Summary from Natasha Chart, WoLF (article linked previously)
(extract)
"I can tell our friends and supporters that we and our allies raised these issues with our representatives’ staff, Democrats and Republicans, and with other conservatives we spoke to over the last few days, many of whom had heard the Heritage panel and were deeply moved, both by the stories of the parents and by Julia Beck’s testimony of being ostracized from within her own community. We told them that …
… 13-year-old girls are getting cosmetic mastectomies in this country, and some 14-year-old girls are being put into menopause, also for cosmetic reasons, with seemingly no care for how early loss of ovarian function can shorten one’s lifespan and increase the risk of cardiovascular disease.
… parents can lose their children in some states if they don’t go along with pronoun changes, with puberty blockers, and with cross-sex hormones administered to their children.
… by including gender identity under “conversion therapy” bans, therapists feel they must stop working with patients to explore distress over trauma, abuse, personality disorders, depression, or developmental disorders, as soon as a child says they have a gender identity.
… “informed consent” means a waiver of the right to sue, and the on-demand distribution of powerful hormone treatments without any required checks for contraindicated health conditions.
… clinicians issue indirect suicide threats to worried parents to force them to comply with the destruction of their own minor children’s reproductive organs.
… women in prison are being forced to bunk and shower with violent male offenders, and there’s no way to stop such men being put in with women, in violation of these women’s international human rights, under a sex self-identification standard. We gave them the examples of three violent men in the justice system right now — Michelle Kosilek in MA, Synthia China Blast in NY, and Dana Rivers in CA — who will have the absolute right to be incarcerated with women if the gender identity provisions of the Equality Act are passed into federal law.
… women in homeless and domestic violence shelters are being forced to room and shower with men because the shelters are afraid of either losing federal funding or being sued by angry, entitled men. Vulnerable women have been kicked out of shelters for complaining about being forced to room with men.
… autistic girls are ridiculously over-represented among children and young people claiming a gender identity, and this current rush to sterilize them so they will “look right,” or to tell them that their real problem is that they are “in the wrong body,” is a eugenicist violation of their human rights and an abdication of responsibility by those who should protect them.
… girls in school will have to deal with menstruation in bathrooms where boys are allowed to walk in.
… girls’ and women’s sports are being destroyed, and with them, scholarship and mentorship opportunities for women and girls. (In one of the meetings where we brought up sports, a conservative man we were talking to volunteered on his own that he knew that was a road to college for many girls and he was quite concerned.)
… women and girls will lose the right under self-identification, and the total elimination of sex as a bona fide occupational qualification, to request female medical or intimate care, or a female supervisor for state-mandated urine tests, or a female security officer to pat them down. Conversely, women holding such employment will lose the right under the Equality Act’s gender identity provisions to refuse to perform intimate care or examinations of male clients.
… Muslim women cannot relax or function as if they were in private at all in shelters or accommodations shared with males, many Christian women would be very offended and worried as well, and we have concern for them. But religious exemptions will not protect these women from all these other circumstances, and also secular women like myself do not wish to be forced to undress in front of men or be confronted by unwanted male nudity.
… in the UK, people can be questioned by police for their opinions on these topics, or for calling the removal of children’s genitals “castration,” or for talking about public figures in the gender identity movement who are paid by the government to advocate for the sterilization of children.
… that advocacy for gender identity and the sex industry travel together, and that men who solicit commercial sex and share porn of themselves online have been given the power by Twitter to censor public health conversations about teenage girls.
… based on the definitions in the Equality Act, “gender identity” protects no definable class of persons, and has nothing to do with gender dysphoria or any other medical condition or diagnosis that anyone may be concerned about alleviating.
… if people are genuinely concerned about mental health or suicidality, it’s odd that the policy goal comes down to allowing people into different rooms, changing a few letters on official forms, hormones, plastic surgery, and enrolling the whole world in their treatment plan, rather than asking for something like more counseling services.
… they have barely heard these concerns before because journalists and doctors alike are worried they will lose their jobs for talking about it, and so we asked them to please, as elected representative who cannot be no-platformed, speak out about this so that families who are worried about what this means can hear that they aren’t alone with their questions and concerns.
… we don’t want anyone harmed, or denied employment or housing because they like to dress quirky or want to have an unusual name, but when the law is prohibited from seeing sex, you can’t ban discrimination based on sex stereotypes; a stronger prohibition of sex stereotype discrimination would protect everyone the bill is meant to support.
"They listened. They brought other colleagues to listen. They asked us questions and engaged, many of them with a concern for women that, while it does not necessarily come from the same place as ours or take the same form, was sincere." (continues)