Monday, June 2, 2025

Part I

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Prisoners Should Not Be Able to Choose Their Gender: Allowing Biological Men in Women’s Prison Leads to Even More Harm for Women in Prison Says UN Official

In Romans chapter 1, Paul tells us that the moral truths that are revealed in Scripture are also revealed in nature, and yet sinners suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Now, a general principle in Christian worldview thinking is that the issues of greatest clarity in scriptural revelation and in general revelation, and that means creation order, the things that are most clear, are most urgent when it comes to moral knowledge. And so there are many issues in which you might have a little bit of time to figure out some ethical analysis. But when it comes to, say, the difference between human beings and other creatures, you better have that down fast. When it comes to the fact that God made us male and female, you better have that down fast. When you confuse issues that fundamental, we’re in a truly urgent, truly emergency situation.

And that’s exactly where we are these days. The LGBTQ revolution, especially the T, has now reached the point that we are being told to deny reality revealed in Scripture, yes, revealed in creation even, revealed even in just common sense perception. We’re now being told yes, that was a boy, not a boy any longer. That was a girl, not a girl any longer. You have to call the girl a boy, you have to call the boy a girl. It goes down an entire catalog of rejections of creation order, an entire catalog, which is a slide into ever greater confusion, ever greater idolatry according to Scripture, ever greater corruption.

So all of a sudden in the last few days, some glaring examples of just how urgent this issue has become. From time to time, I cite The Daily Telegraph. The Telegraph, as it is known, is one of the most influential papers in the United Kingdom. It is one of the most important daily newspapers in London. Among London dailies, it is one of the more conservative. It also has very clearly gone after this issue in a big way, and it’s found a couple stories that are really important. Both of them made it into the edition of The Daily Telegraph for Saturday.

Here’s a headline, “UN,” that’s United Nations, “Warns Against Criminals Choosing Their Own Gender.” Now, let’s pause for a moment and recognize this is just important from time to time, that if we were to go back in history, say 20 or 30, at least 40 years, no one would have a clue what we’re talking about here. What would the United Nations be warning against “against criminals choosing their own gender.”

Daniel Martin is deputy political editor for the paper and he tells us, “Police forces that allow criminals to pick their gender are the biggest barrier to ending violence against women and girls.” And that comes from the United Nations and a report. Reem Alsalem identified as the United Nations Special Rapporteur for violence against women and girls said, “at least a third of British forces were still collecting data on criminals and victims, self-identified gender rather than their sex.” He goes on to say, “It has led to 49 convictions for rape being officially listed as female in the decade to 2023 despite the legal definition of rape as only being able to be carried out by men.”

And by the way, current British law, current criminal law in the UK limits the crime of rape to men. That is, let’s just say anatomical men. And thus, now you have, according to British law, those who are identified as women being charged with a crime that only a male can commit. And all this is being done with a straight face. The big impact of this report from the United Nations is saying that police forces should not allow criminals when it comes to, say, jail or housing or holding cells to determine their own sexual identity, their own gender identity. They should be male or female based upon anatomy and segregated thusly.

And this article is saying straightforwardly and it’s coming from the United Nations, not usually a source of great moral clarity, but the UN Special Rapporteur for violence against women and girls says that confusion over this issue represents one of the major vulnerabilities to women and to girls, to females, when it comes to the situation of being held by justice in terms of jail, in prison and all the rest, incarceration. It turns out that it matters a great deal whether someone, let’s just say, is anatomically male in a female prison or not. And it comes right down to the fact that still, according to the law, you have to be anatomically male to be accused of rape or much less tried for rape. The criminal statute is only applicable to anatomical males who happen to be in at least a good number of British jails identified as women and housed with women.

The UN officials said that this kind of approach “neglects women and girls specific needs and increases risk to their safety.” The UN official “also warned that feminist campaigners have been ostracized, attacked and punished by British political parties, universities, and the media for criticizing gender ideology.” She went further and said The United Kingdom “risks undoing decades of progress made on combating homophobia,” the paper explains, “by failing to stand up for lesbians who had been vilified for demanding the right to same-sex spaces such as bars and dating apps.”

So this started out being about jail, imprisonment, incarceration. Now it’s also about dating apps and lesbian bars. I told you, we’re living in a strange world. It turns out that once again, we have to note that lesbians actually know who women are. That’s the whole point of being lesbian. Go figure. According to The Telegraph, this UN official has also demanded that the Labor Party, that’s the current party in government, “ensured its conversion therapy ban did not criminalize doctors and parents who question whether a child needs to change gender.”

Now, The Telegraph mentions that these comments from this United Nations official come just a month after the Supreme Court in the UK “ruled that sex in the Equality Act means biological sex and not declared gender.” We’re also told, “In March, a review led by Professor Alice Sullivan of University College London urged the home secretary to issue a mandatory order to all 43 English and Welsh police forces and the British Transport Police to collect data by sex, but she has not yet done so.” So here you have the UN, again, not usually a source of moral clarity, complaining that officials in the United Kingdom, including in the current labor government, that they are just basically stonewalling on this question.

In bureaucratic speak, The United Nations report said, “Police data, while disaggregated by crime and location, often conflate sex with the gender. For data on victims and perpetrators, the Special Rapporteur identifies this gap as the biggest barrier for ending violence against women and girls, obscuring trends and intersectional vulnerabilities.”

So you have a little critical theory thrown in there, a little intersectionality thrown in there. The big point is that the moral clarity on this is astounding. The moral clarity is, guess what? Putting biological males in places of confinement with women and girls endangers the women and girls. Get it? Well just about any sane person gets it immediately, and furthermore didn’t need any report from the United Nations in order to get it.

I also want to read to you the last sentence from the report, “At least 16 of 46 police forces follow guidance favoring self-identified gender, skewing the very low rate of sexual and gender-based violence crimes committed by females.” That again comes from the UN official. What does that tell us? It tells us that woman-on-woman sexual assault is very rare, even in prisons. It tells us that putting biological men, declaring themselves to be women, is such a setting actually skews all the statistics simply because, well, to put the matter bluntly, it doesn’t work.

Speaking of it doesn’t work, let’s relate that to the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. Britain is very proud of its National Health Service, at least it has been for decades. It is a form of socialized medicine. And there was a special report that came out even during the Second World War, looking to the period after the war called for the development of something like a welfare state, and something like socialized medicine, and that’s something like what Britain got.

And for a long time it appeared that it was working pretty well except in recent years it has been made very clear it’s not working well at all. Waiting times have increased, people are dying, diagnoses are being missed, facilities are very old. And the only way of course in socialized medicine to fix that is a vast infusion of taxpayer money. But the taxpayers are basically tapped out when it comes to that kind of expense. And when you have government-run healthcare, guess what? You have healthcare just as good as the government would run it.

Part II

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No, Don’t Give Staff Extra Breaks to Hide Their Biology: The Massive Problem in Suggested Transgender Guidelines from UK

Or to put it another way, it would be run just like the government would run it. And that leads to a second issue of our consideration today also on the gender issue.

Also in a major report, another big story published in The Daily Telegraph. This is why Michael Searles, another deputy editor. In this case, deputy health editor of the paper. Here’s the headline, “NHS Plan to Give Trans Staff Breaks so They Can Tuck Genitals.” Now, I’ll have to tell you, I had to decide whether or not this is an article we can discuss on The Briefing. The more I looked at it, I recognize this is an article we must discuss. And I’m not going to go into any kind of detail. Let’s just say when you put the word tuck in this headline, it tells you you have people trying to hide their anatomy. That’s enough said. They’re trying to hide who they are, male or female.

We have a report here in The Telegraph telling us that the National Health Service, or at least a branch of the National Health Service, had decided it was going to give transgender employees a little extra time to do, well, that thing that we were just describing. Evidently, doing that takes a little bit of time.

Here’s how Searles tells the story, “An NHS Hospital Trust drew up plans to give trans staff extra breaks if they wore chest binders or had to tuck their genitals away. In draft guidance seen by The Telegraph, University hospital’s Sussex, NHS Trust, said trans colleagues ‘may require extra scheduled breaks in their shift in order to have breaks from’…” I’m not going to say the rest. “However, the trust said the new proposals, which also said women only spaces should include trans women, have been dropped in light of the Supreme Court ruling last month.”

All right. So at least one promising aspect of this is that it looks like this NHS Trust has pulled the policy back, but they only did so because of that judgment we discussed on The Briefing by the UK’s highest court in which it declared that the Equality Act includes the definition of male as biologically male and female as biologically female. It’s pretty much exactly the kind of clarity that President Trump brought in his inaugural address when he spoke of the government recognizing only two genders, male and female. And the government came back about 24 hours later and said, when it comes to the female, large reproductive cell, male, small reproductive cell, that’s one way of saying it’s just a matter of anatomy, plain and simple.

But the plain and simple fact is that when it came to this NHS Trust, they were actually looking at encouraging trans employees and staff members by saying you can even have a little extra time to deal with that little extra procedure you have to go through. Now, let me just also say that that little extra procedure here is in its own way a revolt against creation order. That little procedure is an effort to hide creation order itself. And by the way, it can’t do any good for anybody. And as a matter of fact, this article says that if not done right by males, it can lead to some real injury and pain. Who would’ve thought?

But when it comes to both male and female efforts, the paper tells us “both can cause infections, inflammation, and other health problems,” doctors have warned, “which in some cases can be irreversible or lead to infertility in those born male.” Again, just consider the irrationality here of having to say those born male. Guess who those born male are? They’re male.

There was some sanity that broke through in this article and it came in a quote from Helen Joyce, identified as director of advocacy at Sex Matters, identified as a human rights charity. She said, the proposals for employees here are “self-harming in pursuit of the impossible goal of sex change.” And she went on to say, “This should never have made it onto paper even as a draft.” Now that’s sanity. This should never have been thought. It should never have been said. It certainly should never have been put into a formal policy. It should never have been printable on paper. This is insanity.

Helen Joyce also spoke the truth when she spoke of the actions we were discussing in saying that they’re “culturally motivated actions that cause permanent physical damage.” She went on to say, “When it comes to some other things that would be considered totally unacceptable and dehumanizing in our society, when compared to these things,” she said, “the only difference is that self-harm in the name of trans identity is high status and fashionable.” That’s truly important. When it comes to the cultural left, when it comes to the cultural elites, self-harm in the name of transgender identity is indeed “high status and fashionable.” That doesn’t make it less deadly, it doesn’t make it any less a direct rejection of creation order. Doesn’t make it any less dangerous or corruptive. So anyway, I found it very interesting. Both of those articles appeared in the same day, the same single day’s edition of the Daily Telegraph. 

Turns out these issues are boiling over just about everywhere.

Part III

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The Justice Department Puts Pressure on Gov. Newsom: Trump Administration Will Look Into Title IX Violations With Transgender Athletes in California

And so next, we have to come back to the United States. I mentioned the fact that in his inaugural address, President Trump made very clear that there are two and only two genders in the view of the federal government under his administration, and he’s seeking to put that into policy to apply that just about everywhere within the reach of the federal government. When it comes to federal funding and federal policies such as, for example, through the Department of Education, it turns out that reach is very wide and it’s very deep. It reaches all the way over to California and it is deep within its school system. It reaches right down to the level of athletic competition for those identified in one article as the under-19s. Just in case you’re a little loose with math, that means you’re 1 through 18. Why didn’t they just state it that way?

Benedict Smith reports, “Donald Trump has threatened to strip California of large-scale federal funding after a transgender long jumper took first place in a state competition. The US president accused California governor Gavin Newsom “of breaking the law and defying an executive order he issued early in his term, barring biological men from participating in women’s sports.” That’s exactly what’s happening here. And the President says that he would personally intervene to stop this biologically male athlete “who won both the long jump and triple jumps at California’s southern section contest for under-19s.” That was on May 17th. The president says he will prevent him from competing in the state finals this weekend. The president said that the trans athlete was “practically unbeatable in the girls’ category, calling their participation not fair and totally demeaning to women and girls.” The President said, and I quote, “California, under the leadership of radical left Democrat Gavin Newsom, continues to illegally allow men to play in women’s sports.” The president posted that on his Truth Social platform.

The president went on to say, “Please be hereby advised that large-scale federal funding will be held back, may be permanently, if the executive order on this subject matter is not adhered to.” Mr. Trump also said, “I will speak to him today to find out which way he wants to go.” Well, who would he be? That would be Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, who, in a podcast, his own podcast he was hosting just a matter of weeks ago, said that he thought it was fundamentally unfair that biological males would compete with biological females. He said, “It’s an issue of fairness. It’s deeply unfair. We’ve got to own that. We’ve got to acknowledge it.”

Well, I said at the time that it would be, I think, a delusion to believe that Gavin Newsom believed anything he was saying there. He was clearly positioning himself for a run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. And furthermore, if he wins the nomination, he wants to win the election. And this is an issue on which you have about an 80/20 divide. The problem for Gavin Newsom is, well, no one knows exactly what he believes because he is such a political creature, but the part of this is that Gavin Newsom is the governor of the state the President’s taking action against because the governor won’t correct the problem. That’s why the president said, “I will speak to him today to find out which way he wants to go.”

Anyone who’s been following the sexual and gender LGBTQ revolution for the last several years understands the poetry in the president’s statement, calling upon the California governor to indicate “which way he wants to go.”

The President concluded with these words, “In the meantime, I’m ordering local authorities, if necessary, to not allow the transitioned person to compete in the state finals. This is a totally ridiculous situation.” The president is profoundly right. This is a totally ridiculous situation. It’s ridiculous that young women will be put in the position of having to even make the argument that biological males should not compete against them. And remember that we are talking here about sports, track and field events, in which it’s extremely clear that the skeletal and muscular distinctions after puberty between male and female are so large, so considerable, that it’s insane to believe that somehow this playing field could be equal or fair or anything in between.

On Friday, USA Today reported, “The Justice Department announced that it will investigate whether a California law is violating Title IX after a transgender high school athlete won track events to qualify for the state track and field championships.” According to a news release, the Justice Department said, “It had sent legal notices to state officials saying it is opening an investigation to determine whether Title IX is being violated by California’s School Success and Opportunity Act.”

USA Today goes on to say, “The announcement came just a day after President Donald Trump warned he would cut federal funding to the state for allowing transgender athletes to complete in women’s sports.” I’ll just assert here that this report in USA Today is an indication that the Justice Department is moving forward in pressing the president’s concerns. This is one way of getting the state of California’s attention. It could be one way of bringing an immediate and material change to the policies there in California or making the state of California pay a rather significant price in terms of defending what the president says is illegal discrimination against women and girls.

But this article is really even most interesting, and offers so much more moral concern, because of the way bureaucrats in California are trying to explain and defend the policy and furthermore explaining how they want to make it more equitable. Let me just warn you, this is really stupid stuff.

USA Today tells us, “The California Interscholastic Federation announced on May 27th that it’s implementing a pilot entry process for the upcoming 2025 California State Track and Field Championships.” Now this is a statement from the California Interscholastic Federation, I quote, “Under this pilot entry process, any biological female student athlete, who would have earned the next qualifying mark for one of their sections, automatic qualifying entries in the CIF state meet and did not achieve the CIF state at-large mark in the finals in their section meet was extended an opportunity to participate in the 2025 CIF State Track and Field Championships that,” according to this announcement, “while the California Interscholastic Federation did not directly respond to a request for comment regarding the investigation from the Justice Department, the Desert Sun,” that’s another newspaper, “was provided with a follow-up statement about the pilot entry process.”

Now, this is bureaucratic speak, but it’s absolute nonsense, but it’s the worst kind of nonsense. It’s the nonsense that is rejecting creation order and making girls and women vulnerable. Listen to this, “Additionally, if necessary, in the high jump, triple jump, and long jump events at the 2025 CIF State Track and Field Championships, a biological female student athlete, who would have earned a specific placement on the podium, will also be awarded the medal for that place and the results will be reflected in the recording of the event.”

Okay, did you catch the insanity? Here’s the absolute insanity in all that bureaucratic jargon. If you have a biological male declaring himself to be a girl or a woman, competing against girls in this kind of athletic competition, and remember several jumps are mentioned here, and this is where the male body has a considerable advantage over the female body just in terms of leg size, gait, hip construction, all the rest, let’s just say it’s obvious, but you have the insanity here in which the association is telling us the federation has announced that if there is a biological female who comes in second because a biological male posing as a female came in first, then the biological female, if you cut through the jargon, is also going to be awarded a first, but there’s going to be a first first, and then a, “Oh, you’re just a female first.”

This is the morality reflected in the bureaucratic speak: “The CIF values all of our student athletes. And we will continue to uphold our mission of providing students with the opportunity to belong, connect, and compete while complying with the California Law and Education Code.” That is not a respectable moral position after you’re predicating the whole thing on rejecting creation order and denying that you really know who a boy is and who a girl is. On the other side of that, you can come up with all the moral language, and all the flowery description you want about equity and order and connecting and belonging and all the rest. It is sheer nonsense.

And you know what? I think just about every parent understands that. I think certainly the girls on those teams and the girls in those events understand the absolute emptiness of that kind of moral statement. They see it for what it is and they know that they’re the ones who lose. In actuality, in a situation like this, the entire civilization loses.

We have to hope the Trump administration on this will press the point and win. And perhaps even in a state like California where you do have such entrenched powers on behalf of the LGBTQ plus revolution, you hope that even maybe there, correction can follow. Maybe the threatening of cutting off funding will finally get somebody’s attention.

But we found out something else too, and that was just how fast Gavin Newsom would be proved to be a liar on this issue. It’s up to him to prove he’s not. Don’t hold your breath.

Well, finally, my wife and I have found ourselves in an unusual situation of the past, say, 48 hours. We’re in Paris, France. And guess what? The city is obsessed with one thing, and that one thing was the win by Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League competition, beating an Italian team 5-0. The streets are, let’s just say, filled. And they are filled with people who are setting off firecrackers and blowing horns. The cacophony has lasted now well over 24 hours. It shows no signs of abating. It has turned violent. In some cases, at least two are dead and a police officer is in a very grave situation. The streets are basically shut down in many areas of Paris. You can still get to some of the major locations, but it will take you a long time to get there.

All of this shows the fervor that comes these days with sports and even some in France are noticing that what used to be a fervor attached to religious devotion is now attached to a sport, in this case, what they call football and Americans call soccer.

It is also, I think, very interesting to note that major Paris media are reporting that this is the first time in the history of Paris that a Paris-based league team has won this kind of championship, the first time in the history of Paris as a city. And let’s just remind ourselves, Paris is very old.

There’s a new aspect of this, of course. A Qatari Sovereign wealth fund is behind all of this, putting big money. The Qatar Sovereign Wealth Fund, and in particular what is known as the Qatar Sports Investments, is the major owner of the team. And thus, this is considered a victory not only on the streets of Paris, but also there in Qatar and throughout the Arab world.

And just as the winning team in the Super Bowl was routinely invited to meet with the president of the United States in the White House, the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, quickly invited the team, Paris Saint-Germain, to meet with him in the presidential palace, something of a new thing for the French. Meanwhile, the Parisian police are just trying to get control of the streets.