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First Openly Transgender Official Hired at White House

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images (73)By Associated Press. The White House has hired its first openly transgender staff member.

The White House announced Raffi Freedman-Gurspan’s appointment yesterday. Freedman-Gurspan is an outreach and recruitment director for presidential personnel in the Office of Personnel.

Transgender advocates say “she” is the first openly transgender official to serve in the White House.
Freedman-Gurspan previously was a policy adviser for the National Center for Transgender Equality’s racial and economic justice initiative. (Read more from “First Openly Transgender Official Hired at White House” HERE)

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HRC’s ‘Gender Inclusive Classrooms’ Guide: Say ‘Friends’ or ‘Students’ Instead of Girls and Boys

By Lauretta Brown. To help “create a classroom where students aren’t limited based on gender stereotypes,” teachers should address classes using words like “friends or “students” rather than girls and boys, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) advises in a new back-to-school guide.

The first tip suggested by the HRC’s Welcoming Schools Initiative is for teachers to avoid using gender to “divide and address students.” The guide claims that separating students for activities according to gender “can leave some students feeling out-of-place, making them distracted or isolated and not able to focus on learning.”

The guide recommends finding new, inventive ways of dividing students for activities. “When lining students up for lunch, rather than saying, ‘Girls line up first,’ try saying, ‘Anyone wearing a green shirt can line up,’ or ‘If your name has an E please line up.’”

The guide also advises teachers to “prepare for teachable moments” linking to suggested responses for questions that might come up in class such as: “How can a family have two moms [dads]? Which one is the real one?” and “Don’t you need a woman and a man to have a baby?”

The suggested responses to those questions are, “There are all kinds of families. Some have two moms or two dads,” and “Children come into families in many different ways, and the families that love the children may have a mom and a dad, some a mom, some a dad and some have two moms or two dads.” (Read more from this story HERE)

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See the Caitlyn Jenner-Inspired Billboard That Ignited so Much Controversy It Had to Be Removed

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18544239191_393efe2dee_b-913x512A Toledo, Ohio, talk radio station saw an opportunity to attract some attention on the current popularity of transgender Olympic gold medalist Caitlyn Jenner. While the resulting billboard certainly did get locals talking, the conversation was not entirely positive.

Social media users have since shared images of the sign, which has since been covered amid growing controversy.

While the host depicted in the obvious Jenner reference acknowledges the advertisement might have crossed a line, he isn’t shying away from future controversy.

“The billboard’s now down,” Denny Shaffer said, “so I don’t know what next is. We have another billboard going up next week.”

Though protests and petitions cemented the billboard’s fate, Shaffer has his supporters. An online petition to force him out of his job was met by an opposing effort to keep him behind the microphone at WWWM.

Nevertheless, activists like Equality Toledo Executive Director Nick Komives are celebrating the sign’s removal as a victory. (Read more from “See the Caitlyn Jenner-Inspired Billboard That Ignited so Much Controversy It Had to Be Removed” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Female MMA Fighter “Transphobic” For Her Objection to Fighting Males Without Testicles, Etc.

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Ultimate Fighting Championship Star Ronda Rousey improved her undefeated record with an amazing 30-second victory over Bethe Correia Saturday night, but “social justice” warriors were quick to remind Twitter users that she’s not PC-approved.

Focusing in on comments Rousey made about a transgender fighter participating in female divisions, the PC police flocked to Twitter in an effort to steal the spotlight from her impressive win.

In 2014, Rousey expressed concern that athletes who were born male might have an unfair advantage in women’s divisions after Fallon Fox, a fellow MMA fighter, came out as transgender.

“She can try hormones, chop her pecker off, but it’s still the same bone structure a man has,” Rousey said in 2014, according to SB Nation. “It’s an advantage. I don’t think it’s fair.”

Concern that Fox – who had a TKO over Tamikka Brents in 2014 that left Brents with a broken orbital bone, concussion, and staples in her head – might have an unfair advantage because of her biologically male characteristics left Rousey labeled as “transphobic.”

(Read more from “She’s No Punching Bag: Libs Renew Attack on Female MMA Fighter for Her Convictions About Trans-Athletes” HERE)

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Transgender Teen, 18, Undergoes Rare Surgery so She Can Be a ‘Dad’ One Day

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[Editor’s note: the below excerpt from Yahoo.com is provided to inform. As with other stories regarding the “transgendered,” the pronouns used below are the author’s choice, not ours] When 18-year-old Cole Carman made the decision to transition from female to male late last year, the San Francisco-area teen knew that she would be in for major surgery and hormone therapy.

That didn’t stop Carman, a recent high school grad set to start college in the fall, from signing on for another potentially risky medical procedure: egg retrieval. It’s a fairly routine (yet still major) surgery, typically undertaken by egg donors and some women undergoing in-vitro fertilization.

But Carman may be the first transgender teen to have her eggs successfully harvested before transitioning — preserving his ability to have children that he’ll be biologically related to, whether he chooses to carry a child himself or turn to a surrogate. “I’ve always known I wanted to have kids of my own, so when my endocrinologist talked to me about it, it was a no-brainer,” Carman told Yahoo Parenting.

The surgery, which was done at the end of May, wasn’t so simple. It required 10 days of hormone shots, and it left her dealing with side effects like bloating and cramping. During the procedure, a doctor used a needle to harvest as many egg follicles as possible, freezing them so they can be thawed and fertilized at some point in the future.

What makes Carman’s situation so groundbreaking is that up until recently, doctors didn’t routinely talk about fertility preservation to transgender teens or adults who were planning to transition. (Read more from “Transgender Teen, 18, Undergoes Rare Surgery so She Can Be a ‘Dad’ One Day” HERE)

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An Unlikely Person Is Joining Bruce Jenner in the Ranks of Publicly ‘out’ Transgender People

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[Janae Marie Kroc] is a former cancer survivor, Marine and professional bodybuilder:

And, formerly went by Matt “Kroc” Kroczaleski:

He spoke frankly to the UK Daily Mail about his gender fluidity:

“I am currently still living life in both genders. I am trying to wait until my sons are out of high school before moving forward…”

“I also feel I need to state that I do not fit into any of the boxes that society attempts to put us into and never have. I do identify as both transgender and gender fluid because these are the closest any available labels come to describing who I am. As my profile states I am both an alpha male and a girly girl; hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine.”

(Read more from “An Unlikely Person Is Joining Bruce Jenner in the Ranks of Publicly ‘out’ Transgender People” HERE)

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This University Offers Six Choices for Gender Identity

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The University of California admissions department believes students can be whatever they want to be.

At least when it comes to their gender.

Admission applications used by the UC system are giving potential students a host of choices for gender-related questions – including six varieties to describe “gender identity.” The questions, which will go into circulation this fall, are voluntarily answered and responses don’t impact the admissions process, a UC spokesperson told The College Fix.

Applicants can choose male, female, trans male/trans man, trans female/trans woman, gender queer/gender non-conforming and “different identity” to describe their “gender identity.”

By contrast, some of the other questions seem downright limiting in potential answers. For instance, “what sex were you assigned at birth” has only two choices: male or female. A question about sexual orientation features three possible responses: “heterosexual or straight,” “gay or lesbian” or fill-in-the-blank. (Read more from “This University Offers Six Choices for Gender Identity” HERE)

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Transgender Only Modeling Agency Opening in This City

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In November 2014, Thailand’s Apple Model Management became the first agency in the world to represent transgender models in addition to its stable cisgender (non-trans) male and female models. This summer, Apple Model Management L.A. [Los Angeles] will open its doors to exclusively represent transgender models.

“We see trans individuals as beautiful,” says L.A. agency director Cecilio Asuncion. “Our strong commitment to developing them as successful models is never about quantifying or qualifying their gender. It’s never a question of if they are women or men, it’s about their passion and commitment to being the best possible models they can be.”

Asuncion, whose award winning documentary film What’s the T? explores the lives of transgender women, points out that there have been trans models throughout history such as Candy Darling, Caroline Cossey (aka Tula), Octavia Saint Laurent, and now Andreja Pejic. “But their full potential was never reached because of the stigma the community-at-large had towards the trans community,” he says. “This has to change.” (Read more from “Transgender Only Modeling Agency Opening in This City” at this pro-homosexual website HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

The Metaphysics of Caitlyn and Planned Parenthood

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I had a very of-the-moment experience the other night at bedtime in my hotel room. After reading about the unmitigated horror of Planned Parenthood’s customized cannibalizing of fetal body parts, I toggled over to the ESPN site to watch the propaganda video the network made to set up its awarding Caitlyn Jenner its Arthur Ashe Courage Prize.

I encourage you to watch the clip, which is about 13 minutes long. It is a remarkable piece of work, and profoundly indicative of the deepest metaphysical assumptions of Western culture today. Jenner’s heroism, according to the film, consists in his dramatic refusal of Nature — of imposing his own will and desires on nature so profoundly that he repudiates his own nature as a male. Jenner retains his male genitalia, and, of course, maleness in his genes. In other words, everything about Jenner’s material existence (that is, his existence in his body) is male. But Jenner thinks of himself as female, and presents himself publicly as a female. He believes that what he wishes to believe about himself is who he really is, in terms of his gender. And our culture has decided that someone who wishes to assert that he or she is actually of the opposite gender than his or her body, that not only is that person conforming to the Truth — courageously, against the opposition of tradition, religion, society, and so forth — but that courage in part consists of that very willingness to impose one’s will on Nature, to make it serve our desires.

If you watch the Jenner video, he/she keeps saying things like, “This is who I am” and “I had to be who I really am.” I’m not making fun of this; clearly Jenner believes this quite deeply. The images in the video in which s/he is presented as a lone conquering hero are crushingly sad; Jenner comes across as a defaced person lost in the desert, someone who thinks s/he is free, but who doesn’t seem free at all. The culture now seems to have accepted as self-evidently true that one’s gender is whatever one wants it to be. To assert this implies a metaphysical view that is radically at odds with classical (including Christian) metaphysics, which holds that nature is not mere stuff that we can fashion as we like, and impose our own meaning onto it, but rather that nature in some mysterious way reflects things as they actually are.

In the new edition of the (unfailingly excellent) Mars Hill Audio Journal, Ken Myers interviews philosopher Roger Scruton, who talks about the implicit atheism of contemporary culture, and how we are “defacing” Nature by denying — whether we realize it or not — that there is intrinsic, metaphysical meaning in matter. Driving home from the airport last night, listening to the Journal, a line from Scruton jumped out at me:

“As soon as we begin to understand how the human person, as it were, defines himself apart from the natural order, till we do that, we won’t begin to see exactly where the limits of scientific investigation lie.”

(Read more from “The Metaphysics of Caitlyn and Planned Parenthood” HERE)

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Ouch: ESPN’s Decision to Give ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner the Courage Award Just Backfired Big Time

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Woman Involved in Bruce Jenner’s Car Crash Decries ESPY Award

By Des Bieler. Caitlyn Jenner made news Wednesday night when she took the stage at the ESPYs to receive the Arthur Ashe Courage Award. Some found her words powerful and moving while some questioned why she was there in the first place.

Count Jessica Steindorff among those who thought that the award should have gone to someone else. She was among those involved, as was Jenner, in a February traffic accident in Malibu, Calif., that claimed a woman’s life.

Steindorff is suing Jenner over the incident, as are the stepchildren of the woman, Kim Howe, who died. Steindorff had this to say to Entertainment Tonight about the former Olympic gold medalist and “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” star receiving the award:

“I find it difficult to understand how the culture we live in can honor a person who is responsible for taking a life and injuring several others with both an award and a reality show,” Steindorff told ET. “For an individual who is such a positive role model in many aspects of her life, Caitlyn has failed to do the right thing and take responsibility for her actions.”

“I would hope that someone who seems to greatly value the importance of human existence would be more sensitive to the fact that she ended another person’s life. Sadly we are living in a tabloid society,” she added.

(Read more from “Woman Involved in Bruce Jenner’s Car Crash Decries ESPY Award” HERE)

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The ESPY Bruce Jenner Courage Award Spectacle

By Norvell Rose. It was indeed a spectacle. But the fallout from Wednesday night’s ESPY Award presented to Caitlyn Jenner — the transgendered woman formerly known as Bruce — is certainly not what a cable net that relies on its fans for success wants to see. The homepage homage to Caitlyn’s “courage” has been blasted with sharply negative comments on the ESPN website.

Western Journalism published a pre-show piece on the Arthur Ashe Courage Award given to Jenner — that post was entitled “Receiving The ‘Courage’ Award From ESPN Could Be The Worst Thing To Happen To Caitlyn Jenner.” Ironically, putting the used-to-be-a-man cultural celebrity in the center-stage spotlight during the nationally televised ABC show last night may have been pretty bad for ESPN as well…if posted reaction is any indicator.

Among the many news outlets gushing with morning-after praise about the high-profile award and Jenner’s long acceptance speech is The Washington Post. The paper noted that Jenner’s moment (actually many moments) in the spotlight was among the “Best of the 2015 ESPYs.”

Then, there are comments such as the following about Jenner’s tearful celebration of self and emotional plea for acceptance of other transgendered people:

“…to give an award like the Arthur Ashe award for Courage to a guy that just feels he’s a woman or whatever the case may be is an absolute travesty and a total misuse and black mark for that award.” (Read more from “Ouch: ESPN’s Decision to Give ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner the Courage Award Just Backfired Big Time” HERE)
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Peter Berg, Friday Night Lights TV Series Producer, Shares “Hateful” Meme about Bruce Jenner

According to the Examiner, producer Peter Berg shared on his Instagram account a “hateful meme” about “Caitlyn” Jenner by comparing him to a true American hero, double-amputee Colonel Gregory Gadson. (Col. Gadson is a West Point classmate of Restoring Liberty Publisher Joe Miller) Here’s the image shared by Berg:

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The End of Boys and Girls: These Companies Are Going to Change How Your Kids Dress [+video]

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Ever since Jaya Iyer’s daughter was a toddler, she had been fascinated by Saturn and its icy rings. When Swaha turned three, she had a space-themed birthday party. But when her mom went to find clothes with space images for Swaha, she couldn’t find any. They were all in the boys section.

So the 41-year-old mother of two, who has a doctorate in fashion merchandising, started her own business called Svaha (which is how her daughter’s name is pronounced) to sell clothes that upend gender stereotypes. One shirt features a grinning green stegosaurus, the plates on its back adorned with polka dots. A second comes in a blazing pink hue, with an astronaut planting an American flag on the moon. That one should satisfy her daughter. “She was very upset with me for not ever buying her anything with astronauts on it,” Iyer says. “Then she started telling me: ‘I want a ninja on my shirt.'”

Svaha is one of several startups that have emerged in recent years with the goal of changing the standards that govern what kids wear. These upstarts aren’t looking to replace current kid’s apparel entirely. Instead, their founders say they want to provide children with more options. Handsome in Pink says it’s all right for boys to wear pink and purple. BuddingSTEM offers science-themed garb for girls. Perhaps the buzziest label is Princess Awesome, which raised more than $200,000 in a successful Kickstarter campaign, showing demand for pirate-themed dresses and girl’s apparel covered in the symbol for pi. Most of the ventures remain in early stages as online-only entities using crowdfunded or bootstrapped cash to sell small numbers of shirts or dresses.

Several of the startups share a common origin: They were borne out of parental frustration with major retailers. Simply shopping in the opposite gender’s section isn’t the answer, these parents say. Cultural norms mean that as kids get older, designating certain items as male or female can confuse and frustrate them. A girl may not want to wear something designated for boys, and vice-versa.

“Most kids and parents are going to the big retailers and seeing all these messages of what its means to be a boy or a girl,” says Sharon Choksi, co-founder of clothing line Girls Will Be. Choksi’s daughter Maya, now 10, never liked sparkles or “feminine” colors, so the Choksis would shop for Maya in the boys’ section. As Maya got older, Choksi worried that “boy” and “girl” labels would unnecessarily upset her daughter. (Read more from “The End of Boys and Girls: These Companies Are Going to Change How Your Kids Dress” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.