When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie. –Yevgeny Yevtushenko
It’s good to be here, isn’t it? In the fold of 2025. On the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th president of the United States? And if you are like me, there’s no love lost for the long and dismal reign of the Biden administration. For a dizzying four years riddled with a languishing economy, draining warfare, and a total disregard for law and order in cities and towns across the land. For the wreckage and corruption of an administration that so casually shucks off even a nod to basic human values.
And there’s hope now, too, for another victory: The abolition of the lie that is gender ideology, and a return to something so ridiculously basic. A fundamental truth: The acknowledgment that we are each one of two gamete-producing members of the human species.
Man or woman, male or female. In other words, with rare exception, card carrying members of bodies imbedded with xx or xy genes. In fact, virtually every cell in the human body is stamped with xx or xy chromosomes, a fundamental reality of biological sex. Simple facts that make the world go round. A small verity we each learned once in a class called human biology.
Facts we must not be afraid to speak of.
It has been a long road for those who have followed and fought for such biological truth, for the acknowledgement of womanhood as real, for the protection of children who have been lied to and devastated by falsehoods about their bodies. For all of those who have been swindled by the biggest medical scandal of modern times.
And it all hit home, too. Here in Harrisonburg City and Rockingham County, the repercussion of this madness has affected children and adults alike. School curriculums have been imbedded with the malarkey of “gendered souls” and “trans kids.” Children have been instilled with the freakish nonsense that they can change sex. For me, it became personal. An obsession. A matter of saving my own sanity. A matter of saving children, especially young women, from the pernicious grip of an anti-woman, anti-child ideology.
Two years ago, I wrote a piece that appeared in the DNR’s Open Forum. Support Youngkin’s Model Policies, it was titled. These were the model policies meant to counteract the bizarre and nonsensical rules about “trans” rights put forth by former Governor Ralph Northam.
It appears here:
Humans are a strange lot, rational, but susceptible to groupthink and easily captured en masse by absurd fallacies. This is evidenced by the rise of transgender ideology and the many who have jumped on the bandwagon in a frenzied acceptance of a cult wrapped in the guise of a civil rights movement. So unhinged have the masses become from reality that prominent individuals like J.K. Rowling are publicly scorned for stating biological fact: Men cannot be women, and women are not men.
Schools have long been tacit vehicles for this propaganda. Now, they continue as active vectors, thoroughfares for the antiscientific flow of gender dogma which teaches that children can be born in the wrong body and can change sex.
Virginia is dealing with the fallout that defines this cultlike movement. In 2023, Gov. Glenn Youngkin released “Model Policies on Ensuring Privacy, Dignity, and Respect for All Students and Parents in Virginia Schools”, which reverses Ralph Northam’s rule that students be recognized by their “gender identities” and not their biological sex. On Aug. 28, the Rockingham County School Board met to discuss these revamped policies. The next meeting was scheduled for Sept. 11.
The harm done by Ralph Northam’s legislation is devastating. It contradicts established science by claiming that human biology is not real. Democratic states like California and New Jersey push the nonsense that teachers should not inform parents when children take on an opposite sex identity. In many states boys who identify as girls are playing on female sports teams. Grown men are stealing women’s trophies in the sports world. Girls have been assaulted in their own bathrooms by boys who claim female identities. Most people are not aware that in states like Maine, New Jersey, and California violent male felons are housed in women’s prisons because they claim to be female.
The medical and psychological fallout of gender tyranny will be with us for a long time: “Treatments” for “gender dysphoric” children are doled out in more than 100 gender clinics across the country, including our own UVA. Puberty blockers, wrong sex hormones and surgeries are primitive medicine, not unlike the gruesome and archaic practice of trepanation, a 7,000-year-old practice of boring holes in the skull to “cure” disease. There is no scientific basis for any of the so-called gender therapies and that truth is coming to light. It is simply not possible to change one’s sex. Physicians who claim otherwise are charlatans doing irrevocable harm to children and adults.
The truth is that this top-down movement has been furthered by the likes of Big Pharma and a host of NGOs their synergistic effect heightened and propagated by the Democratic party. The Biden administration brazenly heralds the LGBTQ community as a protected class and has proposed changes to Title IX that would obliterate the rights of female athletes. Leftist teachers’ unions enshrine LGBTQ into school curricula. Democratic congresspeople from across the country have, with few exceptions, voted against laws intended to protect girls’ sports and prevent the medicalization of children under the guise of “gender-affirming care”.
We are in a conundrum. Society, led by the Democrat-elites, has swapped science for a flimsy gnosticism. Like flat-earthers shouting blasphemy, gender ideologues defend a regressive, antiempirical ideology against the established science of biology. And this ideology is spread by school systems across the land.
Though gender hucksters portray those who don’t go along with their lies as right-wingers or religious fanatics, the truth is quite different: Pushback is coming from all quarters, including radical leftist feminist Kara Dansky, who understands that gender ideology is anti-woman and misogynistic at its core. It’s coming from gays and lesbians who know that the trans movement is targeting boys and girl who are confused about their sexuality. Brave pediatrician, Dr. Julia Mason, a Democrat, speaks out against the lies of mainstream “gender medicine”. Atheist and esteemed evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, has joined the fray, for he understands that human beings are always the sex that they were born, and that natal bodies are not “assigned” a sex at birth. Children who have been irrevocably maimed by “gender medicine” are seeking justice from Texas law firms like Campbell, Miller and Payne that represent the growing number of detransitioners who carry the stigmata of these primitive treatments for life.
The time to speak out is now. Strategically and with the weight of science on your side.
Tell the RCPS school board that a stable and educated society cannot be cross-pollinated with the nonsense of gender woo. It is a regressive, tyrannical farce.
It’s a Kafkaesque nightmare from which we need to awaken.
_________________________
Oh, but momentum is on our side. Now. More than ever.
We are advancing, advancing in small steps. A slow dance first; then a hustle. Voices rising. Speaking up and out against the madness that is entangled in the machinations of a Democratic party that has jumped the rails. It’s important to remember, too, that this was a slow and insidious ride. The enshrining of “trans rights” began with the Obama administration. Obama, after all, framed the specious argument for the “transgender” person; bolstered and helped to enshrine in law a category of factitious humans who are forever marginalized and in need of civil rights protection.
But a swindle it was. And a swindle it will always be. In even plainer words, a scam. A sleight of hand. There are no such people. Only those who are troubled, confused; then boondoggled by mayhem gathered around an outrageous ideology. By a conglomeration of bold and strategic agencies and NGO’s that bolster an agenda that has been deeply imbedded in Western culture.
We must not be afraid to say this.
In our own community, we owe thanks to many outspoken people, people like the three Harrisonburg City school teachers who brought forward a lawsuit against their own school system. Thanks to them, a stranglehold on reality is losing its grip.
Deborah Figliola, one of the teachers in this suit explained her own need to break the silence. Here, her words excerpted from an op-ed in The Citizen:
As a teacher, the last thing I ever thought I would do was bring a lawsuit against my own school district. But two and a half years ago, I had no choice when my district directed all staff to ask students for their preferred names and pronouns; to always use whatever pronouns a student requests, even when inconsistent with a student’s sex; and to keep that information secret from their parents.
Figliola and two other teachers – Kristine Marsh and Laura Nelson were represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a prominent law group that represents individuals’ religious liberty and free speech rights. The ensuing win is an essential piece in the filling of silence with truth, with a compendium of facts that center the world we live in.
It is also an exposure. Of the malevolent agenda that lines the boundaries within the Harrisonburg City School system, an agenda that obscures reality and suspends the parental right to know and care about our children’s mental health in favor of protecting the delusory “trans” child. At the core of this madness sits the tacit belief that a child’s welfare is situated closer to the state’s power than the traditional parent’s role.
We must never be afraid to acknowledge this.
And today’s inauguration fills another void of silence. Not only did President Trump lay out a resounding speech about America’s place in the world, he also signed an expansive executive order called “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” This order establishes a government-wide recognition of the biological reality of male and female, negating the obfuscation of gender gibberish. And though this action does not yet address the restriction of “gender affirming care” for minors, the Trump administration has vowed that future orders will apply this mission.
Executive orders, of course, provide great force in shaping government policies. In the coming years, we will see a return to the recognition of biological reality as it applies to law.
But challenges must be anticipated. These orders should not be interpreted as a sort of forever home for redress. Executive orders can be challenged by organizations like the ACLU. Reversal by future presidents is also a possibility, and without laws to bolster our arguments there is no guarantee that the logic enjoined in the executive order is permanent.
In the end it is vigilance we are after. A need to be alert to danger. To sound the alarm if necessary. Not doing so – isn’t that what brought us here?
We have been sitting in stilled silence for too long. Comfortable and numbed by a coterie of virtue signalers and elitists. It is up to us, all of us – tongues and voices of the many who stand together for the sake of reality and common sense – to save ourselves. To keep the radical outliers at bay.
We must never be afraid to say this.
1 comment
Margaret, many if not mist of the VA patriots have been saying this for years. We have not “sat silent”. We were insulted, castigated, shunned, cancelled but we held firm in the certain knowledge that were right. We are vindicated.