Free Republic

Russian nationalists called angrily on Sunday for President Vladimir Putin to make immediate changes to ensure ultimate victory in the Ukraine war, a day after Moscow was forced to abandon its main bastion in northeastern Ukraine. The swift fall of Izium in Kharkiv province was Russia's worst military defeat since its troops were forced back from the Ukrainian capital Kyiv in March. (snip)Moscow's almost total silence on the defeat - or any explanation for what had taken place in northeastern Ukraine - provoked significant anger among some pro-war commentators and Russian nationalists on social media. Neither Putin, who is Russia's...

CNN political commentator Ana Navarro said Thursday on “Tonight” that Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) was likely being removed from her House Republican Conference chairmanship because her colleagues were “embarrassed” that she showed them to be “a bunch of eunuchs on their knees worshipping at the altar of Donald Trump.” Navarro said, “This is not about right or left. This is about right or wrong. This is about truth or Trump. This is about convictions or conspiracies. I’m going to tell you something I just want to get off my chest that I’m so disgusted by, so disgusted by two women...

President Joe Biden issued an executive order authorizing free transgender surgery for all military personnel—both active duty and retired veterans. The surgery and follow-up lifelong hormone treatments can cost as much as $200,000 per patient. Biden called his action "both necessary from an equity standpoint and an augmentation of the unity my administration is determined to impose on this country." Press Secretary Jen Psaki rebuffed both critics' contentions that it is not the taxpayers' responsibility to fund this sort of elective surgery and questions about whether it detracts from the mission the armed forces are supposed to fulfill. "Historically, eunuchs...

Less than a year after having gender surgery, Nathaniel now says, “This whole thing was a bad idea. I am 19 years old, and I feel as though I have ruined my life.” It’s heartbreaking each time I get a letter from someone who underwent gender-change surgery and regrets it, especially someone as young as Nathaniel. With his permission, I’m telling a bit of his story to raise awareness of the young lives being ruined by the rush to surgery, and hoping that hearing the testimony of this young man will influence others on this path to slow down and...

More than fifty scholars who work at universities in the UK, US, Australia and elsewhere, and are part of a group of over a hundred, have signed a letter that was published last week in the U.K. Guardian. They expressed their concern about the detrimental effects of political correctness and the “trans” lobby on their ability to research and report their findings regarding so-called “transgenderism.” The scholars are from a myriad of fields, as they note: Our subject areas include: sociology, philosophy, law, criminology, evidence-informed policy, medicine, psychology, education, history, English, social work, computer science, cognitive science, anthropology, political science,...

On Wednesday, European Council President Donald Tusk tweeted the following: "Looking at latest decisions of @realDonaldTrump someone could even think: with friends like that who needs enemies. But frankly, EU should be grateful. Thanks to him we got rid of all illusions. We realise that if you need a helping hand, you will find one at the end of your arm. 8:36 AM - May 16, 2018" The vacuous stupidity of that statement is defined by what lies east and south of Brussels, where Tusk is based. Tusk's is the most pathetically ironic of tweets. He fires off his tweets...

Parents of a 17-year-old girl lost custody of their daughter for opposing her wish for transgender medical treatments. Judge Sylvia Sieve Hendon of Hamilton County, Ohio has allowed the girl to be taken into the custody of her grandparents – who support her medical transition – allowing them to make decisions that will further along her physical transition to the opposite sex. According to CNN, Hendon ordered that the family’s names not be released. The parents reportedly continued to call their daughter by her given name, rather than a male name, and refused to consent to hormone treatments that were...

Last week, the finance ministers of Europe's five biggest economies — Germany, France, the UK, Spain and Italy — wrote an anxious letter to their American colleague, US Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin, and copied it to all senior Republican politicians in the Congress and Senate. The letter's thrust: The draft US tax bill, if passed as written a week ago, would represent a break with global fair-taxation rules as applied to corporations, and represent a thinly disguised form of trade war. "The United States is Europe's single most important trade and investment partner," the finance ministers wrote. "It is important...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged the European Union on Monday to back a new U.S. peace initiative in the Middle East, after President Donald Trump’s unilateral decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital met with widespread condemnation and triggered clashes in the Palestinian territories. Netanyahu, making the first official visit by an Israeli premier to the EU’s Brussels headquarters in 22 years, told reporters that recognizing Jerusalem merely stated the reality on the ground. He said he expected many European countries to follow Trump’s lead. But EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, who chaired talks between Netanyahu and EU...

Germany’s top court on Wednesday required parliament to legally recognize a “third gender” from birth, potentially making it the first European country to offer intersex people the option of identifying as neither male nor female. Current regulations on civil status are discriminatory against intersex people, the Federal Constitutional Court said, noting that the sexual identity of an individual is protected as a basic right. Legislators must by the end of 2018 pass a new regulation to offer a third gender option in birth registers, the court added, ruling in favour of an appeal brought by an intersex person. In the...

Recently, during a radio show on which I appeared as a guest, a caller posed a question I frequently get asked: “Do the administration of cross-gender hormones and genital surgery change a boy into a girl or a girl into a boy?” The answer is simple: biologically, not at all. Underneath all the cosmetic procedures, vocal training, and hair growth or hair removal lies a physical reality. Biologically, the person has not changed from a man into a woman or vice versa. Sex is an indelible fact of a person’s biology. Specifically, it describes one’s biological makeup with respect to...

Like many young women, Ria Cooper dreams of one day getting married and having children. But the 23-year-old knows the odds are stacked against her. Not only because she was born a boy, but because she has now switched gender an astonishing three times in her short life. Ria – who was born Brad – became ­Britain’s youngest sex-swap patient at 15. Doctors controversially backed her belief she was a girl in a boy’s body. She was given blockers to stop her going through puberty, followed by injections of female hormones to impede face and chest hair and trigger the...

A transgender ex-Navy surgeon says she will perform free gender-confirming surgery for the service members on her list who have been affected by Donald Trump's new ban on trans people serving in the military. "If the commander-in-chief won't take care of our veterans, our veterans will," Dr. Christine McGinn told CNN's Michael Smerconish on Saturday. McGinn's transition began in 2000, the same year she was named senior flight surgeon at the Willow Grove Naval Air Station, then the largest reserve base in the country. She was later nominated for flight surgeon of the year for the entire U.S. Navy. Today,...

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump tweeted that he wouldn’t allow transgender individuals to serve in the military:

Would you be friends with a transgender person? A full 27 percent of American adults on a recent YouGov survey said no. Even fewer—less than 20 percent—said they would be open to dating a transgender person. The disappointing but unsurprising results reveal a sad truth about the transgender rights movement: Cultural acceptance has tended to lag behind formal recognition.

Democratic lawmakers on Thursday introduced a bill supporters say would make California the first state to add a third gender option on state identifying documents. State Sen. Toni Atkins' bill would add a non-binary gender marker option for driver's licenses, birth certificates, identity cards and gender change court orders. The San Diego Democrat says SB 179 would also simplify the process for changing one's gender on those documents. Transgender people face discrimination in their everyday lives when they use IDs that do not match the gender they appear to be, Atkins said. The legislation would help transgender people and those...

When Oregon resident Jamie Shupe quietly walked into a Portland, Oregon, courthouse this June and received permission to change their gender from female to "non-binary," they did so without the assistance of any nonprofit or national transgender advocacy group. Shupe's successful legal change to a third gender stunned the national LGBTQ community; many intersex and gender nonconforming people had dreamed of someday being able to opt out of "male" and "female" gender designations, but no one thought it could be done so easily. In the six months since Shupe became the first legally non-binary U.S. citizen, the amount of people...

A recent nationwide survey revealed that “60 percent of transgender Americans have avoided using public restrooms for fear of confrontation, saying they have been harassed and assaulted.” The “landmark” survey cites data based on the responses of 27,715 individuals, or an estimated 2 percent of the adult transgender population (which comprises only 0.6 percent of the entire U.S. population). Reuters refers to transgender people as a “severely understudied group whose experiences and challenges from medicine to law to economics and family relations are poorly understood.” And the National Center for Transgender Equality, the group that conducted the survey, hopes the...

Despite the Vatican’s assertion that a so-called sex-change surgery does not alter the sex of a person, Pope Francis has nevertheless chosen to refer to a woman who underwent a sex-change operation as a “man,” and also referred to her as having “married” another woman and admitted to receiving them in the Vatican last year. As with most of his most controversial remarks, the statements came during an in-flight press scrum. On October 2, on his return flight from his papal visit to Georgia and Azerbaijan, the Pope referred to a woman who “felt like a man” but “was physically...

Thomas Beatie's eyes filled with tears as he watched his beautiful bride Amber walk down the aisle just behind his beaming seven-year-old daughter Susan, scattering rose petals. His sons Austin and Jensen, dressed identically in little black suits and striped ties, stood nearby nervously checking the wedding bands in their care. To the casual observer, 42-year-old Beatie and 46-year-old Nichols looked like any other couple tying the knot. Yet Thomas was no ordinary groom - in 2008 he made headlines as the world's first pregnant man. Beatie was born female but started hormone treatment at 23 to become a man....