Transgender righteousness becoming very oppressive

The rise of the gender affirmation industry and its relationship with children is one of the most important stories of our time.

Under the guise of science, we are being told that toddlers can know with certainty that they have been ‘born in the wrong bodies’.

Under the guise of healthcare, we are being told that it is harmful and cruel to do anything other than affirm a child’s belief that they are a different gender.

Under the guise of medicine, we are being told that it is perfectly fine to treat children with drugs that stunt their natural development.

And if you dare criticise any of this, you run the career-ending risk of being labelled transphobic and turned into a social pariah.

In reality, this remains an open social and medical debate that is being pursued across the West where gender affirmation enjoys far less community support than advertised.

Not in Victoria, however, where the Victorian Education Department’s LGBTQ Support Policy, available on its website, encourages teachers to assist minors to transition genders without parental approval, or even their knowledge.

There may be circumstances in which students wish or need to undertake gender transition without the consent of their parent/s (or carer/s), and/or without consulting medical practitioners.

If no agreement can be reached between the student and the parent/s regarding the student’s gender identity, or if the parent/s will not consent to the contents of a student support plan, it will be necessary for the school to consider whether the student is a mature minor.

If a student is considered a mature minor they can make decisions for themselves without parental consent and should be affirmed in their gender identity at school without a family representative/carer participating in formulating the school management plan.

There is to be no debate after the Victorian government made it a criminal offence – on threat of fines and/or jail time – to attempt to counsel a child out of transitioning genders.

Other Australian states are considering similar legislation.

This runs contrary to decades of accepted best-practice which treated gender dysphoria primarily with therapy, as most children grow out of these feelings.

The previous federal Liberal government watched as bureaucrats edited gendered language within Australian health services against the wishes of the general public. Even medicare forms referred to ‘birthing parents’ until outcry led the incoming Labor government to correct it.

It is very much a one-sided conversation in which the media runs a steady stream of pro-transgender stories, while typically ignoring any negative news, such as the tragic stories of de-transitioners seeking to sue for their lifelong injuries.

There was a good deal of media silence when the UK’s main gender clinic, Tavistock, was closed down with 1,000 families threatening to sue the NHS for harm done to their children.

Meanwhile, you are more likely to find trans puff pieces about teenage girls having double mastectomies.

It is the end result of a cultural shift that has seen the entertainment industry increase LGBTQ+ representation targeted at young audiences – from Buzz Lightyear’s gay kiss to a transgendered character in The Umbrella Academy.

Schools and local councils, particularly in America, continue to integrate Drag Queens into the lives of toddlers despite public backlash against what are traditionally adult performers in sexualised attire.

A doctor friend of mine who dared to suggest, in a very well-written and calm email, that his local council should not be promoting a sexualised all-ages drag show, received a curt response from his local member suggesting he was an ‘overly zealous’ religious ‘bigot’ whose ‘wrongheaded’ ideas were ‘harmful to society’.

Whack!

Consider the dilemma Victorian parents face. If you complain that your children ought not be exposed to gender ideology, you will be labelled a bigot.

So you keep quiet.

If your child – having been exposed to gender ideology at school or at a community event – ends up momentarily confused during a time when kids are confused about lots of things related to their changing bodies, you will be criminalised if you fail to agree with them.

So you keep quiet.

Children are effectively at the mercy of schoolteachers, health professionals, and the state – instead of their parents. Many agree that this is fundamentally wrong.

It is also logically bizarre. Your child, who is not able to take a Panadol at school without parental permission, is assumed capable of making life-changing decisions that often result in permanent medical intervention and sterilisation.

Over the weekend, Libs of TikTok, a conservative social media account that highlights Woke progressive videos, released recordings of a conversation with staff at the Children’s National Hospital in Washington DC.

Libs of TikTok contacted the hospital as a parent asking if they would perform a ‘gender-affirming hysterectomy’ on a 16-year-old.

Both the hospital operator, who took the initial call, and a hospital staff member to whom the caller was subsequently transferred, confirmed that performing such an operation would not be a problem. Hospital staff said that such operations had been performed on children younger than 16.

On the recording you can hear the hospital operator ask:

‘How old is your patient?’

‘Sixteen,’ the caller says.

‘Okay,’ the operator replies. ‘Alright. So they’re in the clear.’

After confirming with a second person over the phone that a 16-year-old would be eligible for a gender-affirming hysterectomy, the caller asks whether it is a common procedure for that age.

‘Yes, we have all different type of age groups that comes in for that,’ the hospital worker responds.

‘For the hysterectomy?’ the caller asks.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ the employee says, adding later that she has ‘seen younger kids, younger than your child’s age’ undergo the surgery.

The recording went viral, and the outrage was palpable.

And the next day the story was picked up by the Washington Post under the title: Children’s hospital threatened after Libs of TikTok recording on trans hysterectomies.

It continued:

‘Children’s National Hospital has been inundated with threatening emails and phone calls after an influential right-wing Twitter account published a recording that falsely suggested the hospital is performing hysterectomies on transgender children, a hospital spokeswoman said. The torrent of harassment was accompanied by social media posts suggesting that Children’s be bombed and its doctors placed in a woodchipper.’

So the story was not that two hospital staff wrongly told a prospective patient that gender-affirming hysterectomies could be performed on a teenager. The story was that hospital staff had been threatened. Of course, the threatening behaviour is unacceptable, but that does not mean the core of the story should be overlooked either.

The people behind the recording were demonised as ‘right wing’. Later in the story they are called ‘activists’.

The Children’s National Hospital has since corrected the record and confirmed that, despite what its staff said, the surgery is not offered for anyone under 18.

This doesn’t change the scorn with which readers are treated if they raised their eyebrows at gender-affirming surgery on children – even if it is only in speculation.

In this case, the whistle-blowers were slurred as hateful rather than the hospital criticised for managing to make such a strange error about a serious procedure.

It was an error made by the hospital staff, not the reporter – and why did the staff make this error? Why did they hold the belief that surgery was available for young children? And why was their (now corrected) website in error stating that gender-affirming hysterectomies were available to patients ‘between the ages of 0-21’?

They are not the only American hospital to make this mistake, with a hospital in Boston also exposed by the Libs of TikTok. They also had to correct the record.

These are mistakes, but again, why are these patterns of mistakes being made in the field of gender affirmation and young children?

Society is still having a conversation about whether ‘medical care’, as classed by these hospitals, includes giving healthy young girls (at 18) hysterectomies.

I always thought The Washington Post’s adverting slogan – ‘Democracy dies in darkness’ – was meant to imply that the Post existed to shine a light into dark places.

There is a new darkness in our society, and that is the silencing of criticism when it comes to the future health of our children.

Australia doesn’t have a voice in this debate – that has been silenced by the legislation of our premiers – so we must wait to see if legal action in other countries is able to give those harmed by gender affirmation a voice.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/08/affirmation/

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Questions for the cult of climate hypocrisy

Ron Pike

In my recent article When truth is flummoxed by sophistry, hopefully I rationally and successfully established that not only is Climate Change a fraud, but that present government policy to fight Climate Change has failed.

As I highlight in that article, there is no dispute that CO2 concentrations have risen from around 280 parts per million to a present concentration of around four hundred parts per million in the last thirty years or so.

There is equally no dispute that this increase in CO2 has been advantageous, not prejudicial, to life on earth.

It is widely agreed that our planet is ‘greener’ and more productive than previously. Not only that, dreaded apocalyptic heating has not occurred despite these increases in CO2 concentrations.

So why, dear leaders, are you pursuing policy that cannot make any difference to a hyped problem that does not exist?

Why are you touting the obvious nonsense that ‘renewable energy’ sources can supply our power needs, and then extending the lie by claiming that this so-called ‘renewable power’ will be cheaper than our previous power sources? Do you expect those of us who are impacted by your productivity-killing efforts to applaud this policy madness?

Why are our leaders (in name only) insisting that the main source of their ‘renewable power’ should be the sun when it falls dark for around thirteen hours per day?

Where, dear leaders, do we get our power from when the sun does not shine? Could it be from our old coal-fired power stations? If so, how do you justify using solar at all? Why not just let the coal-fired power stations do what they have done so effectively for over one hundred and twenty years and produce cheap power twenty-four hours per day?

In summary, if the production of CO2 from burning fossil fuels is doing no harm to our planet, and given that most other countries are presently increasing CO2 emissions by building new coal-fired power plants (many using Australian coal), why are we destroying our previous advantage of abundant and cheap power? Why are you making it difficult for our businesses to compete with other nations who are using cheap power and gas, often supplied from Australia.

Surly, dear leaders, this is hypocrisy writ large… You are destroying Australian jobs, not creating them.

It is time for our leaders to answer these questions.

Why did we vote for you in the first place?

Why are you not acting in the interests of the Australian people?

Why can’t you accept truth and act accordingly?

Why should the people accept anything you have to say on this subject?

Why can’t you acknowledge that ‘privatisation’ of power production and distribution was not in the interests of the Australian people? It only benefited the numerous monopolies created; all now gouging Australian consumers.

Why indeed… Because every day you perpetrate more questions, but answers are nowhere to be found.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/questions-for-the-cult-of-climate-hypocrisy/

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EV chargers to be deployed on power poles

Not exactly a great leap forward. Note that it takes a whole hour to get enough charge to drive 50km

A local tech company has won a grant to deploy 50 electric vehicle chargers on streetside power poles, overcoming one of the key obstacles to widespread EV adoption.

The scheme is similar to others that have been rolled out across Europe, the United States and Canada in the past three years. London has more than 1000 public lamp post chargers, ranging in capacity from 3kW to 50kW.

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) – set up to fund investment in EV infrastructure – has awarded Intellihub $871,000 to install the 7.4kW chargers, which can add roughly 50km of charge every hour.

The company will install EV chargers on power poles across nine local government areas in New South Wales, connected directly to the overhead electricity supply.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/motoring/motoring-news/ev-chargers-to-be-deployed-on-power-poles/news-story/082af9e3ad7a88797a094a99f44652a4

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AEMO warns of power 'gaps' in Australia's biggest grid within three years as coal exodus gathers pace

With a brainless claim that more "renewables" could fill the gap. How?

Electricity supplies are forecast to fall short of demand within three years across Australia's eastern grid, unless new renewable energy and transmission capacity is urgently brought online, according to an official report.

In its latest 10-year outlook for the national electricity market, to be released today, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) warns of reliability "gaps" affecting New South Wales from 2025 and Victoria, Queensland and South Australia by the end of the decade.

The warning from the government agency follows a period of turmoil in the market, which has been buffeted by soaring coal and gas prices fuelled by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and higher-than-usual demand.

Central to the upheaval has also been a spate of coal-fired plant outages, which at one stage in June affected a quarter of the fleet in the eastern states.

AEMO said those supply pressures were likely to get worse in the coming years as five coal plants closed, taking with them 14 per cent of the National Energy Market's total capacity.

Further complicating matters is an expected surge in demand amid efforts to electrify big chunks of the economy, such as the transport industry.

Race on for new capacity

AEMO chief executive Daniel Westerman said that unless replacement capacity could be built in time, demand was forecast to periodically outstrip supply by 2025.

First hit would be NSW, where major energy retailer Origin has announced plans to close Australia's single biggest power station, Eraring, in the same year.

But Mr Westerman noted the shortfalls were forecast to spread to Victoria from 2028, Queensland from 2029 and South Australia by the beginning of next decade.

"The report reiterates the urgency of progressing generation, storage and transmission developments to maintain a secure, reliable and affordable supply of electricity to homes and businesses," Mr Westerman said.

"Forecast reliability gaps have emerged across NEM regions due to considerable coal and gas plant closures, along with insufficient new generation capacity commitments needed to offset higher electricity use.

"Without further investments, this will reduce generation supply and challenge the transmission network's capability to meet reliability standards and power system security needs."

To help plug the gap left by exiting coal and gas-fired generation, AEMO has called for governments and industry to urgently get on with building new renewable energy projects.

The agency said the projects, with a combined capacity of 3.4 gigawatts, or enough to power more than two million homes, would be crucial to keeping the lights on.

'Paying through the nose'

What's more, AEMO said there were five high-voltage transmission lines that needed to "progress as quickly as possible" to ensure the new green power could be delivered to where it was needed.

The Australian Industry Group, which represents major manufacturers, said the report was aimed at holding "ministers' and industry's feet to the fire".

Tennant Reed, the group's climate and energy director, acknowledged AEMO tended to err on the side of caution given its responsibility for maintaining the security of the grid.

Mr Reed said the report did not take into account some projects that were likely to be up and running within its timeframe.

But he said the size and the urgency of the task to replace retiring coal capacity was undeniable. "We've got a lot of work to do to meet the existing timeframes," Mr Reed said.

"Ideally, we would be accelerating a lot of those timeframes because we are going to be paying through the nose for electricity and gas over the next few years because of the price of coal and natural gas in international markets.

"The faster we can make the transition to clean energy happen, the less of that Ukraine invasion premium we will be paying.

"But we have our work cut out for us just to deliver the existing timeframes, let alone to do the acceleration which would benefit us."

https://www.msn.com/en-au/money/markets/aemo-warns-of-power-gaps-in-australias-biggest-grid-within-three-years-as-coal-exodus-gathers-pace/ar-AA11i98t?fromMaestro=true

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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