Behind the Curtain of the Gender Game
“It was all a sham.” After four long and difficult years, that’s how Jamie Shupe started making sense of his life again.
“It was all a sham.” After four long and difficult years, that’s how Jamie Shupe started making sense of his life again. To the LGBT community, he’d been a hero — a trailblazer in the transgender movement that’s upending society. But there’s a lot more to the story of America’s first “nonbinary” person than that. And he hopes the world is listening.
“I’m one of the lucky ones,” he says now. In a compelling piece for the Daily Signal, he talks about his winding journey from a gender-free pioneer to a man who understands the horror of walking away from who he is. Like a lot of people struggling with their gender identity, Jamie’s pain started early. After a traumatic and abusive childhood, he became a soldier. Married, but addicted to pornography, he says his life began to fall apart. Plagued by post-traumatic stress disorder from his 18 years in the Army, Jamie’s mental health crisis exploded. He says he convinced himself that he was a woman and decided in 2013 to visit a nurse practitioner to ask for a hormone prescription.
Jamie’s nightmare could have ended there. Instead, it started a devastating six-year roller coaster that he is scarred by to this day. “If you don’t give me the drugs, I’ll buy them off the internet,” he told the nurse. “I should have been stopped,” he says soberly, “but out-of-control, transgender activism had made the nurse practitioner too scared to say no.” She never looked into his background of PTSD or possible bipolar or personality disorders. He walked out of her office on that very same day with a prescription for estrogen.
“The best thing that could have happened would have been for someone to order intensive therapy. Instead, quacks in the medical community hid me in the women’s bathroom with people’s wives and daughters. ‘Your gender identity is female,’ these alleged professionals said. The medical community is so afraid of the trans community that they’re now afraid to [accurately diagnose people]…They just kept helping me to harm myself.”
Only one therapist tried to stop Jamie from “crawling into this smoking rabbit hole.” When she did, he says with regret, “I not only fired her, I filed a formal complaint against her.” But by then, the whole façade was already starting to crumble. Jamie looked in the mirror one day, and everything came tumbling down. “When the fantasy of being a woman came to an end, I asked two of my doctors to allow me to become nonbinary instead of female to bail me out.” Desperate to be let off the hook for his failed sex change, they did.
By that time, Jamie was being pumped full of hormones — the equivalent of 20 birth control pills a day. To “escape,” he decided to lead the crusade for a “mythical third gender.” To the cheers of LGBT activists, an Oregon judge granted that wish, declaring him the first legal “nonbinary” person in American history. Overnight, he became an instant celebrity. From television interviews to New York Times’s features, Jamie had celebrity status. Suddenly, far-Left groups like Lambda Legal were contacting him, sensing an opening to tear down the walls of the only true sexes.
Eventually, the weight of this charade was too much. Despite the intense pressure from LGBT groups, Jamie found his voice. He came out publicly against open transgenderism in the military and the indoctrination of gender-confused children in 2017. Suddenly, he says, “LGBT organizations stopped helping me. Most of the media retreated with them. Their solution was to completely ignore me and what my story had become.” After all, they’d gotten what they wanted. Eleven states now have nonbinary options because of Jamie. And what does he have? A lifetime of regrets.
“I should have been treated,” he shakes his head. But that’s becoming more impossible by the day, thanks to a fierce campaign against counseling for people like Jamie. The unforgiving Left has made the medical community — like the education, sports, and business fields — terrified to embrace the truth and stop people from making a mess of their lives. Their stories are ones of “crippling levels of depression” and suicidal thoughts — even after getting the bodies they think they want. Ask surgeon Miroslav Djordjevic. Behind the transgender flag-waving and pride-marching are real people in real pain. And like Jamie, they’re the puppets of a radical movement that doesn’t care about anything but advancing their agenda.
Some people are fortunate enough to find their way out. But, as Walt Heyer pointed out a wistful USA Today op-ed, it’s time they’ll never get back. As for Jamie, he’ll live with those wounds forever. But don’t feel sorry for him, he says. Learn from him. “Two fake gender identities couldn’t hide the truth of my biological reality. There is no third gender or third sex… I played my part in pushing forward this grand illusion. I’m not the victim here. My wife, daughter, and the American taxpayers are. They are the real victims.”
Originally published here.
Trump Deploys DOJ in Military Reboot
The Democrats’ 2020 hopefuls certainly have an interesting political strategy. They find out where the American people stand on an issue and then take a completely different view. It doesn’t matter where the country draws the line on abortion, infanticide, immigration, or national security, this field is out to prove just how tone deaf a party can be.
Not every good policy is a popular one. But fortunately for Donald Trump, most of his agenda has been both. We’ve watched him fight for life, borders, religious liberty, the economy, strong families, and — in probably the gutsiest decision of his term — the military. When this president walked into the commander-in-chief’s office and slammed the breaks on his predecessor’s open transgender policy, the troops cheered. After all, 61 percent thought it was a terrible idea to begin with.
It’s taken two years and a flurry of court challenges to accomplish it, but the Trump administration is one memo away from putting the military back on its feet after Barack Obama’s social engineering. Thanks to the Supreme Court, America’s activist judges can no longer use the power of their injunctions to stop the policy from taking effect. And last Friday, the Justice Department made it clear that the president is moving full steam ahead to put its partial ban on transgender service in place.
“In light of the district court’s decision yesterday to stay the preliminary injunction in Stone v. Trump … there is no longer any impediment to the military’s implementation of the Mattis policy,” Justice Department lawyers wrote in a filing in federal court. “Defendants therefore respectfully provide notice to the Court that the Acting Secretary of Defense plans to release a Directive-Type Memorandum formally implementing the new policy in the near future.”
According to the Rasmussen polling, the American people are on board — which, of course, means a host of Democratic candidates are not. In their bid to out-radical each other, a string of hopefuls had less than kind things to say about the president’s goal of restoring order to the ranks. Despite stacks of evidence about the deadly side effects of transgenderism in the military, Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) called the president’s policy an insult to “our collective values.” (By “our,” I assume he means the tiny island of Democratic extremists?) Not letting men dress like women is “a national security threat,” he argued on Twitter.
Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) tried to paint it as an “insult” to our troops, which will be difficult to do since the majority of them agree with the president’s decision. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), meanwhile, tried to suggest that the founding fathers would have supported putting mentally unstable Americans in uniform. It’s “unconstitutional,” she insists. But, as experts have said for years: there’s no such thing as a “right to serve” in the military. As former Defense Secretary James Mattis pointed out: “The vast majority of Americans from ages 17-24 — that is, 71 percent — are ineligible to join the military for medical, mental, or behavioral reasons…The Department honors all citizens who wish to dedicate, and perhaps even lay down, their lives in defense of the nation — even when the Department, in the best interest of the military, must decline to grant their wish.”
Already, as of February 1, the Pentagon has forked over $7,943,906.75 to gender reassignment surgeries, hormones, and psychotherapy. That’s millions of dollars it could have spent equipment, salaries, and training. Instead, we’re blowing through taxpayer dollars so that troubled service members can use the military as their free ticket to elective surgery. Not a penny of that is going to the DOD’s real mission: fighting and winning wars.
What these men and women need isn’t a spot on the battlefield — but help fighting the real war within. As veterans like Jamie Shupe will tell you, the worst thing America can do is indulge these fantasies and put the country — and these people — at risk.
Originally published here.
Socialism: From A to Generation Z
It’s an interesting time in American politics when our candidates have to clarify that they aren’t socialists. But unfortunately, in the wild Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez times in which we live, that’s the new state of Democratic play. And while Americans continue to joke about Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) real identity, the senator says she isn’t a fraction Marxist.
Desperate to distinguish herself in a 2020 Democratic field, Senator Warren told a Texas crowd “I am not” when asked if she was a Democratic socialist. “All I can tell you is what I believe — there’s an enormous amount to be gained from markets. Markets create opportunities… but markets have to have rules. They have to have a cop on the beat,” she argued. Maybe Warren is one of the few Democrats tapping into Middle America’s unease about socialism. Or maybe she just wants to carve out her own space in a field of unapologetic radicals. Either way, she’s on the record.
So, apparently, is the next generation. According to a new Harris poll, Generation Z seems hypnotized by the glamorous version of socialism that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is making popular with kids. Wide majorities think the government should offer universal health care (73 percent) and free college tuition (67 percent). Another 49 percent said they wished they lived in a socialist country — proving just how little they know about an ideology that’s destroyed national economies and led to evil empires that persecute, starve, impoverish, and endanger people.
Maybe a few months in Venezuela, where families are literally dying of hunger, would cure today’s young people of their romantic ideas about an ideology that helped build the Berlin war. But then, their ideas about socialism were formed by Bernie Sanders — not the Cold War. It’s easy to cheer Ocasio-Cortez’s version of socialism, Philip DeVoe writes, because it “isn’t about the redistribution of wealth through workers’ seizing the means of production, but about accelerating the timeline for radical liberal change. For young liberals disillusioned by capitalism and by both parties’ failure to achieve the political ends they desire, it is all gain and no pain.”
For liberals in general, the Huffington Post’s Zach Carter points out, it isn’t so much about liking socialism as it is despising the president. “The Democrats have become radicalized in no small part because of their hatred of Donald Trump. And because that is the defining mindset of the Left these days, it creates breathing room for other forms of radicalism. To them, capitalism has come to mean ‘unaccountable rich people ripping off the world,’ while ‘socialism’ simply means ‘not that'… When one is unpopular the other becomes popular by default. It doesn’t seem to matter that very, very, very few people can define socialism.”
It’s no coincidence that these same kids who like socialism haven’t heard of Mao Zedong, Vladimir Lenin, and Che Guevara. Until we start teaching real civics, our public schools will continue to put future generations on an ideological path that ends in the most unjust government known to man.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
