Returning to Jesse Singal’s Atlantic piece on children who say they are trans…

The current era of gender-identity awareness has undoubtedly made life easier for many young people who feel constricted by the sometimes-oppressive nature of gender expectations. A rich new language has taken root, granting kids who might have felt alone or excluded the words they need to describe their experiences.

I’m not sure about that – I’m not sure the new language is genuinely rich. Is it rich or is it impoverished to decide that if you don’t like lipstick and high heels then you are a boy? Is it rich to substitute the trans vocabulary for the feminist vocabulary? Is it better to find your True Gender or to conclude that gender is bullshit?

Singal notes that professional science-based organizations advise caution and deliberation when it comes to physical alterations for children and teenagers.

The American Psychological Association’s guidelines sound a similar note, explaining the benefits of hormones but also noting that “adolescents can become intensely focused on their immediate desires.” It goes on: “This intense focus on immediate needs may create challenges in assuring that adolescents are cognitively and emotionally able to make life-altering decisions.”

The leading professional organizations offer this guidance. But some clinicians are moving toward a faster process. And other resources, including those produced by major LGBTQ organizations, place the emphasis on acceptance rather than inquiry.

Acceptance, affirmation, celebration, all very much instead of and in opposition to inquiry. That should have sent up warning flags long ago.

Ignoring the diversity of these experiences and focusing only on those who were effectively “born in the wrong body” could cause harm. That is the argument of a small but vocal group of men and women who have transitioned, only to return to their assigned sex. Many of these so-called detransitioners argue that their dysphoria was caused not by a deep-seated mismatch between their gender identity and their body but rather by mental-health problems, trauma, societal misogyny, or some combination of these and other factors. They say they were nudged toward the physical interventions of hormones or surgery by peer pressure or by clinicians who overlooked other potential explanations for their distress.

Singal of course has been piled on for saying that. No inquiry allowed.

Conduct unbecoming?

The U.S. Marine who marched with neo-Nazis in last summer’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, has been found guilty in a summary court-martial after he reportedly bragged online about participating in the violence that day.

Lance Cpl. Vasillios Pistolis was convicted Monday of failing to obey an order or regulation and making a false official statement under Articles 92 and 107 in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, according to the 2nd Marine Logistics Group.

Perhaps the regulation was something to do with beating up civilians.

A skeptical world responds.

Which one is it? The First Lady's office said this was just a jacket. https://t.co/39AyQsg6tL

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) June 21, 2018

Sir, this directly contradicts what her spokesperson says (no message intended) and what we all know (that it was a true sentiment and the Trumps really don’t care). Get your story straight! https://t.co/QuB6O3jZL8

— Norm Eisen (@NormEisen) June 21, 2018

So the exact opposite of what her spokeswoman said? Gotcha. https://t.co/fjbquWomTC

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) June 21, 2018

I was inclined to give the benefit of the doubt, but now it's just petulant and inappropriate. If the First Lady of the United States has something to say on a question of important policy, she should say it. If what she has to say is that she doesn't care, that's despicable. https://t.co/teszBRgioY

— Susan Hennessey (@Susan_Hennessey) June 21, 2018

I suppose tomorrow she’ll visit more captive children, wearing a jacket that says “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.”

Aaaaaaaaaand this just in:

FLOTUS spox confirms Mrs. Trump wore a jacket to visit border kids that reads: "I really don't care. Do you?" Spox says: "It's a jacket. There was no hidden message. After today's important visit to Texas, I hope the media isn't going to choose to focus on her wardrobe." pic.twitter.com/Bp4Z8n455G

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) June 21, 2018

Well it’s certainly true there was no hidden message, it’s about as unhidden and overt and explicit as it could be.

I’m gobsmacked. What the hell was she thinking? What were the people around her thinking? What was anyone thinking?

Maybe they’re about to cut all our throats and that’s their mocking goodbye.

There’s another kicker to Trump’s supposed rescinding of the policy to steal immigrants’ children: it’s good for only 20 days.

Though President Trump declared that the executive order he signed Wednesday would “solve” the problem of family separation while parents are prosecuted for illegal border crossing, the order is really only good for 20 days, CBS News’ Paula Reid reports, citing a source familiar with the drafting of the order. The order does not override the 1993 Flores v. Reno Supreme Court case, which says that detained migrant children cannot be held in government detention facilities for more than 20 days.

Essentially, this means that after the 20-day mark, children may still be separated from their parents.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) currently separates most families when they are apprehended for illegal border crossing, Reid notes. But now, with the executive order, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will take custody of the entire family. However, at the 20-day mark, under the Flores consent decree, the department will have to release the children from custody.

Mind you, other reporting I’ve seen says there are vague plans to try to tweak Flores in some way, but it also says it’s not clear that can be done, that it’s a can of worms, etc.

Oh (reading on) – this reporting too.

Nothing in the executive order stops the government from releasing the whole family, Reid says, but under Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ zero-tolerance policy, which states that the U.S. will prosecute all who cross the border illegally, releasing the family is unlikely.

Reid also reports that Sessions is expected to immediately ask a federal California judge to modify the Flores consent decree to permit the government to detain families together throughout the entire prosecution and deportation processes.

It is unclear how long this will take to litigate or whether the judges would be willing to permit indefinite detention of minors.

Of course the “zero-tolerance policy” is optional; they have chosen to treat unauthorized immigration as a crime.

I opened this story at the Huffington Post about Obama speaking up on Trump’s grab the children policy, and saw the subhead –

The former president calls out “the cruelty of ripping children from their parents’ arms.”

I thought for a second about the phrase, which is a frequent trope in this story but also a literal statement – the children are much of the time literally ripped from their parents’ arms, and if they’re not it’s only because the parents are trying to minimize the trauma for the children so decide not to make it a physical struggle that they know they can’t win. The children are forcibly removed, and the parents would clutch them and resist if they had any hope it would work. I thought about that and then about the fact that of course Obama is a loving father so the expression is not a mere metaphor or emphatic rebuke to him. He can empathize with the parents very directly. Then I thought about Trump and before I could form the thought “why doesn’t it affect him the same way?” I remembered that it wouldn’t, because he was never involved with them when they were little. He has bragged about that – which is one of the reddest of red flags about his nature, that the idea of helping to raise his children is funny and disgusting to him. He was completely and determinedly hands-off, so that built-in knowledge is missing in him.

Maybe ultimately it doesn’t make any difference, because Republicans who did help raise their children still backed the hateful policy, and people who have no children are viscerally horrified by it, but…it’s one more thing. One more huge gaping hole in him where there should be something.

What Obama said was in a Facebook post today:

Today is World Refugee Day.

If you’ve been fortunate enough to have been born in America, imagine for a moment if circumstance had placed you somewhere else. Imagine if you’d been born in a country where you grew up fearing for your life, and eventually the lives of your children. A place where you finally found yourself so desperate to flee persecution, violence, and suffering that you’d be willing to travel thousands of miles under cover of darkness, enduring dangerous conditions, propelled forward by that very human impulse to create for our kids a better life.

That’s the reality for so many of the families whose plights we see and heart-rending cries we hear. And to watch those families broken apart in real time puts to us a very simple question: are we a nation that accepts the cruelty of ripping children from their parents’ arms, or are we a nation that values families, and works to keep them together? Do we look away, or do we choose to see something of ourselves and our children?

Our ability to imagine ourselves in the shoes of others, to say “there but for the grace of God go I,” is part of what makes us human. And to find a way to welcome the refugee and the immigrant – to be big enough and wise enough to uphold our laws and honor our values at the same time – is part of what makes us American. After all, almost all of us were strangers once, too. Whether our families crossed the Atlantic, the Pacific, or the Rio Grande, we’re only here because this country welcomed them in, and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, how our last names sound, or the way we worship. To be an American is to have a shared commitment to an ideal – that all of us are created equal, and all of us deserve the chance to become something better.

That’s the legacy our parents and grandparents and generations before created for us, and it’s something we have to protect for the generations to come. But we have to do more than say “this isn’t who we are.” We have to prove it – through our policies, our laws, our actions, and our votes.

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Also Trump wants to wreck the oceans. It’s not as if we need them for anything.

President Trump on Wednesday ended an eight-year-old policy to protect oceans, which was created as hundreds of millions of gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico from a broken well, covering more than 65,000 square miles, killing untold numbers of wildlife and devastating fisheries in several Gulf Coast states.

President Barack Obama mentioned the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the largest and costliest oil spill in the nation’s history, in the second sentence of an executive order that detailed the first national ocean policy and called on federal agencies to work closely with states and local governments to manage the waters off their coasts.

“The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and resulting environmental crisis is a stark reminder of how vulnerable our marine environments are, and how much communities and the nation rely on healthy and resilient ocean and coastal ecosystems,” Obama’s July 2010 order said.

In contrast, Trump’s order does not mention the explosion that killed nearly a dozen workers and the spill of 210 million gallons of oil. The second sentence gives a nod to domestic energy production, the jobs it could provide and the financial rewards that can be reaped.

Beautiful clean coal.

In a statement, National Ocean Industries Association President Randall Luthi praised the new executive order as a “renewed broad vision” to foster energy security and create jobs. Luthi called the Obama policy “an uber-bureaucratic solution to a government self-imposed problem.”

“The offshore energy industry has successfully operated side by side with other ocean users, without major conflict, guided by the planning inherent in the five-year offshore national program and the leasing process mandated by the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act,” Luthi said.

Except for the Deepwater Horizon thing that is, and Exxon Valdez before that, and all the other oil spills.