Also on today’s menu:
Seeking Better Pay For Franklin Employees
Three Of Four Missing Fishermen Recovered
Russian Jet Accidentally Bombs Belgorod
The appearance on the Dartmouth College campus of Chloe Cole, an 18-year-old woman who de-transitioned and now advocates against gender-affirming medical procedures for youths, drew protests from various campus groups, including the Asian American Studies collective, the Dartmouth Democrats, The Dartmouth Radical, Spare Rib, and the Student Workers Collective at Dartmouth. SWCD organizer Polly Chesnokova ’24 told The Dartmouth, “We think it’s abhorrent that the College is helping this event happen and giving space to hate speech and misleading information.”
Speaking for the college, Diana Lawrence quoted from Dartmouth’s policy on freedom of expression and dissent: “Dartmouth prizes and defends the right of free speech and the freedom of the individual to make their own disclosures, while at the same time recognizing that such freedom exists in the context of the law and in responsibility for one’s own actions. Protest or demonstration shall not be discouraged so long as neither force nor the threat of force is used, and so long as the orderly processes of the institution are not deliberately obstructed.”
Cole said she decided at age 13 to transition to become a male during her sophomore year of high school and began using puberty blockers and testosterone. She was medicated for depression later that year, and elected to get top surgery. While recovering from the operation, she said, she began to understand the “reality of the situation” and, while she was initially “happier” after her transition, she began to feel “unhappy being a boy.” She realized, “Now I probably can’t have a child, and I’ll certainly never have the option to breastfeed. … This ripped a hole in my heart, and I couldn’t go on any longer like that.”
Cole chose to detransition at age 16, and said, “Giving kids life-altering surgeries when they don’t understand the consequences — I certainly didn’t — is irresponsible.” However, “if you are a fully grown adult and you have undergone physiotherapy and completely understand the consequences, yes, I support you getting that surgery. The issue is young kids being fed this information.”
That is the issue at the heart of the debate over “gender-affirming healthcare” for youths. Opposition to giving youths the choice of treatment for gender dysphoria — especially without parental permission — is being portrayed as an affront to transgender rights. Instead, as I see it, it should be viewed in the same way society deals with marriage: If teens are too young to be making life decisions around marriage and becoming parents, they are too young to decide whether to submit to medical procedures that will have permanent consequences to their lives. That is not the same as saying that either marriage or transgender procedures are wrong for adults who can more realistically weigh the choices.
Seeking Better Pay For Franklin Employees
The Franklin City Council wants to reclassify city employees to bring their pay in line with other communities in New Hampshire. City Manager Judie Milner has noted that city employees have taken jobs as far away as Nashua and Dover because of how uncompetitive Franklin wages are.
In exchange for higher pay, employees would be required to pick up 10 percent of the cost of their health insurance plan.
The total compensation package, should the city council include it in the coming year’s budget, would be about $9.78 million, up from roughly $9.17 million in this year’s budget. The projected increase in the city’s tax assessment would be $541,764.
Three Of Four Missing Fishermen Recovered
The U.S. Coast Guard has recovered three “unresponsive people” and is continuing to search for a fourth person who left Hampton Harbor in a 17-foot boat on April 19. The group, led by Michael Sai, planned to go fishing near Jeffreys Ledge, about 50 miles off Cape Ann, about 30 miles northeast of Boston, Massachusetts.
Coast Guard aircraft found the overturned vessel about 7 miles northeast of Cape Ann on April 20, but did not see anyone in the water at the time.
Russian Jet Accidentally Bombs Belgorod
The Russian defense ministry has admitted that one of its Sukhoi-34 fighter bombers “accidentally discharged aircraft ordnance” that exploded in the Russian city of Belgorod, around 25 miles from the border with Ukraine, on April 20. The explosion left a 60-foot crater and blew a car onto the roof of a nearby shop.
Regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said three people were injured and several buildings were damaged.
Russian jets regularly fly over Belgorod, a city of 370,000 that lies just north of Kharkiv, Ukraine, during Russia’s “special military operation” and the city has come under periodic Ukrainian attack since the full-scale invasion began last year.
Support Our Efforts
Do you have a story to tell?
The News Café is a virtual meeting place where, each weekday, we discuss the news of the day: local, statewide, national, and international. Mondays are reserved for more personal observations which only paid subscribers will receive, while Tuesday through Friday will draw from news stories published by various sources.
The News Café relies on subscriptions, rather than on advertising and grants, for its support. That frees us to provide an independent focus on events and cultural issues without having to weigh whether it would upset advertisers or fit into grant guidelines. Our only obligation is to provide information we believe is useful to our readers.
Subscriptions to this newsletter are available for as little as $5 per month. Subscribers can share their knowledge, thoughts, and questions about any topic, and we may select some of those subjects for more in-depth analysis.
If you’re unable to pay but still want to receive all of the free public posts in your in-box, click the Subscribe button and select a free subscription.
Visit us at www.libertymedianh.org
Her having surgery at 16 is completely unusual. From 2019 to 2021 “top surgery” a total of 776 were performed to age 13 to 17 in the US. Do some people regret their surgery, sure, I expect that they do. Obviously I don’t know her story, but, having two transgender nieces under age 18, their physicians and mental health professionals do not recommend it before age 18.
I am sorry that she has regrets, but, she can have surgery to have breast implants. I do think that most teens under 18 should not have unless their gender dysphoria is so severe, for example, that suicidal ideation is present.
However, I do not believe that the laws being passed by some states are completely wrong. They are not experts in gender dysphoria. It should be a medical decision between the teen, their parents and medical professionals.