by Thom Nickels
Making it legal to mutilate children.
Philadelphia Mayor James Kenney, who is set to leave office in January 2024, promised to make his last year as mayor count.
“We still have a lot of work to do,” he told WHYY PBS in January of this year.
Much of that important work included the signing Executive Order No. 4-23, the so-called trans refugee bill, which ensures “the protection of individuals seeking, receiving, and receiving gender-affirming health care,” according to the City of Philadelphia website.
The city goes on to state that, “More than 60,000 Philadelphians identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer,” then reminds the public that Philadelphia “has a long history of LGBTQIA+ activism, and is now one of the most accepting cities in the United States for LGBTQIA+ activism.”
“We won’t help those who seek to discriminate against trans people,” Kenney said, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
What the city website doesn’t mention is the fact that most LGBTQIA+ people in Philadelphia don’t call themselves LGBTQIA+ at all, and that the silent majority of gays and lesbians — who are never quoted in the press when it comes to these issues — are still grappling with how transgender activists hijacked and virtually destroyed the gay civil rights movement.
Despite this disconnect, the transgender movement continues to gather steam, as more people, especially progressive heterosexual women, fall into the quicksand of trans children advocacy and pronoun usage, believing they are doing something useful for equity and humankind.
Transgenderism, of course, has become a powerful ideological movement that promotes the idea that one’s gender identity has no connection to his or her anatomy.
“As a movement,” writes Joanna Williams in “The Corrosive Impact of Transgender Ideology,” “It has proven to be far more influential than a numerical count of transgender individuals may suggest.”
When Mayor Kenney signed EO 4-23, I was reminded of the literal jig he danced in his office in June 2018 after a federal judge overruled the DOJ’s efforts to block federal funding from the city because its Sanctuary City status violated statutory and constitutional law. That court order reaffirmed Philadelphia as a Sanctuary City, causing leftists to dance along with the mayor.
But the city has changed drastically since 2018.
Deterioration is visible everywhere now. Businesses close early because of crime. Those that remain open employ multiple security guards. Neighborhoods have become armed camps. Homeless encampments—the tents are sometimes the size of large wigwams in old cowboy movies—spring up overnight, as people you thought could never be homeless, such as the cheerleader-looking girl with blonde hair in a college sweatshirt, beg for money at traffic intersections.
Random gunshots come and go and often mix with fireworks set off by jobless young men exorcising their frustrations.
Amidst these downturns, what does the mayor do?
He signs a trans refugee executive order, a “processed-like liverwurst” EO that has been manufactured in other Democrat-run cities and states because, as The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, “In nearly half of states nationwide, Republican-led legislatures have enacted legislation to restrict access to puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgical treatments for transgender youth.”
All of which means: because Republicans are protecting children, progressive Democrats have to declare war.
The press is equally complicit when it reports on trans issues.
The Inquirer, despite its leftist obsession, did not hide the fact that most objections to gender-affirming health care across the country are based on the fact that these bills concern children or minors, not adults.
But the trend in most publications now that report on gender-affirming health care is to avoid the term “transgender youth,” instead replacing that with ambiguous terminology like “patients” or “providers.”
Precautionary language like this is an important public relations tool, especially since words like “children” or “minor” call into question heated debates about parental rights versus the dictates of government.
The recent “One Million March 4 Children” in Canada is a case in point.
These protests took place in a number of Canadian cities, attracting thousands of people as well as angry counter protests from the far left. The protests focused on the teaching of sexual education and gender ideology in schools, the latter being the most controversial since it is dangerous and destructive to allow children, whose minds are still developing, to make life-altering decisions at such a young age.
Reporting on the demonstrations in Canada, one left wing publication expressed shock at the presence of so many immigrant and Muslim communities in opposition to gender ideology taught in schools.
The simplistic thinking from the left assumes that because they (the left) condemn so-called Islamophobia, and support open borders and unchecked immigration, they deserve unquestioning loyalty when it comes to denying the sovereignty of God and the belief that we do not belong to anyone but ourselves.
One Calgary You Tuber reported that pro-gender ideology counter protesters in that city were trying to abuse anti-gender ideology parents with bullhorns that drowned out speakers.
“The parents moved away multiple times but the mafia just kept following and pushing. I have never seen such hatred in my life. It’s far worse than I thought. They were males in all black with balaclavas and Antifa flags. Pray for humanity,” the YouTuber said.
Pray for humanity, indeed.
Ironically, many of the anti-ideology protesters stated repeatedly that they were not anti-homosexual or even anti-LGBTQ, and that their sole objection was around gender and sexual education in schools.
That made no difference, of course. To the counter-protesters, they were transphobic, homophobic and deserving of hate.
Meanwhile, back in Philadelphia, after Mayor Kenney signed his executive order, the (transgender) executive director of the Philadelphia office of LGBT affairs, Celena Morrison (the fact that the executive director is transgender speaks volumes about the state of the traditional gay and lesbian movement) stated that such care can benefit youth “who experience the psychological distress that comes when the gender and sex assigned at birth don’t match a person’s identity….”
This is the same gobbledygook that not only points to Philadelphia’s decline, but to an overall cultural collapse. As iconoclastic feminist Camille Paglia has stated, “Transgender mania is a sign of cultural collapse.”
But Democrats aren’t budging on the trans issue at all.
In June, New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams signed an executive order protecting gender-affirming care. In 2022, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy ordered state agencies not to cooperate with other states’ efforts to punish patients or providers.
Democrat myth-making also equates objections to the teaching of gender ideology in elementary schools and the transgender mutilation of children’s bodies, as entirely anti-LGBT.
But it’s only anti-LGBT because there is a ‘t’ in LGBT that should never have been there in the first place.
Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/trans-refugee-bills-sweeping-dem-cities/
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