(NewsWars) Border Patrol releasing massive number of illegals into U.S.
Border Patrol is releasing busloads of illegals aliens at a gas station in Del Rio, Texas, according to reports.
Buses contracted by the federal government are dumping migrants two times per day at the fuel stop, where many later board Greyhound buses to San Antonio with the help of ‘charity’ workers.
Most of the migrants are allegedly ‘families’ who have been camped near the Del Rio-Acuna International Bridge on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande in recent weeks.
“On-site support assists migrants on buses from the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition. Two volunteers were present at the Stripes gas station Wednesday evening,” reported Anna Giaritelli for the Washington Examiner.
“The Greyhound bus pulled in at 5:35 p.m., and a white boarded-up school bus pulled in several minutes later with detainees onboard — moments away from being out of federal custody. Just over a dozen people stepped off the white bus and walked across the lot to board the commercial vehicle.”
Border Patrol released just over a dozen Haitian migrants at the Stripe’s Wednesday evening. Large government-contracted buses drop off families twice a day at a gas station on a busy commercial road in the middle of town. https://t.co/SGy4u1csFJ#DelRioTexaspic.twitter.com/YRdc6lXkD4
Haitian migrant families released by federal immigration authorities depart Del Rio. They are allowed to travel anywhere in the US. pic.twitter.com/uuXG4X515X
Federal officials hopes to empty the Del Rio encampment by Friday night, sources have told the Examiner, as scenes of over 15,000 illegal aliens squatting on U.S. soil in dire conditions have created bad “optics” for the Biden administration.
However, reports indicate the vast majority of illegals who have arrived in Del Rio are not being deported but instead let loose in the U.S.
“As of Thursday morning, fewer than 4,000 noncitizens remained under the bridge. Roughly 3,000 to 5,000 of the 15,000 have been deported or are expected to be expelled. The remaining 10,000 to 12,000 people will be released into the country and permitted to travel nationwide, according to two top officials at different DHS agencies that handle border and immigration matters,” Giaritelli reported on Thursday.
Correct. In this Administration’s Orwellian newspeak, “removal proceeding” means released on your own recognizance. https://t.co/d79fu15FKY
NEW: BP source in Del Rio tells me migrants are being released mostly with NTR’s (notice to return) rather than NTA’s (notice to appear). NTR is a *request* to check in w/ immigration within 60 days. NTA gives exact date they must report. NTA takes 1 hr NTR takes 20 min@FoxNews
Out of money and lacking legal counsel, Derek Chauvin has appealed his convictions in the death of George Floyd.
Chauvin, who is “currently unrepresented by legal counsel in connection with the appeal,” said he believes he has “valid grounds for pursuing a Court of Appeals action,” according to Chauvin’s affidavit, filed on Thursday, just before the 90-day appeal window closed following the June 25 sentencing.
“On September 14, 2021, I was denied representation by the public defender. … Due to my current incarceration, I do not have the sufficient means to retain private counsel for the appeal,” Chauvin’s affidavit said, adding that he was informed an arrangement for the Minneapolis Police and Peace Officers Association to pay for his appeal was terminated upon his conviction and sentencing.
The specific issues Chauvin wants the courts to redress include denying him a change of venue for the trial, excluding the testimony of a man who was with Floyd on the night of his death, permitting the prosecution to present “cumulative evidence with respect to use of force,” perceived juror bias, and not sequestering the jury during the trial, among other complaints.
In April, a Minnesota jury convicted the former Minneapolis police officer of second- and third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in Floyd’s May 25, 2020, death.
On Sept. 14, the same judge who sentenced Chauvin to 22.5 years in prison granted him “pauper status,” meaning he does not have to pay court costs or filing fees. He has no income or assets besides “nominal prison wages.”
Chauvin is currently facing federal civil rights charges regarding the same incident. The three other officers also allegedly involved in Floyd’s death will go to trial in March.
Floyd’s death sparked nationwide protests by social justice advocates throughout the United States, and several localities have moved to restrict funding for law enforcement, claiming police departments are plagued by racial bias. Opponents of the “defund the police” movement have countered that rising crime rates are partly attributable to the decreased police presence in these cities.
Two top officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have warned as many as 10,000-12,000 Haitian illegal immigrants will be released into the United States.
This, according to a report by the Washington Examiner who spoke to the senior officials.
The report claims that the camp of Haitians under the Del Rio-Acuna International Bridge, at one point totaling over 15,000 individuals, is to be cleared out by a Friday night deadline imposed by the Biden administration.
The report breaks down how anywhere between 3,000 to 5,000 migrants have been or will be deported. The rest either remain under the bridge or are being processed.
“The remaining 10,000 to 12,000 people will be released into the country and permitted to travel nationwide, according to two top officials at different DHS agencies that handle border and immigration matters,” the Examiner writes.
DHS SOURCES: As of Thursday AM, <4,000 migrants remained under the bridge.
Roughly 3,000-5,000 of the 15,000 processed over the past week have been removed/are expected to be expelled.
Thousands Of Illegal Immigrants To Be Released In U.S.
Why they’re looking to clear out the camp is rather interesting.
Not to deport them because our border is secure and their illegal entry (false asylum claims) will not be tolerated. Not to fix a humanitarian crisis of the White House’s own doing. Not to address a situation that has left thousands of people living in squalid conditions.
But rather, because of optics.
“They want those people out from under that bridge so they can’t be seen anymore,” one official said, according to the Examiner.
“It’s an optics thing. They are moving them around for process and release. They’re going to have everyone at the bridge gone in the next two days.”
Pushing through almost 10,000 migrants in a few days reeks of the WH desperately looking to get rid of the bad optics. No vetting or proper accountability. https://t.co/UMqvTztzf2
“Federal authorities learned this week of a Black Lives Matter protest scheduled to take place near the bridge this weekend and moved quickly to avoid a more chaotic scene,” the Examiner reports.
Another official cited the fact that “they don’t want them all riled up.”
It was okay when residents of Del Rio were riled up about migrants in the area. But when BLM says jump, that’s when the Biden administration asks, “How high?”
NEW: Del Rio residents are gathering to protest the Biden administration over the deteriorating situation at the international bridge in Del Rio. Hearing from source the number of migrants under the bridge has now swelled to over 14,000. Del Rio population is 35,000. @FoxNewspic.twitter.com/3gsrHp5DPL
The new report seems to confirm allegations by officials that Haitian migrants are being released into the United States on a “very, very large scale.”
An Associated Press report earlier this weekcited a source who says the large-scale release of Haitians may rest “in the thousands.”
Both stories undercut the White House claims that the migrants are being expelled from the country.
One official told the Washington Examiner a different story – that the illegal immigrants are simply being moved to other locations.
“Most will be at other holding facilities in other sectors. They are basically just moving the bridge to other areas. It’s all about optics,” they said through email correspondence.
“It’s getting hard to move them because they are getting aggressive.”
Haitian migrants bite ICE agents and assault pilots on deportation flights https://t.co/LpHgGFm8WD
On Thursday, The Political Insider reported that Haitian migrants had ‘hijacked’ buses meant to deliver them to processing centers or deportation flights, while others assaulted U.S. pilots and injured multiple ICE officers by biting them.
President Joe Biden’s approval rating is continuing to crater to historic lows, a recent survey from the Pew Research Center showed.
The survey, taken September 13-19, among 10,371 U.S. adults, found Biden’s approval rating taking a nosedive since July, when 55 percent approved of his job performance. That figure has since fallen ten points, as 44 percent now approve of Biden’s job performance compared to 53 percent who disapprove. In July, his disapproval stood at 43 percent.
Biden’s approval among Democrats has fallen by double-digits, 13 percent, in the same time frame, going from 88 percent to 75 percent, the Hillnoted.
There has been a sizable change in approval among members of Biden’s own party. In July, 88% of Democrats said they approved of the way he was handling his job as president. Today, 75% approve, a 13 percentage-point drop. https://t.co/YCGym7I0Afpic.twitter.com/CLwbUEdRp4
The survey also showed Biden losing support on specific issues, such as the Chinese coronavirus. For example, in March, Biden’s approval on his handling of the coronavirus stood at 65 percent. It has since declined to 51 percent. Additionally, a majority, 66 percent, are not confident Biden can unify the country, compared to 34 percent who believe he can. That is significant, as that stood as one of Biden’s main promises, calling for “unity, not division” in his inaugural address.
The results coincide with the release of a September 22 Gallup survey, which also showed Biden’s approval rating tumbling to 43 percent. A majority, or 53 percent, disapprove of his job performance. As of Thursday, the RealClearPolitics (RCP) average of polls showed Biden’s approval under water, with 50 percent disapproving and 46 approving.
The ever-plummeting approval ratings follow his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and his crackdown on coronavirus mandates. This month, Biden made waves after delivering a divisive speech in which he essentially blamed the unvaccinated for pandemic woes and announced a coming federal rule requiring private businesses with over 100 employees to either mandate vaccines or implement a weekly testing program.
“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin,” he said to unvaccinated Americans. “And your refusal has cost all of us. So, please, do the right thing.”
Al Sharpton attempted to deliver a press conference regarding the border migrant encampment Thursday afternoon in Del Rio, Texas. However, Texans sternly heckled Sharpton and ruined his presser.
Sharpton toured the encampment of migrants, mostly from Haiti, along the Del Rio International Bridge at the U.S. southern border on Thursday. Sharpton called the encampment “heartbreaking,” adding that the “refugees are in crisis.” The MSNBC host called for “total accountability” for U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in their handling of the massive border surge, which reportedly swelled to nearly 15,000 migrants on Saturday.
He also called on the Biden administration to halt all deportation flights of Haitian illegal immigrants.
Leftist activist joins conservatives in belief that “standing against mandatory vaccines is a fundamental issue that is more important than anything else right now.”
After American rap icon Nicki Minaj expressed skepticism regarding the controversial COVID-19 vaccines, and urged her fans to pray about whether to take one of the vaccines and not be bullied into making a health decision, fans rallied behind her and formed a near-spontaneous protest outside the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.
Now, the left wing luminaries behind this protest have planned several more, and have invited conservative Trump supporters to join them in solidarity against the vaccines.
The protests have been organized by the “anti-capitalist Black Hammer Organization’s Commander-in-Chief Gazi Kodzo,” wrote Cassandra Fairbanks for The Gateway Pundit. Kodzo spoke to Fairbanks at length about their goals for the protest, their decision to invite supporters of 45th President Donald Trump, and their hope for Americans to “put political differences aside and fight together against the vaccine mandates.”
Kodzo told Fairbanks that the vaccine passports and mandates represent “a human issue” that should break down traditional political barriers. “A real core value of our humanity is literally being ripped from us,” Kodzo told The Gateway Pundit, before adding that “he is willing to stand with ‘anyone who is willing to go side by side with me to fight for that core value.’”
Fairbanks noted that Kodzo has been ostracized byother communist and socialist groups for protesting with trump supporters but that “he thinks standing against mandatory vaccines is a fundamental issue that is more important than anything else right now.” According to Fairbanks, Kodzo believes “there is nothing more important than people in his community having to choose between putting something they don’t want inside their bodies and being able to feed their families.”
It was actually a pretty interesting conversation.
Nicki Minaj became the target of online racist abuse from left wing activists after she shared a clip of Fox News host Tucker Carlson defending her right to speak freely last week, with many corporate journalists accusing her of secretly being a “white supremacist.”
A former boss of Chris Cuomo has accused him of sexually harassing her at a 2005 work party in front of her husband and friends — the on-air personality later characterized his actions as a “hearty greeting.”
The anchor was recently caught up in controversy for his alleged involvement in the sexual assault scandal that took down his brother, former Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Now it appears Cuomo has his own scandal to account for.
Shelley Ross, who was Cuomo’s executive producer at ABC News, detailed the anchor’s inappropriate actions in a guest column for the New York Times published Friday morning.
Here’s how she recalled the harassment going down:
I was at the party with my husband, who sat behind me on an ottoman sipping his Diet Coke as I spoke with work friends. When Mr. Cuomo entered the Upper West Side bar, he walked toward me and greeted me with a strong bear hug while lowering one hand to firmly grab and squeeze the cheek of my buttock.
“I can do this now that you’re no longer my boss,” he said to me with a kind of cocky arrogance. “No you can’t,” I said, pushing him off me at the chest while stepping back, revealing my husband, who had seen the entire episode at close range. We quickly left.
Cuomo later sent an email apology, Ross claimed. But she said the email left her wondering, “Was he ashamed of what he did, or was he embarrassed because my husband saw it?”
The subject line for the reported email said, “Now that I think of it … I am ashamed.”
“Though my hearty greeting was a function of being glad to see you … Christian Slater got arrested for a (kind of) similar act (though borne of an alleged negative intent, unlike my own) … and as a husband I can empathize with not liking to see my wife patted as such,” Cuomo went on to say.
At around the same time in 2005, Slater, a well-known actor, was arrested in New York City for harassing a woman on the street by grabbing her butt. Charges were eventually dropped.
“So pass along my apology to your very good and noble husband … and I apologize to you as well, for even putting you in that situation … next time, I will remember my lesson, no matter how happy I am to see you,” he added.
A screenshot of the email is included in the Times article and can be seen below.
Chris Cuomo, the Yale Law graduate is one of the few people on earth so brilliant with words, who could make his apology for sexual assault more disturbing and creepy than the sexual assault itself. After reading this, I feel like I need to bathe in fire to disinfect. https://t.co/NRdXvXuDvxpic.twitter.com/w7Nngyzqp8
Ross acknowledged “she never thought that Mr. Cuomo’s behavior was sexual in nature,” but said that “his form of sexual harassment was a hostile act meant to diminish and belittle his female former boss in front of the staff.”
The veteran journalist added that her goal in raising the allegations now is not so that Cuomo would lose his job. Rather, she hopes it will serve as “an opportunity for him and his employer to show what accountability can look like in the #MeToo era.”
A recent Twitter thread posted by the young activist and highlighted by Abigail Shrier caught my eye. I often long to reach out to people like Watson to hear from them and share their stories, but sadly even the name of our site is enough to discourage some from sharing their very worthy stories with us. They don’t wish to be connected to conservative activism and I completely understand that. They want the freedom to move around their activist world without a destructive label that prevents peers from taking them seriously.
It’s a shame, but it’s the state of things now and I don’t have a magic wand to change it. But what I can do is share the very reasonable evidence for why our current public views on gender dysphoria are having a terrifying impact on our youth. I can encourage people to educate themselves about the reality – the full reality – of what is going on out there. I can highlight silenced voices like Watson’s.
Watson’s thread is actually an open letter that she penned to Stanford aimed at one of the premier medical doctors in the field of child and adolescent psychiatry, Dr. Jack Turban. Turban is a chief fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine and is well known for his research on transgender youth. He’s a regular fixture in mainstream media on issues related to LGBTQ youth. His work is considered canon for most activists.
But Watson and others in her organization remain concerned that people like Turban are actually hurting healthy youth by steering them down the singular path of medical transitioning, instead of taking a robust and “evidence-based” approach to the issue of gender dysphoria. For a group of people who claim to be on the side of those we’ve made “invisible” in our society, the pro-transition activists seem very determined to relegate detransitioned trans youth to the plane of invisibility in service of their agenda.
For just a few moments, forget your political and moral outrages on this issue. For just a few moments, ponder exactly how devastating the current push to limit information about gender dysphoria has become for some people. Imagine having your body mutilated and your future changed forever as a teenager just because someone put an agenda above your mental health. All you needed was some time and a place to express yourself, to grow into yourself, and to even perhaps make the decision to change your body with surgery at a later time, when you are an adult and have the capacity to weigh all the consequences. Instead, you were given activists posing as doctors and psychologists, people interested in their own advancement in the field instead of your health and future.
Imagine discovering after having your genitals removed or surgically scarred in some way, that you really don’t wish to be the opposite gender. You do want to have children. You do want to love your womanly/manly form. You do want to navigate the world as the gender you were created to be. And then imagine all those people you originally turned to for help not only turning their backs on you, but simply pretending you don’t exist. For a person already struggling with the idea of loving who they are and being loved as they are, that must be truly devastating.
Try to look at Watson’s letter not as a “gotcha” moment, but as a plea for compassion and sanity. I would prefer Watson’s letter to be splashed across the pages of The New York Times or The Washington Post, where they would have maximum visibility and maximum credibility in the mainstream. It shouldn’t be up to conservative publications to carry this burden alone, particularly when a lot of detransition activists do not wish to be associated with conservative politics. They just want to be associated with science alone. But it is what it is. Mainstream publications will not share the stories of people like Watson. It is left to us.
Watson herself says in the letter that she did not wish to do this publicly. I respect that. But these people depend on secrecy to keep their self-fulfilling medical prophecy businesses alive.
Please read this letter, and share it. We all have our opinions, but here is someone who has lived the horror and rejection and is genuinely advocating for our children. Don’t look away in frustration, and try not to make this “us vs. them.”
Like it or not, we’re all in this together, something Watson and her fellow advocates are fighting for the pro-transition medical elite to understand.
Here is a link to the Twitter thread (and a couple of opening tweets) and a transcript of the full letter follows. It is long, but it is so very, very worth your time.
AN OPEN LETTER REGARDING DR JACK TURBAN
I sent this letter to Dr Jack Turbans training director on August 10th 2021, hoping to keep this offline.
I publish it now because I have received no reply. It is long, but important.
I am writing to you on behalf of a group of detransitioned women regarding your fellow Dr Jack Turban. We are deeply concerned with Dr Turban’s disparagement of psychiatric intervention and exploratory psychotherapy, his singular endorsement of affirmative therapies for people with gender dysphoria, and his dismissive and derogatory treatment of those of us who detransitioned due to transition regret.
We are but a few of many that have been the victims of this type of cavalier attitude. We all suffered from gender dysphoria at one point (and some still do), and were led to believe that our best chance of treating our dysphoria was to medically transition. As it turned out, this was not the case. As a result, we now have to live with bodies and voices that have been irreversibly changed (in some cases damaged) by hormones and surgeries, when what we needed was a compassionate and thoughtful exploration of our gender distress through talk therapy. Some of us will now never be able to have children and many of us live with great distress and regret every day.
Not only did physicians like Dr Turban fail us by sending us down a singular path of transition, they are now letting us down once again by disparaging our experiences and even our existence, when they should be providing us with support to help us heal from our unnecessary medical transitions. The fact that Dr Turban is a psychiatrist at Stanford and uses his credentials to promote his reckless approach is especially troubling, as he has been granted a large and influential media platform. As we see more and more distressed young people following in our footsteps of a rushed medical gender transition, in a few years, we fear that the consequences of Dr Turban’s activism will be catastrophic and visible to all.
Dr Turban does not hide his disregard for the role of psychotherapy in treating gender distress, and his singular belief in medical and surgical approaches to treating gender dysphoria, whatever its cause may be. Appearing on the GenderGP Podcast episode ‘Exploring Detransition with Dr Jack Turban’ (2021), hosted by Dr Helen Webberley, a UK physician criminally-convicted for running an illegal clinic, Dr Turban says:
“There’s no psychiatric intervention for gender dysphoria. There are medical interventions for gender dysphoria, if you will. And it’s not the rule like right, how the psychiatrist’s going to treat gender dysphoria, they’re not like they’re not going to make that go away. The only way that it’s ever been proposed that psychiatry can do that was through conversion therapy, which obviously doesn’t work:”
As you will read later in this letter, many detransitioners report that they strongly wish they had received exploratory psychotherapy rather than affirmation, thus Dr Turban’s insinuation that this would be tantamount to conversion therapy is highly disturbing. Dr Turban describes detransition, in the GenderGP podcast, as having “become this really awful word. I feel like 90% of the time when you read it, it’s really being weaponized.” The claim that discussing detransition is problematic due to the topic being “weaponized” has been used to shame, bully and silence detransitioners who try to tell our stories. This bullying of a vulnerable group is unacceptable, and we find it incredibly worrying that Dr Turban would participate in the accusation that detransition is “being weaponized,” furthering the bullying of detransitioned individuals.
This is not only a matter of rhetoric. Dr Turban goes on to say, in the podcast,
“When you say detransition people usually think that means like transition regret. It brings up this idea that somebody transitioned, then realize like, oh my god, that was a huge mistake. I’m actually cisgender, I regret every domain of gender affirmation I’ve ever had. And as I’m sure you know, that’s not the reality of the situation.”
Dr Turban is, again, completely dismissing those of us who have experienced transition regret. As detransitioned woman, we are deeply hurt that Dr Turban would find it appropriate to suggest that our pain and distress is not a reality. We do, in fact, regret every domain of gender affirmation we ever had and the irreversible changes that medical transition did to us that we must now live with for the rest of our lives. It is, therefore, highly unprofessional and deeply offensive to see comments like this from a fellow at Stanford.
At the same time as Dr Turban dismisses our existence, he also claims to represent us in research, but his bias is clear: the goal is to minimize detransition because it contradicts Dr. Turban’s professional aspirations to promote transgender medical and surgical interventions. In the GenderGP podcast he also says
“We have a paper that hopefully is coming out soon, where we took the data from the 2015 US Transgender Survey. So this was a survey of over 27,000 transgender adults in the United States. And we found that of those who had transitioned in some way, don’t quote me on that exact number, but it’s something like 13% of them said that at some point in their life they had detransitioned. And when we looked at why they did that the vast majority of them like close to 90% I think had detransitioned due to some external factor.”
We bring to your attention that the 2015 USTS survey that Dr Turban repeatedly uses for his research is an online convenience survey that was promoted by transition advocacy sites. We believe in and support transgender rights and trans people, but respectfully submit that this survey, subtitled “Injustice at Every Turn” which is full of biased questions that promote a political agenda, serves as a poor base for respectable research. Dr Turban previously attempted to use this survey to claim that psychotherapy leads to suicide; his problematic analysis and conclusions were thoroughly outlined in a rebuttal by Roberto D’Angelo et al. in ‘One Size Does Not Fit All: In Support of Psychotherapy for Gender Dysphoria’ (2020) to which Dr.Turban never replied, even through he had the chance to do so. Instead, Dr Turban attacked the researchers on Twitter. Dr Turban also used the same survey to attempt to show that puberty blockers saved lives. Another rebuttal showed just how flawed that piece of research was. See ‘Puberty Blockers and Suicidality in Adolescents Suffering from Gender Dysphoria’ (2020) by Michael Biggs.
Dr Turban failed to respond to that critique in the scientific area, but did go on media circuit to promote his deeply flawed conclusions. Most recently, Dr Turban misused this problematic sample to discredit detransition experiences in his research, ‘Factors Leading to “Detransition” Among Transgender and Gender Diverse People in the United States: A Mixed-Methods Analysis’ (2021). Dr. Turban did not seem at all troubled by the fact that 100% of the respondents were transgender-identified and did not identify as detransitioners. This is an expert from his study:
“These [detransition due to internal factors] experiences did not necessarily reflect regret regarding past gender affirmation, and were presumably temporary, as all of these respondents subsequently identified as TGD, an eligibility requirement for study participation.”
Dr. Turban’s conclusions were that detransition is largely a temporary phenomenon, happens in response to external pressures, and does not really represent a problem for those who detransitioned. These conclusions are highly flawed and ignore those of us who have detransitioned due to transition regret, and who were excluded from the survey for no longer being transgender-identified. In comparison, recent detransition research conducted within the actual detransition community – (‘Detransition-Related Needs and Support: A Cross-Sectional Online Survey’ (2021) by Elie Vandenbussche) found very different results: that most of us detransition due to the internal realization that transition was not what we needed, that transition did not help and- can actually make things worse for us, and that we found other non-invasive ways to alleviate our dysphoria. Further, the research showed that detransitioners expressed the need to find alternative treatments to deal with their gender dysphoria, but reported that it was nearly impossible to talk about it within LGBT+ spaces and in the medical sphere. Vandenbussche found that most detransitioners currently are in dire need of psychological support on matters such as gender dysphoria, co-morbid conditions, feelings of regret, social/physical changes and internalized homophobic or sexist prejudices. The research confirmed that detransitionres experience prejudice when working with medical and mental health systems, which Dr. Turban’s vocal activism directly emboldens and reinforces.
We feel it important to add that in May 2021, the Karolinska Hospital in Sweden issued a new policy statement regarding the treatment of gender-dysphoric minors. This policy has ended the practice of prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to gender-dysphoric patients under the age of 18. Finland also revised its treatment guidelines in June 2020, prioritizing psychological interventions and support over medical interventions. Major changes are also underway in the UK as the NHS has convened a Cass Review to examine the practice of transition for young people and the evidence that underlies it. Thus, it seems evident that there is a growing concern over the proliferation of medical interventions that have a low certainty of benefits, while carrying a significant potential for severe medical harm.
It is worrying that Dr Turban does not seem to demonstrate the professional curiosity to rethink his endorsement of medical transition for minors and his dismay at psychotherapy and its role in the care of gender dysphoric individuals of all ages. We are also very concerned by Dr Turban’s activism to suppress the debate on the proper care for gender dysphoria in the public arena. On May 25, 2021, Dr Turban tweeted the following:
“When I spoke with @60Minutes about their “detransition” story and asked where they found the people to profile – they refused to tell me and became defensive. We still don’t know if they searched for people on TERF forums, and transparency would be appreciated.”
We bring to your attention that TERF (acronym for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”) is a pejorative term, and that Dr Turban’s use of it to smear and dismiss the experiences of the detransitioners who appeared on 60 Minutes is incredibly hurtful. That a fellow at Stanford would criticise 60 Minutes for having a brief segment featuring detransitioners has many of us very concerned that, should one of his patients experience transition regret and subsequently decide to detransition, Dr Turban would be unfit to help them due to his hostility towards the subject. Therefore we are concerned with how Dr Turban may practice as a clinician, specifically how he may treat a transgender person struggling with regret or a detransitioner seeking to discuss their regret or reverse their transition. His comments on the GenderGP podcast, his flawed use of the USTS, and his hostility towards any discussion of transition regret are all highly problematic and in need of addressing.
We ask Stanford to speak out for more thoughtful approaches because as it stands now, Stanford appears to be silently endorsing Dr Turban’s harmful claims that exploratory psychotherapy is tantamount to conversion therapy and that hormones and surgeries are the only appropriate treatment for people with gender dysphoria. Detransitioners and transition regret exist.
Provisions would prevent sanctions relief and expose Iran’s malign activities.
The sprawling annual defense bill includes several provisions that would block the Biden administration from providing Iran with cash and would require the administration to come clean about any economic sanctions relief it provides to the Islamic Republic.
The Republican Study Committee (RSC), the largest GOP caucus in Congress, is codifying its anti-Iran platform in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, which funds U.S. defense efforts and is expected to pass through the House this week.
Republicans are using the NDAA to crack down on Iran and expose concessions the Biden administration is making to Tehran as part of negotiations aimed at securing a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear deal. Several measures included in the House version of the NDAA—which will also have to be ratified by the Senate—would give lawmakers an unprecedented window into Iran’s malign activities, as well as efforts by the Biden administration to unwind sanctions on the hardline regime.
Republicans have been planning their NDAA approach for months, according to congressional sources working on the matter. The RSC and its members are spearheading several investigations into the Biden administration’s diplomacy with Iran and its efforts to provide Iran with a financial lifeline. The RSC worked with Democratic colleagues to sculpt several NDAA measures that would mandate transparency from the Biden administration as it negotiates with Iran, these sources told the Washington Free Beacon. These measures are included in the bipartisan legislation and expected to easily pass when the House votes Thursday evening.
“In this year’s NDAA, the RSC worked with our members to draft a number of unprecedented provisions holding the Biden administration accountable for its failed policies requiring regular mandatory reports by the administration into how much money in sanctions relief Iran has used to modernize its military and fund its terrorist proxies,” said Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), the RSC chair and a member of the House Armed Services Committee.
GOP leaders are touting one provision that would require the Treasury Department to immediately inform Congress when sanctions are waived on state sponsors of terrorism—requiring the Biden administration to tell Congress up front about any sanctions relief it is giving to Iran. This is meant to address the Biden administration’s refusal to brief Congress on the state of negotiations with Iran and the concessions being discussed in those talks. Currently, the administration is not required to provide such notification.
Another measure would require the government to provide to Congress a report on all malign operations being conducted by Iran on U.S. soil, another unprecedented requirement. This would include Iran-backed terrorist attacks, kidnapping plots, export violations, sanctions-busting activities, and money laundering. The amendment is meant to address an increase in Iranian activity in America, including a high-profile kidnapping plot of an American journalist that was thwarted earlier this year.
There is also a measure that would require the secretary of defense to inform Congress about the short- and long-term threats posed by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq. There is mounting concern in Congress that these militia groups are plotting terror attacks on U.S. outposts. Iranian-backed militias operating in Iraq have been identified as responsible for a series of drone strikes on U.S. positions, including attacks on the U.S. embassy compound in Iraq.
The growing relationship between Iran and China also is addressed in the NDAA.
The government would be required to provide Congress with regular updates about the growing military relationship between Iran and China, including any weapons transfers, military visits, and material support given by Beijing to Tehran’s armed forces.
Other provisions require Congress be given information about Iran’s military capabilities and its terrorist proxy groups, which include Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas.
“No one understands the Iran threat as well as RSC members,” Banks said. “Since the start of the Congress, RSC has led the fight to hold the Biden administration accountable for its disastrous plans to re-enter the failed Obama Iran deal.”
Democrats successfully blocked several other GOP-led initiatives, including a measure that would have required the president to tell Congress about any energy deals it facilitates between Syria and other Arab countries. The Biden administration is expected to waive sanctions on Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to permit an energy deal for Lebanon, the Free Beaconfirst reported earlier this month.
Republicans blame House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Gregory Meeks (D., N.Y.) for standing in the way of several measures that would have increased pressure on Iran and the Biden administration.
A Black Lives Matter leader is threatening an “uprising” over mandatory vaccinations and vaccine passports in New York.
New York City’s vaccine mandate began on Sept. 13. It requires proof of vaccination entry to certain public spaces, including gyms, restaurants, and bars, unless a person has an approved medical exemption.
New York officials call the program the “Key to NYC Pass.”
Hawk Newsome, the co-founder and chairman of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York (BLMGNY), argues the mandates are fundamentally racist, given the low rate of vaccination in the black community.
Some 85.6 percent of black people in the state of New York remain without one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, according to state data.
“I think, in a perfect world, [vaccine requirements] should be business by business. But it could be a slippery slope, so the mandate should be removed completely,” Newsome told the Washington Examiner.
“It’s not gonna be white men in suits on Wall Street who are gonna get stopped. There’s such hypocrisy in this thing.”
Black Lives Matter is now demanding payback for its support of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the 2020 presidential election, stating that “getting Trump out of office was not the end all, be all,” and that “We want something for our vote.” https://t.co/Au1g4XjBXe
The Examiner points out some 70 percent of black people in New York City aged 18 to 44 have not received the injection. There is a variety of reasons claimed for the lag in shots, including religious beliefs and distrust of government.
“It’s black people who have a natural distrust of the vaccine,” Newsome said. He cited the Tuskegee Syphilis Study as an example of historic distrust by black people of the U.S. medical community, despite the fact vaccines are accessible to people of all racial groups.
BLMGNY is advocating for the complete abolition of vaccine requirements, not only in the city but also on a national level.
Newsome, a Baptist, told the news outlet he is especially worried the vaccine mandates do not allow for religious exemptions.
“How dare they remove religious exemptions? It’s the most disrespectful thing I’ve ever seen,” Newsome said. “Now the government has decided your God doesn’t matter? I love God.”
Chivona Newsome, a fellow co-founder of BLMGNY, threatened an “uprising” in the wake of the mandates.
“We’re putting this city on notice that your mandate will not be another racist social distance practice,” she declared at a protest on Monday, according to the Examiner report “Black people are not going to stand by, or you will see another uprising. And that is not a threat. That is a promise.”
“The vaccination passport is not a free passport to racism,” she concluded.
The pushback against vaccination requirements is not limited to the general NYC area.
As Breitbart News reported, a wider spectrum of black voters is driving down President Joe Biden’s approval rating after the administration mandated vaccines for medium and large businesses on September 8.
According to a Monday Morning Consult poll earlier this month, Biden’s job performance has shrunk five points to 71 percent among black voters since the vaccine mandate. Black voter disapproval of Biden also increased seven points to 24 percent.
The poll additionally indicates support for Biden’s handing of the coronavirus crisis has dropped nine points to 61 percent since the end of August.
The poll illustrates unvaccinated black voters have notched Biden’s job performance lower since the vaccine mandate.
You Must Read This Stunning Letter From a “Detransitioned” Woman Demanding The Medical Establishment Treat Gender Dysphoria With Science, Not Activism
Sinéad Watson is a healthcare advocate for youth experiencing gender dysphoria and an advisor for the Gender Dysphoria Alliance. She describes herself on the site as “detrans” and “detransitioned” and someone who desires to work toward “balanced, evidence-based care for gender questioning youth.”
A recent Twitter thread posted by the young activist and highlighted by Abigail Shrier caught my eye. I often long to reach out to people like Watson to hear from them and share their stories, but sadly even the name of our site is enough to discourage some from sharing their very worthy stories with us. They don’t wish to be connected to conservative activism and I completely understand that. They want the freedom to move around their activist world without a destructive label that prevents peers from taking them seriously.
It’s a shame, but it’s the state of things now and I don’t have a magic wand to change it. But what I can do is share the very reasonable evidence for why our current public views on gender dysphoria are having a terrifying impact on our youth. I can encourage people to educate themselves about the reality – the full reality – of what is going on out there. I can highlight silenced voices like Watson’s.
Watson’s thread is actually an open letter that she penned to Stanford aimed at one of the premier medical doctors in the field of child and adolescent psychiatry, Dr. Jack Turban. Turban is a chief fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine and is well known for his research on transgender youth. He’s a regular fixture in mainstream media on issues related to LGBTQ youth. His work is considered canon for most activists.
But Watson and others in her organization remain concerned that people like Turban are actually hurting healthy youth by steering them down the singular path of medical transitioning, instead of taking a robust and “evidence-based” approach to the issue of gender dysphoria. For a group of people who claim to be on the side of those we’ve made “invisible” in our society, the pro-transition activists seem very determined to relegate detransitioned trans youth to the plane of invisibility in service of their agenda.
For just a few moments, forget your political and moral outrages on this issue. For just a few moments, ponder exactly how devastating the current push to limit information about gender dysphoria has become for some people. Imagine having your body mutilated and your future changed forever as a teenager just because someone put an agenda above your mental health. All you needed was some time and a place to express yourself, to grow into yourself, and to even perhaps make the decision to change your body with surgery at a later time, when you are an adult and have the capacity to weigh all the consequences. Instead, you were given activists posing as doctors and psychologists, people interested in their own advancement in the field instead of your health and future.
Imagine discovering after having your genitals removed or surgically scarred in some way, that you really don’t wish to be the opposite gender. You do want to have children. You do want to love your womanly/manly form. You do want to navigate the world as the gender you were created to be. And then imagine all those people you originally turned to for help not only turning their backs on you, but simply pretending you don’t exist. For a person already struggling with the idea of loving who they are and being loved as they are, that must be truly devastating.
Try to look at Watson’s letter not as a “gotcha” moment, but as a plea for compassion and sanity. I would prefer Watson’s letter to be splashed across the pages of The New York Times or The Washington Post, where they would have maximum visibility and maximum credibility in the mainstream. It shouldn’t be up to conservative publications to carry this burden alone, particularly when a lot of detransition activists do not wish to be associated with conservative politics. They just want to be associated with science alone. But it is what it is. Mainstream publications will not share the stories of people like Watson. It is left to us.
Watson herself says in the letter that she did not wish to do this publicly. I respect that. But these people depend on secrecy to keep their self-fulfilling medical prophecy businesses alive.
Please read this letter, and share it. We all have our opinions, but here is someone who has lived the horror and rejection and is genuinely advocating for our children. Don’t look away in frustration, and try not to make this “us vs. them.”
Like it or not, we’re all in this together, something Watson and her fellow advocates are fighting for the pro-transition medical elite to understand.
Here is a link to the Twitter thread (and a couple of opening tweets) and a transcript of the full letter follows. It is long, but it is so very, very worth your time.
Full transcript:
I am writing to you on behalf of a group of detransitioned women regarding your fellow Dr Jack Turban. We are deeply concerned with Dr Turban’s disparagement of psychiatric intervention and exploratory psychotherapy, his singular endorsement of affirmative therapies for people with gender dysphoria, and his dismissive and derogatory treatment of those of us who detransitioned due to transition regret.
We are but a few of many that have been the victims of this type of cavalier attitude. We all suffered from gender dysphoria at one point (and some still do), and were led to believe that our best chance of treating our dysphoria was to medically transition. As it turned out, this was not the case. As a result, we now have to live with bodies and voices that have been irreversibly changed (in some cases damaged) by hormones and surgeries, when what we needed was a compassionate and thoughtful exploration of our gender distress through talk therapy. Some of us will now never be able to have children and many of us live with great distress and regret every day.
Not only did physicians like Dr Turban fail us by sending us down a singular path of transition, they are now letting us down once again by disparaging our experiences and even our existence, when they should be providing us with support to help us heal from our unnecessary medical transitions. The fact that Dr Turban is a psychiatrist at Stanford and uses his credentials to promote his reckless approach is especially troubling, as he has been granted a large and influential media platform. As we see more and more distressed young people following in our footsteps of a rushed medical gender transition, in a few years, we fear that the consequences of Dr Turban’s activism will be catastrophic and visible to all.
Dr Turban does not hide his disregard for the role of psychotherapy in treating gender distress, and his singular belief in medical and surgical approaches to treating gender dysphoria, whatever its cause may be. Appearing on the GenderGP Podcast episode ‘Exploring Detransition with Dr Jack Turban’ (2021), hosted by Dr Helen Webberley, a UK physician criminally-convicted for running an illegal clinic, Dr Turban says:
“There’s no psychiatric intervention for gender dysphoria. There are medical interventions for gender dysphoria, if you will. And it’s not the rule like right, how the psychiatrist’s going to treat gender dysphoria, they’re not like they’re not going to make that go away. The only way that it’s ever been proposed that psychiatry can do that was through conversion therapy, which obviously doesn’t work:”
As you will read later in this letter, many detransitioners report that they strongly wish they had received exploratory psychotherapy rather than affirmation, thus Dr Turban’s insinuation that this would be tantamount to conversion therapy is highly disturbing. Dr Turban describes detransition, in the GenderGP podcast, as having “become this really awful word. I feel like 90% of the time when you read it, it’s really being weaponized.” The claim that discussing detransition is problematic due to the topic being “weaponized” has been used to shame, bully and silence detransitioners who try to tell our stories. This bullying of a vulnerable group is unacceptable, and we find it incredibly worrying that Dr Turban would participate in the accusation that detransition is “being weaponized,” furthering the bullying of detransitioned individuals.
This is not only a matter of rhetoric. Dr Turban goes on to say, in the podcast,
“When you say detransition people usually think that means like transition regret. It brings up this idea that somebody transitioned, then realize like, oh my god, that was a huge mistake. I’m actually cisgender, I regret every domain of gender affirmation I’ve ever had. And as I’m sure you know, that’s not the reality of the situation.”
Dr Turban is, again, completely dismissing those of us who have experienced transition regret. As detransitioned woman, we are deeply hurt that Dr Turban would find it appropriate to suggest that our pain and distress is not a reality. We do, in fact, regret every domain of gender affirmation we ever had and the irreversible changes that medical transition did to us that we must now live with for the rest of our lives. It is, therefore, highly unprofessional and deeply offensive to see comments like this from a fellow at Stanford.
At the same time as Dr Turban dismisses our existence, he also claims to represent us in research, but his bias is clear: the goal is to minimize detransition because it contradicts Dr. Turban’s professional aspirations to promote transgender medical and surgical interventions. In the GenderGP podcast he also says
“We have a paper that hopefully is coming out soon, where we took the data from the 2015 US Transgender Survey. So this was a survey of over 27,000 transgender adults in the United States. And we found that of those who had transitioned in some way, don’t quote me on that exact number, but it’s something like 13% of them said that at some point in their life they had detransitioned. And when we looked at why they did that the vast majority of them like close to 90% I think had detransitioned due to some external factor.”
We bring to your attention that the 2015 USTS survey that Dr Turban repeatedly uses for his research is an online convenience survey that was promoted by transition advocacy sites. We believe in and support transgender rights and trans people, but respectfully submit that this survey, subtitled “Injustice at Every Turn” which is full of biased questions that promote a political agenda, serves as a poor base for respectable research. Dr Turban previously attempted to use this survey to claim that psychotherapy leads to suicide; his problematic analysis and conclusions were thoroughly outlined in a rebuttal by Roberto D’Angelo et al. in ‘One Size Does Not Fit All: In Support of Psychotherapy for Gender Dysphoria’ (2020) to which Dr.Turban never replied, even through he had the chance to do so. Instead, Dr Turban attacked the researchers on Twitter. Dr Turban also used the same survey to attempt to show that puberty blockers saved lives. Another rebuttal showed just how flawed that piece of research was. See ‘Puberty Blockers and Suicidality in Adolescents Suffering from Gender Dysphoria’ (2020) by Michael Biggs.
Dr Turban failed to respond to that critique in the scientific area, but did go on media circuit to promote his deeply flawed conclusions. Most recently, Dr Turban misused this problematic sample to discredit detransition experiences in his research, ‘Factors Leading to “Detransition” Among Transgender and Gender Diverse People in the United States: A Mixed-Methods Analysis’ (2021). Dr. Turban did not seem at all troubled by the fact that 100% of the respondents were transgender-identified and did not identify as detransitioners. This is an expert from his study:
“These [detransition due to internal factors] experiences did not necessarily reflect regret regarding past gender affirmation, and were presumably temporary, as all of these respondents subsequently identified as TGD, an eligibility requirement for study participation.”
Dr. Turban’s conclusions were that detransition is largely a temporary phenomenon, happens in response to external pressures, and does not really represent a problem for those who detransitioned. These conclusions are highly flawed and ignore those of us who have detransitioned due to transition regret, and who were excluded from the survey for no longer being transgender-identified. In comparison, recent detransition research conducted within the actual detransition community – (‘Detransition-Related Needs and Support: A Cross-Sectional Online Survey’ (2021) by Elie Vandenbussche) found very different results: that most of us detransition due to the internal realization that transition was not what we needed, that transition did not help and- can actually make things worse for us, and that we found other non-invasive ways to alleviate our dysphoria. Further, the research showed that detransitioners expressed the need to find alternative treatments to deal with their gender dysphoria, but reported that it was nearly impossible to talk about it within LGBT+ spaces and in the medical sphere. Vandenbussche found that most detransitioners currently are in dire need of psychological support on matters such as gender dysphoria, co-morbid conditions, feelings of regret, social/physical changes and internalized homophobic or sexist prejudices. The research confirmed that detransitionres experience prejudice when working with medical and mental health systems, which Dr. Turban’s vocal activism directly emboldens and reinforces.
We feel it important to add that in May 2021, the Karolinska Hospital in Sweden issued a new policy statement regarding the treatment of gender-dysphoric minors. This policy has ended the practice of prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to gender-dysphoric patients under the age of 18. Finland also revised its treatment guidelines in June 2020, prioritizing psychological interventions and support over medical interventions. Major changes are also underway in the UK as the NHS has convened a Cass Review to examine the practice of transition for young people and the evidence that underlies it. Thus, it seems evident that there is a growing concern over the proliferation of medical interventions that have a low certainty of benefits, while carrying a significant potential for severe medical harm.
It is worrying that Dr Turban does not seem to demonstrate the professional curiosity to rethink his endorsement of medical transition for minors and his dismay at psychotherapy and its role in the care of gender dysphoric individuals of all ages. We are also very concerned by Dr Turban’s activism to suppress the debate on the proper care for gender dysphoria in the public arena. On May 25, 2021, Dr Turban tweeted the following:
“When I spoke with @60Minutes about their “detransition” story and asked where they found the people to profile – they refused to tell me and became defensive. We still don’t know if they searched for people on TERF forums, and transparency would be appreciated.”
We bring to your attention that TERF (acronym for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”) is a pejorative term, and that Dr Turban’s use of it to smear and dismiss the experiences of the detransitioners who appeared on 60 Minutes is incredibly hurtful. That a fellow at Stanford would criticise 60 Minutes for having a brief segment featuring detransitioners has many of us very concerned that, should one of his patients experience transition regret and subsequently decide to detransition, Dr Turban would be unfit to help them due to his hostility towards the subject. Therefore we are concerned with how Dr Turban may practice as a clinician, specifically how he may treat a transgender person struggling with regret or a detransitioner seeking to discuss their regret or reverse their transition. His comments on the GenderGP podcast, his flawed use of the USTS, and his hostility towards any discussion of transition regret are all highly problematic and in need of addressing.
We ask Stanford to speak out for more thoughtful approaches because as it stands now, Stanford appears to be silently endorsing Dr Turban’s harmful claims that exploratory psychotherapy is tantamount to conversion therapy and that hormones and surgeries are the only appropriate treatment for people with gender dysphoria. Detransitioners and transition regret exist.
END