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2 Stories that Prove Conservative Christians Were Right All Along about Transgenderism

December 11, 2023

The Bible tells us all believers are one Body, and we must “bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). But politically and spiritually aware Christians share another burden: the burden of foresight. We often see so far ahead of current trends and events that no one believes our warnings. The divinely inspired wisdom of God’s Word empowers us to penetrate the media’s smokescreens, to discern the consequences of policies, and to “interpret the signs of the times” a degree or two more deeply than other commentators. While culture waves off our cautions and celebrates the triumph of secular values, events inevitably bear us out — sometimes faster than we had anticipated.

Two such stories occurred recently. They are bad news stories, yet they prove the warnings Christian conservatives made about the ultimate aims of left-wing ideology. Read them, share them without any bitterness or pride, and feel encouraged to continue taking your stand.

1. Transgender policies force an 11-year-old girl to sleep next to a boy on a field trip.

Elementary school field trips create lasting memories; unfortunately, for an 11-year-old girl in Colorado, radical transgender ideology caused lasting fear, discomfort, and trauma — just as conservative Christians warned.

The little girl and her parents, Joe and Serena Wailes, looked forward all year to going on a June trip to Philadelphia and the nation’s capital with her fifth grade class at Governor’s Ranch Elementary School in Littleton, Colorado (part of Jefferson County Public School District, or “Jeffco Public Schools”). Yet the first night, Serena received a phone call from her daughter, who stood shivering in the bathroom with a frightening message: The classmate assigned to share a bed with this 11-year-old girl had revealed “that he was a boy who identifies as transgender,” remembered Serena.

Before the trip, no one in the school told the Wailes family that their child’s room would include a male who only identified as female, much less that their daughter might be expected to sleep next to him. In fact, Jeffco Public Schools administrators told parents that boys and girls would stay on separate floors of the hotel. But their transgender “inclusive” policy put a boy inches away from her in bed.

Yet when the child, referred to in legal documents only as “D.W.,” asked to switch rooms, the teacher acting as her chaperone only let her move to another bed — and told her to lie about the reason, saying she wanted to be closer to the air conditioner. As soon as D.W. moved, her new bedmate graciously offered to let the boy (called “K.E.M.”) move, as well. After that, D.W. again requested, for a second time, to sleep in an all-female room. Finally, the girl’s chaperone moved the boy and another girl to a different room — and again lied, falsely claiming that she moved students to give a sick girl more space.

“Throughout the entire evening, K.E.M.’s privacy and feelings were always the primary concern of JCPS employees,” states the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which now represents the Wailes family. “After JCPS disregarded D.W.’s privacy and the Waileses’ parental rights, JCPS then silenced D.W., thus infringing on her freedom of speech.” The “JCPS teacher told the three girls that they were not allowed to tell anyone that K.E.M. was transgender, even though K.E.M. voluntarily chose to share this information.” That teacher ordered D.W. to lie about the whole uncomfortable incident, her mother told “The Ingraham Angle” on December 5.

The Wailes family contacted ADF in the hopes their twins, who are now in the fourth grade, can take the same field trip without the transgender drama-and-trauma. “This policy and practice violates the sincerely held religious beliefs of our clients and their children, the parental rights of them and other parents in your district, and the privacy rights of all students,” says the letter ADF sent to JCPS superintendent Tracy Dorland and the five members of the school board on Monday, December 4.

Presumably, being ordered to lie also violates their sincerely held religious beliefs. At one time, schools taught the Golden Rule; now, they command Christian children to violate the Ten Commandments.

ADF requests only that the school district inform all parents if their child might spend the night with a member of the opposite sex and allow parents to opt out. The outcome remains in question, but all of this was foreseeable. In fact, Christian conservatives foresaw this very scenario more than a decade ago.

In 2013, the Obama-Biden administration forced California’s Arcadia Unified School District to sign a resolution agreement about allowing trans-identifying teens to sleep with their classmates on school trips. The parents of a girl who identified as a boy sued the school district, because officials did let the girl stay in the boys’ hotel room on two trips in the fifth and seventh grades. The Obama administration joined the parents’ 2011 legal complaint that the district did not allow her “to bunk with [her] buddies in the boys’ cabin and without [her] father being present.” Federal pressure convinced Arcadia school officials to knuckle under and sign an agreement with the civil rights divisions of Obama’s Justice and Education departments promising to victimize girls in perpetuity.

The Obama administration celebrated the agreement. Letting boys and girls sleep in the same room will help them “learn and thrive in a safe and nondiscriminatory environment,” said Jocelyn Samuels, then-acting assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division under Obama. “This agreement” shows the Obama administration’s “commitment to civil rights enforcement runs deep and nowhere is that commitment more meaningful than in our schools,” puffed then-U.S. Attorney André Birotte Jr.

Three years later, the Obama administration attempted to force this policy on every school district in the country. In May 2016, the Obama administration sent out an eight-page “Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students” saying that all “recipients of [f]ederal financial assistance … must allow transgender students to access housing consistent with their gender identity and may not … disclose personal information when not required of other students.” Furthermore, “there is no medical diagnosis or treatment requirement that students must meet as a prerequisite to being treated consistent with their gender identity,” so if a boy says he’s a girl, he’s a girl.

At the time, this author called this provision, “The most dangerous, and underreported, part of Obama’s transgender edict.”

Alongside this legal threat, the Obama administration sent out a 25-page booklet of proposed policies for schools to adopt. The booklet favorably quoted one district’s policy to promote “the goals of maximizing the [transgender] student’s social integration and equal opportunity to participate in overnight activity and athletic trips, ensuring the [transgender] student’s safety and comfort, and minimizing stigmatization of the [again, transgender] student.” That’s nearly identical to Jeffco’s policy on transgender overnight accommodations, adopted in November 2013.

The cultural revolutionary’s principles do not allow him to make forcing boys and girls into the same bedroom a one-night stand. The 2016 Obama policy also applies to “housing” at “colleges, and universities” — that is, to college dorms. The Democratic Party’s radical activists want your daughter to show up at college and learn that her roommate is a man who identifies as female, and have no legal recourse.

Obama began laying the legal framework for males to claim a “civil right” to sleep next to uneasy females early in his first term. By 2011, then-HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan wrote a new federal rule banning landlords who receive Section 8 housing funds from “discrimination” based on gender identity. Even then, the policy let landlords inquire about a tenant’s biological sex if they would share “sleeping areas or bedrooms.” A dozen years later, public schools do not allow 11-year-old girls the same privilege. Obama sought multiple legal avenues, including the Arcadia case, to establish the legal precedent that barring boys from sleeping next to girls constitutes sex-based discrimination against “students who do not conform to sex stereotypes.” At the time, this author called Obama’s view “jurisprudence by sophistry, a legal theory crafted from word association.” But Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch allowed Obama’s legal revolution to succeed in the 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County ruling.

The Wailes’ case is instructive, because the Left is trying to ensure it will not be an isolated case. Personnel is policy, and the policy of forcing underage girls to share a bed with trans-identifying males is plowing full-steam ahead under Democratic presidents. The two people who signed the 2016 letter telling schools to allow incidents like the Wailes’ family trauma both occupy leading positions in the Biden administration: Biden appointed Vanita Gupta, who was Obama’s assistant attorney general for Civil Rights, as the number-two person in his Justice Department, and reappointed Catherine Lhamon, then-assistant secretary for Civil Rights at the DOE, to the exact same post she held under Obama. He also rewarded the two figures in the Arcadia settlement: Biden named Jocelyn Samuels as vice chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to inflict her views on HR departments nationwide, while Obama appointed the U.S. Attorney, André Birotte Jr. a federal judge in the Central District of California shortly after the resolution.

Democratic administrations are happy to put boys in your daughter’s bed against her will. The Obama and Biden administrations have convinced public school administrators to focus on LGBT-identified students’ “comfort,” not your daughter’s safety or modesty.

Christian conservatives must broadcast this case — and the fact that we accurately analyzed the legal precedents that led up to it — at every opportunity. Incidents like the humiliation and potential victimization of this 11-year-old girl will continue until we do.

2. Ohio Issue 1 does intend to legalize transgender surgeries.

In November, Ohio voters unwisely approved Issue 1, a constitutional amendment which states, “Every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to” abortion. Much of the debate hinged on the definition of “reproductive decisions.” Critics from Protect Women Ohio and the Center for Christian Virtue rightly noted the vaguely-worded amendment could create a “right” for minors to have transgender procedures or surgeries without their parents’ knowledge. As this author revealed, the groups behind Issue 1 openly support transing minors without their parents’ input.

Predictably, legacy news outlets around the state ran “fact checks” branding concerns abouttransgenderism and parents’ rights false (sometimes on the basis of gender studies “experts”). The Associated Press accused conservatives of spreading “misinformation.”

Exactly three weeks after the election, Ohio Democrats have essentially admitted they always intended Issue 1 to cover transgender procedures — and are trying to codify that into state law. On November 28, Democrats in the state legislature introduced the so-called “Reproductive Care Act” (H.B. 343), which states that “reproductive health care … means gender affirming care.” The relevant section reads in full:

‘Reproductive health care’ means all medical, surgical, counseling, or referral services that are lawful in Ohio or the receipt of products relating to the human reproductive system that is lawful in Ohio, including services or products relating to the use or intended use of a particular medicine or device, medical service or procedure, practice, or similar intervention, that are related to the human reproductive system, including fertility-related medical procedures or medicines; sexually transmitted disease prevention, testing, or treatment; gender affirming care; and family planning services and counseling, such as those related to birth control medication or supplies, other contraception methods, sterilization procedures, pregnancy testing, or the intended or actual initiation or termination of a pregnancy.” (Emphasis added.)

“With the passage of Issue 1, we have made abortion access a constitutional right,” said the bill’s sponsor, State Rep. Anita Somani (D-Dublin). “However, there is much that still needs to be done to remove barriers to care and improve access. The Reproductive Care Act will help to do both.” As of this writing, the bill is sponsored or co-sponsored by 30 of the 32 Democrats in the Ohio House of Representatives.

“Ohio Dems have offered their first interpretation of what reproductive health care means, & I’d like an apology from every reporter, law professor, and troll who accused me of lying and/or transphobic-saber-rattling when I said it would include gender affirming care,” wrote Beth Vanderkooi, executive director of Greater Columbus Right to Life.

The Left’s victory lap isn’t exactly news. Immediately after the election, Planned Parenthood announced its next move would be to “dismantle abortion stigma”; as this author exposed, the abortion franchise’s “End Stigma” website explicitly links “abortion stigma” to transgender procedures. (“The right to access abortion and the right to access gender-affirming health care — they are built on the same foundation,” one of its featured writers states.) But the Democratic bill brings the entire party structure out of the closet.

The good news is, Democrats have no chance of passing this law through Ohio’s Republican-dominated legislature, much less getting it signed by its Republican governor, this session. The bad news is, they don’t have to. The Left merely needs to shop around for a friendly judge, who will agree the imprecise language of Ohio’s now-updated constitution covers “gender-affirming care” for people of all ages and voila, a new constitutional right will be created by judicial fiat — just as the Left invented the constitutional “rights” to abortion and same-sex marriage. And just as Christian conservatives said all along.

The Bible says the “fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7). That may explain why Christian conservatives, like you, penetrated directly to the heart of these issues, and why your prescient insights can forecast events well into the future. God revealed the inner essence of the issues to us, allowing us to apply those principles on a case-by-case basis and draw appropriate conclusions. The next time media “fact-checkers,” self-appointed experts, or friends and family members dismiss your warnings as baseless “slippery slope” speculation, remind them of these two stories. Take comfort that history always follows the design crafted by the King of ages (I Timothy 1:17). And take courage to continue taking your stand.

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.