Please excuse our collective breakdown
Someone needs to issue a formal apology to the world. If it wasn’t official before, it is official now.
Allowing a minor to use nonstandard pronouns is now a “medical treatment.” No, really. Person, am I out of touch (Tallahassee Democrat):
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier and Republican leaders in 19 other states are urging a federal appeals court to reconsider a decision that backed the Leon County school system in a dispute about a student wanting to express a gender identity and use pronouns the child’s parents didn’t support.
Lawyers in Uthmeier’s office and Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen’s office last week filed a friend-of-the court brief calling for the full 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to hear arguments in the case. A three-judge panel of the appeals court in March ruled against the parents, January and Jeffrey Littlejohn, in the lawsuit against the Leon County School Board, Superintendent Rocky Hanna and other school officials.
The child, then 13, female at birth, asked to go by a male name and they and them pronouns. The parents allowed that “J” could go by that nickname at school but disapproved of the pronouns.
The child told a school counselor about wanting to use the name J and the they and them pronouns, the ruling said. Under a school system policy guide at the time, the parents were not informed of the social transition at school. That ultimately led to the lawsuit.
“Social transition” is a thing? Apparently.
The parents’ attorneys filed a brief in the appeal. Here’s the crux:
“Put simply, parents have a fundamental right to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children, including controversial decisions like whether to allow their children to socially transition,” the brief said. “Purposefully withholding from a parent critical information about supposed medical treatment that a school is providing a student not only violates that right, but does so to a disturbing and constitutionally intolerable degree.”
So allowing a kid to use alternate pronouns and a school agreeing is now a “medical treatment” on par with transition surgery? Is this where the RW talking point about kids going to school and coming home a different gender originates? It makes me nostalgic for the moral panics of my youth. Ah, the days of razor blades in Halloween apples, fingerprinting kids at the mall over “stranger danger,” lurid tales of alleged ritual Satanic abuse at daycare centers, and “super-predators.”
‘Has the world gone mad? It has’: foreign reporters share a view of Trump from abroad
The United States of America is engaged in Mind Boggling Cruelty under Trump 2.0. Sending immigrants to a gulag in El Salvador wasn’t enough. Now it’s Libya. I’m amazed we’re not sending them to Syria to be tortured. The Bushies did that. But give Trump and Trump’s Himmler (Stephen Miller) time.
Now we’re handing out quack medicines and deep down a rabbit warren of of conspiracy theories.
Five o’clock can’t get here soon enough.
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