When You Control the Words People Can Use, You Can Control Their Thoughts

How the AP Style Guide enforces gender ideology (via Breitbart):

ONE: Warns against “all views” in transgender coverage: The guide says to “avoid false balance [by] giving a platform to unqualified claims or sources in the guise of balancing a story by including all views.” “Do not use the term ‘transgenderism,’ which frames transgender identity as an ideology,” the guide demands.
TWO: Demands the use of “gender-affirming care”: The guide says to use the term to describe puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender-reassignment surgeries.
THREE: Opposes describing people by their biological sex: “Use the term sex assigned at birth instead of biological sex, birth gender, was identified at birth as, born a girl and the like,” the style guide states. “Avoid references to a transgender person being born a boy or girl, or phrasing like birth gender. Sex assigned at birth is the accurate terminology.”
“Since not all people fall under one of two categories for sex or gender — as in the cases of nonbinary and intersex people — avoid references to both, either or opposite sexes or genders,” according to the guide.


Relatedly, via Matt Osborne:

To tell a boy that he should put on pants is exactly the same as saying that he ought to un-alive himself: this is what the Trevor Project means by “trans rights.” … According to the Trevor Project, telling a lesbian girl she was born in the right body is “conversion therapy,” a “dangerous and discredited practice,” whereas the surgical mutilation and biochemical harms of gender quacks are life-saving settled science etcetera.


And this:

The Sermon (and who is actually putting ‘gay kids’ at risk)

Ben Appel writes about the Inaugural prayer service sermon that LGBTQ+ activists and progressive media have been celebrating:

By now, you may have heard about the sermon that Bishop of Washington Mariann Edgar Budde delivered during the inaugural prayer service…. Near the end of her sermon, Budde addressed President Trump directly. “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” she said. “There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives.” …
I hadn’t planned to write about this topic until I came across a New York Times headline on Wednesday, which appeared to take a page right out of a Democratic strategist’s playbook. “Bishop Asks Trump to ‘Have Mercy’ on Immigrants and Gay Children,” the headline read. Yes, Budde did mention gay and lesbian kids as well as trans kids. But let’s not pretend that that’s the population the Democrats, the mainstream media, and LGBTQ activist organizations are constantly fretting about “protecting”: gay kids. …
We need to be very clear: President Trump’s executive order on “gender ideology extremism,” just like the Florida legislation before it, is a direct result of the total capture of our institutions by the pseudoscientific religious belief of gender ideology. If blue-haired radicals hadn’t entered schools and told kids that sex is “assigned” rather than simply observed, that the sex they feel like inside supersedes the material reality of their bodies, and that some kids don’t have a sex at all, then these measures wouldn’t even be a figment in the GOP’s imagination. …
For years now, gay people like me have been pleading with Democrats, mainstream news outlets, and activist organizations to consider the implications of affirming feminine boys and masculine girls as “transgender,” when the research (not to mention our own experiences) tells us that nearly all of these gender-dysphoric/gender-nonconforming/whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-them kids, if not socially transitioned, will grow up to be gay and choose not to medically transition. …


And this, a welcomed development:

Boys and Girls

Andrew Doyle writes: >>Of all the absurdities of the culture war, perhaps the most egregious is the normalisation of the…

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Wednesday, January 15, 2025

As the Post-Millennial reports, the bill amends Title IX to read:

It shall be a violation of subsection (a) for a recipient of Federal financial assistance who operates, sponsors, or facilitates an athletic program or activity to permit a person whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls. … [Sex under the amendment] shall be recognized based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth. …
Nothing in this subsection shall be construed to prohibit a recipient from permitting males to train or practice with an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls so long as no female is deprived of a roster spot on a team or sport, opportunity to participate in a practice or competition, scholarship, admission to an educational institution, or any other benefit that accompanies participating in the athletic program or activity.

Democrats No Longer Good for Gays

Ben Appel explains in Why I’m Not Voting why he can’t vote for a political party whose policies put gender-nonconforming gay kids at risk:

The progressive position, embraced by Democrats, used to be that there was no “right way” to be a boy or a girl. That boys can like dolls and girls can play football. Not so today. Today, so-called progressives tell young boys that if they like pink, mermaids, and long, flowing dresses, they might be girls “on the inside,” and they tell young girls that if they prefer short hair and hate makeup, they might really be boys.
What we have known for years, decades, maybe centuries, is that most gender-nonconforming children—that is, butch girls or girly boys, like the sissy little boy I once was—will grow up to be gay. And yet the Democratic Party advocates for medical treatments that block the natural development of these young people. Medical treatments that leave them sterile and often sexually nonfunctional. Medical treatments that began as nothing more than an attempt to turn homosexual young people into straight adults.
Talk about conversion therapy!
This is not progressive. This is regressive, illiberal, and antigay.
And, like Donald Trump’s election denial, it is inexcusable.

Note: When I tried to post this on the IGF CultureWatch Facebook page, Facebook’s censors removed it as “inappropriate.” It’s true, Facebook is censoring posts that its progressive gate-keepers see as critical of Democrats on the eve of the election!

More from Ben, post-election:

Ben Appel’s election reflections, which hopefully Facebook’s moderators won’t remove (as they did my attempts to post…

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Friday, November 8, 2024


And this:

Here's hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court next year will allow U.S. states to do the same.

Posted by IGF CultureWatch on Friday, November 8, 2024