Opinion
UK High Court upholds ban on puberty blockers for children, rejects LGBT activists’ challenge
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From LifeSiteNews
The England High Court of Justice ruled that the United Kingdom’s ban on puberty blockers for children is lawful.
In a July 29 decision, Mrs. Justice Lang upheld a ban on puberty blockers for gender-confused children in England, Scotland, and Wales, after it was challenged by an LGBT activist group, TransActual.
“In my view, it was rational for the first defendant to decide that it was essential to adopt the emergency procedure to avoid serious danger to the health of children and young people who would otherwise be prescribed puberty blockers during that five- to six-month period,” Lang ruled.
Lang based her ruling on the Cass Review, an independent assessment of transgender interventions for youth commissioned by England’s National Health Service.
The four-year review of research, led by Dr. Hilary Cass, one of Britain’s top pediatricians, found no proof behind transgender activists’ assertion that gender dysphoria in children or teenagers was resolved or alleviated by so-called “gender-affirming care,” in which a young person is subjected to “social transition,” puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and/or mutilating surgery.
Nor, she said, is there evidence that “transitioning” kids decreases the likelihood that gender dysphoric youths will turn to suicide, as adherents of “gender transitions” claim. These findings backed up what critics of transgenderism have been saying for years.
“In my judgment,” Lang explained, “the Cass review’s findings about the very substantial risks and very narrow benefits associated with the use of puberty blockers, and the recommendation that in future the NHS prescribing of puberty blockers to children and young people should only take place in a clinical trial, and not routinely, amounted to powerful scientific evidence in support of restrictions on the supply of puberty blockers on the grounds that they were potentially harmful.”
In March, following the publication of the review, U.K. introduced a clinical policy that announced that it would not administer puberty blockers to children.
Later in May, the Conservative government doubled down on its decision, introducing an emergency ban on puberty blockers from being prescribed by private and European prescribers.
This decision was then challenged by TransActual, which falsely claimed the emergency order banning puberty blockers for children was not backed by evidence.
However, in addition to asserting a false reality that one’s sex can be changed, transgender surgeries and drugs have been linked to permanent physical and psychological damage, including cardiovascular diseases, loss of bone density, cancer, strokes and blood clots, infertility, and suicidality.
There is also overwhelming evidence that those who undergo so-called “gender transitioning” are more likely to commit suicide than those who are not subjected to irreversible surgery. A Swedish study found that those who underwent so-called “gender reassignment” surgery ended up with a 19.2 times greater risk of suicide.
Indeed, the most loving and helpful approach to people who think they are a different sex is not to encourage them in their confusion but to show them the truth.
A new study on the side effects of transgender so-called “sex change” surgeries discovered that 81 percent of those who had undergone the surgeries in the past five years reported experiencing pain simply from normal movement in the weeks and months that followed — and that many other side effects manifest as well.
Courageous Discourse
Reviewing NATO’s Rationale
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By John Leake
“To keep the Russian’s out, the Germans down, and the Americans in.”
To an observer who has studied history, it’s very difficult to assess what Europe’s heads of state are now thinking with respect to NATO, Ukraine, and Russia. Judging by their pronouncements, it apparently hasn’t occurred to them that they have no rational grounds for maintaining a state of mortal enmity with Russia. The Germans are being especially obtuse.
After Germany was reunified in 1990 and the Soviet Union was dissolved, it was, above all, the Americans who wished to maintain enmity with Russia because doing so served as the rationale for:
1). Maintaining the American military occupation of Germany.
2). Maintaining America’s vast Military-Industrial-
3). Maintaining a weak Russia with a weak leader like Boris Yeltsin who was amenable to American financial players and their cronies in Russia exploiting the country’s natural resource assets.
The clearest evidence of this state of affairs was Washington’s hatred for German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s friendship with Russian President Vladimir Putin and their Nord Stream Pipeline deal, which became (in Washington) the hated emblem of fruitful German-Russian relations.
The last few years have been crowded with spectacular acts of stupidity, but of all these, none was more stupendous than the U.S. carrying out Joe Biden’s avowal—with German Chancellor Scholz present—“to bring an end Nord Stream.”
Not only was this a massive crime against pipeline’s owners, it was an act of war against Germany, which is purportedly a U.S. ally. Finally, blowing up the pipeline was the single largest human point source of greenhouse gas emission in history—yet another example of how those who push the “Green Agenda” are ruthless humbugs.
And how did the German government respond to this stunning act of crime and war against its people and industry? Not a peep of protest against the Biden administration—a perfect act of submission to the most demented and depraved U.S. action in the history of American-German relations.
This brings me back to one of NATO’s three key objectives—namely, to keep the Germans down. Since Bismarck united the various German principalities into a unified nation in 1871, the country has been periodically plagued with dreadful leadership. Bismarck himself was a reasonable man, as were Adenauer, Kohl, and Schroeder. However, starting with Angela Merkel in 2005, Germany has been led by inveterate nincompoops. Olaf Scholz has proven to the worst.
Now President Trump is signaling that the Europeans—and especially the Germans—may be free to be their own masters, and equally free to forge a mutually beneficial relationship with Russia. And yet, somehow Europe’s leaders have managed to forgot what all those who attended the Bucharest NATO Summit in 2008 perfectly understood at the time—namely, the Americans were aggressively pursuing an agenda of enmity and provocation with Russia by declaring NATO’s intention to expand yet further east into Ukraine and Georgia.
To reiterate: the Americans hated German Chancellor Schroeder because of his friendship with Vladimir Putin and their Nord Stream deal. They equally hated Schroeder because he was reluctant to support their stupid Iraq invasion in 2003. In the dubious person of Angela Merkel, Washington found a submissive servant. In 2008, Merkel voiced her opinion that George W. Bush’s agenda in Europe would make needless trouble with the Russians, but she didn’t push back against it.
During the Obama years, Vice President Joe Biden was made a sort of American Proconsul to Ukraine, where he and his cocaine addict son forged lucrative relationships with the country’s corrupt oligarchs. Likewise, Hillary Clinton and the Ukrainian oligarch, Victor Pinchuk, became fast friends.
While none of the Ukrainian oligarchs during this period held particularly strong anti-Russian sentiments, they were incentivized to adopt such sentiments by the promise of a lucrative relationship with Washington’s creepy denizens. They should have understood that getting into bed with the U.S. to poke the Russian business was a risky business. Of course, it wasn’t especially risky for them, because if things got hot in Ukraine, they could always take refuge in one of their innumerable houses in London, the South of France, Vienna, Switzerland, or Miami. Needless to say, ordinary Ukrainians, with their annual median household income of about $1,000, haven’t had this luxury.
The Obama years were the era in which Washington developed its current, bizarre sentimentality about Ukrainian nationalism. I remember a time not so long ago (in the 1980s) when Ukrainians were viewed with deep suspicion for their collaboration with Nazi Germany during the war. There was a great deal of chatter about this in the American press in 1988, when the American citizen of Ukrainian birth, John Demjanjuk, was extradited to Israel to stand trial for being “Ivan the Terrible,” a notorious watchman at Treblinka extermination camp.
Back then, Ukrainian nationalism was regarded as having been badly corrupted by Nazism. But then, around 2014, the narrative lurched to the other extreme, and suddenly the American media started peddling stories about the sacred blood and soil of Ukraine and valiant struggle of its people against the Russian aggressor. America’s newfound love for das Volk of Ukraine culminated with Ukrainian flag waving in the U.S., whose people couldn’t have identified Ukraine on an unmarked map just three years earlier.
Almost as stupid as the Biden and Scholz administrations has been the French administration, which somehow forgot that their great post-war President Charles de Gaulle correctly perceived that NATO was primarily an instrument of American domination. On could argue that de Gaulle’s decision to withdrawal from NATO in 1966 was premature, but how on earth did rejoining NATO in 2009 serve the French people?
Last but not least are the English, which now has the most abominable ruling class in the nation’s entire history—a ruling class that has enthusiastically embraced every form of naked tyranny that has emerged in the west since March 2020.
The historic cradle of free speech is now a country in which the police are sent to the homes of people who express politically incorrect opinions on social media. In 2022, Konstantin Kisin— a strident critic of Vladimir Putin—pointed out that while 400 people were arrested in Russia in 2021 for online speech violations, 3,300 were arrested in Britain. With this record, how can the British government reasonably claim to be a valiant defender of Western civilization from the odious Putin?
If British, German, and French leadership could somehow muster a shred of common sense, they would drop their kindergarten mindset, join President Trump in burying the hatchet with Russia, and do beneficial deals with the world’s largest nation.
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Courageous Discourse
Zelensky Met with Dems Before He Met President Trump
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Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) encouraged Zelensky to reject deal with Trump, confirms my suspicion the Dems have been acting as agents for Ukrainian oligarchic state.
By John Leake
Zelensky’s conduct during his Oval Office meetings strongly suggested his confidence that Ukrainian’s oligarchic state—of which he is the dictatorial figurehead—has been calling the shots in Washington for the last four years.
I just saw a New York Post report that confirms my intuition. Turns out, Zelensky met Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) before he met President Trump at the Oval Office. As the Post reported:
Before meeting Trump, Zelensky met with anti-Trump Democrats who advised him to reject the terms of the mineral deal the president was offering, according to Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.).
“Just finished a meeting with President Zelensky here in Washington. He confirmed that the Ukrainian people will not support a fake peace agreement where Putin gets everything he wants and there are no security arrangements for Ukraine,” Murphy’s office posted on X at 11:15 a.m. Friday.
He attached a picture of Zelensky at a conference table, with Murphy seated on the opposite side. Forty minutes later, Zelensky arrived at the White House, where Trump met his car, smiled, shook his hand and walked him into the Oval Office.
This is consistent with my suspicion that many Democrat politicians have been acting as agents for the Ukrainian state. They may claim that their agency is purely out of personal conviction in the righteousness of the Ukrainian cause, but the sheer amount of public money that has been transferred to Ukraine raises the suspicion of corruption.
Because the mainstream media and the Democrats have succeeded in creating widespread adulation for Zelensky and Ukraine, it seems that approximately half of Americans don’t recognize the danger to U.S. national security that this state of affairs poses.
We don’t know who is actually running Ukraine and who is actually receiving the money and taking possession of the weapons, and where the weapons are ending up. What we do know is that multiple international watchdog organizations, including the European Commission, have long regarded Ukraine as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
I do not share the common affliction of having a short memory, and I still vividly recall this 2015 report in the Guardian and many other similar reports, including reports issued by the European Commission. As recently as 2023, former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker characterized Ukraine as “massively corrupt.”
I hope that the FBI under Kath Patel is considering the possibility that Democrats such as Chris Murphy have violated—or at least subordinated—their duty to uphold the U.S. Constitution by acting as agents (official, unofficial, or undeclared) for the oligarchic state apparatus of Ukraine.
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