In my new blogging environment, some posts may cover more than one topic.
Today, I want to share a short film from 2013, posted by TwistedReverie, om Arabic, apparently filmed in Pakistan, titled “Mother”. There are subtitles but the closing credits are in Arabic script only (not on imdb). The video quality (as to resolution) could be better. The story is that a young man leaves his mother at an outdoor place with a note to give to others, and in the end we learn he does not want to have to care for her. It is certainly a comment on filial piety.
The other topic concerns the mess in red states over, not just the 'don’t say gay' laws, but specifically the anti-trans issues.
Alabama, for example, has passed and a federal court has let stand a very draconian law felonzing the medical treatment of kids under 18 for gender dysphoria (Reuters). Some states seem to want to stop even “social transisitions” while school boards in blue or even purple states have encouraged it (with pronoun and bathroom rules).
I shall cite for discussion a discussion of puberty blockers from an obviously reputable place, the Cleveland Clinic. There is a discussion of an unusual condition of premature puberty where they are medically appropriate regardless of psychology. The article says also that they are never given until puberty starts.
I would add that we know that generally normally puberty encourages continuation of brain development. For some boys, issues like dyslexia or ADD sometimes improve with puberty.
Generally, drug (or possibly surgical) interventions for minors are pretty rare to start with, so states should not be going out of their way to score political points by banning them against medical advice. However some advocates on the radical left do seem to glamorize openness to their use.
Here are a couple more videos to site.
In Dark Horse Podcast Clips, May 6, 2022. Bret and Heather (and the cat and dog) encourage temperance in bringing up these topics with children in school, whatever the countervailing arguments now.
On UK channel Triggernometry, therapist and university graduate student James Esses gets canceled for questioning left-wing dogma recklessly encouraging aggressive gender transition treatment for minors.
It does seem that some of the battle concerns moral perceptions or philosophical beliefs surrounding fidelity to sex observed (or 'assigned') at birth. Conservatives seem to see full development according to birth sex (laying aside intersex) as morally virtuous, partly because men and women are supposed to share certain gender assigned risks for their society (men go to war to protect women and children -- look at Ukraine now – and women bear risks in childbearing – look at the abortion issue now. People (myself included) do not feel 'attracted' to non-binary people usually, and may want to protect their inner value for the attractions they do feel. Along these lines, Esses notes that the far Left does not want to see transgenderism or non-binary status spoken of as a medical or psychiatric issue or disability; they want it to become a new identity to be proud of. But if it requires medical intervention, as argued by Leonard Sax in "Why Gender Matters" (2006, Harmony), then the Left stumbles into a logical contradiction, just like mathematicians do in proof by contraposition.
(Posted: Monday, May 9, 2022 at 10 AM EDT by John W. Boushka)