Eugenics in California: Never Again (just kidding lol)

THEN: Nonconsensual sterilizations in the 20th century

A century ago, fueled by exciting and idealistic new fake-Science (eugenics), progressives in California began state-sponsored, legal, compulsory eugenic sterilizations. Sterilization ramped up from small beginnings in 1909 to a statewide industry by the 1920s, with many feeder institutions. Other states did the same, but California performed the most by far: 20,108. That's a rate of 13 eugenic sterilizations per 100,000 inhabitants per year. [1] For context, Nazi Germany peaked at a rate of 75-80. So we got that going for us: California's Progressives were only one-sixth of Germany's Nazis! Of course, we kept doing it well into the 1960s.

Decades later, in 2003, Governor Davis finally apologized to California's sterilization victims. Attorney General Lockyer called out by name Gov. Gillett and his own predecessor A.G. Webb, who aggressively advanced eugenic sterilization laws. By 2021 there had been some desultory effort for reparations, though little came of it. The 20th century eugenic era was “a sad and regrettable chapter in the state's history,” and that closed the book. Good thing Californians today are too enlightened to let it happen again. Right?

NOW: Uh, about never doing it again...

Today, fueled by exciting and idealistic new fake-Science (gender theory), California progressives like Attorney General Rob Bonta are aggressively using the power of the state to circumvent informed consent. That has already led, and will continue to lead, directly to the sterilization of thousands of Californians – including children. [2] Minors by definition cannot give informed consent, just ask the Nuremberg lawyers. Bonta doesn't mention eugenics (he'd never come within a million miles of that word) but the result is the same as before: state-approved non-consensual sterilizations. Californians today are so enlightened we are letting it happen again. We’re cheering. And we’re electing leaders like Bonta.

Bonta today is aggressively promoting and expanding policies that three years ago had already outpaced [2] the "sad and regrettable chapter in the state's history that must never be repeated again." By 2020 California had already hit 13 per 100K, and rising. (Actually it’s worse: today California is sterilizing 13 per 100K children; in the 20th century we were sterilizing 13 per 100K of mostly adults.) Are we now shooting for Germany's record?

Bonta parrots the trans activists' claims. He has adopted their language, calling transparency and disclosure “forced outing.” He has adopted their frame, selling his move not as a violation of parental rights and a threat to child safety but as the affirmation of child rights. But ask the parents in Chino Valley:

"I can't believe we're at a point in America where authoritarians in power are fighting this hard to keep sexual secrets about children from their own parents. They are now using the heavy hand of the state to subvert local control and try to strip away the most fundamental parental rights.”

Governor Newsom laughed as he dismissed parent concerns, saying trans-identified kids are so few in number; but the numbers make a liar of him. In mutilating these 21st century kids, California has already hit and exceeded its peak rate of 20th century eugenic sterilizations.

It goes without saying that A.G. Rob Bonta is an ambitious partisan hack. What does need saying is that one day, maybe soon, gender dead-enders like Governor Newsom, Attorney General Bonta, Superintendent Thurmond and State Senator Scott Wiener will be viewed not as heroes but as criminals. Read the room, guys. Things are changing quickly. They need to get on the right side of history, or wind up remembered like their eugenic forebears. The second "sad and regrettable chapter" in California history is right now.

When 2103 comes around – or at the current rate of change, in 2033 – how will GovGPT apologize for what Newsom and Bonta and Thurmond and Wiener are doing today? Smiling and eyes wide open, they are walking right into sterilizing and otherwise harming thousands of young people. They are boasting about tearing down the parental guardrails that everyone agreed were necessary until a hot second ago. Bonta and Thurmond both hope to become the next Governor; they are campaigning on opposing even basic transparency to notify parents of what's going on. SILENCE=VICTORY is their plan. They are criminals, and in a just world they'd face a Nuremberg-style trial for what they're doing right now. CA better save its pennies; someday it'll be paying reparations for what's happening at your school.

Have we entered the farcical stage of civil rights thinking? CA already says "Congratulations, mentally ill Californians: you have the right to refuse your medication!" "Congratulations, homeless Californians: you have the right to live under the bridge!" That worked out great. Now children – our children – are breathlessly told "Congratulations, confused kids of California: you have the right to escape your parents' protection and deal directly with groomers and profiteers in complete privacy!" What could go wrong? No thanks, A.G. Bonta, your plan will work as well as all the others. I shudder to think of what civil rights for children Bonta will discover next: "Congratulations, kiddies, you have the right to age-diverse love! (We don't use the hurtful term 'pedo' any more.)"

Guardrails? Who needs parental guardrails? Given the inherently expanding ambitions of Queer Theory, A.G. Bonta needs to answer, Where does this end? Does it end? This is not alarmist thinking. It's a recurring and fundamental issue. If a child can plan his gender transition with other adults in state-enforced secrecy from parents, why can't he consent to sex with adults? That is the (un)Holy Grail of Queer Theory. Dr. John Money, who coined "gender is just a social construct" and popularized the term "Gender Identity", advocated pedophilia – er, Minor Attraction. He's still celebrated at Alfred Kinsey's Institute – another academic sexologist who was pro-pedophilia and even solicited live "data" from an actual Nazi pedophile, Dr. Fritz von Balluseck. No joke. And, for decades beginning in the 1970s West Berlin's Kentler Project routinely placed homeless children with pedophile men, reasoning they'd make "especially loving foster parents." I bet they did. (Read more on Dr. Money and the Reimer kids and Kentler.) The State of California is careening down a dark road; it needs to respect the most basic guardrail – parental notification – or it will find itself on the wrong side of history yet again. Maybe the wrong side of a defendant's dock.

What can I do? 1: Promote California Eugenics Reparations.

Here's an idea: California is giddy about reparations for slavery – even though California was never a slave state, and all slavery in the US ended 158 years ago. What California does not discuss enough is a far more sensible plan: thorough acknowledgment, education, and reparations for the compulsory eugenic sterilizations the state really did carry out as recently as the 1960s. (Hundreds more improper sterilizations continued in CA from the 1970s until 2014.) That really was state policy, and people directly harmed by it may still be alive; few have been compensated or even stepped forward to accept the 2003 apology. The legacy CA does need to reckon with is its own fervent, world-leading embrace of eugenic sterilizations. (Governor, “being the leader” is not always a good thing.) If we popularize the worthy cause of eugenics reparations from the past, that of course will raise the question, My god how did this happen and could this happen again? – a conversation we’d love to start. “Yes, we're doing it at this very moment. Worse than before! Our leaders are pressing for it.” #CAEugenicsReparations

What can I do? 2: Support our troops.

Long-term, caring Californians need to end several political careers. (Long-long-term, a criminal trial would be nice.) Both Bonta and Thurmond are running for governor; they must not succeed. Wiener’s reach must be curtailed. Newsom says he is not running for president, which guarantees you that he is…

Short-term, both Californians and non-Californians can support and encourage the brave parents who have stood up for children and earned the state's wrath for it. I emailed the six CA school boards that chose sanity, assuring them that they are not alone and hoping that more follow their lead. [3] In five minutes you can do the same. What are you waiting for?

I hadn’t realized the numbers were this bad; California’s 21C leaders have already taken us far down the same dark road we traveled in the 20C. We mumble apologies for the deeds of a century ago but California’s 21C leaders have already equaled and surpassed them – and promise still more. A century ago California's leaders went all-in on trendy pseudoscience, sterilizing thousands of people without consent. Later leaders said they learned their lesson and regretted the error. But today California's leaders are doing it all over again -- and their numbers match or beat anything CA did in the past. California is approaching numbers not seen since Nazi Germany. [2] And it's proud of that fact. It's eagerly signing up for more. In Round 2 it's specifically targeting and luring children to mutilate. The resistance needs every brave voice we can find.

With laws like AB665 (lowering the age of consent to 12 for gender counseling and residential shelter, without parental consent or even notification) California's leaders (Newsom, Bonta, Wiener, Thurmond) have allied with the real-life Child Catchers and Comprachicos. [4][5] (Erin Friday is on the case: “The parents will have no idea what happened to their child. Imagine their fear and anxiety. These parents are criminalized without an accusation, evidence or trial.”) With SB107 (giving CA custody of out-of-state children who come to CA for gender-affirming care, with or without a parent) California's leaders are becoming Child Catchers and Comprachicos. The stuff of nightmares. They seem immune to shame; will they be shamed by the predictable outcome of these laws? Which one, faced with the enormity of repeating California's historic crime, will be the first to say “no more”? My bet is on Thurmond. First, he needs something to differentiate his campaign for governor. Second, in the past Black Californians have been skeptical of LGBTQIA+ adventures. Finally, of the four, Thurmond’s current job involves listening to parents. So let’s give ‘em an earful. (I haven’t found a personal email for Thurmond and the others; can a PITT help me out?)

NOTES

[Note 1] That number – a rate of 13 eugenic sterilizations per 100,000 inhabitants – comes from Professor Lutz Kaelber at the University of Vermont. He calculated it this way: using original source materials like this he reports eugenic sterilizations in blocks of years: 1921-1928, 1928-1933, and so on. During the 8-year period 1933-1941, for example, California performed 14,568-8,504 = 6,064 eugenic sterilizations. That's 758 per year on average. (Across all ages: mostly adults but also some minors.) At the time the population of California was approximately 6 million (or 60 x 100,000). Divide 758 sterilizations per year by 60 and you get about 13 sterilizations per year per 100K residents. Kaelber comments, and you can check this claim too, that that rate of 13 per 100K in CA held fairly constant over three decades. He compares California's peak rate of 13 to Delaware's peak rate of 18 and to Nazi Germany's peak rate of 75-80. So that was our "sad and regrettable chapter" a century ago – and it is sad and regrettable. And we’re doing it again.

[Note 2] Just how many gender-affirming sterilizations are we looking at? Providers don't like to talk about the numbers – surprising, if this care is so good and important – but there’s enough data now to form an estimate. Williams Institute (2022) measures the distribution of trans-identified children. Wright (2023) measures the number of gender-affirming surgeries on children. Reuters (2022) measures the number of children starting blockers and hormones. Taken together we can form a rough estimate of the total number of children being sterilized in California each year. It ain't pretty.

(The estimate is complicated by the fact that today, unlike the eugenic era, not all sterilizations require surgery; for example, hormone treatment in boys by itself impedes testicle growth and sperm production. And vice versa, not all gender-affirming surgeries are sterilizing; a double mastectomy on a girl is horrific but by itself it does not sterilize her. So these numbers will be rough.)

SURGERY BASED ESTIMATES

Wright et al. (2023) count 3,678 “gender-affirming surgeries” (GAS) on children age 13-17 in the US from 2016-2020. They acknowledge "there may be under-capture." (So when someone tells you “that never happens,” you can reply with “yeah, over 3,678 times.”) Over that period they found exponential growth averaging roughly 42% per year. They don't specify the state, only that 45.9% of all surgeries (1,688) were performed "in the west."

The Williams Institute (2022) estimates 300,000 trans-identified kids age 13-17 in the US, of whom 81,700 (27.2%) live in "the western US" and 49,100 (16.4%) live in California.

Put together, we get a rough minimum estimate of 3,678 x 16.4% = 603 total GAS performed on children in CA over 2016-2020. It's probably closer to 1,000 total since these sources imply a surgery rate in the Western US that is elevated 45.9% ÷ 27.2% = 1.7X with respect to the number of trans-identified kids living there. Either way, with the 42% per year average growth rate we expect roughly 220 to 360 of those surgeries to have occurred just in 2020. Assuming continued growth, we'd expect 630 to 1,040 surgeries to occur in 2023 and 900 to 1,490 surgeries to occur in 2024.

Finally, the US Census estimates that California has roughly 2.34M inhabitants age 13-17, so even 300 GAS per year implies a rate of 300 ÷ 23.4 = 13 GAS per 100K among that age group. By 2020 we had tied our own 20th century sterilization record, and still were rising fast.

Here's a key point: not all gender-affirming surgeries are sterilizing. However GAS is one late step in a years-long process that does reduce fertility. The girl who gets a double mastectomy at age 17 may have started growth disruptors (aka "puberty blockers") at 12 and synthetic wrong-sex hormones at 15 – and those have harmed her fertility. Chloe Cole certainly thinks so. Ditto the boy who gets feminizing surgery at 17; if he has been taking castrating drugs since middle school, he never developed in the first place. And he doesn't need surgery to seal the deal; the drugs alone may have reduced or destroyed his ability to ever father children. Even the butchers admit that. So how many of those GAS correspond to a sterilization? Probably most of them.

Gender affirming surgery is horrific but what has changed in a century is that today we don't need surgery to sterilize someone, especially a child. Therefore if we look only at surgeries we undercount the total number of child sterilizations.

DRUG BASED ESTIMATES

Reuters (2022) and Komodo Health measured the number of children starting blockers and hormones. Their analysis, the first of its kind, found that "at least 121,882 children ages 6 to 17 were diagnosed with gender dysphoria in the five years to the end of 2021. More than 42,000 of those children were diagnosed [in 2021], up 70% from 2020. ... The number of children who started on puberty-blockers or hormones totaled 17,683 over the five-year period, rising from 2,394 in 2017 to 5,063 in 2021."

Reuters concedes "reliable national data on how many children receive care for gender dysphoria have long been unavailable." I wonder why. But warning that it's "probably a significant undercount," they report a minimum of 5,063 US children started on puberty-blockers or hormones in 2021. The implied growth rate over the period 2017-2021 is 21% per year. Again, Williams implies that 16.4% of all US trans-identified kids live in CA, making 5,063 x 16.4% = 830 new patients in CA in 2021. Put together, Reuters and Williams imply that in 2023 over 1,227 children in CA started on puberty-blockers or hormones, and in 2024 over 1,480 more will start.

Having started, how many will continue drug therapy until their fertility is permanently harmed? It's hard to say, but if it's even one quarter, then for 2023 we're back to the same surgery-based estimated rate of 13 sterilizations per 100K, equaling California’s 20C eugenic peak. And if it's one half... then we're entering very dark territory, a rate of 26. Nazi Bavaria had a rate of 36.

ECONOMICS BASED ESTIMATES

Another way to estimate the number of patients is to look at clinics. America has 400 pediatric gender clinics. (Activists tried to erase that fact. Again, funny if they’re doing such good and important work...) You can't support hundreds of medical practices and thousands of highly skilled workers without a lot of patients – the economics alone dictate that currently active child gender patients must number ten thousand or more nationwide.

CONCLUSION: In the medical and technological and secrecy climate of 2023 it's harder than it was in 1923 to count the number of sterilizations in California. Back then Californians were proud of what they were doing, eagerly compared themselves against their peers, and worried openly that they were falling behind. Now parents are forced to feel our way through a darkened room – because the groomers and profiteers like secrecy and have set it up that way. But whether we consider surgeries or drugs or economics, we conclude that California today is sterilizing children at a rate that equals or exceeds the maximum rate at which it performed eugenic sterilizations a century ago on all people. Shout that from the rooftops.

[Note 3] The Chino Valley Unified School District bravely led the charge. You can write to their five board members here. (Sonja Shaw sounds like an absolute tigress. PITT should interview her.)

Donald Bridge <don_bridge@chino.k12.ca.us>
Andrew Cruz <andrew_cruz@chino.k12.ca.us>
Jonathan Monroe <jonathan_monroe@chino.k12.ca.us>
James Na <james_na@chino.k12.ca.us>
President Sonja Shaw <sonja_shaw@chino.k12.ca.us>

Subject: Thank you for CVUSD's stand for parent rights

Dear Chino Valley USD trustees,

Thank you for standing up for child safety and parents rights. Your policy, simply to notify parents when a child announces a transgender identity, is both modest and reasonable and wise. How I wish my California school had a policy like yours. I hope you will go further, and I hope that hundreds of CA school districts will follow your lead.

I also hope that Attorney General Bonta and Superintendent Thurmond listen to you and to the voices of CA parents, and end their opposition to your good work. California today is mutilating and sterilizing children at rates that match or exceed the dark days of eugenics in the US. (link to this article)

This CA parent thanks you and wishes you victory in your fight for child safety and parent rights.

Good luck and courage,

My Name, My Town CA

Once you’ve sent your message of support to Chino Valley, copy and paste to support our other troops:

● Chino Valley Unified School District Board of Education: President Sonja Shaw <sonja_shaw@chino.k12.ca.us> , Donald Bridge <don_bridge@chino.k12.ca.us> , Andrew Cruz <andrew_cruz@chino.k12.ca.us> , Jonathan Monroe <jonathan_monroe@chino.k12.ca.us> , James Na <james_na@chino.k12.ca.us>
● Dry Creek Joint Elementary School District: President Scott Otsuka <scottotsuka@dcjesd.us> , Jon Fenske <jonfenske@dcjesd.us> , Jean Pagnone <jeanpagnone@dcjesd.us> , Jason Walker <jasonwalker@dcjesd.us> , Jeff Randall <jeffrandall@dcjesd.us>
● Rocklin Unified School District: President Julie Hupp <jhupp@rocklinusd.org> , Tiffany Saathoff <tsaathoff@rocklinusd.org> , Rachelle Price <rprice@rocklinusd.org> , Dereck Counter <dcounter@rocklinusd.org> , Michelle Sutherland <msutherland@rocklinusd.org>
● Anderson Union High School District (also see https://shastascout.org/anderson-union-parental-notification/): President Joe Gibson <jgibson@auhsd.net> , Butch Schaefer <bschaefer@auhsd.net> , Staci Adams <sadams@auhsd.net> , Jackie LaBarbera <jlabarbera@auhsd.net>
● Temecula Valley Unified School District Board: President Dr Joseph Komrosky <jkomrosky@tvusd.us> , Jennifer Wiersma <jwiersma@tvusd.us> , Danny Gonzalez <dgonzalez@tvusd.us> , Allison Barclay <abarclay@tvusd.us> , Steven Schwartz <sschwartz@tvusd.us>
● Murrieta Valley Unified School District Board: Paul Diffley <pdiffley@murrieta.k12.ca.us> , Linda Lunn <llunn@murrieta.k12.ca.us> , Nicolas Pardue <npardue@murrieta.k12.ca.us> , Julie Vandegrift <jvandegrift@murrieta.k12.ca.us> , Nancy Young <nyoung@murrieta.k12.ca.us> , Superintendent Dr Ward Andrus <wandrus@murrieta.k12.ca.us>

[Note 4] For the 1968 film adaptation of “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” Roald Dahl added the character Child Catcher, whom BBC viewers voted “the scariest villain in children’s books” and EW named one of the “50 Most Vile Movie Villains.” In 2023 Child-Catcher is real and, like the fictional character, has government support. They always do. Only with official support could such monstrosities go on.

[Note 5] We've been here before. Progressive 21st century CA is not only repeating Progressive 20C CA policy errors, it seems intent on actualizing ancient nightmares, too. European folklore of the middle ages spoke of the Comprachicos – “child buyers” – nightmarish artisans who abducted healthy children and systematically mutilated them, transforming them over years into something frightening or amusing or both, which they’d sell to a king to be his court jester. Shakespeare knew this legend. Victor Hugo had a big hit with a book about a 17C Comprachico victim; the 1928 film adaptation scared the bejesus out of moviegoers and inspired the ultimate Batman villain “The Joker.” Now every time you see Joker’s twisted grin, think of its deep origins in a bad king and the evil artisans who did his bidding. (Now there's a thought: Disney, want to make another Victor Hugo film? A feel-good story about a disabled hero and heroine?)

We are not alone in our suffering. Our ancestors had the same anxieties about their kids we feel today. They told stories like these to process those feelings and give name to them. Today, CA has returned to the days of mysterious child abductors, for real, calling it “progressive” – but it’s not. It’s medieval and nightmarish. Abducting and secretly mutilating healthy, loved children on the king’s whim – that is not a good look, Gavin. You can dress him in a designer suit and put gel in his hair, but a bad king is still a bad king.