LGBTQIA+

There's video of Roberts saying all this, if anybody needs an emetic:

"But where there continues to be disagreement is on what you do with adults. At Heritage, we believe that so-called transgender surgery is bad for anybody because of what you saw in Rhode Island yesterday," said Roberts, referencing a domestic violence shooting at a Rhode Island ice rink the day before. "There does seem to be a mounting body of evidence that suggests a correlation between that surgery at any age, mental health issues, and increasingly, although we're running the numbers on this at Heritage, acts of violence. We have to come to grips with that as a society, in a way that transcends left versus right, because this really is about the human condition." "How do you address this, though?" replied host Patrick Bet-David. "You outlaw it," Roberts responded.

Then, when asked if transgender adults should have their medication taken away, Roberts endorsed the idea, stating, "We like that idea, too. One of the reasons is that we not only work in coalitions, but we often work toward an ultimate goal via incremental steps—sometimes people will call us radical incrementalists. We're willing to take a quarter of the enchilada if we can keep working there. So if that's the kind of thing that policymakers can agree on left and right, Heritage would be fully supportive of that, knowing that ultimately we have an ideal position that would be much stronger than that."

[…]

One thing is clear: gender-affirming care bans have never been about science, despite attempts by far-right organizations to launder their lobbying efforts through pseudoscientific hate groups and overseas "reviews." Rather, it’s always been about hate. That much is made clear by the openly-stated agenda of a billionaire-funded political machine that has always been working towards one goal: the elimination of transgender people from public life. The only thing that has changed is that they are now saying it out loud.

Remember when Roberts voiced support for self-avowed Nazi Nick Fuentes and the respectable mainstream media cried with one voice "He's gone too far! This is the beginning of the end of the MAGA coalition!"?

Nope. They're only getting louder and more brazen.

The real gender ideologues at work:

Aiv Puglielli, the Greens’ equality spokesperson, on Wednesday moved a motion calling on the upper house’s legal and social issues committee to investigate the scale of such crimes, as well as the state’s current response and support available to victims.

It follows what Puglielli described as a “disturbing” and “terrifying” series of attacks targeting gay and bisexual men across several states and territories since 2024. In some instances, videos of the attacks have been recorded and posted on social media.

As of October 2024, 35 people had been arrested in relation to such incidents, Victoria police confirmed in a statement to Guardian Australia.

Police said the alleged offenders – most aged between 13 and 20 – had used fake profiles on dating apps to lure their victims.

“The victims are then allegedly assaulted, robbed, threatened and subjected to homophobic comments,” a police spokesperson said.

[…]

During the June 2025 sentencing of a 19-year-old Victorian man who met and assaulted two people after speaking to them on the gay dating app Grindr, the court heard he admitted to police he had been inspired by vigilante-style videos he had seen on TikTok.

Puglielli said the inquiry would examine how influencers sharing far-right, misogynistic and homophobic “alpha male” content operate online, and how to protect young people from their messaging.

He alleged some perpetrators, often very young men, had been “groomed and radicalised by far-right manosphere influencers”.

Dannie Dai, lead author of the report, said the hope is that the study "will help policymakers understand how gender-affirming surgery is being used by both cisgender and TGD people," as "health policy should be driven by facts" rather than partisan or religious views on sex and gender.

“Our findings highlight a bitter irony: that by banning gender-affirming care for only TGD people, these bills are targeting a group that in reality accounts for the minority of gender-affirming care use and for whom gender-affirming care has been most clearly shown to be lifesaving," Dai said. 

This is an interesting overview, though obviously quite dated:

The fetal brain develops during the intrauterine period in the male direction through a direct action of testosterone on the developing nerve cells, or in the female direction through the absence of this hormone surge. In this way, our gender identity (the conviction of belonging to the male or female gender) and sexual orientation are programmed or organized into our brain structures when we are still in the womb. However, since sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place in the first two months of pregnancy and sexual differentiation of the brain starts in the second half of pregnancy, these two processes can be influenced independently, which may result in extreme cases in trans-sexuality. This also means that in the event of ambiguous sex at birth, the degree of masculinization of the genitals may not reflect the degree of masculinization of the brain. There is no indication that social environment after birth has an effect on gender identity or sexual orientation. 

This is so, so important to read in full. For me to be told that a critically important part of my identity is reducible to my sexuality — an embarrassingly marginal part of my life — is not merely insulting but ridiculous. To tell children that not merely what they have, but what they are, is a fetish and that therefore they are for all practical purposes not allowed to even discuss it until they turn eighteen is murderous cruelty. Post-egg-crack, I don't know what I would have done if I'd not been able to establish friendships online with other trans women my age who had similar life trajectories.

Queer identity is one of being born into a secret society that you as a member have to discover as rite of induction. If you fail, misery tends to visit you again and again, without having a good explanation for it, dissatisfaction, and shame from an unknown source.

In this light, the push to #AgeVerification for social media and internet access is especially awful. With "queer" being equated to sex stuff exclusively, queerness is effectively banned in the era of life where teens are supposed to discover love, and have first, clumsy experiences. But while the cishets generally experience queerness from porn and get their fingers sticky to what they view as fetish, it is so much more. Especially for trans kids, research on who and what they are is postponed to a time when devastating damage is already taking place, and a lot of it in fact irreversible, or a huge effort and cost to correct.

In my defence, everybody needs a hobby.

On December 18th, during a Health and Human Services press conference that saw RFK Jr. announce new federal rules that, if implemented, will almost entirely ban gender-affirming care for minors nationwide, Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services and acting CDC Director Jim O’Neill said the following:

“Men are men. Men can never become women. Women are women. Women can never become men. [pauses for applause from other Trump officials] Children are innocent and they need our protection. [pauses for more applause] It takes organized efforts to deny these fundamental truths. Sadly, we’ve seen such efforts succeed from time to time.

The denial of fundamental truths can destroy nations from within. At the root of the evils we face, such as the blurring of the lines between sexes and radical social agendas, is a hatred for nature as God designed it and for life as it was meant to be lived. This ideology does not just deny biology; it declares war against it.”

[…]

And it wasn’t just O’Neill either. The next day, conservative political commentator Benny Johnson, in a speech at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix, escalated even further while speaking about Charlie Kirk’s death:

“The person who pulled the trigger is part of the demonic transgender ideology that warps the minds of our young children, that poisons them, that is antithetical to creation itself. God called on us: I maketh you, man and woman. God doesn’t make mistakes. Transgenderism is a lie from the pit of hell and I’m sick of seeing transgender violence and murderers in my country!”

A good account of events around Robin Ince's resignation, and an answer to the obvious question that had been bugging me:

This won't convince everyone, but it is very good:

To the transphobes, “what is a woman?” is never treated as a serious question. It is only a rhetorical device meant to “own the libs” or whatever. This is a shame, because it’s an excellent question. As a trans woman myself, I love this question because if treated seriously, it yields some surprising and uplifting insights into the nature of identity itself.

So that’s what we’re going to do today: take it seriously. And for the sake of clarity, the rest of this article will refer to “what is a woman?” as The Question.

If you took any philosophy classes in college, you may recognize The Question as fundamentally an ontological one. It is a question about categories, which are sufficiently interesting that an entire branch of philosophy dedicates itself to examining them and how they work.

[…]

The broad strokes of ontology are about how categories are defined and how you determine which things in the world do or don’t belong to a given category. In that sense, The Question is clearly ontological because it implicitly posits that a category called “women” exists, and then asks for a definition of that category.

Why? Because we would presumably like to have a rigorous way of knowing which people belong to that category and which do not. That is, we would like to be able to use that definition in a social context to do useful things like decide who gets to marry whom, who gets to use which bathroom, and who might get sent off to fight in foreign wars.

Keen readers will observe that there is a circularity problem here: to define a category, we must examine members of that category to see what traits they have. But without an a-priori definition of the category, how do we know that the things we’re examining actually belong to the category? Ontologists take a variety of approaches to this circularity problem. The ones that are most relevant for our purposes are prototype theory and iterative refinement.

Prototype theory takes the existence of the category itself for granted and builds a definition of the category around uncontroversial examples. If examining the category of “birds”, the prototype theorist more or less says, “look, we’re not sure about penguins, but we all agree that crows and robins and sparrows are birds, so let’s just start there, ok?”

Iterative refinement takes a prospective category definition and refines it by examining additional candidate members of the category, to see whether they should be rejected from the category or whether the category definition itself should be refined to properly recognize them. The iterative refiner says “Ok, so penguins don’t fly, but they do lay eggs. Should we refine the category definition to exclude flying as a necessary attribute, or should we reject penguins from the category of birds?” And they probably decide to exclude flying from the definition, because a broken-winged sparrow is still a bird.

Joyless monomaniacs, the lot of them. This one is quite a specimen:

As Utah lawmakers return to Capitol Hill for their 2026 session next week, LGBTQ+ advocates are on guard for what will be the fifth year in a row with multiple bills targeting transgender people.

But one bill in particular — HB183 — stands out as especially bad, said Marina Lowe, policy director for Utah’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy group, Equality Utah.

“That is by far the most harmful and outrageous piece of legislation I have seen in a long time,” Lowe told Utah News Dispatch in an interview this week.

The bill — sponsored by one of Utah’s most hard-right Republicans, Rep. Trevor Lee, of Layton — is far reaching and would have broad impacts in a variety of areas of state code.

[…]

The bill would effectively “erase transgender people from existence under state law,” she said — except in one provision, which “allows you to disparage transgender people on license plates.”

Lee told Utah News Dispatch in an interview this week that his bill is aimed at “getting away from this idea that there are like 100 different genders out there.”

“There is no such thing as gender, it’s a made up word and term. It’s actually just two sexes. There’s male and female,” he said. “We need to get back to that basic biology.”

He said he also wants “no more changing birth certificates” because “that’s stupid and it makes it very confusing for people, as we get older, especially our children.”

Lowe said it’s one of the most egregious legislative attacks on transgender people she’s ever seen crop up on Utah’s Capitol Hill because it would basically undo years of progress to create equal protections for a class of people that do exist — whether Lee likes it or not.

[…]

Lee refused to acknowledge that his bill would allow discrimination against transgender people in housing and employment, instead insisting that they don’t exist.

“You’ve got to pick one. You’re not both. See, this is part of getting away from this complete, alternate universe that people have been living in for a long time,” he said. “There’s male and female. There’s nothing in between. It doesn’t happen.” 

A new Justice Department memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi instructs the FBI to create a “cash reward system” to incentivize providing information against domestic terrorists. However, it also makes it clear that the targets of such domestic terrorist investigations will be “Antifa-aligned extremists,” including those promoting “radical gender ideology.”

“The FBI shall establish a cash reward system for information that leads to the successful identification and arrest of individuals in the leadership of domestic terrorist organizations,” the memo reads. The memo, dated December 5, was leaked.

Bondi’s memo cites multiple laws that might be used to target domestic terrorism, but also lays out a clear vision for the priorities of the FBI in targeting suspected terrorists. Primary examples given are not the mass shootings and white supremacist actions that have plagued the nation; rather, the document names the “doxing of law enforcement” or the “violent efforts to shut down immigration enforcement.”

While it raises the specter of extreme viewpoints, they are not the ones that previous studies have linked most domestic terrorism to. Bondi’s memo suggests that the perpetrators are “certain Antifa-aligned extremists” and that their “animating principle is adherence to the types of extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment.”