Letters Forum: Off Topic!
– JUNE 2023 –

by the Editors | Jun 1, 2023 | General

In the spirit of offering Letters to the Editor as a traditional platform for lively, wide-ranging conversations in the public square, we invite you to write about whatever is on your mind.

Because we require comments under articles to be “on topic”, we found that readers who want to speak to other important issues, events and concerns that our small crew can’t cover don’t have a place for that. This Off Topic! feature allows readers to bring up other subjects, post news flashes, announce community events, or express concerns outside of the selected topics we write about.

A new Off Topic! forum is posted monthly. The post is open throughout the month for new letters and your responses.

How this works:

Submit your letter in the white box below Comment Guidelines at the bottom of the page containing the muted prompt “Enter your comment here…”

Either provide your own title to the letter as a top line or we will title it for you.

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City Finances “Falling Off Cliff” as Cherry Street Project Enters Seventh Year

by Jim Scarantino | May 25, 2023 | General

Unsustainable. In less than five years, Port Townsend will burn through its reserves and be unable to maintain its current level of services. Its finances will “fall off a cliff.” Those exact words were used by city staff in its presentation to the joint session of City Council and its Financial Sustainability Taskforce on May 8, 2023.

The graph at the top of this article shows what’s coming. Starting this year, the city will begin consuming its reserves. The burn rate accelerates each subsequent year until in 2028 the city starts dropping through the “policy level” that represents its ability to maintain existing services. You might notice that the graph shows a significant peak during the past couple of years. Those were years of a massive infusion of federal and state money and savings due to cutting staff during the pandemic lock downs. It was an unreal time of external munificence that won’t be repeated

The unpleasant and, for many people, painful solution will necessarily involve raising existing taxes and the imposition of new taxes. This will make the cost of living in Port Townsend rise even faster, hastening the shrinking of the city’s middle class and making life ever harder for workers. Taxes get passed through to everyone one way or another. Port Townsend already is not a family-friendly place; things are going to get worse for households on limited budgets trying to raise children.  A higher cost of living exacerbates conditions already faced by employers who cannot attract workers or keep on their payrolls younger people who are forced to choose a community that better fits their paychecks. Higher costs in Port Townsend have also driven out some of the creative class. An older, wealthier demographic emerges, including a greater concentration of people moving here to spend their last years and those with surplus money capable of acquiring second homes.

An alternative would be to put ambitious, costly plans on hold and immediately impose austerity measures.  This will be the involuntary consequence anyway if, very quickly, something “radical” is not done. That was the message of Steve King, the city’s public works director. He shared hard truths I can’t remember hearing at any previous city council meeting. He informed council that, “Our tax structure absolutely requires growth.” He said that a “radical” change was needed to achieve a significant rate of growth not seen here in recent memory.

The necessary growth would mean, he said, something like building 75 new homes annually — an unheard of accomplishment under the city’s difficult-to-build regulatory regime. Not discussed at the meeting was radically promoting growth by making Port Townsend much more business friendly in order to attract new employers that would create better jobs than those the tourist trade generates. That requires relaxing business and environmental controls, governing with a very light regulatory touch, and dramatically reducing the cost of doing business here — the opposite of our current high taxation, tightly controlled, closely planned, anti-growth dominant culture.

Five years to go before the city launches off that cliff. It took six years to take a first stab at loosening city codes that were making it difficult to add ADUs — even though the need for housing was declared a “crisis” back in 2017. That same year, the city, with the enthusiastic support and advocacy of its current mayor and deputy mayor, began wasting a pile of money, staff time and public resources on the fiasco of the Cherry Street Project. This supposedly “affordable housing” endeavor has sucked up over $2 million in city funds, bond capacity and land. Entering its seventh year, the project provides housing only to rats, raccoons and the squirrels that I have observed entering the building through holes chewed in the building’s eaves. It is also a publicly-funded place for kids to party and do who-knows-what-else inside the vandalized derelict on the hill over the golf course.

“Lean Thinking”

The May 8 meeting partially focused on how to craft a message to persuade taxpayers to accept a higher tax burden. One slide boasted of steps that have been taken to slow the impending launch into a fiscal abyss.

King informed council it would take at least another $1.5 million annually over future decades to start to turn around the city’s dire streets problem. It will take another $750,000 annually just to keep things from getting worse. The touted “efficiencies,” as anyone with some sense of proportion will realize, are insignificant. The cliff up ahead has been visible since at least the time the current city manager began employment. That’s three years ago, yet this is all that can be claimed in the way of meaningful efforts to cut costs.

Notice that “lean thinking” is cited as an example of an efficiency achieved.  What is “lean thinking”?  Some kind of thought experiment?  An image of an unhealthy overweight person imagining a fit, trim twin in the mirror comes to mind.

At the same time it confronts an impending fiscal crisis, city leaders are spending scarce resources on dreams of a grand new pool and exercise facility. Just a basic pool alone, as was stated during the May 8 meeting, will cost $25 million. Opsis, the Portland, Oregon consultant working for the city, pegs the minimal cost at more than $30 million and running as high as $52.7 million.

The city is also tossing around ideas for remaking the golf course, though it has no money to do anything (already needing volunteers to trim the grass).

And even as a poison hemlock forest again engulfs the Cherry Street Project the city is moving forward on its largest housing project ever – the Evans Vista development. The land was acquired with grants, but the city has shelled out at least $500,000 on consulting services while also using considerable costly staff time for a project that may be a decade away from making the faintest impression on the city’s housing market.

In an act that cannot qualify as “lean thinking,” in October 2022 council approved a large increase in compensation for the city manager, John Mauro. They boosted his salary by 10% and threw in a “retention bonus” of $12,500. They also increased his vehicle allowance and doubled the city’s contractual obligation to provide severance pay from 6 to 12 months. Not long after this act of municipal generosity, Mauro went on a five-week vacation.

Mauro’s base salary is now $189,297, up from his starting salary mid-2020 of $156,000. In addition to his base salary, he also gets 13% of his salary contributed to his retirement account, almost $25,000 annually at his current rate of pay. When he was hired, he received a $20,000 relocation allowance to move him here from New Zealand. His current automobile allowance of $6,600 is equivalent to driving more than 10,000 miles, at the current IRS business mileage rate. One could reasonably wonder how and why the city manager is driving more than 10,000 miles annually on city business. How is that possible? For background on Mr. Mauro, please see our report, Who is John Mauro, Port Townsend City’s Manager?, in which his previous employer in Auckland contradicted published claims about the job Mauro held as an employee of that city.

Just three days before the meeting with the Financial Unsustainability Taskforce, city council had to admit it was going to blow its 2023 budget. It approved a “supplemental” budget that recognized the need for an additional $4.7 million above what had been anticipated. Bills from consultants drove the budget-busting, er, supplemental measure. These consultants are being used to advance the Mountain View pool/rec center and golf course projects. Council was also told that expensive consultants were doing work normally done by staff engineers, as the city has been shorthanded in that department.

At the same time it was claiming it needed more money to pay consultants to fill holes in its engineering department (not to be confused with filling holes in the streets), the city hired a new marketing manager. She will work on “engaging the public,” according to a Peninsula Daily News report, on “decisions including the Port Townsend Golf Course, an aquatics center, streets, housing and…” (get this) “financial sustainability.” In other words, she will be working on selling the public on projects the city acknowledges it cannot currently afford and trying to convince taxpayers to accept tax increases for the sake of “sustainability.”

Recently the city sought to recruit a Director of People and Performance, with a salary ranging from $107,00 to just over $130,000. Desperately needed licensed engineers with a minimum of 6 years experience, meanwhile, were being offered jobs starting at under $75,000, with a top range of $92,000. The opening for Director of People and Performance position has been closed. The city is still looking for three engineers and a Deputy Public Works Director/City Engineer. In the meantime, more expensive consultants are doing those jobs and/or services are being curtailed.

As for that Cherry Street Project, in August 2022 it looked like the city would sell the building and property. City staff projected the sale might net $320,000. City council was going to decide whether to impose conditions on the purchaser that required them to build a certain number of “affordable” units, or unload the property for the best deal that could be had. The city has already passed up a $1 million cash offer. City Manager Mauro blew off Keith and Jean Marzan of Morgan Hill who offered to bail the city out of the mess it had created for itself and pledged to build affordable housing on the site (see our report). When Mauro presented the history of the Cherry Street Project to city council last year, he failed to mention that he had rejected this cash offer, which was about three times more than the city could hope for now. I spoke with a council member immediately after the meeting. She said she had never been informed of the $1 million cash offer that Mauro dismissed.

(On May 15, the City Council during its business meeting went into executive session to discuss a real estate sale or lease. The property in question was not identified during the meeting.)

Whether it sells the property or not, until 2040 the city will be making annual payments of $61,896 on its $1.4 million bond principal and interest obligation assumed to rehab the 70-year building barged across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Victoria, B.C.  Netting $320,000 from a sale would be swallowing about a $2 million loss (the land alone was valued at $600,000 by the city in 2017).

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Cherry Street Project, May 2023. Top two photos, back of building; bottom photo, front view.

Taxes and More Taxes

Even with the annual 1% increase in property taxes city council always imposes, in five years the city heads into “red ink,” in the words of Mayor David Faber. Just treading water — not demanding more from taxpayers already paying high taxes — means red ink washes ashore very soon. Streets will continue to deteriorate and services will decline. Intermittently and futilely patching crumbling streets guarantees even more costly repairs down the road. Public Works Director King said in the May 8 meeting that replacing a failed street, as Lawrence Street has become, costs 4-5 times more than required to properly maintain a street. He said that F Street and San Juan Avenue “are next” for failure. “We will,” he said, “continue to see those streets go down, and pretty much [then] the whole town is shot, not just the side streets.”

The kind of growth King intimated is necessary to prop up the city’s existing fiscal structure is not going to happen in the time remaining before the edge of the cliff is under city leaders’ toes.

If the city sold all available disposable land identified by city staff, an option discussed at the meeting, it could raise maybe $2 million. The Cherry Street Project was not identified as one of those properties. But even adding the possible proceeds from sale of that failed project, it is still not enough to avert the upcoming cliff dive.

An idea was floated to lease space at City Hall and charge a rental fee for the pool, raising maybe – maybe – $150,000 annually. That’s a big if and would put the city in competition with private landlords for some uses. As mentioned, getting streets into sound condition will cost $1.5 million a year for a long time. The aquatic center city leaders want will require, according a May 10 Leader article, an annual subsidy of $750,000 “for the base option.”

Some “efficiencies” were suggested, along the lines of the “efficiencies” listed above. Let’s be serious. None of this would make much of an impact.  Not on the list, by the way, are salary freezes or more modest annual raises. The trajectory off that fast-approaching precipice incorporates maintaining annual 4.5% to 5% raises for staff.

That leaves raising or adding taxes. The Sustainability Task Force and city staff have plenty of ideas on how to get more out of homeowners, shoppers, business owners, renters… everybody.

Those ideas include the obvious: raising property taxes. A proposal was discussed to raise property taxes by $.50 for every $1,000 of assessed value, and adding this to the basis for annual 1% overall property tax increases. That would mean a $250 increase in the first year for a property assessed at $500,000, which would then increase annually thereafter. This would be a permanent tax increase.

Other ideas for bringing in more money to city coffers: raising the water, sewer and stormwater utility tax; increasing taxation of electric and telephone services; a higher B&O tax; charging parking fees on 500 parking spaces (which requires additional enforcement and administrative costs); increasing user fees; imposing a “transportation benefit district” sales tax; imposing a “transportation benefit district” license fee; imposing a $5,000 per housing unit impact fee; enacting a metropolitan park district property tax; imposing a parks and recreation district levy; imposing a parks and recreation service area levy; collecting a public facilities district sales tax; adding an affordable housing sales tax; and raising development service fees.

This was one of the most important city council sessions in years. It received decent coverage by Peter Seagall of the Peninsula Daily News. It was ignored by the city’s own newspaper. Staff’s PowerPoint presentation is here. You can view and hear the entire 2.5 hour meeting at this link. You will hear city leaders laughing and joking. Yet the situation is so serious that having the county take over the city’s police department, parks, library, planning and engineering services was presented for consideration.

Here is the full list of our reporting on the Cherry Street Project since our first article:

Unhappy Birthday: Cherry Street Project Turns Five Years Old 5/9/22

The Tragedy of the Cherry Street Project, 12/12/18

What’s Happening With the Cherry Street Project? 10/29/19

“Completely Bogus” Numbers–More Problems and Delays for Cherry Street Project, 12/2/19

Multi-Million Dollar Fraud on Taxpayers: The Cherry Street Project Unmasked, 6/27/20

Cherry Street Welcomes First Tenants, 2/28/20

Default the Cherry Street Project Now, 4/22/20

Latest Cherry Street Giveaway Hits Taxpayers Harder, 10/2/20

Cherry Street Project Handover “Not a Done Deal,”10/19/20

Accomplished Developer Will Donate Time and Services for Cherry Street Project, 10/20/20

Cherry Street Handover: Red Flags About Bayside Housing, 3/3/21 (and related articles)

Happy Fourth Birthday, Cherry Street Project! 5/10/21

Cherry Street Project Costs Soar in Bayside Housing Proposal, 6/23/21

New Majority on Council Should Kill the Cherry Street Project, 11/27/21

Cherry Street Project Vandalized, 1/4/22

“Incredibly Expensive” Housing Project Follows Cherry Street Debacle, 1/6/22

Mayor Faber (Almost) Opens Up on Cherry Street Project Failure, 4/23/22

Jefferson Healthcare’s Trans Mission —
Suicide Risk as Emotional Blackmail

by Annette Huenke | May 21, 2023 | General

“The transgender rights movement has gone well beyond seeking equal rights. It seeks to liberate women without their consent from the legal protections associated with birth sex and even from the recording of birth sex… I have changed my mind with regard to certain transgender demands, including access to women-only spaces, after listening to women. Men are rarely, if ever, affected by transgender demands, so it is easy to say ‘yes.’ We must always try to imagine ourselves in the changing rooms, hospital wards, and prisons of lesbian, bisexual and heterosexual women.”
Professor Robert Wintemute, original Yogyakarta Principles signatory

————————————-

In 1964 or so, my pal Leah and I hatched a scheme to outwit the dress code enforcers in our small elementary school in a rural farming community of southern New Jersey. As was demanded by sex stereotypes at the time, girls were required to wear dresses/skirts, all logic against that tradition be damned, not the least of which was cold autumns and freezing winters. The school featured a playground with a basketball court, baseball diamonds, swings, a big slide and old-fashioned monkey bars… everything an active kid could possibly want. What young girls didn’t want was other kids (or adults) seeing up our dresses.

Leah and I were rough-and-tumble girls with lots of brothers. We were as fast and strong as any of the boys at that prepubescent age, but modesty prohibited our participation in a sport we both loved — baseball. One day we appeared at school with shorts under our dresses, and proceeded to head out to the diamond with the boys. It wasn’t long before our ruse was discovered. That afternoon, we each carried a note home from the teacher to our parents. Our scheme fizzled out before the sun set that night.

A few years later, as a young teenager, again I was sidelined as spectator, enviously watching my brothers and their mates enjoy Little League baseball to their hearts’ content. To assuage my longing, my brothers allowed me to catch practice pitches behind the backstop. It would be some years before the 1972 Title IX civil rights law paved the way for females’ access to sports spaces that males had previously dominated. We didn’t want entry into boys and mens locker rooms and showers. We wanted to enjoy the commons, which our parents’ tax dollars incidentally helped fund to provide for healthy lifestyles.

I could not have imagined that I would live to see the day when males would be not only welcomed, but lauded, for insinuating themselves into women’s sports and private spaces. The banner supporting males identifying as females is being carried by many of the very same women who were themselves forbidden by institutional policies and patriarchal norms from participating in a full range of sports not so long ago. Now they’re facilitating turning Title IX inside out to accommodate what are fundamentally misogynist urges — the emotions of males are more important than the intrinsic value of women’s sports and the physical safety of females.

In 1967, the first woman to enter the Boston Marathon was attacked from behind by a race official as she was running with a group of men. Fifty-five years later, I and numerous other women were attacked from behind by a body builder who identifies as a woman, who was trying to prevent real women from speaking in public. Cowardice appears to be characteristic of these fellows, and even that is welcomed and celebrated by the woke contingent that has possessed our society in general — for the moment.

Pennylvania Quakers’ swimmer Lia Thomas (Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports)

Lia (William) Thomas, the now infamous biological male swimmer who imagines he is female, was a mediocre competitor among his own sex. His fortune changed last year. The news was so shocking, it made headlines around the world. “Thomas ruffled feathers last season as the swimmer set pool, school, and Ivy League records. Thomas competed for three years on the men’s team and was ranked 462 as a male swimmer, but shot up to number one after being allowed to join the women’s team last season.”

What does it say about this man’s character that he never stood a chance placing tops among males, but would relish purloining valuable awards in competition against women?

This chicanery is occurring in many women’s sports these days — cycling, skateboarding, volleyball, weightlifting, track, rugby and martial arts — I’m sure I’ve missed some.

Sports are an important part of our culture — teaching confidence and team-building, providing physical exercise and valuable win/lose life lessons, and opportunities for modest to spectacularly lucrative career opportunities, to name a few examples. But sports shouldn’t dominate the discussion around the so-called ’transgender’ issue because of their popularity.  This article will consider other crucial aspects of the debate, including institutional collusion and identity-politics activists’ manipulation.

HEI Leader Award slide from Transgender Navigator Jackie Levin’s 2/28/23 Jefferson Healthcare Board of Commissioners’ meeting

Celebrating a decade of “gender-affirming medical care”

At the February 28th Jefferson Healthcare hospital (JH) board meeting, Patient Advocate/Transgender Navigator Jackie Levin presented a slideshow (pps. 71-80) that spoke in glowing terms of the hospital’s progress in the last decade promoting and supporting the ‘LGBTQIA community.’ JH first applied in 2013 for the Healthcare Equality Index (HEI) Leaders award, sponsored by the American LGBT-interest activist group Human Rights Campaign (HRC), and has “achieved that every year since.”

Levin reported increasing numbers of people from the “transgender community” seeking medication and medical services providers:

We’ve done a lot with sponsoring events in the community and attending events in the community as well as bringing in physicians and other trainers for our staff, for our providers and we now have ten providers who are trained to help our transgender patients with their hormone replacement therapy. And we’ve got some real advocates in our OBGYN department. So it really feels like it’s really grown, we’ve made some strong connections with people in the community and I think that’s one of the things that’s really important.

An internal audit of patient charts was conducted last year, which Levin said “noted that legal sex is there… but somebody’s sex assigned at birth is [only] at 40% gender identity… pronouns are barely put in our Epic medical record, and so we’re going to be doing that for this year.”

Increasing complaints to the hospital about misgendering are particularly worrying:

Right pronouns are part of our access [to hospital services] — folks don’t feel seen if we don’t use their proper pronouns… It’s how we identify ourselves and if I mis-pronoun you, you’ll correct me and if I mis-pronoun you again, you may begin to wonder if I see you. And if I continue to mis-pronoun you, you’re gonna be wondering if you can trust me.

She paused to reinforce the importance of this convention:

Oh, I did want to add that there is a risk of, great, much greater, I mean like uh, 40% higher risk of suicide in youth if we’re not using the transgender persons appropriate pronouns.

That’s quite a distortion of the oft-cited, though poorly supported, claim that “transgender” people are at least 40% more likely to have attempted suicide in their lifetime than the non-trans population. For some time I have been curious about where that figure came from, and exactly which suicide statistics it referenced, so I set about to find out. More on that later… for now we continue our dive into JH’s keen interest in the HEI.

Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and party politics

HRC was founded in 1980. You may be familiar with the logo — a yellow equal sign (=) on a blue background.

Influence Watch, a project of The Capital Research Center, describes the organization this way:

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) is the nation’s largest LGBT-interest activist organization and a prominent force in left-of-center politics. Together with the affiliated Human Rights Campaign Foundation charitable arm and super PAC, HRC has built relationships with powerful mostly Democratic Party politicians and major corporations, and has taken a leading role in Democratic Party politics and left-leaning activism. The group has faced criticism from the left over the years for insufficient zeal in securing its social-liberal agenda. …

HRC has leveraged its position as the largest advocate for LGBT interests to pressure major corporations, law firms, hospitals, and local governments into implementing and expanding socially liberal policies, supporting HRC financially, and withdrawing support from conservative and religious organizations through implicit threats of low scores on its Corporate Equality Index, Healthcare Equality Index and Municipal Equality Index “scorecards.”

Writing for the Free Beacon on May 15th, 2023, Aaron Sibarium penned an edifying analysis of the insidious tactics employed by HRC to coerce compliance within U.S. hospital systems —

Meet the Healthcare Equality Index, the Human Rights Campaign’s scorecard for hospitals that purports to measure the “equity and inclusion of their LGBTQ+ patients.” The index, which uses a 100 point scale, is [in part] funded by Pfizer and PhRMA, the trade association that lobbies on behalf of large pharmaceutical companies…

To earn a perfect score, hospitals must display LGBT symbols, solicit and use patients’ preferred pronouns, and conduct trainings on LGBT issues approved by the [HRC], according to the scoring criteria. They must also provide the same treatments for gender dysphoria that they provide for other medical conditions—meaning a hospital that uses puberty blockers to treat precocious puberty cannot withhold the drugs from children who say they’re transgender. And though the index does not mention medical conscience exemptions explicitly, it does penalize hospitals for allowing “discriminatory treatment that is in conflict with their non-discrimination policy.”

Once again, here we find direct involvement by pharma shills in the development of policies that require use of their products, in a manner that closely resembles blackmail. Don’t want to play ball? No “points” for you, and we’ve got the budget to make sure your reputation suffers for it. HRC also receives funding from major labor unions, Planned Parenthood and the Soros Fund Charitable Foundation. HRC and its Foundation reported revenue in excess of $65.56 million in 2020. A lot of societal pressure can be brought to bear with those considerable sums. Author Sibarium continues, describing the extent of the arm-twisting:

The most coercive part of the index is its “Responsible Citizenship” deduction. Hospitals can lose as many as 25 points for any behavior the [HRC] deems “discriminatory,” an expansive category that includes statements made by hospital doctors and policies that restrict access to gender medicine, including puberty blockers.

Last year, for example, the [HRC] deducted points from two Texas hospitals… because they stopped using puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria but continued to use them to treat precocious puberty—the blockers’ original purpose.

That “amounts to discrimination against transgender youth,” the [HRC] argued in a press release.

What it really amounts to is a private organization’s social credit scoring system having potential legal impact, should activists get fired up and sue for not performing what HRC insists is “medically necessary affirmative care” such as hysterectomies and double mastectomies. “To cover mastectomies for breast cancer but not gender dysphoria … discriminates on the basis of diagnosis.” Wisconsin now requires their Medicaid agency to fund these procedures, the outcome of a 2019 court ruling.

Sibarium adds

Beyond the veiled legal threat, critics say the scorecard creates reputational incentives to defer to activists instead of medical science, which on transgender issues is increasingly in flux. Hospitals that do well on the index typically incorporate it into their marketing materials, issuing press releases about the quality of their LGBT care.

Our little hospital here in Port Townsend has been swallowed whole by this ideology.

The 40% myth

The most recent survey of gender self-identified persons was conducted in 2022 by the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) — aka TransEquality — however its contents have not yet been distilled. Their latest published survey is now eight years old —

The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS) is the largest survey examining the experiences of transgender people in the United States, with 27,715 respondents from all fifty states, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and U.S. military bases overseas. Conducted in the summer of 2015 by the National Center for Transgender Equality, the USTS was an anonymous, online survey for transgender adults (18 and older) in the United States, available in English and Spanish. The USTS serves as a follow up to the groundbreaking 2008–09 National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS), which helped to shift how the public and policymakers view the lives of transgender people and the challenges they face.

The 2008-09 survey (results published in 2011) pegged the lifetime attempted suicide rate at 41%; this latest 2015 survey, with more than four times the respondents, pegs it at 40%.

The 2015 summary also notes significant progress compared to the earlier survey in terms of community and family approval:

Respondents’ experiences also suggest growing acceptance by family members, colleagues, classmates, and other people in their lives. More than half (60%) of respondents who were out to their immediate family reported that their family was supportive of them as a transgender person. More than two-thirds (68%) of those who were out to their coworkers reported that their coworkers were supportive. Of students who were out to their classmates, more than half (56%) reported that their classmates supported them as a transgender person.

We are told that lack of affirmation of this group is causing a genocide. If that is the case, why has the significantly accelerating support for these people only yielded a one per cent improvement in that suicide stat? Could that figure be little more than hot air?

As with the ’08-’09 outreach, the 2015 survey utilized convenience sampling, a study design of the lowest quality with high bias probability. Respondents were self-identified. The survey was conducted by a highly-motivated activist group rather than an independent pollster, and hosted online by a consultant that “specializes in assisting education institutions in maximizing equity and inclusion…” (Survey questions can be found beginning on page 247 of the 2015 full report.)

A March 2023 peer-reviewed article titled “Suicide-Related Outcomes Following Gender-Affirming Treatment” speaks to the quality of the USTS, and other surveys like it. This is the most thorough review of the literature on the subject so far, revealing that shoddy research practices continually plague the field.  The author says “the literature to date suffers from a lack of methodological rigor that increases the risk of type I [false positive conclusion] error.”

This June 2022 study found:

a 14% increase in suicide rates among young people by 2020 in states that have a provision allowing minors to access care without parental consent relative to states that do not. Easier access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones by minors actually exacerbated suicide rates.

Not to be deterred, Governor Inslee signed a new bill on May 9th that will allow minors to shelter within “host” homes while they seek “gender-affirming care,” without knowledge or consent of their concerned parents (who are termed “estranged” in this legislation).

When Transgender Navigator Levin invoked the trans lobby’s questionable approximation of 40%, she neglected to add the critical qualifier of “lifetime attempted” to the word “suicide.” Then she really upped the ante by crediting the simple factor of misgendering with causal relationship. This is no trifling error on the part of a hospital employee who was essentially educating administrators and board members about these matters. It’s reasonable to assume that participants of that board meeting went away believing that using wrong pronouns increases “trans” suicide risk by 40%. Levin’s interest in advancing the goals of “gender-affirming care” is undoubtedly well-intentioned, but clearly misguided by propaganda that gets further distorted with each retelling.

The age-old chicken and egg dilemma

According to the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP):

The majority of children and adolescents who attempt suicide have a significant mental health disorder, usually depression.  Among younger children, suicide attempts are often impulsive. They may be associated with feelings of sadness, confusion, anger, or problems with attention and hyperactivity.

Among teenagers, suicide attempts may be associated with feelings of stress, self-doubt, pressure to succeed, financial uncertainty, disappointment, and loss. For some teens, suicide may appear to be a solution to their problems.

A Gallup poll published this week reveals record-breaking depression rates across America. Twenty-nine per cent of adult respondents reported depression throughout their lifetime. That’s nearly one third of the country, and it doesn’t include the youth — America has a mental health problem.

I doubt I’m the only one who views the populations described above as ripe for influence by a well-funded lobby that tells them they can be happy if they become someone else. Social contagion is real, and peer pressure is tremendously powerful.

So which came first — the mental health disorder or the gender dysphoria?

TransEquality would have us believe that their “community” is uniquely persecuted — that discrimination, mis-gendering, bigotry, threats of violence and other forms of rejection of individuals’ perceived identities are to blame for their elevated suicide risk. But is that really the case? Their 2015 survey design does not enable a view from outside the lens of gender-identity victimhood.

We have no idea how many of the 40% who claimed to have attempted suicide in their lifetime

• did so completely unrelated to gender issues
• had pre-existing mental health issues that they were or were not being treated for
• were on psyche drugs that increase suicidal ideation
• were plagued by chronic health issues as a result of “gender-affirming” medications
• did so because their “transition” did not ultimately make their lives better
• did so because their “transition” required surgery after surgery — not at all uncommon
• did so because their “transition” left them with ongoing post-surgical pain, wounds that didn’t heal properly, or non-functioning new body parts — also not uncommon
• did so because of regret for what they’d done to their bodies

Encouraging children, teenagers and young adults to hyper-focus on sexuality, themselves, their subjective “identity,” their looks and how they’re perceived by others, promises cultivation of entitled narcissists who are the center of their own universe. We’re raising generations of perpetual adolescents.  Coddling in this manner is not the path to a healthier community.

Interestingly, the survey reports a 29% poverty rate among respondents, despite an 84.2% “some college” through M.D./J.D. level education. The fact is, not everybody is willing to work for a living. Association of gender identity with mistreatment in the workplace can be misplaced.

Employees who are hair-triggered for the next micro-aggression are less-than-ideal contributors, often too busy self-obsessing and keeping score to apply themselves fully to the task at hand. I’ve met some of them.

This is a huge problem in the employment sector right now. I’ve spoken to numerous employers who are deeply frustrated, and quite hamstrung, by the dearth of skilled, mature candidates to select from to sustain their businesses.

What will this scenario look like in twenty years?

All is not well in the land of the Gender Unicorn

Has “gender-affirming care” (GAC) made life better for the “transitioners?”

The Tavistock Centre gender clinic in the UK has been shuttered and is now facing class-action lawsuits from more than a thousand former patients, many of whom say they were pressured by the medical community.  Alarmingly, their female referrals had grown 5,000% in 7 years between 2010 – 2017.  (“Trans” proponents insist social contagion is not a thing.)  Lawsuits against GAC medical practitioners in the US are looming as well.

Lack of fully informed consent is one reason the ranks of “detransitioners” is growing by the day. The Detransition SubReddit page currently has 47.3k members.  This is a big problem for the ideologues pushing the “trans” agenda, similar to that presented by defectors from religious cults.

I will leave you with the memorable discussion below that took place at the Genspect “Bigger Picture” conference in Ireland just last month.  I’ll be back soon with a report on the local impacts of this movement’s oppressive institutional elements that have infiltrated healthcare, education and every other system that orders American society today.

“A panel of detransitioned young people spoke about their lives, the context in which they came to identify as transgender, about the process of falling for what Stella O’Malley called “perhaps the most bewitching line in the world: that you can be a different person.” They talked about their interactions with a medical system that ultimately harmed them when they needed help instead, and how the stories they told themselves about transition fell apart. They talked about what real help might have looked like. “I realized that I didn’t have to live up to those expectations [of womanhood],” one young woman said, “and someone should have told me that when I was 14.”

Washington State Board of Health
Wades Into the Misinformation War

by Brett Nunn | May 4, 2023 | General

Years have gone by since the Covid outbreak of 2020, many meetings have been held, studies have been done, mountains of data have been compiled. What problem would you guess the Washington State Board of Health (WSBOH) would focus on, would ask for help in the form of millions of taxpayer dollars and three full time employees, to improve their response to future pandemics?

• An in-depth review of the effectiveness of Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Covid treatment protocols?
• A search for the reasons behind the large increase in vaccine related, died suddenly incidents, and injuries compiled in the VAERS data?
• A panel discussion on exit strategies from Big Pharma capture of federal, state, and local health agencies?

Nope.

Just over a year has passed since I reported on the April 2022 meeting of the WSBOH during which they voted, for the time being, against adding the Covid shot to the list of vaccines required for children to attend school in Washington State.

You may recall during this meeting that one of the board members stated that “loss of public trust” was her “primary concern in this process.”

So, a year later, after hours and hours of public comments, thousands of emails, and thousands of pages of public letters offered in opposition to the WSBOH Covid pandemic policies and procedures, we find a PDF file, nestled amongst the many requests that are part of WSBOH’s 2023-25 Budget Proposal, titled “Restore TRUST to Public Health.” The agency recommendation summary for this budget request is as follows:

The Department of Health requests funding to launch a 5 year multifaceted campaign focused on rebuilding trust in Washington public health, and its information to ensure people in Washington are less skeptical and more likely to follow through on the desired behaviors central to risk mitigation. Over the past two years, public health has become controversial. Without this campaign, the public’s perception and relationship with public health agencies may continue to decline, and the Department will have less resources to repair and rebuild its trusted brand.

The WSBOH is asking for thirty million dollars, $7.5 million a year through 2027, for a public relations campaign — not to acknowledge and address the public concerns with how the WSBOH responded to the pandemic, but to ensure that the citizens in Washington State are “more likely to follow through on the desired behaviors central to risk mitigation.”

Clearly the problem, from the WSBOH’s perspective, isn’t with what they were saying, it is just that they weren’t saying it loudly enough, in enough places, or often enough for the public to finally realize their “safe and effective mantra” is the absolute truth.

If you were one of the many who took the time to write, email, or speak directly to the WSBOH, in good faith, hoping to help them make the right choices in a time of great difficulty, the following is what they think of you. This paragraph is taken from the section of the “Restore TRUST to Public Health” PDF labeled as “Problem”:

Over the past 6 years misinformation/disinformation has spread rampant throughout the nation. Over the last two years in Washington, DOH saw firsthand the impact of these disinformation campaigns through audience research, ongoing polls, and community feedback. As a result, some people have become more likely to believe something false from a friend or family member than something true from the government, which in some cases, leads to decisions to not access life­saving public health services.

If you find this statement by our state health officials condescending, you are not alone.

Further down in the document, in the section that is labeled “Proposal,” the actions to be taken are detailed. The line that seems to be attracting the most attention is the following:

The effectiveness of any public health intervention depends on the ability to influence the specific audience’s behavior.

Here in Jefferson County, we know what happens if a Board of Health intervention doesn’t influence a specific audience’s behavior. Those of us who would not comply were the first in the nation to face proof-of-covid-shot requirements for entry into restaurants and bars.

Take your concerns regarding the efficacy and legitimacy of county health practices to the local board of health and your statements will be dismissed in an avalanche of words from Public Health Officer Allison Berry, who has been shown, many times over in the Port Townsend Free Press, to have a problematic relationship with the facts.

Now we have County Commissioner Kate Dean appointed to a position on the WSBOH. She is an ideal candidate, a skilled politician who has demonstrated a willingness to follow the recommendations of Health Officer Berry… though her Board of Commissioners did draw the line at requiring the covid shot as a condition of employment for county employees (unlike Jefferson PUD).

Does that mean we will have a representative at the state level that can provide the citizens of Jefferson County with some transparency as to WSBOH actions? Or will this assure our position at the top of the list of test beds for future board of health actions in regards to pandemic policy?

In defense of the members of the WSBOH, after sitting through a few meetings, I am convinced that these are well-intentioned people that do their best to follow the illogical and arbitrary mandates handed down to them by the Governor. Over the last three years it has become readily apparent that everyone involved in state regulated health care, including doctors and nurses, has very little latitude for independent opinion without risking their ability to be employed.

However, following these mandates without reflection on their effectiveness was the beginning of a bad relationship. The complete lack of dialogue between the WSBOH and the citizens of this state has only solidified the problem. The few public comment opportunities at WSBOH meetings are similar to school board, city council, or county commissioner meetings. Speakers have two minutes to make their case. WSBOH members have no obligation to respond. There are no follow-up questions.

Nothing in the 2023-2025 budget request addresses this aspect of the WSBOH/citizen relationship.

Will thirty million dollars of taxpayer money and three new state employees (who are required by the governor to be up-to-date on all Covid shots before they can be hired) make everything better? Will enough public relations voodoo be generated over the next five years to restore your confidence in the WSBOH, so the next time around you will not hesitate to “follow through on the desired behaviors central to risk mitigation?”

I leave it to the reader to decide.

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Photos by Stephen Schumacher

Letters Forum: Off Topic!
– MAY 2023 –

by the Editors | May 1, 2023 | General

In the spirit of offering Letters to the Editor as a traditional platform for lively, wide-ranging conversations in the public square, we invite you to write about whatever is on your mind.

Because we require comments under articles to be “on topic”, we found that readers who want to speak to other important issues, events and concerns that our small crew can’t cover don’t have a place for that. This Off Topic! feature allows readers to bring up other subjects, post news flashes, announce community events, or express concerns outside of the selected topics we write about.

A new Off Topic! forum is posted monthly. The post is open throughout the month for new letters and your responses.

How this works:

Submit your letter in the white box below Comment Guidelines at the bottom of the page containing the muted prompt “Enter your comment here…”

Either provide your own title to the letter as a top line or we will title it for you.

To respond to someone else’s post, hit the REPLY button under that specific letter or comment you wish to respond to.

Artificial Intelligence Challenge for the PT Poet Laureate

by Stephen Schumacher | Apr 10, 2023 | General

At their March 27 meeting, the Port Townsend City Council unanimously approved the PT Arts Commission’s proposal for an expert selection panel appointing a Poet Laureate to serve throughout 2024 “as ambassador of Port Townsend’s active creative community, promoting the City’s robust literary arts and celebrating the written word.”

A major emerging challenge for the arts is the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), dubbed “our biggest existential threat” by Elon Musk. What was once remote Skynet fantasy has become today’s hands-on AI for the masses with OpenAI’s launch of its ChatGPT prototype program in November, 2022.

Now anybody with a web browser, an email address, and a cell phone for authentication can easily open a ChatGPT account and experiment with this AI technology free of charge during its initial feedback phase.

KUOW reported on how “ChatGPT has infiltrated the arts world,” enabling a science fiction novel to be written in 7 hours and a local poet to increase her productivity by generating “an echo version of myself.” Moreover it’s not just words but visual art too, like the feature image above created by DALL-E 2 when asked for “an image of a realistic dragon flying over the harbor of Port Townsend, WA.”

While AI can be a complement for creativity, downsides include concerns about plagiarism, authenticity, homework cheating, and replacing artists with AI that was trained using past work combed from the web without consent.  After musician Nick Cave was confronted with a ChatGPT song “written in the style of Nick Cave”, he called it “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human”.

Celebrating Port Townsend with AI-generated Poetry

Our Poet Laureate program aims to “celebrate the cultural heritage, the spirit of the people, and the unique qualities of our region” and “collect new literary works that celebrate the diversity and vibrancy of Port Townsend,” so I wondered how readily and successfully those aims could be promoted using ChatGPT.

Remembering Peter Simpson’s seminal book City of Dreams: A Guide to Port Townsend,

…I fed it into ChatGPT and asked the AI to “please compose a poem about the city of Port Townsend, WA based on the information in this PDF.”  ChatGPT immediately popped out this verse:

Port Townsend, city of dreams,
Where history and beauty convene.
Nestled by the sea and the mountains tall,
A gem of the Pacific Northwest to enthrall.

Once a bustling port of trade,
Now a town of art, music, and shade.
With Victorian architecture that’s unique,
And the finest in seafood, every week.

The Jefferson County Historical Society
Preserves the town’s rich legacy.
From the Hudson Bay Company’s presence,
To the discovery of golden opulence.

Walking down Water Street’s charming scene,
The Starrett building, a highlight to glean.
The Rose Theatre and its film delights,
The Swan Hotel with its grandiose sights.

Step onto the dock and take a ferry ride,
Watch the eagles soar and the tides collide.
Visit Fort Worden and its military past,
Or simply stroll and enjoy the waterfront blast.

Port Townsend, city of dreams,
A place where the past and present gleams.
A haven for those seeking peace,
Or an adventure for those with a wanderlust feast.