A billboard drawing attention to the harms of transgender medical practices in Los Angeles near a Kaiser hospital has been taken down after being up for a day and a half. Concerned parents who paid to erect the billboard say it bodes ill for free speech amid a medical scandal about which much of the general public knows little.
The billboard is the second sign to go up in Los Angeles and was intentionally positioned about one block away from Kaiser West-LA, where transgender surgeries occur regularly. It was scheduled to stay up for a month.
Before it was taken down, the sign read: “Why do so many of our youth think they are transgender? Know the facts before making a life-changing choice. Read this book.”
The text was positioned next to a picture of the cover of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by journalist Abigail Shrier. The first billboard, which was put up in nearby West Hollywood in October and was sponsored by the same group of concerned parents, also promoted Shrier’s book next to text explaining that “puberty is not a medical condition” and noting how children are being taught about gender identity at school. The first board remained up for a month.
The dad of a trans-identifying teenaged daughter who is behind both billboards spoke with The Christian Post on Tuesday, again on condition of anonymity, explaining that the official word from the billboard company was that it was being taken down because of “complaints by the community.” The father’s money to book the billboard was refunded.
But the area is not very residential and the father speculates that the surgeons and medical staff and those that are financially benefiting from the surgeries are the ones who complained. They were told the billboard went up Sunday morning. By Tuesday, it had already been taken down completely.
“It may sound surreal to some people but it’s clearly in jeopardy,” he said when asked about the state of free speech in the United States in light of the billboard company’s move….
The father cited as an example the case last week of Keira Bell, a 23-year-old woman who de-transitioned after having identified as transgender during her teen years and underwent experimental hormone treatments at the Tavistock clinic in London. Bell, who went on to have a double mastectomy, alleged the medical treatments irreparably damaged her body and likely sterilized her and that she was not made aware of the risks as a teenager. The British High Court of Justice ruled in her favor, holding that minors under 16 are not capable of giving informed consent to puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones.
But the father noted that the story that “should have sent shockwaves throughout the entire world” was buried and the U.S. media was soon consumed by the announcement from an Oscar-nominated actress, Ellen Page, that she was coming out as trans and identifying as a male named Elliott. Bell was largely ignored while Page was cheered in the press…
Meanwhile, another group of parents from the newly-formed Partners for Ethical Care were planning to put up a near-identical billboard in Dallas across the street from the Genecis transgender clinic. This clinic has been involved in the case of James Younger, an 8-year-old boy in Texas whose mother, Anne Georgulas, has been intending to medically transition him into a transgender girl named Luna against the wishes of his father, Jeffrey Younger.
The billboard message had been agreed to, the contract had been signed, and it was scheduled to go up in mid-December but the agent — the same one who had connected with the Los Angeles parents — told a parent involved in the effort Tuesday that the billboard would not be allowed after all and that the Irreversible Damage book cover was too controversial to be featured….
The above comes from a Dec. 9 story in the Christian Post.
Did the person who paid for use of the billboard get a refund? It was a sales contract, after all.
This is one of the areas progressives are happy to not be the “Party of Science”
I understand, especially on this rather conservative Catholic site, that there is a concern about LGBTQ issues, mostly in terms of not recognizing their right to exist within the confines of the church. The father who bought the billboards had his views up, and they were taken down. Your site is claiming this as flagrant denial of freedom of speech. I would be careful of how much that term is used. If one could post the billboard as shown, could not a member of the KKK then also put up a billboard endearing one of their beliefs? Bear in mind that the KKK is no friend of Catholicism, so sometimes, when the public complains about a billboard, there are considerations for public good versus individual rights balanced. Is it a perfect system? Far from it, but there are other avenues where the father could have his billboard message placed without it being deleted, unless it goes against the platform’s announced policies. That too is the platform’s right to do. Just as the printed values of Catholic Church state that there is a no abortion policy, one could not force this site to put up a pro-choice billboard. Is that lacking freedom of speech then? No, because there are places one can place such a message.
You’re warning is way too late. The ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) has defend the right of the KKK to demonstrate a long time ago. That is because they hate the Catholic Church more.
Corrections: Your warning
defended the right of the KKK
Wrote in too much haste.
Totally incorrect opinionating by LGBTQ. Equating banning Hormonal treatment of underage children, with the KKK, is not only complete nonsense, it is morally evil. Children are to be supervised and guided by their parents, not by some gay guy on Castro street.
We have an extended family member whose son decided that he wanted to be a girl at an early age. They started on hormone treatments etc., that child now has major health issues including a golf ball size tumor around his/her’s heart.
Similar things are happening all the time. There is a video on line from England where the mother allowed her son to take hormones to “become” a girl at an early age. Now the “girl” wants to return to being a boy after his voice stayed girlish and his face beard free because he was given estrogen. I do not know if he had full genital mutilation, but I hope not. The father is absent in many of these cases; therefore many boys can only relate to their mothers, or the mothers do it out of spite to punish the father. They talk as if it is just a common thing to do to mutilate a child’s body. Demonic!
As a woman who has had to have reconstructive surgery from an amputation from cancer. I can tell you that the body is never the same, and one will have pains in places one never had them before, even with the best of surgeons. My advice to those who might even be considering “sex change”, which is really impossible, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” If you have a real genital defect, that is a whole different matter, but one needs to talk to different board certifide surgeons to get the best results. And it is most times best done as an well informed adult.
I sympathize with a parent who has a child actually born with a genital defect. Whether or not, or when to make corrective surgery must be terribly difficult, but that is not what a “sex change” operation is. A “sex change” operation mutilates a person with a perfectly formed body, often before they have had time to even develop normally. Many children go through stages of envying the opposite sex for various reason, but mutilating them because they say they want to be the other sex is just horribly wrong. Adults should not be encouraging this at all.