The Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon, under the leadership of Archbishop Alexander K. Sample, has adopted a model policy on how to deal with transgender students. It is a model not just for Catholic schools, but for all schools, private and public. It is empathetic in its understanding of those suffering from gender dysphoria, yet firmly opposed to gender ideology.

“The first chapters of Genesis in sacred scripture provide the foundation for a Catholic anthropology—the Catholic understanding of the human person. According to our faith, human beings are made in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:27).”

Pope Francis, who has called gender ideology “demonic,” is quoted in the policy, reminding us of who has stewardship over our bodies.

“The acceptance of our body as a gift from God is vital for welcoming and accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father and our common home, whereas thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy an absolute power over creation. Learning to respect our body, to care for it and to respect its fullest meaning, is an essential element of any genuine human ecology.”

The policy rejects the widespread notion of “gender identity theory,” which holds that “one’s identity as a man, woman, or both/neither is based solely on subjective self-perception.” This is false. Indeed, this kind of subjectivism is at odds with “the objective fact of biological sex.” Thus, it is contrary to truth. This, more than anything, is the heart of the problem of gender ideology.

The inclusion of “Pastoral Guidelines” is most helpful. Here are some of them.

• It recommends that “designations and pronouns should accord with biological sex.”
• Restrooms and locker rooms “should be organized according to biological sex.”
• Sports teams should be “based on biological sex, rather than self-perceived gender.”
• Dress codes should also be in accordance with one’s biological sex.
• Importantly, “no person should have on-site or distribute medications for the purpose of gender transition.”
• Just as critical, the policy recognizes that “parents are the primary educators,” and should be treated as such.

This commonsensical policy should be adopted nationwide. For starters, we need to end the exploitation of minors for ideological and financial profit. This means we need to start respecting the human dignity of the person. We did not come into the world as something other than male or female, and no amount of brainwashing to the contrary should be tolerated.

Most of the mainstream media is in the tank with pro-abortion activists, which explains their reluctance to accurately report on the seriousness of abortion complications. Yet any person who truly believes in the best interests of women should want all women to know what can happen to them when undergoing an abortion. Since they won’t do it, we will.

The latest data from the CDC on abortion shows that in 2020 there were 620,327 abortions in the United States. They also found that roughly 2 percent of all abortions involve some type of complication. To put that in perspective, that means that in about 12,400 cases, there was a complication.

The CDC further determined that 2020 marked the first time that a majority of abortions (53 percent) involved pills. Abortion clinics account for almost 100 percent of the other cases.

Dr. Ingrid Skop is an OB-GYN and a senior fellow and director of medical affairs at the Charlotte Lozier Institute. One of her biggest concerns is the recent decision by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to permanently remove restrictions on obtaining the abortion pill: women are no longer required to see a doctor in-person to be prescribed chemical abortion pills.

“The regimen that’s been approved by the [FDA] consists of two pills,” Dr. Skop told the Daily Signal. “Mifepristone blocks the progesterone receptor, so it cuts off the hormonal support and kills the embryo or fetus. It’s followed generally in 24 to 48 hours by misoprostol, which induces contractions and causes this tissue to be expressed. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work. Probably about 1 out of 20 times it will not express all the tissue, and the woman will require surgery to complete the abortion.”

It was President Biden who took away the in-person requirements for the abortion pill. Dr. Skop explains what this means.

“This means there’s no physical exam, there’s no ultrasound to make sure that the gestational age is correct, to make sure the pregnancy is not in the fallopian tube where it could rupture. There’s no safeguards to make sure a woman is not being coerced into an abortion. No one’s doing labs to determine if she has an Rh-negative blood type and needs a RhoGAM shot to prevent future pregnancy complications.”

Here are some other problems associated with abortion pills (the information is taken from the Charlotte Lozier Institute).

• Chemical abortion has a complication rate four times that of surgical abortion, and as many as one out of five women will suffer a complication.
• Chemical abortion drugs are more likely to send women to the emergency room: the rate of chemical abortion-related emergency room visits increased over 500% between 2002-2015.
• Chemical abortions are over 50% more likely than surgical abortions to result in an ER visit within 30 days affecting one in twenty women.
• Some abortion advocates encourage women to lie to their doctors if they need urgent care and say they are having a miscarriage. However, if a chemical abortion is miscoded as a miscarriage in       the ER (which occurred 60% of the time in one study), the woman is at significantly greater risk of needing multiple hospitalizations and follow-up surgery.

Women who go to abortion clinics that are not run by doctors are also in a risky situation. If she has complications, she is dependent on the judgment of a non-licensed physician to attend to her. Question: If no one in his right mind would undergo dental surgery performed by a dental hygienist, why would anyone allow a midwife, nurse or physician assistant to perform an abortion?

We did a study of the prevalence of non-doctors performing abortions across the country. It is available on our website.

The passion for abortion is so strong at Planned Parenthood that it now has mobile clinics that “roam the southern Illinois border” looking to entice women in nearby pro-life states, such as Missouri, to get rid of their unborn child. Pregnant women can hop on board an RV and have their abortion done lickety-split. Even DoorDash can’t match this kind of service.

Finally, abortion activists are pressuring the Biden administration to declare an “abortion public health emergency,” decrying the lack of access to abortion in some parts of the country. Makes you wonder: Do they really hate kids that much?

No civilization has brought about more liberty and equality than western civilization, and that is due, in large part, to the contributions of Catholicism. Yet on many campuses, not only is western civilization being trashed—while primitive cultures are being celebrated—Christianity is under attack. More than that, the western haters have turned their academic guns on Christians themselves.

“Christian Privilege” classes, workshops, and lectures have been in vogue for the past several years. At George Washington University, diversity workshops teach that “Christians enjoy a privileged, easier life than their non-Christians counterparts, and that Christians possess ‘built-in-advantages’ today.”

In other words, Hispanic Catholics who clean the toilets of filthy-rich atheist students and their pampered professors are the “privileged” ones.

At Rutgers University, a guest lecturer from Fairleigh Dickinson University, Khyati Joshi, told students a few years ago that “white Christian privilege” was responsible for slavery. She did not say who is responsible for slavery in a large part of the non-white world today.

Florida State University has been in the news lately for promoting “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or what is really racism—racism against white people, especially white Christians. Some of what follows, the university now says, is being discontinued, but there is reason to doubt it.

Students are being told in some classes that they must list their “identities.” One student was told to list himself as a white, heterosexual, Catholic male. To what end? The point of the assignment, everyone knew, was to shame him.

Another student, a female, said that her professor was known for going off on “white privilege” and “systemic racism,” and that if any students disagreed with him, their grades suffered. In fact, when she wrote a paper defending Christianity as an institution that helped to end slavery, she received an “F.”

The diversity, equity and inclusion gurus on campus have training programs where participants learn the four expressions of “Religious Oppression,” all of which blame white Christians for oppressing everyone else. The Indians and Pakistanis, and rival African tribes, according to this narrative, never butcher each other.

The proponents of this left-wing propaganda, which is today called scholarship, say that observing Christmas is an example of Christian hegemony. If that is the case, we need more of it. “Christian Privilege,” they say, refers to “the view that Christian beliefs, language, and practices do not require any special effort to be recognized, as they are embedded into the U.S. American culture.”

Leaving aside the fact that there is no such thing as a Christian “language” (these idiots should be fired for incompetence), why should it be considered controversial for a nation founded by Christians to celebrate its history? What exactly do they do in countries founded by Jews, Hindus and Muslims—celebrate Christianity? The USSR and Communist China were founded by secular genocidal maniacs and their celebrations were never criticized by the same people at war with Christians.

Classroom instruction at Florida State also includes discussion of the “Matrix of Oppression,” or what some people call the “Matrix of Domination.” It is basically a list of victimizers and victims.

The bad guys include white people, “biological” men (meaning real men), “gender conforming men” (meaning sane men), rich people and “naturalized citizens” (meaning those who didn’t break the law coming here). The good guys, the victims, are non-whites, “biological” women (meaning real women), “transgender, genderqueer, intersex” (meaning the sexually confused), and “undocumented” people (meaning those who crashed our borders illegally).

Asking university staff and students to swallow this moonshine is not without consequence. In 2021, Florida State had to settle out of court with Jack Denton, the Student Senate President, after he sued for having his First Amendment rights violated. Here’s what happened.

Denton sent a text to his fellow Catholic students complaining about Black Lives Matter and the ACLU. A student who read the text, and was offended, shared Denton’s private correspondence with his friends, triggering massive retaliation against him. They distorted his remarks and he was removed from his Senate office. When he brought this to the attention of university officials, they refused to do anything about it. That’s when he sued.

Any person—of any race, ethnicity, religion, sex, or sexual orientation who apologizes for who he is—simply because of real and contrived offenses committed by people who share his identity, needs help. Unless the bullies on the Left are told to take a hike—and sued when appropriate—this madness will continue.

On March 12, the Hollywood gang congratulated themselves again at the Academy Awards, and some Oscar winners made obscene comments. It’s who they are.

On the same day, an event that is of much greater cultural significance took place: it was Detransition Awareness Day. Hollywood was not cheering, but everyone else should have been. Detransitioners are people who have made the courageous decision to transition back to their normal sex.

Last year those who had transitioned to the opposite sex, and back again, held a Zoom conference on March 12 to discuss their experiences. Participants logged in from the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Chile, Brazil, and other countries. Their stories would shake most people.

In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in children who are confused about their sex, with girls transitioning to boys much more than vice versa. The latest data show that approximately 30 percent now transition back to their father-determined sex.

It is a national scandal that the elites in the medical profession are mostly supportive of transgender ideology. To counsel young people to switch their sex—which despite anatomical surgery can never happen in any true biological sense—is child abuse.

Virtually every boy and girl who has expressed misgivings about his or her natural sex has been encouraged by therapists, and those in the medical community, to take the next step. If they were left alone to work through this stage, 80 percent would choose not to transition.

Why do we need Detransition Awareness Day? Because those who make the decision to reverse course are attacked for doing so. They are harassed, verbally abused, stigmatized, shunned, and treated like dirt. Many examples could be cited. Here are a few.

Sinead Watson works as an advisor to Genspect, a parent-led organization opposed to transgenderism. In 2015, she made the switch from female to male; she decided to detransition in 2019.

Her second decision was greeted by therapists with scorn. “They just didn’t want to speak about detransition,” saying “it was like a kick in the stomach.” She calls the initial push to transition young people “disgusting,” arguing that the affirmative model must change.

Chloe Cole is the first person in the United States to bring a lawsuit against those who assisted her, as a minor, to make the medical transition. That was when she was 12. Four years later she realized this was a mistake.

When she made the first transition, her parents were told what has become the standard line—if you don’t support your child to transition she may commit suicide. Chloe says that “they were pretty much coerced into allowing this to happen.” Her lawsuit expressly says that she and her parents were “falsely informed” that she was “at a high risk for suicide.”

When she changed from male back to female, she was “attacked online” and in person. “I started getting harassed a lot.” She was shunned at school and made to feel like a pariah, if not a traitor to the cause of transgenderism.

There is no end to the services afforded to those who buy into the transgender scam and seek to transition. But there is nothing available for those who seek to detransition. This includes the Biden administration, which has shamelessly taken the side of the child abusers.

Those who choose to return to their nature-given status should be given every resource available. They are the ones who truly deserve our compassion and support.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams angered secularists recently when he spoke at an interfaith breakfast event. After his closest aide, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, introduced him as someone who “doesn’t believe” in separation of church and state, her boss took the stage and said, “Ingrid is so right.” “Don’t tell me about no separation of church and state. State is the body. Church is the heart. You take the heart out of the body, the body dies.”

Adams continued this line of thought, saying, “I can’t separate my belief because I’m an elected official.” He then made an observation that was just as contentious. “When we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools.”

As expected, this didn’t sit well with left-wing secularists and their religious next of kin. Rabbi Abby Stein, who is an LGBT activist, said Adams’ remarks were “unhinged and dangerous.” Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union, a militant secular organization, said his comments left her “speechless.”

Fabien Levy, a spokesman for Adams, said that Adams was merely trying to show that faith guides his actions. That is no doubt true. Adams has been in office long enough for us to know if he was literally attempting to abridge the First Amendment rights of New Yorkers.

It is paradoxical, to say the least, to hear left-wing activists hyperventilate over Adams’ speech. The fact is there is a very real threat to separation of church and state these days, and it is coming from organizations like the ACLU: they are using the state to encroach on the rights of the faithful. It is not the church that is busy abridging the rights of the state; it is the other way around.

When secularists like the ACLU lobby for the Equality Act—which would allow the state to tell Catholic doctors and hospitals that they must perform abortions and sex-reassignment surgeries—they are showing contempt for separation of church and state.

Secular activists pose the real constitutional threat, not Mayor Adams.