Yes, March 31 Is Easter Sunday …
This year, Easter falls on March 31. But some people will apparently celebrate what Joe Biden officially designated as “Transgender Day of Visibility.”
In Fairfax, Virginia, for example, during its most recent meeting, the County Board of Supervisors unanimously declared March 31 to be “Transgender Day of Visibility.”
“This was requested by a lot of people, which is great,” board Chairman Jeffrey McKay said, according to a report at the Washington Examiner, one that also cited Supervisor Dalia Palchik as referring to the day’s designation as a “moral imperative” due to high rates of depression and suicide among LGBTQ young people.
“To me, when we look at data, regardless of how you feel in your value system and your religious beliefs and other, there’s nothing that stands out more to me as to why this is important more than the information [showing]… more than half of our transgender students are depressed,” Palchik said. “Nearly half have considered suicide, and you see it across the board in our LGBT community.”
The Fairfax board’s declaration of this year’s Easter Sunday as another day to call attention to gender ideology was not overlooked.
“The proclamation goes far beyond the supposed intent of making transgender people and gender ideology activists feel seen,” Fairfax County mother and author Stephanie Lundquist-Arora wrote in an op-ed Tuesday at the Examiner. “Members of the board are also sending a message to Christians that they do not matter as they turn one of their holiest days into a celebration of an ideology that undermines the church’s core convictions.”
Lundquist-Arora observed the current overflow of attention already given to those claiming to be “transgender” in her county:
Aside from the inappropriateness of Transgender Visibility Day being on Easter this year, the resolution seems unnecessary in Fairfax County. The transgender activist community does not have a visibility problem in northern Virginia. But it does appear to have a narcissism problem. Fairfax County School Board, for example, has designated June as LGBT Pride Month and October as LGBT History Month. The community gets two full months of celebration in our district’s schools. Apparently, that just wasn’t enough.
The city of Sacramento is currently celebrating an entire week of “transgender visibility” with the launch of a resolution declaring the city a “sanctuary city for transgender people”:
In 2021, Biden proclaimed March 31 to be officially designated a day on which “all Americans … join in the fight for full equality for all transgender people.”
Despite the fact that the Constitution already provides for full equality for all Americans, Biden’s proclamation also served as a promo for the Democrats’ Equality Act (H.R.15) – now with 215 co-sponsors in the U.S. House – which, he said, would “more fully protect the civil rights of transgender Americans … and provide long overdue Federal civil rights protections on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.”
In reality, however, the Equality Act would cement into law the belief that the self-perception of gender overrides biological distinctions of male-female sex.
As is often the case when the left brings to the forefront another “identity group,” Biden appeared to make the necessary emotional plea for the Act with the statement the measure “will serve as a lasting legacy to the bravery and fortitude of the LGBTQ+ movement.”
Last year, Biden’s “Transgender Day of Visibility” statement repeated that, for him, transgender individuals are “some of the bravest people I know.” His comments quickly took a political turn again, however, as, in the very next sentence, he accused “MAGA extremists” of “advancing hundreds of hateful and extreme state laws that target transgender kids and their families.”
Biden added these “hateful and extreme state laws” – which seek to protect children and teens from experimental drugs and surgeries – are “un-American.”
Last week, Wyoming became the 24th state to protect young people from what Liberty Counsel called “medical mutilation.” Even so, however, some of the state laws seeking to protect minors have been blocked temporarily as legal challenges against them are adjudicated.
Meanwhile, even doctors associated with the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) – often revered by Biden’s transgender Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel (born Richard) Levine as the premier source of “evidence-based” information about gender medicine – have been revealed to admit young people are incapable of comprehending the long-term effects – such as sterility – of the hormone drugs and life-altering surgeries to which they are about to be subjected.
In February 2023, Levine applauded the work of Connecticut Children’s Medical Center’s (CCMC) gender clinic, spreading the narrative that gender clinic staff “have been targeted for discrimination, harassment and abuse.”
“I think that these attacks are ideologically and politically motivated,” Levine said during CCMC’s Pediatric Grand Rounds. “I think they’re being done primarily for political purposes throughout the country. And I think that we need to stand up to these attacks and to provide the expert care … that we know through standard of care evidence-based treatment.”
While the Biden administration is careful to be heard supporting parents who have acquiesced to the “gender-affirming care” approach for their children, its top-level HHS official has accused more skeptical parents of contributing to an increase in suicidal ideation among gender-confused kids who, unlike at school, Levine said, feel they must hide their true “identities” from their parents at home.
Levine also insisted “numerous peer-reviewed journals have noted that there is nothing inherent with being transgender that predisposes youth to negative mental health outcomes,” adding:
It is the bullying, the harassment, and discrimination that transgender youth face that leads to these conditions. Transgender youth who are supported by their parents, school, and community, who receive evidence-based standard of care treatment actually have excellent mental health outcomes. Gender-affirming care is medical care, gender-affirming care is mental health care, and, literally, gender-affirming care is suicide prevention care.
Nevertheless, a study from Finland published at BMJ Mental Health in February found gender dysphoria is not predictive of suicide when other mental health issues are accounted for.
“Psychiatric morbidity” is the primary predictor of death in gender-confused young people, the researchers concluded. “Medical gender reassignment does not have an impact on suicide risk.”
“In this nationally representative, register-based, long-term, follow-up study, the all-cause mortality of gender-referred adolescents did not statistically significantly differ from that of matched population controls,” the authors found, noting that while death from suicide first seemed to be much higher among the “gender-referred” young people, “the association was fully explained by psychiatric treatment history.”