There was a time when America was admired as the world’s moral leader, a place where a poor person could work hard and achieve wealth and respect. We were known as “the city upon a hill.”

Those days are lost.

Today, a president posts a disgusting comment and doesn’t lose followers, the government hires masked thugs to abduct people from the streets and send them to the hell-hole “Alligator Alcatraz” without any trial, and the Supreme Court justices vote to absolve the president from any punishment for any crime, no matter how heinous.

It has become evident that our once-admired nation has transformed into a symbol of evil rather than freedom.

We should return the Statue of Liberty to France and allow a more worthy nation to flaunt it. The America of Trump, Thune, Johnson, Roberts, the GOP and FOX News is nothing more than a “Gulf of America” banana dictatorship.

 

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Monetary Sovereignty

Twitter: @rodgermitchell

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What happens when religious ignorance, bigotry, hatred and cruelty are in charge? What if the people who are being “protected” don’t want the government to make their medical decisions?

Trump administration moves to cut off transgender care for children The sweeping proposals include cutting off federal Medicaid and Medicare funding from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to children. They contradict the recommendations of major medical groups. By ALI SWENSON, MATTHEW PERRONE and DEVI SHASTRI

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday unveiled a series of regulatory actions designed to effectively ban gender-affirming care for minors, building on broader Trump administration restrictions on transgender Americans.

The sweeping proposals — the most significant moves this administration has taken so far to restrict the use of puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgical interventions for transgender children — include cutting off federal Medicaid and Medicare funding from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to children and prohibiting federal Medicaid dollars from being used to fund such procedures.

“This is not medicine, it is malpractice,” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said of gender-affirming procedures on children in a news conference on Thursday.

“Sex-rejecting procedures rob children of their futures.”

Thursday’s announcements would imperil access in nearly two dozen states where drug treatments and surgical procedures remain legal and funded by Medicaid, which includes federal and state dollars.

The proposals run counter to the recommendations of most major U.S. medical organizations. And advocates for transgender children strongly refuted the administration’s claims about gender-affirming care and said Thursday’s moves would put lives at risk.

“The multitude of efforts we are seeing from federal legislators to strip transgender and nonbinary youth of the health care they need is deeply troubling,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, of The Trevor Project, a nonprofit suicide prevention organization for LBGTQ+ youth, who called the changes a “one-size-fits-all mandate from the federal government” on a decision that should be between a doctor and patient.

Proposed rules would threaten youth gender-affirming care in states where it remains legal Medicaid programs in slightly less than half of states currently cover gender-affirming care. At least 27 states have adopted laws restricting or banning the care. The Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding Tennessee’s ban means most other state laws are likely to remain in place.

Nearly all U.S. hospitals participate in the Medicare and Medicaid programs, the federal government’s largest health plans that cover seniors, people with disabilities and low-income Americans. Losing access to those payments would imperil most U.S. hospitals and medical providers.

The same funding restrictions would apply to a smaller health program, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, when it comes to care for people under the age of 19, according to a federal notice posted Thursday morning.

Kennedy also announced Thursday that the HHS Office of Civil Rights will propose a rule excluding gender dysphoria from the definition of a disability.

In a related move, the Food and Drug Administration issued warning letters to a dozen companies that market chest-binding vests and other equipment used by people with gender dysphoria. Manufacturers include GenderBender LLC of Carson, California and TomboyX of Seattle.

The FDA letters state that chest binders can only be legally marketed for FDA-approved medical uses, such as recovery after mastectomy surgery.

  ========================================

ASSOCIATED PRESS Fewer than 1 in 1,000 US adolescents receive gender-affirming medications, researchers find

As U.S. lawmakers debate issues around health care for transgender youth, it’s been difficult to determine the number of young people receiving gender-affirming medications, leaving room for exaggerated and false claims.

Now, a medical journal has published the most reliable estimate yet and the numbers are low, reflecting more clearly on medical practices now being weighed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Fewer than 1 in 1,000 U.S. adolescents with commercial insurance received gender-affirming medications — puberty blockers or hormones — during a recent five-year period, according to the study released Monday.

At least 26 states have adopted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, and most of those states face lawsuits. A decision by the Supreme Court in a Tennessee case is expected later this year. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to roll back protections for transgender people.

“We are not seeing inappropriate use of this sort of care,” said lead author Landon Hughes, a Harvard University public health researcher. “And it’s certainly not happening at the rate at which people often think it is.”

The researchers analyzed a large insurance claims database covering more than 5 million patients ages 8 to 17.

Only 926 adolescents with a gender-related diagnosis received puberty blockers from 2018 through 2022. During that time, 1,927 received hormones. The findings, published in JAMA Pediatrics, suggest that fewer than 0.1% of all youth in the database received these medications.

The researchers found that no patients under age 12 were prescribed hormones, an indication that doctors are appropriately cautious about when to start such treatments, Hughes said.

“I hope that our paper cools heads on this issue and ensures that the public is getting a true sense of the number of people who are accessing this care,” he said.

The database included insurance plans in all 50 states, but did not include youth covered by Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for low-income people.

The study did not look at surgeries among transgender adolescents. Other researchers have found that those procedures are extremely rare among young people.

Not all transgender youth proceed with medical treatments, said Dr. Scott Leibowitz, co-lead author of the adolescent standards of care for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, a leading transgender health group.

Transgender adolescents “come to understand their gender at different times and in different ways,” he said, noting that the best care should include experts in adolescent identity development who can work with families to help figure out what’s appropriate for each young person.

Leibowitz, who has worked in gender clinics in several U.S. cities, said the study “adds to the growing evidence base about best practices when serving transgender and gender diverse youth.

As America sinks lower on the national morality scale, Trump and Kennedy will tell doctors how to cure heel spurs in the military.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Monetary Sovereignty

Twitter: @rodgermitchell

Search #monetarysovereignty

Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell;

MUCK RACK: https://muckrack.com/rodger-malcolm-mitchell;

https://www.academia.edu/

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College undergoes conservative shift

Lawmakers in Texas are altering leadership and classes at UT Austin. By Vimal Patel The New York Times AUSTIN, Texas

In a state dominated by conservatives, the University of Texas at Austin stood out. Its leadership had often been a thorn in the side of the state’s politicians, resisting efforts to erode faculty power and championing diversity.

The university defended its race-conscious admissions policy all the way to the Supreme Court in 2016. It has long been a magnet for liberal students and student activism.

Today, the conservatives are winning. State Republicans have passed laws to curtail what is taught in college classes and installed new university administrators with partisan affiliations, among a host of new strategies to remake a public higher education system that they argue has been held hostage to left-leaning ideas and become hostile to conservative ones.

The University of Texas is one of their main targets. The campus is no longer led by an academic, but a Republican lawyer who worked for the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton.

The president has promised curricular changes, and the system is now conducting an audit of all gender studies courses, after a state House bill passed in May enshrined in state law that there are effectively only two genders.

Another piece of legislation, Senate Bill 37, gutted faculty control of universities, tightened a grip on what can be taught and gave appointed boards the power to approve academic leaders.

The Austin campus has opened the School of Civic Leadership, one of many such new schools on college campuses with the goal of attracting more conservative students. The university laid off several dozen employees last year after a state law made diversity and inclusion offices illegal at public colleges.

A similar story is playing out across Texas. This fall, the firing of a Texas A&M instructor teaching a gender studies course after a student complained put the university at the center of a national debate over a crackdown on professors’ speech. The instructor’s department head and dean also lost their administrative posts, and eventually, the Texas A&M president resigned.

Last month, the university system’s regents went further than Texas lawmakers, approving a policy that requires courses that teach “race or gender ideology” to have presidential approval.

The Texas Tech University System has also sought to limit how race and gender are taught in its schools and created a new course approval process.

But perhaps no campus embodies the depth of the change in Texas higher education more than UT Austin, located blocks from the Texas Capitol.

The Austin campus is one of a handful of universities that has responded warmly to a Trump administration offer to give funding preferences to schools that adhere to its list of policy prescriptions.

The proposal was widely panned by advocates of academic freedom. The handful of other schools that embraced it are right-leaning schools, such as New College in Florida. Some faculty and students worry lawmakers are trying to turn the University of Texas — a selective school with students from across the country — into a conservative campus.

But state officials and the university’s new leaders, along with the Trump administration, say their goal is to restore balance to universities. “Texas is targeting professors who are more focused on pushing leftist ideologies rather than preparing students to lead our nation,” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said in October. “We must end indoctrination.”

Right-wing, fascist indoctrination is OK, however.

In a “state of the university” speech in October, Jim Davis, the University of Texas president, said changes on campus are meant “to create balance.” “We don’t want degree programs that are so narrow they develop only one perspective,” he said.

Right-wing perspective is allowed. The left-wing perspective that created Social Security, Medicare, poverty aids, and equal rights legislation is not allowed.

The Trump administration this year has led an aggressive attack against higher education, threatening to strip a set of mostly private institutions of large sums of money if they don’t conform to the president’s policies. But it is public university systems that are seeing the biggest changes.

For years, Florida, which, like Texas, has unified Republican control of state government, served as a lab for conservative changes. Other conservative states like Indiana, Ohio and Alabama have also demanded changes at their schools that have led to quick acquiescence, most notably the closure of diversity programs and new limits on professors.

But the main energy is in Texas, where Republicans who learned from Florida are going even further. The changes over the last year have been rapid fire, leaving students and faculty members reeling.

At a coffee shop across the street from the Austin campus last month, five students spoke of fear and helplessness. Sofia Gomez, a rhetoric and writing major, said a history professor told her of pulling a book about the experiences of a transgender man, a move the professor described as the toughest decision of her career. “I considered transferring out of UT,” said Gomez, “because if my professors are unable to teach me, and I’m not able to have candid conversations to get a proper education, what am I here for?”

The idea is that if we pretend gay people don’t exist, then they won’t exist.

A poll by the student newspaper, The Daily Texan, found 40% of faculty respondents are changing their syllabus or teaching approach to comply with state legislation. “I take classes that are supposed to be about politics, and a lot of professors are scared to even apply anything we learn to the modern day,” said Mia Reballosa, a junior majoring in government.

Next, we’ll get rid of vaccination and teach prayer instead. That should protect our children against disease.

“There’s this large looming fear on campus.” The university is exploring consolidating many liberal arts departments, an effort many faculty members believe is aimed at eliminating politically controversial departments.

Teaching religion instead of science is not controversial.

The university said the academic reviews will explore factors like student demand and academic rigor. “The university,” its statement read, “is also encouraging academic units that have allowed some of their hiring, programs and course offerings to become excessively politicized to instead recommit themselves to balanced inquiry, depoliticized curricula and welcoming a diverse range of views (especially on controversial issues).”

Balanced? Depoliticized? Deverse? Sure, as long as we get rid of immigrants, because they are replacing us. Right?

Mary Neuburger, head of Slavic and Eurasian studies, another department under threat, said she remained quiet until she had trouble sleeping at night. Then she began talking publicly. “There’s total chaos,” Neuburger said in an interview, noting a constant turnover of administrators.

“When you tell a unit they might not exist by the end of the year, what do you think that does for morale?” “I’ve been at UT for almost 30 years,” she added, “and I’ve never seen anything like this.

Somewhere, Hitler is smiling.

 

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Monetary Sovereignty

Twitter: @rodgermitchell

Search #monetarysovereignty

Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell;

MUCK RACK: https://muckrack.com/rodger-malcolm-mitchell;

https://www.academia.edu/

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A Government’s Sole Purpose is to Improve and Protect The People’s Lives.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY