the journal issued a veiled political endorsement of the Democrats in the upcoming US election, echoing Joe Biden’s talking points about the Covid-19 pandemic without naming any names.
At the end of September, the NEJM published a study advocating for mandatory vaccinations against Covid-19 under penalty of job loss or home confinement, but stopping short of criminal charges as they would “disadvantage the poor” and minorities.
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Father who raped own child will receive tax-payer funding for gender transition and move to women's prison
Campbell has received taxpayer-funded hormone treatments and counseling since being incarcerated. In 2013, six years into the prison term, Campbell requested gender confirmation surgery.
Chad Felix Greene
December 20, 2020 7:21 AM
In 2007 Mark Allen Campbell, who now prefers to go by Nicole Rose Campbell, of Waupun, Wisconsin was arrested for sexually assaulting and abusing his 10-year-old daughter and was sentenced to 34 years in prison. In December 2020 a federal judge declared that Campbell at age 49, now identifying as a transgender woman, has a Constitutional right to gender affirmation surgery, paid by the taxpayers.
Racine Correctional Institute, a men's prison, where Campbell has been housed has allowed Campbell to dress in women's clothing and wear make-up. Campbell has received taxpayer-funded hormone treatments and counseling since being incarcerated. In 2013, six years into the prison term, Campbell requested gender confirmation surgery.
At the time, Campbell's request was denied. In 2016, Campbell filed a lawsuit claiming that Campbell's Eighth Amendment rights had been violated as Department of Corrections officials were "indifferent" to Campbell's "medical needs." The suit claims that Campbell was forced to suffer under the cruel and unusual punishment of not allowing Campbell to undergo drastic body modification surgery that would destroy Campbell's reproductive system and sexual health.
Since the DOC had provided Campbell with hormone therapy, Judge Diane Sykes argued there was no way for them to anticipate the medical care being insufficient in resolving the inmate's distress, certainly not to the degree of violating Campbell's Constitutional rights.
The dissenting judge, Diane Wood insisted that the DOC was deliberately indifferent to Campbell's condition which could lead to self-castration, if in Campbell's dismay at not having surgery provided Campbell would undertake to remove her penis with her own hand. Campbell's lawyer agreed, stating that while the DOC medical director was respectful towards Campbell in allowing her to live as a woman, they refused to change their policy to accommodate her request.
Further complications surrounded the fact Campbell was housed in a men's prison and the national standard of care for a candidate of gender confirmation surgery is to live a year as the opposite sex with "real-life experience." This was determined to be impossible in a men's prison.
There is much more to this abysmal story at The Post Millenium. I can't bring myself to read the rest of it.
Bihar Police consider raising transgender battalion
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Their total population in the state exceeds 40,000
Published: December 26, 2020 15:22
Lata Rani, Correspondent, Gulf News
Bihar could soon become the first state in the country to have a separate police battalion of transgenders.
Photo for illustrative purposes.
Patna: The state government in Bihar is working on a plan to raise a separate police battalion of transgender people. The move vould provide employment to hundreds of loitering eunuchs on the streets who survive on seeking alms from people. The total population of transgenders in the state is 40,827.
Top state government officials confirmed they are working on the plan and something concrete will come out soon. “The state government is looking into the matter of raising a dedicated battalion of transgender in the Bihar police,” state’s additional chief secretary (Home) Amir Subhani told the media on Saturday.
Subhani, a 1987 batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) topper from Bihar, refused to share more details about the plan but added the matter was under consideration of the state government.
The development comes after a woman activist Veera Yadav filed a petition in the Patna High Court demanding that the transgender community people be allowed to take part in recruitment process against 8,000 vacancies of constables in state police department. Acting on the petition, the court has directed the authorities to look into the matter.
This is the second time in quick succession that the state government felt the need for raising a battalion on the transgender people. Earlier, the state authorities had planned to employ eunuchs as security guards in remand homes or short stay homes to put a check on the sexual exploitation of girls lodged there.
The authorities planned to take their services after the rapes of some girls in at least two such short stay homes for females rocked the state in 2018. Indian rulers once castrated boys to create eunuchs to work in their harems but eunuchs today are generally males with partial genitals or who opt for castration because of strong female feelings.
Sex organs
Also known as ‘Hijaras’, eunuchs are widely feared for their nuisance values as none likes to interact with them. The authorities believed the employment of these eunuchs who survive on seeking alms from the villagers at the beating of claps could not only guarantee a foolproof security to the girl inmates lodged in short stay homes but also lessen the chances of their sexual exploitation since they have no sex organs.
Authorities went with the unusual idea alarmed at the recent incidents of rapes of girls at two short homes which earned a very bad name for the state. In one incident, a security guard was arrested by the police after he was found involved in rape of a girl at a short stay home in Chapra town.
Another incident was reported from Muzaffarpur town where as many as 34 girl inmates lodged in a shelter home were found to be in poor mental condition owing to alleged repeated sexual exploitation. The main accused in the case Brajesh Thakur who was alleged to have several connections in the political circles has been sentenced to life imprisonment by the court for sexually and physically assaulting several girls at the short stay home.
My two daddies: Row rages in Latvia over LGBT-friendly children’s books as critics blast initiative ‘imposed by EU elites’
27 Dec 2020 17:43
For modern liberals, they are an important step in normalizing different kinds of families. But for others, children’s books depicting gay parents are an attack on traditional values. That’s the debate now playing out in Latvia.
On Saturday, local media in the Baltic state reported that a complaint had been formally lodged with authorities over a new illustrated volume entitled ‘Time To Go To Sleep.’ After buying the children’s book, one woman said she was “unpleasantly surprised” to find “a story about a girl with two dads. I think it’s absurd to sell something like that.”
Sandris Tocs, a Latvian publicist, took to social media to ask how “we can want to be part of the EU, and turn a blind eye to this?” He suggested that recent drives for greater LGBT+ rights came from the bloc’s “elite,” and that it was unwanted by “most people.”
Not everyone in Latvia echoes those sentiments, however, with press there quoting one online commenter as saying, “oh, no! The child will find out that there are different types of families in the world! And that it is normal to love anyone, regardless of their gender. What can we do now?”
Latvia currently has among the most limited provisions for LGBT+ people in the EU, and marriage is not legal for same-sex couples. Adoption is also limited to couples in a heterosexual union and to single people. As a result, the circumstances in ‘Time To Go To Sleep’ are not possible under current Latvian law.
Similar debates have played out in neighboring Baltic nations, where there is often a clash of values between older citizens and younger people with stronger cultural ties to Western and Northern Europe. In 2014, Estonia became the first former Soviet Republic to legalize gay marriage, after a tight parliamentary vote that passed by only two votes. Likette Kampus, an LGBT+ rights activist said at the time that “mentally, we want to belong in Scandinavia and share those same liberal values.”
However, there was a much broader split across Estonian society, with a poll by public broadcaster ERR finding that 58 per cent of the population was against the bill. Older respondents and the Russian-speaking community, which accounts for about a quarter of the country, were far more likely to be critical.
Conservative groups, which are often seen to be in favor of closer ties with Moscow, staged demonstrations in the streets against the decision, which was not underpinned by a public vote. Varro Vooglaid of the Foundation for the Protection of Family and Tradition insisted that his group was independent from Russia, but that it sought to emulate its stance on the issue. “I’m not in favor of criminalizing private life,” he said, “but on the other hand… not allowing the homosexual lobby to propagandize in society, especially among children – yes, I do agree.”
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