Free Republic

The legal defense to "save women's sports" scored a big win in its Supreme Court battle over transgender athletes this week. After an Idaho trans athlete tried to have the potential landmark SCOTUS case dropped, a federal judge struck down the attempt to dismiss it and ruled that the case should proceed. U.S. District Judge David Nye, appointed by President Donald Trump in 2017, rejected former Boise State trans athlete Lindsay Hecox's motion to dismiss the case. The trans athlete started the legal battle in 2020, but tried to have it dismissed in September after the Supreme Court agreed in...

The journal iScience recently published a study showing that the share of Americans who read books for pleasure has fallen 40 percent over the last 20 years. Unfortunately, this decline has endured for generations. For example, among high school seniors in 1976, 11.5 percent did not read a single book for pleasure; by 2021, this had risen to 41 percent. It’s a similar situation in Britain. A recent survey revealed that 47 percent of adults do not read books by choice—roughly half the population of England. More worryingly, two-thirds of 16- to 24-year-olds describe themselves as “non-readers” or “lapsed” readers....

The world is waking up. This is great news for young people, great news for parents -- and terrible news for the doctors who had begun to profit from this madness. From UnHerd: Data from my new Centre for Heterodox Social Science report, 'The Decline of Trans and Queer Identity among Young Americans', shows that since 2023 both trans and queer identification have dropped sharply within Generation Z. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which conducts a large annual survey of US undergraduates, polled over 60,000 students in 2025. My analysis of the raw data shows that in...

California will seal records of transgender adults who change their names and gender markers on official documents and limit data sharing with federal agencies after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a handful of bills shoring up protections for transgender and nonbinary people as the White House has targeted the community for attack.

“. . . this time the story has escaped the narrative guardrails and some real reckoning looms.” —Jeff Childers Unwittingly, that New York Times headline is a wondrous case of the self-solving mystery. You come here to understand the many social and political mysteries of the day. I will attempt to unravel this hairball.Most obviously, the suspect, now dead, in Wednesday’s Minneapolis school shooting was not a “her.” He was a him, a 23-year-old male, Robert Westman, who had been pretending to be a female for some years since undergoing puberty, with the encouragement of his parents and the cultural...

...Regardless of the question of whether he has had his genitals amputated, Cox is not a woman, but an effigy of a woman. Sex is a biological reality, and it is not subordinate to subjective impressions, no matter how intense those impressions are, how sincerely they are held, or how painful they make facing the biological facts of life. No hormone injection or surgical mutilation is sufficient to change that. Genital amputation and mutilation is the extreme expression of the phenomenon, but it is hardly outside the mainstream of contemporary medical practice. The trans self-conception, if the autobiographical literature is...

Redefining marriage won't satisfy gay rights activists; they want to redefine reality. Segregating genders in marriage to suit the sexual attractions of less than 2% of the population isn't enough. This woman with same-sex attraction wants scientists to "try harder" and give "priority" to making it possible for two women to procreate. Michelle Cheever says: "I want to have babies the way straight people do." Huffington Post: What I mean is that I want the ease, the convenience, the — dare I say it — naturalness that straight people have when starting a family. I want both the simple beauty...