Free Republic

Josiah Wise has face tattoos and a prominent septum piercing that almost touches his lips. Some days he wears bright blue makeup, or colors his facial hair neon pink. He has a collection of dolls and often carries one with him. Equally eclectic is his musical background. He grew up singing in church choir, attended college for classical music, and now is finding his sound at a cross-section of gospel, R&B and avant-garde pop, performing under the name serpentwithfeet. serpentwithfeet, Soil On his full-length debut album, soil (released June 8), he looks back to the sounds of his religious upbringing...

If you went to school, earned a bachelors or master’s degree, yet were being turned down for jobs you are qualified for because of the way you look or talk, how would you feel? How would you feel if this was happening to your spouse or your children? You’d be infuriated, right? There are thousands of transgender men and woman who face this situation with most job applications they submit. Transgender people are over “four times more likely than the general population to have a household income under $10,000,” even though 47% of them, more than the general population, have...

Forget extreme plastic surgery, tattoos and piercings - a minority are taking body modification to the next level - by voluntarily cutting off their own limbs. A body modifier has exclusively revealed how his "extra" limbs feel alien, and has resorted to the drastic measure of self-mutilation - because he actually want to be disabled. Dr. Michael First, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, has led investigations into this bizarre and extremely rare psychiatric condition which he is calling body integrity identity disorder (BIID). Also known as amputee identity disorder, it gives people a fierce desire to rid themselves...

Like many new dads, Sabastion Sparks knew parenting would come with serious challenges. But most new dads didn't give birth to their child. They didn't breastfeed them. And they don't endure glares from strangers when they go shopping with their wife and their toddler son. Sabastion, 24, is a transgender man who lives with his wife Angel in suburban Atlanta. Assigned the female gender at birth, he began transitioning five years ago . It's a process that felt more complete last month when he had surgery to remove his breasts.

After achieving some notoriety as Donald Trump’s ghostwriter for “Art of the Deal,” Tony Schwartz has been seeking a second bite at the celebrity apple, advancing the notion that Trump is—not to put too fine a point on it—crazy. And of course, the liberal media is happy to provide Schwartz a platform to promote his theory. So there was Schwartz on CNN this morning: “I’m going to say it very bluntly: he’s mentally ill . . . He’s prima facie mentally ill: he has a personality disorder.”Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

A Honduran immigrant reportedly took his own life while in custody after his wife and child were separated from him at the U.S.-Mexico border. Marco Antonio Muñoz, 29, killed himself in the cell of a Texas jail last month, according to the Starr County sheriff’s department incident report obtained by The Washington Post. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not publicly disclose the death, according to The Post. The Hill has reached out to DHS for comment. U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Starr County authorities did not respond to The Washington Post’s requests for comment. Muñoz’s death occurred...

I don’t wish to be unkind. But facts are facts. A victim is someone who has something bad happen to him, totally against his will and without any say or control in the matter. Suicide does not “happen” to someone. It’s something one does to oneself. Most of us are drowning in virtue-signaling and political correctness — so much so that we can’t even see it. It seems cool to mourn people who kill themselves even though you never knew them. How do we know we would have liked and admired them had we even known them personally? Consider some...

Would you rather date an MS-13 gang member or someone who supports President Donald Trump? That's what Daily Caller reporters Stephanie Hamill and Julia Nista asked young people on the streets of Washington, D.C. Stunningly, a majority of respondents said they would rather date a member of the brutal gang, which operates by the motto "kill, rape, control." When asked why they wouldn’t date a Trump supporter, people said those who back the president "weren't for them" and they would "never" do it.

Officers responded to the location on “a service call involving a subject brandishing a knife in the area of Planet Fitness,” he said Police say the suspect – described as in his 30s -had a folding knife that was approximately four inches in length, which he was waving around in the parking lot. Witnesses said the man was holding a snake and doing some sort of “ritualistic dance” with the snake in the parking lot, according to CBS2’s Michele Gile. An aquarium was spotted at the scene, but no snake was spotted at the location. When the man refused to...

The plane landed safely at San Jose Mineta International Airport, about 50 miles south of San Francisco. The airline says the passenger accused of smoking was turned over to law enforcement. The remaining 32 passengers were placed on other aircraft to continue their trips. Passengers reported smelling smoke, and one said he smelled marijuana. “It looked like that someone needed to smoke a joint on a plane, and he went into the bathroom, smoked his blunt, and set off the fire alarm,” passenger Jonathan Burkes said.

Chelsea Manning alarmed her friends Sunday night with a pair of since-deleted tweets in which she contemplated suicide. The U.S. Senate candidate — a former soldier and whistleblower — who is hoping to unseat a Maryland Democrat shared a jarring photo of what appeared to be her poised to jump from the ledge of an unidentified high-rise building. The figure in the photo was wearing pink pajamas and had painted toenails. It's unclear where the photo was taken.

US Army Chaplain Tim Brown of Sanford is fighting for his husband facing deportation back to Honduras. "I will not stop. I am determined. I am persistent. and I am an advocate for humanity," said Brown. On Thursday, Brown's Husband, Sergio Avila Rodriguez was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Charlotte. Sergio is now being held at a facility in Georgia. "I get a phone call and that's when Sergio says to me, 'I've been detained and they are deporting me,'" Brown said. Sergio escaped Honduras with his family when he was just 6 years old. Brown says...

Twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton spoke in Melbourne Thursday with Australia's first female prime minister Julia Gillard. The two discussed misogyny in politics and Clinton yet again blamed sexism for her 2016 loss, implying that the U.S. just couldn’t handle a leader who is a woman. “There is still a very large proportion of the population that is uneasy with women in positions of leadership,” Clinton told Gillard, “and so the easiest way to kind of avoid having to look at someone on her merits is to dismiss her on her looks.” Gillard compared the chants of “lock her up”...

This is the intersectional equivalent of a car wreck. It all took place in a Cornell class titled “Acting in Public� which seems to be a relatively normal speech class based on the syllabus. Last week, a student named Letitia Chai was set to do a practice run of her senior thesis but, for reasons explained below, wound up giving it in her underwear. The crisis began when her professor pointed out that Chai’s cut-off jean shorts might not be ideal for a major presentation. From the Cornell Daily Sun: “The first thing that the professor said to me...

“It wasn’t my performance,” Herbst said. “It was me.” Jess Herbst thought she had a good shot of becoming the first openly transgender mayor to be elected in Texas on Saturday. She’d already served in the post for two years — a first in its own right — after the sudden death of the town’s former mayor. And she’d done things like re-establish the planning and zoning board and push for more law enforcement funding in the North Texas town of New Hope, population roughly 700. But after a bruising campaign, she lost, coming in third in a contest of...

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- The news of Ben and Rene Ruiz's deaths come as a shock for the many people who described the couple as happy, loving and groundbreaking in the gay community. Houston police say the men, who were in the midst of a divorce, died in a murder-suicide inside a million-dollar home near the Galleria. Their bodies were discovered Thursday inside a bathroom at their home on Markham Street near Weslayan. "It's not truly set in yet," said Ben's longtime friend, Edward Sanchez. "I think deep down inside I'm waiting to hear from him." Sanchez said the couple...

The Counseling and Mental Health Center at the University of Texas at Austin recently launched a new program to help male students “take control over their gender identity and develop a healthy sense of masculinity.” Treating masculinity as if it were a mental health crisis, “MasculinUT” is organized by the school’s counseling staff and most recently organized a poster series encouraging students to develop a “healthy model of masculinity.” The program is predicated on a critique of so-called “restrictive masculinity.” Men, the program argues, suffer when they are told to “act like a man” or when they are encouraged to...

Cannabis is responsible for 91 per cent of cases where teenagers end up being treated for drug addiction, shocking new figures reveal...The findings also back up academic research, revealed in The Mail on Sunday over the past three years, that skunk is having a serious detrimental impact on the mental health of the young. At least two studies have shown repeated use triples the risk of psychosis, with sufferers repeatedly experiencing delusional thoughts. Some victims end up taking their own lives.

Nearly two-thirds of U.S. voters back legalizing marijuana, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday. Support for legalization hit 63 percent in the survey — the highest level of support recorded by a Quinnipiac poll. A third of American voters still oppose legalization, the poll found. Support for medical marijuana is even higher, at 93 percent. Only about 5 percent of respondents opposed it. The poll also found little support for Attorney General Jeff Sessions's decision earlier this year to rescind an Obama-era policy that paved the way for individual states to legalize marijuana without federal interference. Seventy percent...

Maryland Democrat also calls for national single-payer health care systemSenate hopeful Chelsea Manning said she’ll work to abolish federal immigrations and customs agencies if successful in her bid to unseat U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin, Maryland Democrat. Ms. Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst convicted of leaking classified documents to the WikiLeaks website, listed eliminating both the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) as top priorities on her platform unveiled Thursday. “We believe the solution to the so called ‘immigration’ issue, which amounts to nothing more than justification for ethnic cleansing in America, is not...