“THE END OF WOMEN’S SPORTS? - EQUATING BIOLOGY WITH GENDER IDENTITY DOES NOT WORK”

Well, good evening. Welcome to Mondays with MoCo. A special Tuesday edition yesterday was Valentine's Day. Welcome to Mondays with MoCo. I am Dennis Melby with the Republican Party. For the folks at home, let's get started now. And as more folks join in, we'll let them in. We have an hour for our program and our honored speakers and guests have other commitments that they have to get to. So I'm glad you're able to join us via technology. We have a great Zoom presentation for you and a wonderful discussion. Today, we have two great speakers and time-permitting questions at the end. If you're familiar with Zoom, there's a little thing at the bottom called Q&A. If you type your questions in, we'll be able to have people ask the panelists your question at the end. Looking through my end of the camera, it's good to see so many good-looking folks, fellow Republicans and Central Committee members. With me working the seminar tonight are Committee members Jamie Greeden, Paul Hagel, who was put together by our Organization Chairman Brad Botwin. And we're hoping that Chairman Reardon Sullivan can join us a little bit later. Well, we're into 2022 and the Groundhog said six more weeks of winter. It's like he's trying to get back at us or something. It must have been one of the Groundhogs that escaped the attention of New York City Mayor de Blasio. I'm tired of the snow. I'm tired of the cold weather. We've got some great events coming up. Next Monday is President's Day and as 45 says, it'll be huge, huge. As far as the local Republicans, there's a lot going on. As you know, the courts are looking into the gerrymandered electoral maps that the state legislature has passed. So we have another month until folks have to sign up for the candidacies for office. Stay tuned. We'll give you that list as soon as we've got it. Our MCGOP Lunar New Year celebration is finally happening March 3rd. It'll be a great party at New Fortune restaurant in Gaithersburg. Lots of great food, lots of candidates and more. We plan to raffle off one of Hunter Biden's laptops we found. I have a little bit of his artwork here starting at $500,000 a piece. Hope to raise a little bit of money. We have a historical exhibit of ancient photos, pictures of actual full shelves of stuff, affordable steaks and receipts where folks actually paid less than $3 a gallon for gas. I kid you not. We actually have folks who remember that in their lifetime. We'd love you to come party with us. Check out the Lunar New Year party at mcgop.com under events and buy your ticket there. In our webinar every month, we explore important issues facing our community. Among the many guests we've had are Dr. Carol Swain, Sheriff Chuck Jenkins, ICE Director Tom Homan, Dr. Christopher Schwartz, State Senator Huff, and Delegate Eric Hann, Congressman Andy Harris, just to name a few. Actually, Kenny Chu, who spoke here about anti-Asian discrimination, will be the speaker at our Lunar New Year party. He'll also sign copies of his book, An Inconvenient Minority, at the event. Last month, we featured scholar Hans von Spakosky and researcher and advocate Robin Sachs talking about holding elections that we can have trust in. Now, the issue of transgenders playing in the sport of the gender to which they have transitioned has been front page news of late. Most recently, Leah Thomas, formerly Will Thomas of the University of Pennsylvania swim team, has been crushing long-standing women's swimming records by margins never deemed possible. In the coming months, Thomas may even be in a position to defeat college swim records of Maryland's own Katie Ledecky, an Olympic multi-gold medalist. Is this fair to biological females who are losing out on team leadership and scholastic opportunities in high school and college sporting activities across the board? Biological boys are in almost all cases bigger, stronger, and have larger cardiovascular and respiratory systems. In head-to-head competitions, it's just not fair. Michael Phelps, the most decorated U.S. Olympian, has also stepped up, stating that the current system of allowing transgenders to compete with women needs to be restructured. But the issue of transgenders is more encompassing than sports. Women and girls are being effectively erased by the woke left, some 50 years after Title IX brought men and women closer to equality. Is the number two of all-time champion of the TV show Jeopardy, transgender Amy Schneider, also the number one women's Jeopardy champion of all time? Discussion of pregnant women and female body parts is verboten. We're looking forward to Hallmark selling birthing person cards. Questioning anything transgender makes you transphobic. In the woke mindset, any male who self-identifies as a female can invade any biological space. Bathrooms, locker rooms, dorms, changing rooms, and more are now open to all. How does this end? Well, our first speaker tonight, Cara Dansky, will provide us with her experiences and insights on this controversial topic. Well, then we'll ask Delegate Zeliga about how she plans to tackle this in Annapolis. Cara Dansky is a public speaker, a writer, and a consultant committed to protecting the rights, the privacy, and safety of women and girls on the basis of sex in law and throughout society. She currently serves as president of the U.S. chapter of Women's Declaration International, which seeks to promote the Declaration on Women's Sex-Based Rights. She also serves as the chair of the Committee on Law and Legislation, or WDI, globally. Cara served on the board of the Women's Liberation Front from 2016 to 2020 and also as an attorney with a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University with an extensive background in criminal justice law and policy. She has appeared multiple times on Fox TV on the Tucker Carlson Show, highlighting her belief that the rights of women and girls should not be perceived or debated as a conservative versus leftist progressive issue. Rather, it's about fairness and equity for true females. We're glad to welcome you here, Ms. Dansky. Could you give us your perspective on men and women's sports? Yes, thanks so much for having me. In addition to those things, I want to let you all know that I recently published a book. It's called The Abolition of Sex, How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls. And I always put the word transgender in quotes, and it's that way here on the book cover page. And I think that there'll be a link provided to where you can get it if you're interested. And I thought that what I might do tonight is just read some sections of the book, which does go into the sport issue, and it also goes into a lot of the other issues that we're dealing with here in the world of transgender or gender identity. So I'll just read a couple sections of the introduction, and I'd love to take questions and have discussion afterwards if that's okay. So the book starts with a preface, and this preface was written in 2020 by a British feminist, and it's sort of a take on what our future selves might say about the time that we're living in right now. They literally stopped recognizing every actual single woman and girl, every female person. And they told us that we were now all identity instead of sex, a psychology instead of physiology. That was what female now meant, so that men could say they were women, and they did. Hundreds of thousands of them did. There was no single word for actual females. We weren't allowed one. Our word was reallocated to men. We had to talk about ourselves as people with cervixes or menstruators, and we had to agree that biology wasn't the real difference between the sexes identity was. One by one, every reference to biological sex was replaced in every law with references to identity until the law had erased any connection with female biology from pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. Everything became something that was applied to both men and women because it was forbidden to have real references to sex. Stating that only females were women was enough to lose your job or even be charged with a crime. Failing to agree with the man that he was a woman was enough to be ostracized, censored, or threatened with legal action. Men took over women's prisons, sports, institutions, and groups. Men represented us in every level of society calling themselves women. There were no words to distinguish ourselves from these men. Everyone could see that the female sex were becoming unspeakable people, unspoken of. You weren't allowed to acknowledge our separate existence from male people. Men committed crimes and society said women did it. You could never escape a man because he could follow you into any public space by identifying as female. People were very, very afraid to tell the truth. Many hundreds of children lost their reproductive organs trying to become the other sex. It was a very dark time. So again, that is her future statement regarding what we may say in the future about what is really happening to us today in our society. So the introduction to my book begins with the phrase the transgender delusion observations of a TERF and we'll get into what that means. In March of 2021, a person named Rachel Levine was confirmed as the Assistant Secretary for Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Levine is a biological male who claims to be a transgender woman. During the confirmation hearings in February 2021, every single member of the United States Senate was expected to pretend that Levine is a woman. Every single member did so. No one was permitted to question this and no one even tried. Under questioning from Senator Rand Paul, Levine refused to state whether or not he approved of administering life-altering, potentially sterilizing and lethal drugs to physically healthy teenagers. On October 19, 2021, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that Levine had been sworn in as the first female four-star admiral of the U.S. Public Health Service Commission Corps. On the same day, the New York Times said the same thing on Twitter. The United States government and the New York Times outright lied to everyone by saying that Levine is female. Awareness of this problem has been building for some time but only recently has it begun to engender resistance. The breakthrough issues in terms of public opinion have involved the invasion of female spaces by men claiming to be women, particularly women's sports and other female-only spaces like public bathrooms and changing rooms. All over the world, men are competing in women's sports on the pretext that they are trans women, which is taken to mean some special type of women. For example, a man named Laurel Hubbard was permitted to compete in the women's weightlifting category in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics on the basis that he is a so-called trans woman, i.e. a man who pretends to be a woman. This is said to be true because he has a so-called female gender identity. The International Olympic Committee and the global media expected everyone to accept these assertions as true. Most people appeared to play along with the charade. Male convicted rapists are being permitted to be housed in women's prisons with vulnerable women, many of whom have already suffered tremendous abuse at the hands of men. A man who goes by the name of Princess Zoe Marie Andromeda Love, who was convicted of raping a 12-year-old girl, is being housed in a Washington State women's prison and has allegedly had sexual intercourse with a female inmate, which, if true, legally constitutes rape. His placement in the women's prison is completely in accordance with the official policy of the Washington State Department of Corrections. Let me pause here and say it is my understanding that since this book has been published, a bill has been introduced in Maryland to mandate the same thing, and a hearing was just held on this bill, I believe, last week. In July of 2021, a man was permitted to enter the women's section of a nude spa in Los Angeles and expose himself and his erect penis to naked girls. The reason that this was allowed to happen is that California law prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in public accommodations, but it also defines sex to include gender identity and gender expression, completely ignoring the material reality of biological sex. All of this is accomplished via the claim that men can be some form of women, i.e. trans women. Anyone who questions this is immediately labeled transphobic. Discussion is not permitted. This assault on women's sex-based rights is not occurring in a vacuum or by accident. It is being perpetrated by a vicious and brutal industry that operates openly and yet manages to sneak under the public radar. Its aim is to abolish sex in the law and throughout society. We are all victims of this assault, but those most harmed are women and girls, i.e. female human beings. Our society has simply not grappled with the implications of enshrining words like transgender and gender identity in the law, policy, business, academia, and media. We need to start grappling with this. The time to do that is now. The media will not speak candidly about this, and any woman, or man for that matter, who attempts to speak the truth is immediately labeled a TERF, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist. This kind of labeling is extremely dishonest and misleading, but it has also been remarkably effective, putting feminists on the defensive as though defending our existence as female is somehow harmful. Here is the truth we are not allowed to speak. Gender identity does not exist in any real material sense, and transgender is simply a made-up concept that is used to justify all kinds of atrocities. It is, in effect, a men's rights movement intended to objectify women's bodies and erase us as a class. It is left-wing misogyny on steroids. I say this as a leftist and a Democrat. Famed author J.K. Rowling recently said that we are living in one of the most misogynistic times in history. She's right. From a feminist perspective, men as a class have always dominated women and trampled on our rights, and today is no different, except that it is worse, because it is being done under the ruse of transgenderism or gender identity, both of which are being enshrined in law at all levels of government and pushed by the political left. Many of us women on the political left are accustomed to having our rights trampled on by the right. We are not used to experiencing it from within our own political ranks. I care about this issue for two reasons. First, as a feminist, I care about the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls, and allowing men and boys to invade female-only spaces is dangerous and profoundly misogynistic. Second, as a human being, I want public policy to be grounded in material reality and science. Enshrining vague concepts like transgender and gender identity in law and policy threatens both of those interests. I have always considered myself a feminist, although my understanding of what that means has changed over time. I became a registered Democrat in 1990, and I still am. When I was in college, I took numerous women's studies courses, volunteered at the Women's Center, served on a task force to eliminate sexual assault and rape on campus, and engaged in abortion clinic defense. During law school, I volunteered at the Philadelphia chapter of NARAL, which was then known as the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. After law school, I embarked on a 20-year career in criminal law and criminal justice, but that would eventually come to an end. In 2015, I joined the Women's Liberation Front, or WOLF, and I served on its board from 2016 to 2020. In 2020, I got involved in what was then called the Women's Human Rights Campaign and is now called Women's Declaration International, and I currently serve as president of the U.S. chapter. My involvement in WOLF and WDI meant that I was a TERF, i.e., a feminist who cares about the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls. That meant that I was no longer permitted to associate in the so-called progressive circles or work in the so-called progressive criminal justice reform movement. Instead, I'm labeled a TERF. Feminists have a saying, we can't fight sexism if we can't say what sex is, and that is precisely where we are as a society today. We can't say what sex is. We are abolishing sex and replacing it with gender identity or transgenderism throughout law and society. Intriguingly, increasing numbers of lesbians, gay men, and bisexual people are taking a stand against the inclusion of the T in the acronym LGBT, because sexual orientation and gender identity have nothing to do with one another, although they are typically linked together. Sexual orientation is about sexual attraction to people of the same sex, opposite sex, or both sexes, whereas gender identity is a fiction that denies the reality of sex altogether. Further, the notion that sexual orientation is some kind of identity rather than a reality is extremely homophobic. How can we legally protect same-sex attraction if the law denies the reality of biological sex? The conflation of sex and gender has come to be known within radical feminist and gay rights communities as woke homophobia, and it's coming from the political left. Many readers will have a hard time believing some of the things that I describe throughout this book. That is understandable, because on a certain level, the things that I describe are unbelievable. These include such dangerous absurdities as the mandated incarceration of male convicted murderers and rapists in women's prisons, the protection of known male sexual abusers in women's domestic violence shelters, and the complete silencing of women and men who speak out against these abominations. For example, in California, it is perfectly legal for men to be housed in a women's prison because of a 2020 law that redefined sex to include so-called gender identity for the purpose of deciding where to house convicted felons. This is nothing less than a war against biology, and predictably, it is creating tremendous confusion. It also presents a unique challenge for feminists, because while we support nonconformity with traditional sex-based stereotypes, we reject, we strongly object to the complete obliteration of biological sex. Often when I discuss these matters in my life, my statements are met with stares of incredulity. It is very difficult to get one's head around what is happening, because it all sounds so astonishing. People often say things like, I'm trying to make sense of it all. My response to this understandable expression is typically, you are trying to make sense out of something that does not make sense. You are using critical thinking and intelligence to make sense out of something that cannot be made sense of. You are not the crazy one here. Throughout this discussion, I'll be focused primarily on U.S. law and society, because I'm most familiar with it. But it is important to note that the abolition of sex is playing out globally as well, and many of the stories I tell here come from outside the U.S. In short, the abolition of sex is not just an American problem. It's playing out all over the world. Readers can be forgiven for not knowing much about this. No one ever reads about the abolition of sex in the media, because most mainstream media outlets are actively engaged in a concerted effort to conceal it. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube all deplatform critics of transgenderism. Amazon has said publicly that it will not sell books that criticize it. But the abolition of sex is real, and it is dangerous. This book is an effort to uncover and explore its origins, the reason it is happening, and its impacts on women and girls. My aims are twofold. One, to persuade readers that while sex is real, transgender, in fact, is not, and therefore has no basis for being enshrined in law. And two, to persuade readers that to the extent our society seems to have accepted the lie that transgender is real, its main victims are women and girls, because the agenda is to obliterate sex. If we cannot talk about the material reality of sex, we cannot fight for the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls as a class. Many people think that the phrase transgender people refers to a grassroots movement to secure the rights of a marginalized community. This is not true. The truth is that there is no such thing as transgender, which is why I always put the word in quotation marks. Instead, the entire agenda is rounded in and fueled by an industry whose aim is to abolish the material reality of biological sex. Jennifer Billick, who founded and writes at the 11th Hour blog, coined the phrase gender identity industry to describe this loosely affiliated conglomeration of corporations, law firms, nonprofit organizations, foundations, and others that literally aim to obliterate the material reality of biological sex legally and physically. This industry is fueling the transgender agenda by giving out billions of dollars in funding, lobbying for the redefinition of sex to mean gender identity in the law, and pushing the idea that transgender has some coherent meaning beyond sex. I have only just a little bit more. Do I have a few more minutes? Yes, you do. Okay. Feminists worked hard to ensure the creation of female-only spaces such as public bathrooms, sports teams, and domestic violence shelters. Before that, suffragists secured the right of women to vote. Today, we have scholarships, business loans, and other civic institutions that are intended exclusively for women and girls because women have historically been discriminated against on the basis of sex. The transgender agenda threatens all of these important historical gains and undermines feminists' ability to fight for future goals by insisting that women do not exist as a class of people. I'm going to skip ahead a little bit here, and then I will be done. At this point, many readers might be thinking, okay, but I have a child, sister, brother, niece, nephew, cousin, friend, etc., who is trans. What should I do about that? Just ignore his or her identity? My answer is this. Your child, sister, brother, niece, nephew, cousin, friend, or whomever is still either female or male biologically even if the person has adopted a so-called trans identity. That is what matters. That is what is true in a material, real, objective sense. The person in question can adopt a subjective gender identity if he or she wants to, but that identity is no more real than it would be for you, me, or anyone else to identify as a tree or a chair. I know these issues are difficult to think and talk about. I know that many of us have loved ones who are caught up in the delusion, and yes, it is a delusion, that there is a coherent category of people called trans. I have loved ones who are caught up in this cultural fact. Many people struggle with painful confusion as to whether they are really the opposite sex. Many conclude that they are, in fact, the opposite sex and go on to get all kinds of surgeries and take all sorts of hormones to validate that fantasy. They then insist on having everyone else in our society act as though it is perfectly normal. If you ask me, the best thing we can do for these people is to be kind to them by telling them the truth. We can help our children, sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews, cousins, and friends to love and accept themselves as they are, girls, boys, women, and men. Everything else is a lie. I'm often told that I ought to be kind and compassionate and let people live their best lives as they choose. Fair enough, except that I don't think that validating a person's delusion counts as kindness. The purpose of this book is to break down each of these topics in detail. We will examine the concept of womanhood, the abolition of sex in law, the implications of the abolition of sex for everyone, and for women and girls in particular, the difficulty of discussing these topics publicly, and the industry that is fueling the abolition of sex. Last, we'll discuss what can be done to stop it. In 2014, a friend opened my eyes to the problems that the transgender agenda presents to women and girls in terms of rights, privacy, and safety. Along the I have met numerous parents whose children, both minors and young adults, were struggling with matters of sex and gender. Many of these children appeared to believe that they were born in the wrong body and that they were, in fact, the opposite sex. Some simply wanted to escape their biological sex in search of something different. Today, such a phenomenon might seem healthy and normal. It is not. The parents I have met with trans children are in agony. The gender identity industry is feeding their children drugs that will result in permanent sterilization and possible terminal illness. It is subjecting them to surgeries that mutilate, amputate, and destroy healthy body parts. Most of these parents are unable to speak out because they have very legitimate concerns about their relationships with their children and about their children's privacy. So they sit and wait and hope while their children's lives and bodies are being destroyed. This book is for them. Thank you, Kara. Thank you. That was very, very good. Let's bring our other guest into discussion right now. Kathy Jaliga is a Republican member of the Maryland House of Delegates since January of 2011, Minority Whip since 2013. She was a Republican nominee for United States Senate in 2016 to replace Barbara Mikulski. She entered college in her 30s, enrolling in Towson State, and graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor of arts degree in elementary education when she began working as a teacher in the Baltimore City Public Schools and started a construction business with her husband. She's a member of the Women Legislators of Maryland Caucus, the Maryland Legislative Sportsmen's Caucus, and Maryland Veterans Caucus. In April 2013, she was elected to leadership by her peers and serves as a whip in the House Republican Caucus. Delegate Jaliga is the highest ranking Republican woman in Maryland's state legislature and has been described as one of the most powerful female politicians in the state. I am so glad to have you with us tonight, Kathy. Welcome. Tell us what you're doing in Annapolis to try to deal with this issue. Well, thanks so much for having me tonight, Dennis and MCGOP. I'm grateful for all your hard work. I do want to let you know you need an updated bio from me. I resigned as the whip in April. Delegate Hippy and I led the House Caucus for eight years and handed the reins over. It was time for some fresh new blood and new ideas. So Delegate Buckle and Haven Shoemaker are the leader whip now. But yes, I am really honored to be a delegate since 2011 and a leader in the House of Delegates as well in the Republican Party. So this is an issue near and dear to my heart as well. Cara, thank you for all this information and what you're exposing on this movement. I'll call it a movement that we're seeing across our country and across our state. And I think you may have even used the term, Cara, to erase women. There's this movement to erase women. I see I'm on the Health and Government Operations Committee in Annapolis. And we had a briefing from the Department of Legislative Services last week on the Department of Health. One of the major issues that we talk about is maternal morbidity. And we have a very high rate of maternal morbidity amongst black women, especially in Maryland. It's really tragic. And we're trying to get to the bottom of it and see what we can do to change that horrible plight for some women who die in pregnancy or shortly thereafter. Nonetheless, in the report, the person who wrote the report called them pregnant people. Now, I was grateful that the person who presented the report called them pregnant women. And after that presentation, I asked her to please take it back to the writer of that report and let her know that we are pregnant women, that women get pregnant, and I don't want to be erased. So I have a bill this year called Save Women's Sports. So I've been following, if you don't follow on Twitter and Facebook, Save Women's Sports, I encourage you to do so. It's a national group. And they've passed legislation, I want to say in 14, 11 to 14 states. So I have model legislation that I'm working with that is passed in Idaho, it's passed in Indiana, and some other states. And it's House Bill 757. And it has a hearing in ways and means on February 24, at 1pm, anyone that wants to weigh in our system is two days before. So on February 22, you sign up to testify in person and or submit your written testimony. So this is a pretty simple bill. And it will allow only biological women to participate in women's sports. It's for K to 12. You know, there's not a lot of competitive sports going on at K and a lot of that's co-ed stuff. I used to coach soccer. For many, many years, I was involved in youth sports and, you know, played sports myself. I think sports are awesome, and it's a great opportunity for women. And this bill would allow women's teams, men's teams and co-ed teams. That's it. And you know, you must be biologically woman or biologically man. I'm really focused on the women's sports. We didn't go to college with our bill because the NCAA governs college sports. And you know, I didn't, in order to try to pass this bill, I thought, you know, I can't take on the world. Let's start with K to 12 in Maryland, public and private schools, both because private schools also need this protection. It includes civil actions for those who are adversely affected for reporting a violation. So if somebody says, hey, you know, Jill is not Jill. Jill is a boy. And you end up, you know, being adversely affected. You can take civil action on that. And, you know, it seems very common sense, doesn't it? You know, I'm not that I'm old, but not that old. I'm 60. And I remember in high school, I played soccer in middle school and high school in northern Virginia. My dad was in the army. I moved around quite a bit. And so in middle and early high school, I lived in northern Virginia and I played varsity girls soccer. I was the first varsity team for girls soccer in 10th grade. And I was really proud to make that team. We didn't have girls soccer before that. And we didn't have varsity and JV. We just had varsity girls sports, varsity soccer. Then in 11th grade, I moved to Maryland and I moved to Severna Park. And there was no girls varsity JV. There was no girls high school sports, high school girls soccer. I'm sorry. There were, of course, girls sports, but we were limited. So as a woman in the 70s, a girl growing up, loving sports, playing sports, you know, there were very few opportunities in collegiate sports that had just opened up, you know, to allow women to have opportunities to play in college. You know, but it was like volleyball, basketball, field hockey, and softball. You know, it was very limited. And today, you know, because of all the hard work that's that have been done by women, look at the Olympics going on right now. You know, there's so many great opportunities for girls and for women to expand their collegiate opportunities or just to love sports and be fit and, you know, enjoy being outside playing a team sport or an independent sport. So I think this is really important. And, you know, I think it's time for us to act and to say enough is enough. Women's sports have been a long, hard fought battle. And we're not going to let men take over our sports because common sense tells you that, you know, the fastest boy in high school would beat any Olympic girls in track. I mean, men and women are different. We're created different. Our bodies are different. We're built with different muscles, different, you know, heart capacity to breathe, lungs, lungs to breathe and heart. It's just not fair. So that's my bill. But what I'd love to do is, you know, turn it back over to you, Dennis, and maybe we have time for some questions. And Jamie can moderate that. Thank you. Thank you, Kathy. I really appreciate that. Thank you for everything you have been doing in Annapolis and continue to do for us. Jamie, do you have questions? Yes, we have a few. And if you don't mind, I actually have a question for Kara. Briefly talked about how you mentioned J.K. Rowling and as a millennial and, you know, I'm constantly on Twitter. I remember hearing of J.K. Rowling and, you know, the whole turf situation. And you brought up the fact that you're left leaning a Democrat and most of the time, you know, all the attacks come from the right. How was it watching that and having, I mean, J.K. Rowling's on the left and then watching the left basically attack the left? And like I said, I'm a millennial. So watching, you know, J.K. Rowling, who like I basically grew up reading all her books, I was like, how can they be attacking her? She's J.K. Rowling. So just a general overview of what you thought about how that happened. Yeah, it's really interesting. Thank you for that question. And for anyone who might not have context, she's referring to a controversy that kind of got started in 2019, December, and then really kicked off in the summer of 2020. There's a woman in the UK named Maya Forstater whose her contract was terminated, essentially, because Maya says publicly that sex is real and her contract was terminated for that. And J.K. Rowling tweeted a tweet that it said something like dress as you please, date anyone who will, you know, any adult who will consent to be with you, you know, take on whatever role in society you want. But firing women for saying that sex is real? I don't think so. And then she said, I stand with Maya. And that was a pretty big deal in the feminist community in the UK and in the US. And then in 2020, J.K. Rowling came out with what I thought was an extraordinarily powerful essay explaining her position and why she's going to take a stand on behalf of women and girls. And she has just been relentlessly attacked. She has gotten, I know, thousands at this point, probably tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of death threats, rape threats. People will say really vile things online like, you know, die in a fire turf. People have just been horrendously abusive toward her. And it's just been awful to watch. Another thing that she's alluding to is that opposition to the trans agenda in the UK is primarily coming from rank and file leftists. You know, we're talking about J.K. Rowling, who's not exactly rank and file, she's pretty famous and wealthy. But I know tons of feminists who either are dissenting within the Labour Party or have quit the Labour Party over this. And most Americans probably don't know that. But these are these are people like me. These are leftist feminists who are fighting back against the gender identity agenda in the United Kingdom. I will also just take this opportunity to say something that most people don't know. There are a ton of American Democrats, rank and file, everyday, ordinary people all over this country who have had it with what the Democratic Party is doing on this topic, probably on others as well. But this is the topic I know the most. So it's been a really interesting thing to watch both here and across the pond. And, you know, Kara, I would agree with you. I've had a number of my friends here. You know, I I always remind people that Annapolis isn't Washington, D.C., and we get along most of us. You know, there's obviously jerks on the right, jerks on the left. You know, there's always these outliers. But, you know, 90 percent of us really enjoy each other's company. We get along, you know, go have a beer together, a cup of coffee. And many of my female Democrat friends here in Annapolis have said, I'm with you, Kathy, I just can't speak up. You know, so, Kara, I hope you give them some fortitude to do so. You know, and I think about Caitlyn Jenner. I just looked up her quote. And, you know, just to remind people, you know, Caitlyn Jenner was, you know, a triathlete. He was an Olympic star, you know, before he was Caitlyn Jenner. Caitlyn Jenner says, that's why I oppose biological boys who are trans competing in girl sports in school. It just isn't fair. And we have to protect girl sports in our schools. You know, so here you have a leader, you know, obviously he's a Republican, but a leader in the transgender community who's speaking out as well. So hopefully, you know, we get a culmination of folks that are Republicans, that are Democrats, that are feminists, that are even transgenders that are looking at this and saying, this is wrong. We have to protect women in sports. And Kara, you point out other areas as well. You know, we don't want to erase women and we don't want to erase feminism or being a woman. It's just not right. That's very true. Jamie? We have another one here. And this can be for either Kara or for you, Kathy, whoever wants to answer it, go for it. Why do you think there are certain teachers who are so determined to hide their efforts to convert children and hiding that efforts from their parents? Kara, you can start and I'll back clean up. So what is going on in schools is deeply troubling to me. And I learn more and more about it every day. I've known for a while now that our children, our nation's children, are being taught some of the most anti-science, disingenuous lies. And it really worries me because, of course, our children are confused. They're just being taught some of the most nonsensical, unscientific nonsense in school. And they're being taught this stuff by teachers who they're told to look up to. And these children have every right to believe that they can learn from their teachers. That's what they're there to do. And these children are being confused and manipulated. And it's just awful. And it's getting worse. And so I'll just recount an example that just appeared in my social media today. There's some school somewhere that has a transient closet where a teacher, to your point, a teacher has created or taken a closet in the classroom. And students who claim to be transgender arrive at school wearing the clothing that their parents have dressed them in or authorized them to wear or whatever. And the child left his or her house dressed in the clothing that she or he was wearing. And then in school, allowed to go into the closet and change schools that match their true self. And it's just without the parents knowing. And I'm just seeing it get just so deeply insidious. I'm really concerned about what is being done in our schools and in part what many teachers are doing. Now, I know there are a lot of teachers who do not like this at all. There was a teacher in Loudoun County, Virginia, who did her job in defiance of all this stuff. And teachers with a broad brush. But there are teachers, to the questioner's point, there are teachers who are pushing this stuff. And it's really insidious. And it's really awful. And this is another reason why I think that pushing back does not have to be and cannot be a partisan issue. I know that there are parents all over this country, Democrats, Republicans, independents, none of the above, who simply want to stand together as parents and say, stop teaching our children this unscientific nonsense. And I so hope parents can do that. I spoke in my book about parents of kids who think they are trans. That's a particularly agonizing situation because those parents really can't speak because of their kids' privacy. But parents across the political spectrum, across the country, I really hope parents will stand, because I'm not one, I hope parents will stand together across the political spectrum and say, stop teaching our kids this nonsense. Yeah, I agree with you wholeheartedly, Cara. And this should not be a partisan issue. This is a parent's rights issue. And you can see what happened in Virginia with Youngkin, who had liberal Democrat women working on his campaign and advocating for his governorship because he was sticking up for parental rights. We said, I am a parent of two grown sons. I have two amazing little granddaughters. They're at four and seven. So it's just a delight to see them go to school. And as a parent, as a grandparent, you're trusting the school with your most precious, precious thing in your life. And you don't expect that school to violate your trust. And that's what they're doing. And I believe that the public school system, you know, I have a degree in elementary ed. I taught, you know, my former teacher taught many years ago. And even 30 years ago, I saw activists, maybe 25 years ago, I saw activists that were attracted to the public school system. And, you know, you get other teachers that are afraid to speak up. They don't want to lose their jobs. You know, the teachers union is pushing a lot of this stuff. It's well documented that the teachers union, the teachers are not the teachers union. Most teachers we all are, you know, know we're related to love our, you know, our kids, our grandkids, teachers. So, you know, teachers are here and the teachers union that's driving the agenda is not the teachers. But we really need to empower teachers to be whistleblowers. I mean, probably the only thing that is positive that's come out of COVID is that parents are now looking at what their kids are learning. Parents are seeing, you know, this insidious, duplicative stance that people are taking within our schools to turn our kids away from parents. And, you know, it's wrong. That bond, that trust between child and parent must be respected. And, you know, it is, I think we're in a bad situation. And I'm hoping that the tide is finally turning and that we can, again, I say, coalesce together and not be political, not say Republicans are the only ones fighting this, because Kara, that's obviously not true. You know, we just have to stand for the truth and fight back on this. Very good. Very good. Jamie? I actually have a follow-up to something that Kara said earlier about social media. Myself, I have a TikTok and I constantly see teachers, you know, oh, this is my student. The pronouns are she, she or she, her, him, her, you know, all that kind of stuff. And it kind of goes off to this question here. Somebody said that they heard on the radio today that there was a teacher who ended up getting fired for refusing to use a student's pronoun correctly or correctly in the sense of, you know, the student. How can people who are afraid to speak up or people like yourself who are on the left who are classic liberals, how can they stand up and speak out? And if they're afraid, what do they do? So two things. We're seeing, first of all, I'm not surprised. I have not heard about that case, but I'm not at all surprised. I think teachers are in a particularly difficult bind when it comes to using the so-called preferred pronouns of their students. I won't do it. I mean, I just, I won't, I won't do it. If someone asks me for my preferred pronouns, I just reject the premise of the question. And I won't use someone else's preferred pronouns. Like I just, I think to the extent that any of us feel like we can, we just need to not go along with this because the whole notion of preferred pronouns is to get into our heads and to persuade us that we are somehow not congruent with our sex bodies. It's a really insidious thing. It might seem innocent. It might seem like, oh, I'll just do the nice thing and play along, but it's really much more sinister than that. So if anyone can just reject the whole thing, please do. There is a growing movement among employers to encourage their staff to get people to put so-called preferred pronouns in their email signatures. If you can, please just say no. If you can't stand up and say no, please just don't comply. I mean, if you have to comply as a condition of your employment, I understand that. I don't want anyone to lose their job. But anywhere, any single point at which we can resist this effort throughout society to deny the material reality of biological sex, we really need to be doing it. We all need to be doing it. It can't just be crazy people like me who write these books. It's got to be all of us. Yeah, we need whistleblowers as well. It is hard. Certainly people don't want to lose their jobs over something like that. But CARE is right. Just say no to this stuff and reject the premise, reject the platform that they're taking. But so many times, if a teacher sees something like this going on, having somewhere for them to call, some way to get the word out. It's just become a very precarious situation, but you're hearing it more and more often. And schools are instructing teachers and counselors to not tell parents what they're doing with transgender identification with their children at school. I think that's just a problem that anyone, it's nonpartisan. Again, people should say this is just wrong. Yeah, this is a strange thing in politics, in the political world. It's time for us to run again for election. And I've just filed for the Central Committee, for the Republican Central Committee again. But the Democratic Central Committee here in Montgomery County, their rules are that you have to elect a male and a female from each jurisdiction. But they've changed their rules to say that the person has to identify as either a male or a female. And you have to give their pronouns with them when they file for office. So we've had to change all the paperwork at the Board of Elections and everything. It's very curious between the two parties, even there. Well, I mean, here's another idea. And this is really out there. And I don't know how many of us would be willing to do it. But if you can really have a preferred pronoun that is any word, which we're seeing these days, right? It's not only she, her, hers, he, him, his, they, them, theirs. It's also ze, zer, za, or whatever. It's a bunch of nonsense. But as long as you can declare your preferred pronouns, they can be whatever you want. Maybe you can have some fun with it. I mean, maybe you can announce to your employer that your preferred pronouns are Her Majesty. And I've heard of this happening. I'm not even kidding. I know the kid. I don't know him personally, but he entered his freshman class of college, and he thought the whole thing was ridiculous. And he told his college administrators that he demanded to be known as His Majesty. I mean, he did it. And I don't know what they did with that situation. But if our employers are going to be requiring us to put our so-called preferred pronouns into our bios, into our email signatures, you know, have some fun. Do it, you know. When it first started happening a few years ago, you know, in the legislature, and now we're on all these Zoom calls, right, where people, legislators, delegates will put their pronoun next to their name. Mine just has my name, you know. But I said to my son, he's in his 30s, and Kara was saying the same thing. Can I be ridiculous? Can I put on there, like, rainbow unicorn? Or, you know, magical princess? Or, you know, he told me, no, Mom, you can't do that because you're a delegate. But you may be inspiring me here, Kara. I kind of like Your Majesty, but I also kind of like magical unicorn. You know, that's kind of fun, too. Yeah, I mean, if a preferred pronoun can be anything we want it to be, let's take advantage of that. I know, Jamie, you've got questions. I want to quickly address something that's in the chat. It says, as a Penn alumna, have you contacted the Penn administration to document my views? The answer to that specific question is no, only because if I write to the Penn administration, it's going to do nothing. It's going have absolutely no effect. I could still do it. It's just not going to do anything. But what I did do is submit an op-ed to the Philadelphia Inquirer, and I submitted a letter to the editor to the Penn Daily. Both went completely ignored. I'm not surprised. Jamie, you got another question? Yes, this was for Kara. How was it being interviewed by Tucker Carlson? Did your appearance make you lose any friends? The answer to the first question is I've actually been on his show, I think, eight times at this point. The first time was quite nerve-wracking. It was in February of 2017, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing on Fox News. So I was quite nervous in February of 2017 to go on Fox News and be interviewed by Tucker Carlson. At this point, I actually think that of any media outlet, he's probably the smartest reporter on this. I mean, he's doing some of the most incisive commentary on this topic. I'm not going to comment on anything he says about anything else. But on this topic, he's really done his homework, and he's looked into it. And after eight or nine times on the show, it's pretty comfortable. Have I lost friends for it? A lot of radical feminists were very mad at me for going on the show initially in 2017. And at this point, I honestly think that most of us who are resisting this from the left understand that if we can reach 4 million Americans by going on Tucker Carlson, then that's what we're going to do. And I would love to get on Tucker Carlson, send me a link, introduce me. No, I think he's one of the smartest and best commentators, I think, on TV right now because he's honest, and he gets to the bottom of an issue. And I record his show and watch it almost every day. I think he does a great job. And he is obviously to the right, but I think he tries to be as inclusive and unbiased as possible. Last time I was on the show, he and I bonded over our shared disagreement with several leaders of the Republican Party on this topic. His book is awesome. I'll give it a plug. The long slide is really, really good if you haven't read it. It's a compilation of things he's written over the last 25 years. And you get a real, really, you feel like you knew him by the end of the book. He's a multi-dimensional guy. He's not a flat character whatsoever. Maybe they're watching this and they got both of you on the TV show soon. I'm hoping. You'd be surprised the number of people that- The right and the left, we joined together to save women's identities. We're kind of out of time. We want to thank you both for your thoughtful comments. It's given us so much to think about and to act on as we continue to struggle regarding a serious question of transgenderism. And I'll do the quotes, transgenders in women's sports. Folks, before we go, make sure that you continue to stay in touch with the local Republican Party. We need to hear from you. We intend to keep reaching out to you for help, support, for guidance, and fresh ideas. You can always email us at newsletter at mcgop.com. That's newsletter at mcgop.com. And we're already planning the March Mondays with MoCo. We'll send you the announcement and also post it in our online newsletter, The Party Line. To our speakers, we'll make sure everyone has your contact information, your correct information, and after tonight so they can reach you and further information you'd care to pass on, give it to me and I'll send it out. We'll also include websites so that folks can help support your cause. I think we're at capacity with our Zoom viewership tonight, so the folks that registered but couldn't make it to the presentation will be sent a recorded session I know all of you join me in thanking our speakers for their thoughts and their comments and the important things that we're doing for the country. Kara Dansky, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Delegate Kathy Zaleska, thank you. Thanks. And for the Republican Party, I'm Dennis Melby. Have a good night and a good February.