We warned you that Arianna Laureano is unstable. We said he was a chaos agent and a threat to your gender critical organizing. We are now vindicated by the actions of Mr. Laureano, for he has brought disrepute to an important gender critical action with his poor impulse control. He is exactly what we said he is. He proved it himself.

A group of people, mostly women, attended a Portland Thorns FC game on Friday wearing XX-XY Athletics shirts and sat together in a section where another group of team fans regularly wave transgender flags. Some of the women in XX-XY Athletics shirts were allegedly struck with flags and shoved over the stadium seats. Rather than remove the attackers, security removed the women who had been attacked.

Importantly, Providence Park, the home field venue for the Thorns, is a publicly-owned and operated facility that is subject to state and federal laws against viewpoint discrimination. Moreover, the facility has already established a pattern of that very conduct when it removed a group led by Amy Sousa in September. Now the Department of Justice is reportedly looking into the incident as a potential case of viewpoint discrimination.

If only Mr. Laureano had not aggressively moved towards a woman with a flag, making physical contact with her, there would be absolutely no questions about this incident. But he did do that. Today, the apologists for viewpoint discrimination are blasting video of his actions all over social media to shape public perceptions against everyone else who was with him.

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In this video clip of the incident, you can hear Mr. Laureano shout that he is a “castrated gay man”, a point that he inserts into every conversation. He is very upset at being touched by a transgender flag and becomes violent, striking out at strangers. One woman, apparently journalist Brandi Kruse, even tries to hold him back, but Mr. Laureano returns to the confrontation anyway.

Laureano recorded and posted this video moments before in which he is becoming increasingly agitated with someone over their flag touching him. This is exactly the sort of behavior that segregationists used to display during civil rights events. During demonstrations and lunch counter sit-ins, hecklers and counter-protesters frequently tried to harass, insult, and otherwise provoke the participants.

This is exactly why the civil rights movement trained and prepared for actions with a strict, nonviolent discipline. It was a core element of the movement, essential to their effectiveness: Don’t hit back. Sit up straight. Face the lunch counter. If they knock you off the stool, get right back on it.

The late John Lewis recalled one confrontation at a Woolworth’s in Nashville. “They jabbed us as we passed and chided us for not fighting back. ‘What’s the matter? You chicken?’ they teased, trying to force the situation onto terms they were comfortable with — fists and fighting.”

“Hitting someone who does not hit back can last only so long”, Lewis also noted. “Fury spends itself pretty quickly when there’s no fury facing it.” The composure of the civil rights demonstrators always contrasted sharply with their antagonists, creating public sympathy for their cause.

Mr. Laureano has achieved the opposite. He has muddied the waters. Either he has no discipline or training, or else he was only paying half-attention. For when he was removed from the stadium with the rest of the participants in the Portland Thorns action, Laureano laid down at the fire exit, refusing to leave. He says he was afraid that they would be attacked in the street. We rather suspect Mr. Laureano was just trying to make up for his violence by showing us what he thinks nonviolence looks like.

Note that, while Mr. Laureano shouts about himself (“I have a right to exist in public!”), others, including apparently Ms. Kruse, ask why they are the ones being removed, or call out “Save women’s sports!” He is not behaving as a part of this group, but as a self-obsessed individual.

In this clip, which was apparently recorded either moments before or after he lay down, Mr. Laureano is highly excited. He shouts that he is “The wrong kind of gay!” He is still amped up, full of adrenaline from the confrontation. Which is the point, for him, because Arianna Laureano needs drama to feel alive.

In a video that he apparently recorded just before the event, Mr. Laureano explained why he chases thrills. “If I’m not home at my desk and I don’t have a riot or a crisis to manage, or something like that, I’m fucking bored”, he said. “I get bored so fucking easy, and then all interest is gone. It’s just malaise.” We suggest he was speaking the truth, here.

Apparently taken moments before Mr. Laureano lashed out, this video shows what ought to be the only subject of conversation about this incident. Everyone involved in the action appears to be peaceably watching the game while the flag-waving antagonists gather around them, cursing and shouting and crowding them. This is exactly the kind of behavior that lunch counter protesters were trained to ignore in 1960.

Someone also caught this video on Mr. Laureano’s Facebook page. About five days before the Portland Thorns game, he was visualizing himself punching a woman in the head hard enough to “break her fucking skull.” Now, one might argue that he was making a point about the unfairness of pitting women against men in sports, except that he says this sort of thing all the time, and clearly seems to relish the mental image.

As we explained months ago, we consider these messages to be revealing of the true, unstable character of Mr. Laureano. He is discussing his desire to ‘curb stomp’ a Jewish woman and break all of her teeth.

Perhaps the reader will recognize his imaginary scenario from the movie American History X, in which a neo-Nazi played by Edward Norton commits this exact act of violence against a Black man. The similarity might not be a coincidence, for as we noted in March, Mr. Laureano has at least one “National Socialist” alt account on the X app.

We did that reporting to let organizers in the gender critical space know what he is, so they would avoid and exclude him from sensitive activities. We wanted everyone on our side in this issue zone to have fair warning of what Arianna Laureano has done to every ‘community’ he has ever been part of. Perhaps we were too optimistic. We expected that the ‘ultras’ shouting in all caps that radical feminists should have “NO PET TROONS!” would actually live up to their words.

Instead, some of the most unexpected women have adopted Mr. Laureano as a pet transsexual. Organizers have believed his lies and fallen for the soft voice he uses when he is trying to seem innocent. It is strange that a movement which has so much discourse around autogynephilia somehow misses that this man is deep in its throes. Attention women: this man gets off on getting you to include him. It is his thrill.

Sadly, we expect to report more about Arianna Laureano. Not because we want to, but because too many people are too kind to him, too nice, too trusting. He will not stop until he has entirely disrupted gender critical organizing at every level, wherever people fail to see him for what he is.

Finally, the debate over nonviolent tactics in gender critical organizing has to change. If 50 people take part in an action, and just one of them lashes out in anger, that person will always be disproportionately ‘visible’ compared to the other 49. Some people resist a commitment to nonviolence because they fear assault, but this incident highlights exactly why it exists in the first place.

Defending yourself against a brutal assault is one thing. Letting hecklers and counter-protesters goad you into violence is quite another. Every organizer must understand the difference and explain it to everyone they organize.

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“This style choice is not personal, nor is it a partisan statement. There is no clear way to report on the Zizians without grounding the narrative in verifiable facts about who they are and were”, he writes. Systematically ‘deadnaming’ everyone, this book is uncompromising on matters of identity. To be this easy to read, and still tell the whole story of an ideological extremist group, it must consistently ignore all pretensions.

The book therefore represents an evolution for Ngo, who used to receive some criticism for reporting on suspects with ‘preferred pronouns’. “I was not always rigid on this issue, but I came to believe that ceding language to ideology ultimately means ceding clarity and, with it, the truth.”

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To make his case for the subtitle, Trans Death Cult, Ngo presents the evidence of a toxic cocktail of ideology. The Zizians mixed a transgender hormone hangover with sleep deprivation “experiments” and militant veganism, all according to the bespoke theories of Jack LaSota, aka “Ziz”. Noted for wearing black robes and affecting the image of a “Sith” from Star Wars, LaSota is now linked to eight deaths.

Transgenderism was foundational to the cult. LaSota convinced his acolytes that the two hemispheres of the brain contain different personalities, each having potentially any gender, and each being good or evil, usually evil. Somehow, LaSota remained alone among the group by having two “good” brain hemispheres that were both female.

Others did not fare so well in his analysis. Krzysztof Pasek, who seems to have been convinced that he was entirely bad, eventually took his own life after enduring the “experiments”. So did Jacob Pekarik aka “Jay Winterford”, another victim of these “debucketing” exercises. Ngo describes a program of mental torture aimed at deliberately splitting the mind of a subject to create internal conflict, and connects it to the mental spiral that preceded these first two deaths.

LaSota met Jasper Ryan Danielson, his first acolyte, in October 2016. Both transgender, they bonded immediately over hormones. Ngo reports they had started recruiting others in the rationalist community by October 2017, one year later. Like the ‘effective altruists’ behind AI companies like Anthropic, the Zizians are terrified that artificial intelligence will destroy the world. Such beliefs were common in the Bay Area rationalist community.

Most of us were supposed to suffer in this AI-powered future. The Zizians treat eating animals as an original sin of mankind. Danielson called meat-eaters “flesh eating monsters”. This ideation was intensely violent, an attitude that became general to the group.

Danielson was also “fixated on defeating death”, according to LaSota, who “believed death itself could be overcome by helping create a superintelligent artificial intelligence (AI) that would upload only ‘good’ souls like his own into an eternal ‘simulation’”, according to Ngo.

Eternal life is not a new idea, it is the original religious idea. Despite their avowed rationalism and rejection of religion, the Zizians were reinventing religious belief from first principles. After all, they were planning to run the world, one day, after the singularity arrives to grant them power over mankind. They needed a control software for the planet.

As if to drive the point home themselves, Danielson and LaSota even enacted death and resurrection after being arrested in 2019. LaSota’s sister and his paramour, Amir Dayyan Borhanian, filed a false report with the Coast Guard in 2022. Danielson simply disappeared, and it appears that a member of the group told his lawyer he had committed suicide.

Borhanian was an active believer and recruiter. He lived with Michelle Jacqueline Zajko, maintained a polyamorous relationship with her, and appears to have introduced her to Zizian thought. Alexander Jeffrey Leatham, who “functioned as a central node connecting the current and future Zizians on Tumblr”, was also partnered with two other members of the group, including the deceased Pekarek. He appears to have recruited Tessa Berns, aka Suri Dao, to the Bay Area when she was 18 and becoming sexually active.

Polyamory emerges from the book as another radical Bay Area culture that shaped the group. Maximillian Snyder allegedly killed the Zizians’ former landlord, Curtis Lind, with a knife in 2025. Snyder was romantic partner to Teresa Consuelo Youngblut, who is accused of killing officer David Maland of the Border Patrol in a shootout on 20 January 2024. Felix Bauckholt, who disappeared from his Wall Street job and first reappears on the record visiting Leatham in jail, was also killed in the shootout.

All three individuals seem to have been drawn to the Zizians online and sex played a role in cementing group bonds. Andy Ngo has not analyzed the Zizians cult as a cult. He is a journalist, not a scholar of religion. Nevertheless, his book describes many familiar hallmarks of a radical ideological sect: a group vocabulary, a shared sense of grievance against the world, a totalizing politics of everything. He justifiably compares them to the Manson ‘family’.

The call to radical violence was always explicit. “Borhanian … suggested that what is called ‘psychopathy’ is actually ‘psychological freedom.’ He believed ‘retribution,’ or revenge, was merely self-defense”, Ngo explains. Of course, ‘retribution’ includes all the horrible things the Zizians want to do to meat-eaters after the glorious singularity arrives.

Also, they were keen to kill their landlords. The Zizians schemed out ways to stop paying rent, so that they could focus their limited finances on managing the AI future of humanity to achieve the most altruistic effects, from their extreme perspective. They eventually decided that killing Curtis Lind and disposing of his corpse was the easiest way to stop paying rent for his lot space.

By this time, they were living in customized box trucks they called “slackmobiles”, having failed at boat ownership. Ngo untangles the story of the Caleb, a World War II tugboat that Danielson and LaSota tried to convert into a free floating residence, and provides a helpful timeline of their transition to box truck living. Danielson was the first to propose the idea.

Berns, the youngest person charged with a crime, cut off her family after participating in the LaSota “experiments”. “Though she had expressed skepticism about Ziz’s ideas as late as May 2020, by September that year, her writing sounded no different than that of the group’s committed followers”, Ngo observes. Zajko also changed from skeptic to fanatic.

This is another common pattern in cult formation: Martin Harris challenged Joseph Smith’s abilities and became a devout Mormon; Dr. William Samuel Sadler debunked countless spirit-mediums before becoming convinced that Wilfred Kellogg was really channeling aliens from other planets. Prophets who seem to pass tests gain believers, and of course LaSota passed every test.

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The Protect Kids Colorado website is at this link.

Erin Lee’s X account is at this link.

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“Will women soon outrun men?” This is the question that exercise scientists Brian J. Whipp and Susan A. Ward asked in the title of their 1992 letter to the journal Nature.

The authors suggested that women would outpace men in distance running by 1998. Television and news coverage of their findings shaped public perceptions of the sports performance gap.

Of course, the evidence failed to replicate over time, but without the fanfare of the original, false positive result.

“The world's fastest women are now getting slower, while the men keep getting faster”, sports statistician Steven Sailer and Norwegian journalist Stephen Seiler reported in 1997.

However, “a pre-Olympic poll of 1,000 adults last May found that 66 percent of Americans believe ‘the day is coming when top female athletes will beat top males at the highest competitive levels’”.

Whereas Whipp and Ward had seen a steep improvement curve for women, one key rule change had flattened their progress. “We believe that drug testing has reduced the use of anabolic steroids by both men and women. Drug testing is restoring the physiological gender gap.”

After eliminating all the other possible explanations, Sailer and Seiler were left with the end of the Cold War and eastern bloc doping programs as the only remaining logical reason for the discrepancy. After the Ben Johnson steroid scandal in 1988, the Olympics instituted random, unannounced drug testing.

“The single most powerful explanation for the growth of the gender gap in running is that the use of banned performance-enhancing drugs has declined as a result of this testing program, and that drug use, including anabolic steroid use, has previously benefited female performers more than males”, Sailer and Seiler wrote.

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As monitored by the Stasi, State Plan 14.25 put as many as 10,000 athletes at risk through athletic doping. Women and girls had priority because they showed the largest performance gains.

Stasi files and later court cases confirm that East German coaches and sports doctors knew the health risks: early heart disease, other organ damage, cancer, infertility, depression, and stunted growth. For some sports, like gymnastics and figure skating, that last bug was a feature.

“East German sports doctors had systematically manipulated her growth”, Gymnastics History records of one victim. When her gymnastics career ended, so that she no longer needed to be small, Heike M. was given growth hormones to restore her to normal height.

Because her growth plates had been locked, however, “her musculoskeletal system could not withstand this forced transformation. The result was damaged joints, causing lifelong pain.”

Swimmer Andrea Pollack died of cancer at age 57 after acknowledging systemic steroid use during her career.

“Like other members of that team, she was systematically doped as a teenager with Oral-Turinabol, an anabolic steroid created by the state-run company Jenapharm”, Lucas Ackroyd reported in 2019. “Christiane Knacke, Pollack’s teammate at the 1980 Olympics, said Pollack also suffered a miscarriage.”

The athletes had no choice. They were given mysterious “vitamins” and told to take them, or else leave the team. Gold medalist Rica Reinisch “subsequently had several miscarriages, which she attributes to steroids.”

Other women had “physical side effects such as acne, deepened voices, excess growth of leg hair and pubic hair, and enlarged clitorises. Some female athletes gave birth to children with club feet or other defects.”

These symptoms will be sadly familiar to anyone who has studied the lived experience of the ‘trans man’. Victims of the Stasi’s doping regimen reportedly die 10-12 years earlier than the general population of what was East Germany.

The implications of this history are sadly obvious for the “best life” that so many young women are living on testosterone, these days.

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I have read hundreds of war memoirs. Nearly all of them include accounts of wounding and scenes of gruesome injury. I never flinch.

To name just one famous example, Ernst Jünger was hit by enemy bullets, shrapnel, or shell fragments 14 times, requiring 7 field evacuations. His memoir of the First World War, Storm of Steel, never made my spine curl.

Reading Chalked Up: My Life In Elite Gymnastics did. What an accomplishment.

To be clear, I am praising author Jennifer Sey’s talent with words when I say that it physically hurt me to read about her injury experiences in gymnastics.

My bones felt the crunch. My head and neck felt the whiplash of the bad landing. My gut wrenched at the abuses she put her body through to make weight for the team, the coaches who pressured her to ‘play hurt’. Her injury chronicle is raw, real, felt right in the marrow. Ouch.

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A different sort of pain informs her second book, Levi’s Unbuttoned: The Woke Mob Took My Job, But Gave Me My Voice.

Per the title of her sequel, Sey describes the pain of being cut off from career success in her prime. That is the core story, but it contains multitudes: the pain of regrets, the painful loss of the marriage she had at the end of her first book, the pain of labor and breastfeeding, introduced at the end of Chalked Up, that only a mother with a tortured body can know.

Her younger brother Chris breaks off contact with her in the hyper-polarized, social media-lubricated atmosphere of covid. That pain is doubled by knowing about her strained relationship with Chris from the previous book. He struggled at gymnastics as a boy, outshined and outranked by his sister. The new rupture in their relationship is a re-injury, a recall of the ankle that never healed.

Read as a single memoir, the most painful wounds are the self-inflicted ones, the self-criticisms. Jennifer Sey has no mercy on herself. Her body and soul each take more hits than Jünger, and all at her own instigation.

Every self-wound burns like fire, stings like venom. Her brutal honesty is honestly brutal, which makes her indictment of other people, and of her sport, even more compelling. The pain they inflicted on her is left without excuses.

Gymnastics was too much of a good thing. Completing a feat instilled confidence in her, at first, but then it became a daily routine of facing down her anxiety. “By junior high school, many of the girls I’d trained with were burned out”, she writes in Chalked Up. “The daily fear of injury was an exhausting strain, and for many, it was just too much to take.”

It proved too much for Sey to take, eventually. Injuries and pressure and too few calories led to gym burnout, so that competitive success was followed by training collapse. Coaches were instrumental in this process. They forced girls to do ever-more dangerous stunts, lose more weight, train with injured limbs.

By comparison, her brother Chris was never under the same pressure. None of the boys were. Gymnastics delayed Sey’s puberty and left her painfully image-conscious, themes that resonate with dysphoria. Sey regrets a cosmetic breast reduction when she breastfeeds: she knows something of the pain that ex-trans mothers feel.

Jennifer Sey has become controversial for her XX-XY Athletics brand. It is her third act, perhaps worthy of a third memoir. While sports are her life and the basis of her brand, Jennifer Sey clearly has compassion and understanding for what many girls are going through when they adopt transgender identities.

They are looking for the brand that fits, and that kind of marketing is Sey’s specialty.

“My first pair of Levi’s were baby blue corduroys that I wore with pride until they were floods, several inches above the ankle (this is before cropped was cool, they were just too small).”

Style notes about jeans are not random in the second memoir. Sey is explaining what makes a brand a brand, something that people will wear to announce who they are. Everyone wants to look great in their jeans, but women especially want their butts to look good. Sey did not fight this ‘male gaze’ at Levi’s. She proudly and successfully exploited it, she tells us.

Mentorship is a theme in both memoirs. Chalked Up has Lois (‘Lolo’), “warm and grandmotherly, almost fifty when I met her”, who becomes a refuge for Sey. Lolo is just about the only coach that ends up looking good in the book.

Levi’s Unbuttoned on the other hand has Dominic, who spots her talent early. Turn the page, and Jean Jackson, CEO of Banana Republic, is focusing Sey’s ambition to become a chief marketing officer.

“It was 1995, and she was the last corporate leader who would express unconstrained support for what I wanted from my career. She was also the only leader I’ve worked under who was so forthright about who we really served” — the shareholders — “and why we were actually in business at all.”

Moving up, Sey describes the social environment at The Gap as she found it, explaining why she walked out of it. Then she walks out of her first marriage.

“Mean girls gone mad best described the culture”, she writes of The Gap. “Conspicuous consumption ruled the hallways” as female executives wore expensive labels and handbags.

Sey was unsatisfied with her husband, too. “I mention this part of my life only because quitting is a theme in my narrative”, she writes. Sey did not want to share his starving artist lifestyle anymore.

Indeed, this is another continuous theme from Chalked Up, her story of quitting gymnastics before it killed her: Sey will walk right out of any soul-crushing situation.

Between the two books, there is a continuous thread of inter-female competition. “Angie was destined to become my best friend, my fiercest competitor, my alter ego”, her frenemy in gymnastics. “Other girls could beat me, but it only needled when Angie did.”

Sey’s first “talking to” at Levi’s came from Kelley McGinnis, head of Corporate Communications. “Our partnership had been somewhat strained in the early days when I was a new CMO”, Sey speculates. “With only a few slots reserved for women at the executive level, weren’t we all in competition to ascend the ladder?”

Sey did not share this form of toxic femininity, though she understood it. She “took special care to mentor women” in her role and writes that women made great mentors and collaborators throughout her time at Levi’s.

In fact, Sey’s politics were discernibly left, liberal, progressive, and concerned with racial justice, as late as 2020. Her account of the death of George Floyd is the mainstream media telling of the story.

Whatever her opinion on the controversy is today, Sey has left a snapshot of what she believed before and after she was canceled, and it turns out that she was rather woke.

She does not explain her ‘gender critical’ turn in Levi’s Unbuttoned, for it came later. We do see her mind changing, though.

It happened with covid. McGinnis played the key role in Sey’s ouster, which began with the “talking to” about her opinions on social media.

Sey wanted the public schools to reopen. Her colleagues, McGinnis included, had children attending private schools in person already while the public schools remained closed in the Bay Area. Sey could see at-home “learning” devastate her own son and worried that minority kids would suffer learning deficits.

Sey was an Elizabeth Warren voter. The issue was radicalizing her. Had Levi’s left her covid heresies alone, Sey might have remained a loyal Democrat. They could not leave her alone, however.

Woke capitalism was changing the company culture. Levi’s was already taking a public stand against the first Trump administration and considering a public stance on gun control. The company youth cadre could not leave Sey alone after she dared to appear on The Ingraham Angle. Right wing! Racist!

Nor could they leave her second husband’s social media accounts alone. Sey observes that “one of the seven signs you’re in a cult is that the cult asks you to cut off contact with any nonbelievers.” Daniel “was the enemy, and I incurred guilt by association.” A woke mob was forming.

At the time, companies were mistaking market noise for signal. Many brands still are. Nike has depreciated in market cap by forgetting who its customers are. Levi’s too was hearing noise and interpreting it wrongly as market signal.

Rather than sign the NDA and take the money, Sey walked away and told her story. This too is consistent with her gymnastics career.

Chalked Up drew criticism for broaching the taboo topic of pedophile coaches when it was published in 2006; then it won praise when the Larry Nassar scandal proved her right. That episode was forgotten again when Sey was canceled for having wrong opinions about covid that turned out to be right.

Now she is subject to cancelation for having wrong opinions about female sports, namely that males should not be included in them. The woke mob is fickle.

Jennifer Sey does not explain sex difference scientifically. She describes it as she found it: coaches pushing girls’ bodies too hard, favorable scoring by judges for girls they favor, constant shaming about their weight.

What seems normal inside a cult looks insane to those outside it. “I had broken my femur, one of the largest and strongest bones in the human body, nearly in two” at a competition in Montreal. Sey was relieved, for she had thought it was a knee injury, which would be a harder recovery.

“Everyone gathered around my bed in the recovery room and we celebrated. It seemed likely I’d do gymnastics again.”

“It’s not your knee!” John cheered.
“It’s only broken!” Mrs. Strauss rejoiced.

Decades later, the memory of pain still lingers in her joints. The bone chips that went unremarked and unremoved from her ankle while she struggled through the pain have left a permanent hurt. She left her mark on Levi’s, but the pain of losing her ‘work family’ still stings in the pages of her memoir.

Heresy led to heresy. In her X and Substack posts, Sey ties youth gender medicalization to the broader erasure of sex-based categories, including sports. She attended the 2025 Genspect conference to speak on the role of woke capital in the shape of public discourse. It is companies, not the government, which decide whether your social movement is acceptable enough to be allowed to speak.

In the epilogue of Levi’s Unbuttoned, Sey rejects any return to corporate leadership on such terms. Her athletic brand is an act of radical resistance, though she is hardly anti-capitalist.

“XX-XY Athletics” carries its message in the name. To take issue with the brand message is to argue against reality. The late American political scientist William H. Riker coined the term heresthetics for this kind of communication.

Jennifer Sey’s brand sets the agenda and controls the referendum on its own meaning. It is her very own corporate communication, built on an intimate understanding of what women and men each want. After reading her books, I must say the brand looks very good on her.

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According to her bio at The Wall Street Journal, Corinne Ramey worked as a professional violist before she became a reporter covering federal law enforcement and white-collar crime.

I can believe it because her story published this weekend, “How a Business Litigator Became DOJ’s Point Man Against Transgender Care”, is like a fiddle playing while Rome burns.

As we noted last week, the abysmal coverage of legacy media outlets has focused on publishing a list of enemies rather than explaining just why so many hospitals are capitulating to the Trump Department of Justice.

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Ramey has made the most aggressive effort yet to portray the campaign against pediatric sex rejection medicalization in a false legal light. She has put Jordan Campbell on trial.

Campbell, a Dallas native, doesn’t own a pair of dress shoes and has been known to wear cowboy boots to court. He doesn’t care about politics, colleagues say, and isn’t registered with a political party. But after President Trump won re-election in 2024, Chad Mizelle, the incoming chief of staff to Attorney General Pam Bondi, gave him a call. “My pitch to him was, ‘Hey, would you be willing to leave that practice and come do that on behalf of the United States?’” Mizelle recalled.

Ramey practically spits at the charge of “chemical and surgical mutilation” the Trump administration uses.

She repeats the magical mantra of the settled science consensus: “Major U.S. medical groups consider gender dysphoria a condition that merits treatment.”

These “major medical groups” have all “pointed to studies showing that such treatment can help alleviate mental-health issues including the risk of suicide.” Wait, I have a meme for this:

Corinne Ramey is relying on a circular citation scheme that ends at WPATH, which has never been able to generate any sort of evidence to support the absurd premise that sex rejection medicine in children prevents adult suicide.

This is the heart of the fraud committed in the name of sex rejection in children. Furthermore, Ramey and the Wall Street Journal do not realize that their reportage is already past its expiration date.

WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, recently admitted in a Texas federal court that the whole suicide-prevention claim was just an “opinion”. Merely an opinion, guys! Not a settled scientific consensus.

There was never any scientific foundation to this lie. Nevertheless, secure in the moral superiority of the righteous cause of castrating and mutilating children, Ramey’s reportage is a study in spin without a center of gravity.

With Campbell at the helm, the Justice Department is anchoring its legal efforts on the idea that doctors may be making false claims about the off-label use of hormones as gender treatments, as well as misclassifying treatments on billing documents submitted to government healthcare programs and private insurers. It alleges drug companies may be making false claims about pharmaceuticals used for gender treatments.

What evidence do we have that doctors “may be making false claims about the off-label use of hormones as gender treatments”? Why, we have the FDA drug labels, which do not in fact recommend them for “gender treatments”. Weird how that works.

We also have Lupron and other puberty blocking drugs, which also are not recommended for “gender treatments” on the label. Claims that hormones will prevent suicide are patent fraud.

We have copious evidence that pediatric sex change clinics were “misclassifying treatments on billing documents submitted to government healthcare programs and private insurers” for a decade because they posted their intentions to commit these felonies right on their websites.

They did it on the advice of WPATH, which is currently defending its opinions in Texas. Ramey does not mention WPATH, or the Federal Trade Commission litigation which charges the organization with extortionate fraud for telling parents their children would commit suicide unless they received harmful hormones.

Ramey notes that “Several courts … have ruled the government was motivated by a political agenda rather than any reasonable suspicion that the healthcare providers engaged in wrongdoing. Judges in at least nine separate cases have blocked all or parts of government subpoenas.”

In fact, liberal judges have reacted to some of these cases with the unreasonable disdain of political activists because that is what they effectively are. Ideological capture of courts was a key project of political transgenderism. That has somewhat slowed the work.

Still, the government is pressing forward with these cases, and those knee-jerk decisions will likely be reversed by higher courts, because the government’s case is incredibly strong on both facts and law. Ramey and The Wall Street Journal do their readers a disservice with this kind of coverage. It is denialism that will not withstand the pressure of reality.

They have clearly chosen sides — and cast the story as a moral panic, a matter of good people against evil monsters.

Despite quoting a detransitioner, Soren Aldaco, and acknowledging Campbell’s law firm has interviewed “hundreds of potential clients” like her, Ramey minimizes detransition with talking points that have not changed since 2018.

“Studies show that a small percentage of minors who take gender-transition hormones stop such care, and an even tinier percentage regret their choice”, she writes. “Campbell’s worldview, though, has been driven by those stories of remorse.”

Detransitioners are not even real, and even if they are real by the hundreds, or the thousands, they shouldn’t count, and no one should do anything about them. Hang on, I also have a meme for this:

Talk to some ex-trans and detransitioning people, and they will confirm that their harms were covered by insurance under false billing codes. There are literally hundreds of potential witnesses, according to Ramey, who blithely whistles past the graveyard of an ideology.

On the other hand, Ramey talks to one mother who “said that while she didn’t know if her 8-year-old transgender daughter would seek such care in the future, it was important the option remain on the table.” If this poor Munchausen mom is not allowed to castrate and alter her son to be more girlish as a stunted man, are any of us truly free?

Corinne Ramey and The Wall Street Journal are asking us this insane question. They maintain the pretense that black letter crimes are not crimes. This is fake news. It is an industry-wide phenomenon, however, which is the true scandal. Of the four mainstream outlets that have covered the story, Ramey’s is easily the most irresponsible — and the most unintentionally revealing, as she flatters anxieties and impugns characters.

Trump is getting wins, but these professional journalists are not allowed to understand or correctly explain what is happening. Instead, they moralize against the people they perceive as responsible. Americans will be left in the dark about what is really going on.

It happens that I have met Jordan Campbell. He was a panelist at the FTC’s July 9, 2025 workshop, “The Dangers of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Minors”, which I attended and reported on for The Distance.

Campbell spoke during the second panel, “The Politicization of Science,” alongside Edmund LaCour Jr., the Solicitor General of Alabama. LaCour successfully unlocked WPATH internal communications in a federal court discovery motion while defending the state’s ban on pediatric sex lobotomy.

WPATH emails in the Alabama case show that Adm. Rachel Levine pressured the organization to abandon almost all age limits for pediatric ‘gender’ surgeries in its 8th edition of their “Standards of Care”. The Biden HHS feared that any such limits would make the practice harder to defend in court.

At the time, Campbell was already the newly-appointed Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Consumer Protection Branch of the DOJ Civil Division. Also on the panel were Dr. Eithan Haim, MD, a whistleblower pursued by the Biden administration, and Leor Sapir of the Manhattan Institute.

Dr. Haim provided journalist Christopher Rufo with evidence the Texas Children’s Hospital was defying a state ban on pediatric sex rejection through the exact coding fraud mechanism now at issue in multiple courts.

During the panel, Dr. Haim explained how the scheme works. He speculated that the entire gender clinic ‘industry’ was rife with black-letter insurance fraud, and suggested to Mr. Campbell that the Department of Justice should be aware of these potential slam-dunk fraud cases.

“Working on it”, Campbell replied.

No one in the legacy media business seems able to tell this story, which is hidden in plain sight, accurately. Instead, they all tell readers who they are supposed to hate. They name the characters who are adjudged guilty of expelling the holy cult of the ‘trans child’ from the cathedrals of medicine.

They call it journalism, but it is activism.

My own activism was never secret. I did come from ‘the left’, after all. I know the progressive templates and I have professional familiarity with Democratic operations. In fact, I first heard this scandal described in 2018 at a progressive conference.

The plan to use false billing codes was explained to me in New Orleans. It was presented to me in a positive light, as if we were liberating a generation. I am no lawyer, but I could not help thinking in the moment that the women running the panel were describing criminal fraud. Turns out my instincts were correct.

This history has its ironies. One of them is that I can tell this story better than Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Associated Press, or Mother Jones reporters because my coverage led to insider access. I was invited to the FTC panel in 2025 and I have interviewed the people who made it happen.

I have written about my experiences in the intended first chapter of my current book project. By sheer coincidence, my own story of seven years in the ‘gender critical’ movement covers the whole story of a systemic fraud being uncovered.

The Trump administration caught them all dirty, and now there is hell to pay. The real story really is that simple.

I am telling this story in my current book project. I plan to share the introduction and the opening chapter with premium subscribers as a podcast in the coming days, so if you are a free subscriber, consider upgrading. Thank you to everyone already supporting this work.

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“At least six major hospitals have agreed to refuse gender-affirming hormones and surgery for transgender young people and agreed to make payments to the federal government, according to deals with the Department of Justice”, Associated Press reporter Geoff Mulvihill writes today.

Mulvihill, who covers both gender medicine and abortion topics at the state level for AP, notes that hospitals have resisted the Trump administration accessing patient records, and a 9th Circuit ruling has broken the dam on Trump administration subpoenas.

The AP article does not use the word ‘fraud’, thereby failing to inform readers just why six hospitals have already folded under pressure from the Trump Department of Justice to shutter their pediatric sex rejection clinics.

Mulvihill does inform his readers that this phrase, “sex rejection”, has come into common use by the administration in its court battles against the gender clinics, though he does not seem to approve. As always, it is honest language that gets the most outrage.

In an update to the AP article, Mulvihill clarifies that the hospitals are paying settlements to the government rather than paying “to reverse transitions”. He does not use the word ‘detransition’ for the return leg of the ‘gender journey’ because it is not supposed to exist.

Mulvihill quotes Eliel Cruz, a cofounder of something called the Gender Liberation Movement. Cruz “has protested hospitals that have ended the care. Cruz said some families have moved to other states for access to treatment, only to find providers stop it there. Some, he said, have left the country.”

This is fake news. This is the Associated Press. But I repeat myself.

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Writing for The New York Times, Amy Harmon does much better by informing readers in the first paragraph that the Department of Justice is investigating “potential legal violations related to billing practices and consumer fraud.” In the interests of balance, however, she lets the other side speak at length.

“Some critics have argued that the Justice Department was acting in bad faith, raising financial questions to intimidate hospitals into ending services that are permitted in their states and to carry out the Trump administration’s policy goals.”

So-called gender-affirming care is still legal in 23 states, goes the argument: evil Trump just won’t leave the poor transes alone.

This is the new line of defense that Madison Pauly attempted to organize in August at Mother Jones, a progressive publication that really ought to change their name to Birthing Person Jones, just to be consistent with their principles.

Look! SQUIRREL! …A right wing squirrel!

Rather than address the fraud, or attempt to spin the details of the fraud, Pauly prefers to focus on the “right wing” sources of information used in the recent HHS report, “Wolves In White Coats”, that explains the vast fraud in gender medicine billing.

“The report frames these billing practices as a kind of fraud”, Pauly writes: a KIND of fraud, as if to imply that it’s barely even a real crime because conservatives caught onto it. Americans can, and do, go to prison for this exact kind of coding fraud in other areas of medicine, so activist-journalism must resort to special pleading, here.

Instead of billing for the diagnosis found in DSM-V, the standard diagnostic reference published by the American Psychiatric Association, the now-shuttered clinics submitted false claims for nonexistent endocrine disorders.

Preliminary evidence suggests that more than 95 percent of all ‘gender medicine’ billing everywhere in America has likely been fraudulent. Coding fraud has been extensive and pervasive.

Pauly worries that this “could be a successful angle of attack in the administration’s broader project to wipe out gender-affirming care for minors.” He is right to worry, and wrong to mislead his readers on the seriousness of criminal fraud.

Rather than an argument on the merits of these cases, Pauley has presented readers with a list of enemies. Terrible, no-good right wingers are not allowed to notice naked insurance billing code fraud at scale.

Harmon’s newspaper is as ‘woke’ as any in America, yet compared to other legacy media outlets, the NYT has done a better job than the other two presented here of informing their readers while the science of ‘trans kids’ has come unsettled in the last two years.

Activists are choosing their preferred enemies. Like Mulvihill, Harmon quotes the Gender Liberation Movement.

“It’s devastating to watch, one by one, health care institutions that once cared for trans youth turn their backs on them,” said Raquel Willis, the organization's executive director.

Harmon also quotes a parent’s disappointment that Connecticut Children’s Medical Center agreed to stop medicalizing minors.

“By agreeing to this settlement, the hospital has doubled down,” Hannah Hussey, a lawyer for the parents, said in a statement. “Not only on that breach of faith with parents and patients, but on its attempt to thwart its obligation under Connecticut law to provide medical care without discrimination.”

It is “discrimination” to shut down the systemic fraud of pediatric sex rejection. The new plan for ‘saving’ the ‘trans kids’ is public pressure on the institutions that don’t want to defend themselves and their people against criminal fraud charges.

New York State Attorney General Letitia James can sue to keep a New York clinic open, to no avail. Colorado has also tried to strong-arm a restart of a shuttered state hospital clinic. These efforts fail because there is no constitutional principle that can make a doctor or a hospital risk criminal prosecution for black-letter fraud.

According to Cruz, the Gender Liberation Movement representative quoted in Mulvihill’s piece, the real issue here is “who has the courage to do what their calling and education calls them to do — which is do no harm — and those (who do) not.” Which is an irony for the age.

Harming children for cosmetic purposes is wrong. In Associated Press-land, it is harmful not to harm a child for cosmetic purposes.

Pauly assails the organization Do No Harm, not just for criticizing the harms of chemical and surgical sex lobotomy on minors, but also for noticing just how large the coding fraud is, and of course, for being “right wing”.

“Transition surgery for people under 18 is rare,” Mulvihill lies dissembles spins prevaricates, “but many transgender youth receive hormones to block puberty or to trigger development of sex-linked characteristics consistent with their gender identity.”

We must give children cosmetic sex changes before they are old enough to have sex, otherwise they will die and the wrong politics will win.

Politics are usually the last resort of any fraud worthy of the title, and this fraud came with potential charges of criminal extortion.

Nice trans kid, mom and dad. Would be a pity if something happened to it. Mr. Mulvihill stresses that no laws were broken by any gender transition. What is the fuss even about, then?

A criminal enterprise

Nothing in the AP article informs the reader of the massive fraud committed through ICD insurance coding fraud by these hospitals, or that they did it on the instructions of WPATH, the World Professional Association of Transgender Health.

Mulvihill, Harmon, and Pauley all fail to connect the dots for readers: WPATH is also defending itself from the Federal Trade Commission and four state attorneys general over their role in this massive, harmful fraud. These are not separate stories, they are the same story.

These articles don’t mention WPATH at all. Nobody does, lately, for some reason that no press outlet can seem to explain in any of their coverage of this issue. Readers of The Distance are better-informed on this story than readers of the Associated Press, New York Times, or Mother Jones.

During 2025, I attended the FTC panel that led to this whole-of-government approach. Indeed, the phrase “whole-of-government approach” was spoken emphatically in the panel. So was the myth of suicide risk.

I was there to hear it all because a small percentage of readers support this project with premium subscriptions. If you are a free subscriber, consider an upgrade.

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You can visit the Detransitioner Justice Project website at this link.

The organization’s X account is at this link.

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Critics of Enes Freedom and Royce White say they are not really transgender women, but men pretending to be transgender women, so they must not be allowed to play in the WNBA.

However, their critics cannot explain the difference between a man pretending to be a woman and a man pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman, or how the WNBA can make such a distinction.

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Put simply, in New York City, where the WNBA is based, gender identity is entirely self-reported. It is “self-ID”.

Title 8 of the New York City Administrative Code was amended in 2002 to include actual or perceived sex, gender identity, and “gender expression” in the city’s definition of “gender” as a human right. Under this rubric, a man identifying as a woman “for the purposes of basketball” is an expression of gender.

Nothing about Freedom or White, “including [their] actual or perceived gender-related self-image, appearance, behavior, expression or other gender-related characteristic, regardless of the sex assigned to that person at birth” prevents them from being ‘women’, according to the city of New York.

A male who says he is a transgender person must be allowed to use single-sex facilities, including restrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, and hospital rooms “consistent with their gender identity”. He says he is a woman, so let him in.

To exclude him is discriminatory.

His beard is irrelevant.

His penis is irrelevant.

His medical history is irrelevant.

He does not owe us femininity, proof, or documents.

If women object to his presence in their spaces and sports, the city of New York does not care, because those women are clearly bigots.

The NYC Commission on Human Rights can impose civil penalties up to $125,000 for normal violations of this law, or $250,000 for willful violations, plus damages.

Civil complaints can also be filed in city courts. New York City courts are required by the city law to construe the statute broadly, independent of state or federal laws that would be narrower.

Of course, the city law applies to accommodations, not sports teams, but the controversy highlights that contradiction, embarrassing the WNBA.

The WNBA could fix their public relations problem by simply defining what the word ‘woman’ means. The league could just say that Enes Freedom and Royce White are adult human males and clarify that the WNBA is for adult human females only.

This current WNBA cannot do that, however, because it has been among the most ‘woke’ professional sports leagues in the nation. WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert has chosen to let her current term expire rather than confront the issue of what a “woman” is.

Mr./Ms. Freedom recently attended a Chicago Sky home game against the Indiana Fever wearing a shirt that read: “WOMAN noun: Adult Human Female”. Freedom stepped onto the court after Sky guard Natasha Cloud apparently started a shouting match with him.

Freedom was then ejected and banned from Sky home games at the arena.

Club owner Michael Alter confirmed the ban, citing a remark that Freedom had supposedly made in reaction to a three-pointer by Sophie Cunningham. “It was pretty clear to us that his purpose of coming here was trying to be provocative and see how much attention he could get.”

“The whole thing changed when [Freedom] decided to get up.”

“I got up and I took a step, but I never crossed the baseline”, Freedom says. he maintains that he was removed for “supporting women” and claims he was subject to viewpoint discrimination.

Wintrust Arena is owned and operated by the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, a public entity. When public officials or public-entity security enforce a fan code of conduct, First Amendment and Illinois constitutional constraints apply.

Enes Freedom is not a lawyer, but he has lawyers. It is not a stretch to suggest he might have done his homework before he arrived at the arena in that shirt. Thanks to Natasha Cloud, he has established a pattern of conduct at league games.

This is all consistent with a possible plan to punish the WNBA through lawfare.

Lawfare has been used against critics of gender ideology for a very long time. Litigants against the gender critic usually enjoy deferential authorities and helpful systems. Judges have been trained to use pronouns. Laws have been rewritten in advance of the lawsuit.

Sex realist activists and organizers will likely be subject to increased lawfare in the near term. Everyone subject to lawfare risk should understand what it is, how it works, and what it costs.

That last bit is important. There are things that a retired NBA player can do, that you cannot, because he can afford lawyers.

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You can find Dr. Travis Morrell on X here.

The Do No Harm website is here.

In 2025, Brazilian feminist activist and graphic designer Isabella Cêpa received political asylum in Europe because she faced years in prison for online comments that offended transgender politician Érika Hilton. Cêpa became the world’s first gender critical political refugee and an embarrassment to Brazil, which had proudly overcome its authoritarian past.

Cêpa was officially charged with “racism” for “misgendering” Hilton, a representative of Brazil’s wokest political party, the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL). Like abusive men worldwide who use gender identity as grounds for legal harassment, Hilton was riding a wave of well-meaning legislation and court rulings from a self-satisfied political class.

In 2019, the Brazilian judiciary reinterpreted homophobia and transphobia as forms of racism under the country’s 1989 Lei do Racismo. Then, in 2023, the court criminalized slurs against gays and trans individuals, with some prosecutors also deeming misgendering to be a slur. Fearing prosecution on these grounds, publications thereafter referred to trans Brazilians by their preferred pronouns.

The same Brazilian supreme court (STF) ruled in Cêpa’s favor in September 2025, dismissing the case against her in what was seen as a landmark victory for free speech. However, at least one woman that Cêpa retweeted still faces trial in Paraíba for what she posted on X. She is not the only woman in Brazil now being criminalized for calling a man a man. It is becoming far too common, anymore, despite the STF ruling.

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Cêpa’s story is told in the new documentary, On Whose Behalf? Women and Gender Policy in Brazil. Created by MATRIA, the Associação de Mulheres, Mães e Trabalhadoras do Brasil (Association of Women, Mothers and Workers of Brazil), it is a comprehensive reveal on the crybully campaign against women’s rights in that country.

Karen Mizuno, who was investigated for making a joke about archaeologists determining sex from bone structure, is another example of a woman’s human right to speak being crushed by the Brazilian state. Isadora Borges, a veterinary student, has also been charged criminally for 2020 social media posts stating that transwomen are male — again, at the behest of Érika Hilton.

Last week, Bianca Barreto was sentenced to two years of house arrest for using male pronouns in reference to transgender politician Duda Salabert. What these cases all have in common is that they involve crybully men punishing women for saying words that make those men feel bad. They are exactly like regular abusive men who hate women, but they wear lipstick.

On Whose Behalf? contains the familiar litany of abuses. Men use their putative gender identities to barge their way into women’s sports and spaces. Male prisoners identify their way into women’s prisons. Men identify as women to commit men’s crimes and get counted as women in statistics. Transgender advocacy has a disturbing focus on children and restroom access. Detransitioners are treated as pariahs, their existence denied.

Because their building was planned without women in mind at all, the Brazilian Senate only constructed a women’s restroom inside the plenary chamber a decade ago, after 55 years. Aside from this notable example of the local conditions, the rest of the documentary feels very familiar — because it is all so very familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the impositions and demands of ‘gender identity’ for the last decade.

Well-meaning Brazilian politicians and judges have provided tools that transgender identity politicians have weaponized against women. Silencing and punishing women is a feature of their agenda, not a bug. For it is only by crushing the dissent of women that these men can impose themselves on every woman in Brazil, wherever they want, in every way they want.

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Not only was Ritchie pushed into surgery, he says that his clinicians went out of their way to deny that he was experiencing regret. Ritchie shares his harrowing tale of alleged medical abuse and the lifetime of recovery after.

You can find Ritchie on X here.

His Substack is here.

Ritchie Herron

Writer, Advocate and Speaker

By @TullipR / Ritchie

“The problem is that the grown-ups in the room have turned into cowards, and they are all running away from the fantasists”, Sir Trevor Phillips said in an interview with The Telegraph last week. “When I was a student, one of the things we fought for was that women could operate independently of men. Now, according to this new fantasy world, the one thing women cannot do is decide when they want to be separate from men. It’s not just outrageous, it’s insane.” Or: ironic.

Fantasists have indeed run amok with ‘gender identity’ and ‘self-ID’, inflicting a form of insanity on western societies for more than a decade. Male fantasists have treated these putative human rights as an excuse to cheat at female sports. Self-described liberal feminists excuse and even promote this travesty in the name of ‘inclusion’, an historical irony that the Women’s National Basketball League exemplifies by failing to define the word ‘woman’ in its eligibility rules.

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The WNBA is the wokest professional sports league in America. It also would not exist without the financial support of the all-male NBA, a second layer of irony. When Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, both retired NBA players, declared themselves WNBA prospects last week, they were calling a bluff that the league had spent a week making in its dispute with Indiana Fever star Sophie Cunningham.

Too many layers of irony have collapsed the supporting pillars of cognitive rationalization. If ‘trans women are women’ and gender is fluid, then Royce White can indeed be “transgender” if he says so. “I’m a woman” is all he needs to say, and he has said it. “I identify as sometimes identifying as a woman for purpose of basketball, professional basketball.” According to the reigning ideology of trans-ness, that is enough.

The WNBA says that only “players who are women” are eligible, but the league also maintains a political pretense that some men can be women if they say so. Royce White says he is so. Stunning! Brave! Anyone who calls him a troll is clearly a racist white supremacist policing black and brown bodies.

Admittedly, it has been fun on social media. We get to turn all the idiotic language of woke inclusivity gibberish back on those who enforced it, before now. We get to mock their book of rules by holding them to it. This is the moment that too many layers of irony are too heavy for ideological structures to support, so that all the arguments that were made in favor of men in women’s sports over the previous decade collapse upon themselves.

Enes Freedom has not mocked anyone. He has instead argued that if self-identification is enough to meet the league eligibility rule, then it applies just as easily to himself as herself as it does to anyone in the world. Needless to say, advocates of ‘transgender sports inclusion’ are aghast that their own rule is being used this way. Mr. Freedom is however a brown man, so they are policing ‘her’ body, according to their own book of rules, now.

Adding one more layer of irony, the WNBA is chartered in New York City, where the law lets these men sue if they are denied. In a Friday memorandum obtained by the Associated Press and other outlets, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert told league clubs that a task force of team presidents and general managers will discuss the issue this week. Because the eligibility rules are set by collective bargaining, the entire league must agree to any new policy clarifying what is a woman, the perennial ironic question that ‘gender identity’ advocates refuse to answer.

‘History as irony’ is the dominant modern historiographical and cultural predicament. We have adopted a self-aware, skeptical stance that dissolves earlier naïve confidence in coherent plots or objective meaning, leaving us guided by relativism, often in a satirical or pessimistic tone. According to historian Hayden White, it is when that ironic apprehension reaches its fullest, most complete expression that we are able to break with irony and return to a story that has earnest meaning.

I have no crystal ball. However, the WNBA is poised to follow the Women’s Tennis Association, the International Olympic Committee, and 27 Republican-controlled state legislatures in protecting the female category this week. Maybe. If that happens, it will mark the collapse of this ironic era of elite silencing of dissent and the beginning of a meaningful society-wide dialogue about female sports categories. In a word, it would be historic.

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In this conversation, we discuss the long and lonely road to victory in what we agree is the dumbest culture war ever waged. Helen Joyce is politically homeless, isolated by the media establishment, and out-funded by orders of magnitude compared to the legacy activist organizations that push insane ‘self-ID’ policies. She will fight until she wins. How long that will take, and how much of her, remains to be seen.

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The Sex Matters website is here.

Helen Joyce’s X account is here.

This is her Substack.

Helen Joyce

I’m a journalist, women’s rights campaigner and author of “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality”. “Incisive, compassionate and nuanced” – Louise Perry; “Utterly unintimidated by extremist orthodoxy” – Lionel Shriver; “A sane, humane book” – Daniel Dennett

In this exclusive interview, Jon analyzes his own blind spots and complains that fringe candidates are becoming the face of the Democratic Party, further alienating voters outside of deeply-blue, highly-educated, liberal urban bubbles. He is a vocal critic of the socialist DSA wing and candidates like Graham Platner.

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Jon agrees that identity politics have been a disaster for both parties. Republicans lose when they pander to Black voters and win when they are just normal Republicans who serve Black constituents well. Democrats on the other hand have slowly lost Black men by pandering to anti-police activism.

Then I asked Jon to analyze the party’s adherence to gender ideology, and we found our point of disagreement. He has not been radicalized on the issue (‘peak trans’). He still believes that “actual transgender people” need special rights. And like many Democrats, he discounts the valence of social issues at election-time.

However, Jon acknowledged that, like unrestricted immigration or consumer inflation, gender ideology can have deleterious long-term effects on the Democratic coalition that are hard to see in polling data. He admits that Democrats have a hard time being normal — and he is pessimistic about the future of the party.

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Jon’s X account is here.

Oregon’s Intermountain Education Service District fired social worker Roderick E. Theis II in November 2023 for the crime of displaying the books He is He, She is She, and Johnny the Walrus in his La Grande Middle School office. Last week, a divided federal appeals court ruled that Theis was not protected by the First Amendment when he showed the books to students who asked to see them.

Judge Lawrence VanDyke noted the majority ruling is “irreconcilable with Supreme Court precedent.” Other school system employees have been allowed to display contentious symbols, such as Pride flags. A “free and open American society appropriately recoils at the prospect of public school teachers becoming involuntarily conscripted apparatchiks of any administration’s particular orthodoxy”, VanDyke, a Trump appointee, wrote.

The two-judge majority, which was appointed by Presidents Obama and Biden, ruled that a lower court judge had “acted appropriately ‘given the robust body of precedent holding that educators speak as government employees when they convey messages to students within the four walls of a school.’” A single staff member had complained that the books were “transphobic”.

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Despite the indoctrination of the federal judiciary that is evident in the 9th Circuit ruling, the original judge in the case made a ruling that is entirely consistent with the gender-affirming character of the state government and its constituent school systems. Oregon has systematically inscribed politics on the bodies of children for over a decade, overriding parental rights at the slightest sign of resistance to medicalization.

Social pressure against the non-affirming parent would be bad enough without state pressure. Oregon is now the leading state in sex rejection medicalization of young people because the state adopted ‘affirmation’ as official policy in 2014 when the Health Evidence Review Commission (HERC) decided to cover sex rejection for adults and minors under the Oregon Health Plan (Medicaid).

HERC based this decision on the 2012 ‘Standards of Care’ published by WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries are all considered “medically necessary” in Oregon because WPATH says so. This alleged necessity has empowered children to circumvent or overcome parental guidance at scale.

The numbers are telling. “According to a new study published in Research Connections, at age 17, roughly 1 in every 240 girls and 1 in every 630 boys in Oregon received cross-sex hormones for “gender dysphoria” between 2016 and 2023”, Leor Sapir and Paul Terdal recently revealed.

“These figures are triple and double the national average for girls and boys, respectively.” The children subject to indoctrination the longest are the most at-risk, in Oregon. “For younger children the disparity is even greater: Cross-sex hormone use in the study was four to five times the national rate among 14- and 15-year-olds, and puberty-blocker use was more than five times the national rate at age 14.”

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Gill’s enemy is the intersectional oppression hierarchy. He is adept at twisting its administrators into pretzels with leftist logic.

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Rep. Gill started with an examination on the subject of ‘implicit bias’, which the ABA website exists in all of us like original sin. Gill challenged Behnke to name her implicit biases. She filibustered instead. Then he switched topics.

“Do you think it’s important that the next Supreme Court justice be transgender?” Gill asked. Then, over Behnke’s filibustering, he continued to ask questions over her.

“Have transgenders been included on the US Supreme Court?” Gill asked, establishing that in fact not one of the 116 justices in the history of the Court has been transgender.

“Do you think that it’s a problem the transgender community has never had representation on the Supreme Court?” he asked.

“I’m asking you about diversity, equity, and inclusion”, he said over her boilerplate non-responses. “I’m asking you about the transgender community. You’re refusing to answer my question.”

Finally: “You’re not answering in a straightforward way. Is it because of your own implicit bias? Do you have implicit transphobia?” Cue the rimshot.

Implicit transphobia is a pathologizing term that plays to the behavioral demands of transgender ideology. Failure to use pronouns in your email signature is implicit transphobia. Women’s shelters that exclude men are guilty of implicit transphobia.

Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham took questions about her ‘implicit transphobia’ yesterday. Reporters wanted to know what she really meant when she said she supports fair and safe sports for girls.

Was it implicit transphobia? “I said what I said”, she replied.

Ms. Cunningham was asked to accept responsibility for any “targeting” of the world’s most marginalized community. Isn’t it possible that she has somehow implied the transes should be targeted? “I don’t dislike anyone”, she replied. “I think there’s room for everyone here.”

She maintained that “biological women” have “rights to be protected”. She stood on her “morals” and “beliefs” without apology. “Never once said that I hated the trans community”, Cunningham concluded.

This is what ‘implied transphobia’ always meant. The new thing in the world is that Sophie Cunningham is not afraid to stick to her guns and the attempted mob crucifixion is not leaving Bluesky, so far.

Is the tide turning? Is the spell breaking? Something has changed. Here is David Remnick of The New Yorker sparring with 2028 Democratic hopeful Rahm Emanuel. Remnick tried to hold the former White House chief of staff and Chicago mayor accountable for soft support of transgender “rights”.

Emanuel maintained that “bathrooms” are a distraction from the crisis in American public education. “Our reading and math scores are in the tank,” he said. “50 percent of our kids cannot read or do math at grade level. And we’re gonna talk about bathroom access?”

Remnick pushed back. Why can’t the transes have their demands met immediately, he asked? After all, there were “other groups that didn’t have their rights” that were told to wait, before, and that was unjust.

Thus the desire of autogynephilic men to be in women’s restrooms perfectly compares to Martin Luther King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail”, according to David Remnick, who speaks for our betters in American society.

Rahm Emanuel would not let the discussion “distract” him from reading scores, math skills, or graduation rates. He has signed a ‘bathroom bill’ into law, so like Remnick, he is quite willing to support the agenda now, and in the future.

Unlike Remnick, however, Emanuel wants to win elections more than he wants to let the curious boys into the girls’ restroom at school right away. He understands that moral scolding from New Yorker columnists has no resonance with most voters.

People who are not very-online, who prefer sports to social elitist struggle sessions among the Elect, are just not into trans rights like the Democratic Party is. Emanuel is unlikely to be the party nominee, but he is being allowed to speak heresy.

Conversational dams are breaking and dialectical tides are turning. The vibe shift is real. That does not mean this particular culture war is over. We are far from finished. A long-delayed conversation has finally begun.

Fully a decade after ‘no debate’ took command of the dialogue, the silence is breaking. Let freedom ring.

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You can find Gerald Posner’s X account here.

His books are available at this Amazon link.

Here is his Substack.

Just the Facts with Gerald Posner

News and fact-driven analysis from a bestselling author and award-winning investigative reporter the Chicago Tribune described as “a merciless pit bull of an investigator.”

Everyone can stop talking about ‘gender dysphoria’ now. The term is largely irrelevant to questions about kids and puberty blockers and hormones, anymore, because hardly anyone is actually billing for coverage under that diagnosis.

For example, Texas Children’s Hospital recently settled litigation with the Department of Justice that alleged billing fraud for pediatric sex rejection medicalization in the amount of $10 million.

However, a database maintained by Stop the Harm indicates that Texas Children’s only billed $11,000 over five years to ‘treat’ gender dysphoria.

Instead of billing for the diagnosis found in DSM-V, the standard diagnostic reference published by the American Psychiatric Association, Texas Children’s submitted false claims for nonexistent endocrine disorders.

Damages are tripled under the False Claims Act. For every dollar in claims the hospital submitted for medicalized treatments for gender dysphoria, they submitted approximately $300 in fraudulent claims for ‘endocrine disorders’.

This is not happening at just a few facilities.

Medical watchdog Do No Harm found just 22 annual insurance claims for puberty blockers or hormones for minors from 2019-2023 at the Children’s Hospital Colorado’s TRUE Center for Gender Diversity.

In court testimony, on the other hand, the TRUE Center admits treating 1,140 patients under 18 in 2025 alone.

Fraud explains the entire difference. Children’s Hospital Colorado, Texas Children’s Hospital, and the Cleveland Clinic have all settled with the Department of Justice over charges of submitting false insurance codes in pediatric sex rejection cases. Similar cases are playing out elsewhere.

This is what the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, WPATH, actively advised clinicians to do. As a result, the entire industry of sex rejection medicalization is almost certainly completely rife with potential fraud claims awaiting slam-dunk prosecutions based on black-letter law.

Arguments about transgender identification become moot under the federal False Claims Act. WPATH allegedly told American sex rejection providers to break the law, and they did.

This was not like leaving an exhaust port on the Death Star. This is like leaving a big, fat bullseye on a Death Star exhaust port that is a mile wide. This was hubris by an activist organization pretending to do scientific medicine when what they were really doing was fraud, all along.

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This was happening from the start.

WPATH exists at all because gender doctors wanted insurance coverage for their patients. As attested by internal documents from the organization, there was never a preliminary scientific evidential stage to anything they have ever done. WPATH is an industry advocacy organization.

The WPATH organization expanded their patient pool to include children in 2008. To justify the change, WPATH declared it was “medically necessary” for children to realize their “embodiment goals” as future adults, so that they would be happier as adults.

This exactly mirrored the approach of the so-called Dutch protocol developed by Peggy-Cohen-Kettenis and Louis Gooren. Altogether, during the 1990s, 12 of 105 adult male patients in their vaginoplasty program committed suicide, while a staggering 70 percent were lost to follow-up.

The clinicians still presented their findings in a positive light, saying that because so many patients had declared they were satisfied immediately after the procedure, the results were good, actually. Regret never registered on their scales.

Rather than stop and think, Gooren and Cohen-Kettenis reasoned that if they started earlier, in pre-pubertal males, the cosmetic results would be more pleasing. The unhappy boys would be a happier as transgender ‘women’, they said, because they would be more pleasing ‘women’ in the eyes of adult men.

While the industry peddled sex rejection as ‘giving kids time to think’, the actual results of puberty blockade were a fast track to medicalization with cross-sex hormones and surgeries.

In the years to come, parents across the western world were extorted with the imminent suicide of their children unless drastic endocrine disruption began immediately.

There was never an evidence basis for this claim. It is instead the rationalization of Gooren and Cohen-Kettenis for the world’s first experiment in blockading nonprecocious puberty. It remains the official justification for following WPATH guidelines to medicalize a sex-rejecting child.

Questions about brain development, body development, sexual development, and the ability of a minor child to effectively consent to future iatrogenic health effects were pushed aside at every stage.

The medical-scientific world pretended that everything it knew about the evolved human life-cycle had been disproven by ‘ settled science’.

In the United States, however, there was an important snag in health care coverage. WPATH found that insurers were never suspicious about ‘endocrine disorders’, whereas gender dysphoria diagnoses required lots of paperwork.

Being careful did not pay. Getting paid was easier if they just lied, so WPATH did, and told providers to do it. This put them on the wrong side of the law years ago. Such petty concerns were easily swept aside by the urgency of turning boys into better-looking women, so they would not take their own lives, later.

Activists in lab coats invented the ‘trans kids’.

Dr. Norman Spack, the man who brought pediatric sex rejection medicalization to the United States from the Netherlands, gave a TED Talk in 2014 that ought to have raised red flags. Instead, it was celebrated at the time.

Spack presented Jackie Green, transgendered son of former Mermaids CEO Susie Green, as a case study. Spack crowed about his decision to start Jackie on estrogen early, to fuse his growth plates faster, so that “she” would not be over six feet tall.

In this video, Spack wants us to focus on Jackie Green’s “normal breast size.” He shows a photo of Jackie in a beauty pageant representing Mermaids. Spack is similarly effusive about twin boys, ‘Nicole’ and Jonas, that diverge in appearance thanks to his endocrine interventions.

My dissection of the Spack TED talk video is the highest-performing post in the history of The Distance. It is preserved here for the historical record as well as the potential criminal and civil court record.

The evident satisfaction that Dr. Spack takes in achieving adult “embodiment goals” by altering the body of a minor child to fit the sexual tastes of adult men in the future is disturbing.

He thinks of himself as a good person, of course. Spack does not live with the damage, years later. None of them do, these gender quacks.

Jonni Skinner, who appeared in a podcast for The Distance earlier this week, had the same early hormonal interventions as Jackie Green. His puberty was blocked at 13 and his bone growth plates were locked at 14.

Just like Dr. Spack, they said it would make him better able to attract a husband.

Today, Jonni Skinner is a young gay man trapped in a boy’s body, unable to have a fulfilling adult relationship with anyone. He is anorgasmic despite being in his 20s.

Jonni’s ‘care’ was charged to his insurance coverage as an endocrine disorder, even though he was dysphoric.

Curing dysphoria was never the point. Meeting embodiment goals was always the point. It was impressed on him from the beginning of his medicalizeed sex rejection.

Doctors made Jonni “very distressed about my height”, he tells The Distance in a recent exclusive podcast interview.

One of them went out of his way to convince Jonni that he needed his growth plates locked. “I remember him specifically pulling up a chair because he was very short. He pulled up a chair and climbed in the chair to measure me just to make me feel like I was freakishly tall.”

“And it worked because I was 14.” Jonni had normal adolescent anxieties on top of other issues. “Being made to feel like I was so much taller than a grown man” was “very distressing for me.”

In another twisted turn, the boom in pediatric sex rejection medicalization saw a complete demographic flip. Today, girls are medicalized at a far higher rate than boys, with serious long-term health implications.

Jonni was the intended target of the Dutch protocol and WPATH standards. He does not expect personal justice, sadly, but the justice system is moving, and its wheels grind exceedingly fine. A reckoning is here.

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He is running to replace Graham Platner as the Democratic Party nominee for the state’s US Senate seat currently held by Republican Susan Collins. He put himself forward and stands above the rest, literally. He is actually the tallest of the candidates on the News Center Maine “Voice the Voter” debate stage.

I genuinely hope that Maine Democrats see fit to make this man their nominee. “I’m just an angry citizen now, and if I got elected, I’d be an angry Senator”, he says, which describes the current-day Democratic Party at large. I believe in representation, you see. Democrats are uniformly supportive of all things transgender. Surely if this man can identify as a woman, he can identify as a Senator, too.

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Webb claims to be intersex as well as transgender. I don’t believe him. I also don’t believe Democrats when they say they really believe this man is a woman. They know he is not. Lying about that is required to be a Democrat, however, which means the party is already seen as Ashley Webb by half the country. He might as well be its national face, at this point. And let’s be honest, if it was this guy or Susan Collins, the Democrats of Maine would vote for this guy.

Webb would make a perfect Democratic nominee for anything, mumu dress and all. He is what every Democrat looks like when they talk about the totalizing demands of gender identity as if they were an objective moral good. “What’s going on with ICE?” he asks. Viewers wonder what is going on with his evident boundary issues. Perfect. 10/10, no notes.

Webb has two albums titled Out Of The Closet: Killing Them Softly With Her Vibes and Out Of The Closet: Rage Against The System. A brief pass through his YouTube channel reveals an AI “assisted” songwriter working in eclectic styles to produce pedantic lyrics in voices that are clearly not his own.

Something else is unsettling about Webb. It’s not the lazy eye, but the vacancy in his eyes. Looking at him makes me think of James Shupe, the world’s first ‘nonbinary’ person, who took his own life after a long battle with autogynephilia. Shupe did not belong in women’s restrooms, and neither does Webb.

Paige Ashley Loud, the actual woman standing second from the left on the debate stage, is a social worker with a master’s degree from the University of Maine. She emphasizes affordable housing, universal healthcare, food access, and support for working families as well as rural communities. A member of the Cherokee Nation, a renter, and a first-generation college graduate, Loud is the perfect intersectional candidate.

Democrats were disappointed that Graham Platner turned out to be a rapey sort of guy. They have a chance to redeem themselves by running a woman. Ashley Webb, however, is the superior ‘woman’ because he has had to ‘become’ a woman rather than being born female, like Paige Loud, who has cisprivilege. This is how transgender ideology works, Maine Democrats. I don’t make the rules.

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