“Like Carlson, Vance had once opposed Donald Trump, and like Carlson, he had transformed into a prominent Trump supporter and a rabid participant in the culture wars. “We are effectively run in the country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs,” he told Carlson, “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to name Kamala Harris (and Pete Buttigieg, and AOC) as his prime examples of the childless leaders who should be excluded from positions of power.”
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“Vance appears to be a decent family man — someone who supports traditional conservative values, and is even willing to buck conventional GOP norms by supporting strong pro-family policies. But a quick perusal of his thoughts on women and gender reveal some unusual opinions that lie outside the American mainstream, beyond a stray comment about cat ladies.
Vance is staunchly opposed to abortion, and has suggested that it is wrong even in cases of rape and incest. He has compared the evil of abortion to that of slavery, and opposed the Ohio ballot measure ensuring the right to abortion in 2023. He also was one of only 28 members of Congress who opposed a new HIPAA rule that would limit law enforcement’s access to women’s medical records. He has promoted Viktor Orban’s pro-natalist policies in Hungary, which offer paybacks to married couples that scale up along with the number of children (a new Hungarian Constitution that banned gay marriage went into effect in 2012, so these benefits only serve “traditional” couples). Vance opposes same-sex marriage. During his 2022 Senate campaign, he suggested the sexual revolution had made divorce too easy (people nowadays “shift spouses like they change their underwear”), arguing that people in unhappy marriages, and maybe even those in violent ones, should stay together for their children. His campaign said such an insinuation was “preposterous,” but you can watch the video yourself and be the judge.”
“Ohio has banned gender-affirming care for minors and restricted transgender women’s and girls’ participation on sports teams, a move that has families of transgender children scrambling over how best to care for them.”
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“The new law bans gender-affirming surgeries and hormone therapies, and restricts mental health care for transgender individuals under 18.”
“A federal judge struck down Arkansas’ first-in-the-nation ban on gender-affirming care for children as unconstitutional.., the first ruling to overturn such a prohibition as a growing number of Republican-led states adopt similar restrictions.
U.S. District Judge Jay Moody issued a permanent injunction against the Arkansas law, which would have prohibited doctors from providing gender-affirming hormone treatment, puberty blockers or surgery to anyone under 18.”
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“Moody ruled that the prohibition violated the due process and equal protection rights of transgender youth and families. He said the law also violated the First Amendment rights of medical providers by prohibiting them from referring patients elsewhere.
“Rather than protecting children or safeguarding medical ethics, the evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients and that, by prohibiting it, the state undermined the interests it claims to be advancing,” Moody wrote in his ruling.”
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“The ruling affects only the Arkansas ban but may carry implications for the fates of similar prohibitions, or discourage attempts to enact them, in other states.”
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” At least 19 other states have enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming care for minors following Arkansas’ law”
“A federal judge delivered a stinging rebuke to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican-controlled Legislature over rules and a new state law that banned minors from receiving “puberty blockers” and other types of gender-affirming care.
U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle on Tuesday blocked the state from applying the ban to three minors whose parents are part of an ongoing lawsuit, saying they would “suffer irreparable harm” if they were not allowed to continue access to hormones and other types of treatment.”
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“The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association support gender-affirming care for adults and adolescents. But medical experts said gender-affirming care for children rarely, if ever, includes surgery. Instead, doctors are more likely to recommend counseling, social transitioning and hormone replacement therapy.”
“intersex is actually an umbrella that covers four parts of human biology: chromosomes, those X’s and Y’s that carry genetic information; gonads, the organs that produce eggs or sperm; the mixture of hormones coursing through a person’s veins; and what their genitalia looks like. An intersex person might have differences in one of these areas, or all of them.”
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“Not only is gender a spectrum, but actual physical, biological sex is a spectrum … And so it’s impossible to fit these bodies into a single box.”
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“Wong says it’s hard to know for sure what the rate of intersex traits are because there are so many differences that could be counted and because some differences go unnoticed without genetic testing — which most Americans never do. But she and Fraser worry that these laws could mandate that kind of test, say for participation in sports.”