NC schools could open activities for all kids. Plus, Trump's EO on girls' sports (02-06-2025--Hour2)

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[00:00:28] Carolina Journal reports on Wednesday, a bill filed by North Carolina Senators Ralph Heise, Carl Ford, Heise is from Mitchell County, Ford is from Rowan County, and Amy Gailey from Alamance County, would allow students attending private or home school to play sports or other extracurricular activities at their local public school.

[00:00:57] Carolina Journal reports on Wednesday, a bill. It also would allow public school kids to play at a different public school if theirs does not offer the specific activity. Right? So there's-there are two elements here. One is to open up extracurricular activities at public schools, which are public. Right? Yes. And so the activities are now open to the public. Um,

[00:01:26] and then the other is that if you go to a school and it doesn't have the basket weaving club that you so desire to be a part of, uh, you can then go to the basket weaving club, uh, at the other high school or junior high. Right? Or I guess middle school, I guess they call them now. I don't know. I went to a junior high, but I, yeah, it's middle school. So, um,

[00:01:53] it's Senate bill 48. It's called access to sports and extracurriculars for all. And under the bill, according to Carolina Journal, students enrolled in schools without a particular sport or activity would be permitted to participate in that program at a nearby public high school offering it.

[00:02:12] Specifically, if a public high school does not offer a certain sport, let's say, its students may join that sport at the closest public high school that provides the program, adhering to the same terms and conditions as regularly enrolled students do. Okay? So it's a, it's a uniform standard. It's a consistent standard.

[00:02:35] You're going to treat the kid from the crosstown high school, the same as the one going to your high school. Similarly, private and homeschooled students would be allowed to participate in sports at their designated base public high school. So if they would otherwise be going to, you know, whatever, West Charlotte and they live near West Charlotte high, that would be their normal student assignment, but they're going to a private school or they're being homeschooled.

[00:03:03] Then they would be able to go to West Charlotte high and plan the football team, for example. And if West Charlotte doesn't have, well, they do have a football team, but if they didn't, then that kid could go to the nearest public high school that offers it under the same conditions.

[00:03:23] And I know what the opponents of any kind of school choice are going to say about this is that, well, they're not going to the school and they're probably taking voucher money to go to their private school. So therefore they should not be able to participate in those extracurricular activities at that public high school. That's closest to them.

[00:03:47] So, uh, the lawmakers thought of this, but first I would say, hang on, uh, the vouchers don't cover the actual full cost of educating the kid, right? The, the, the per pupil expenditure at public schools is higher than the vouchers are. So if you take the voucher and go to a private school, um, and I, I seem to recall, I don't even believe the homeschoolers get the vouchers.

[00:04:17] I think that's true, but I, I, I, I might be mistaken on that, but I think that's still true. And I think people still want that to occur. Like if I'm going to homeschool, I should be able to keep my private school or I should be able to keep the opportunity scholarship, the, the, the voucher. Um, so if they, um, if they're not going to the public school, then you don't have to educate the kid, right? Which means the class sizes are smaller, which I'm told, right? That makes a huge difference to educating the kids.

[00:04:48] So not having that kid in the classroom means smaller class size, which would be a benefit to the kids that are still there. And the cost to educate the kids that are still there is still higher than the voucher is right. So there's that element here, but the lawmakers address this concern that it says the, the public high schools can charge a fee.

[00:05:18] So if you are going to a private school and you want to go play football for the local, the local high school team, the public school team, then you can pay a fee to be a member of that team to play with the team and a tryout, whatever. I don't know. You know, it depends on the program. I guess you're trying to get into.

[00:05:39] So it permits the public high schools to charge a reasonable participation fee to non-enrolled students as determined by the local board of education. So the school boards will have to set the fee. So at a practical level, I'm trying to see the downside here. And I really don't. You can make this about I'm against vouchers. That's a different argument.

[00:06:06] If you are actually interested in helping kids and what has what has actually been the argument against like homeschooled kids for all these years, it's always been something like, well, they're not getting socialized. Right. That was always the argument that you have to send your kids to the K-12 GovCo monopoly in order for them to get socialized.

[00:06:28] And I think that means like learn about all of the genders and have them adopt pronouns and have them read the porn books and maybe even get shanked in the hallways or something like that. That's how you appropriately socialize a homeschooled kid, I think is. Yeah, I don't know. I never found that to be a persuasive argument, particularly when I met homeschooled kids who knew more about subject material than their public school peers.

[00:06:58] So it's it's not all kids. There are underperforming homeschooled kids and there are underperforming public school kids. There's a thing called the bell curve. But anyway. If you are actually interested in giving kids opportunities, then it seems like this is a good way to do it. And. And. If the kids are really good, you know, mathlete or athlete. Don't you want that kid on your program?

[00:07:28] Wouldn't you want them on your on your team? Right. If they try out, they make the team and they're like really good. Don't you want them on the team? And here's the other thing, too, from a, you know, pro public school advocacy position. If the kid starts playing on the team, they make friends with their teammates. And then maybe you woo them back to that public school. Right. I know. I know.

[00:07:58] This is a difficult concept for people who rely on, you know, the public service of schools and they don't understand this competition thing. But you are offering something to them and you give them an access point into that public school. And so now the kid may turn around and say to mom and dad, you know what? I don't want to go to that private school anymore. I have more friends. I have a better time over at the public school.

[00:08:25] It actually allows the public schools to compete for those kids now. Because now the kid has a point of reference and they've got a connection to that school. Right. You guys are looking at this all wrong. Thank you. Opponents of this idea. You're looking at it all wrong. The bill mandates that local boards of education have to publish a schedule of approved fees, charges and any solicitation.

[00:08:51] So they've got to do that by October 15th. Okay. So you have to post this stuff up and let people know, like, this is what you would what what you would be charging. Right now, Senate Bill 48 has been referred to the Committee on Rules and Operations, where basically everything goes to die. But maybe to live. You never know. It's the all powerful Rules Committee. Nothing moves unless it goes through the Rules Committee.

[00:09:21] That's how they that's how they shepherd through legislation. So we'll keep an eye on that. All right. If you're listening to this show, you know, I try to keep up with all sorts of current events. And I know you do, too. And you've probably heard me say, get your news from multiple sources. Why? Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with Ground News. It's an app and it's a website and it combines news from around the world in one place so you can compare coverage and verify information.

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[00:10:21] I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. So the Associated Press reporting President Donald Trump signed an executive order. Yesterday intended to ban transgender athletes from participating in girls and women's sports. Not true.

[00:10:51] Transgender athletes can still participate in girls and women's sports. Right. A transgender male can still participate in girls and women's sports. So the AP, this is part of the problem.

[00:11:10] When you are making up stuff and rewriting the language in real time and not thinking these things through and you're trying to, you know, cram down vocabulary changes on the society to kind of twist people's thinking. You run into problems like this when you call them transgender athletes and say they can't participate in girls and women's sports. And that's because that's not true.

[00:11:37] A transgender athlete would include a man and a woman. Right. Sorry to limit it to only two sexes slash genders here. But, right, if it's a person who is born a female and then thinks they are a male, that female will still be able to play on girls and women's sports.

[00:12:02] Now, assuming that they're not taking any kinds of drugs that would be classified as a performance enhancing drug. Right. So why not just say female athletes intended to ban male athletes from participating in girls and women's sports? Right.

[00:12:52] Well, since the HB2 debate a decade ago in North Carolina, this is not to say that people who are suffering from gender dysphoria are not actually suffering from that. I always try to point this out that I have empathy for people that are going through something like that. I can't imagine what that must be like to have your brain telling you something that is not true.

[00:13:17] Much like bulimics or anorexics, people suffering from anorexia or people who have an anyway. It's the same thing. People have these dysmorphic views of their bodies. There are people that are what they call trans ableists. They think that they are supposed to be crippled in some way. And then they go about crippling themselves.

[00:13:45] In some way, either permanently or just temporarily. People who think that I'm actually blind. I've always identified as a blind person and all this. And then there was a case, famous case, where a, quote, mental health therapist of some kind actually aided her patient in blinding herself. Like. There are people that cut off their limbs because they think their brain is telling them you shouldn't have this arm.

[00:14:15] That is a. That is a. That is a. That is a mental health condition. And you are not helping the person by helping them cut their arm off or cut their leg off. That is maiming somebody. You are helping them to maim themselves. And if you are a medical practitioner, you are not supposed to be doing that. You are causing harm to the patient. These things never used to have to be said.

[00:14:44] But thanks to Obamacare, now we do have to say them. And that's really where a lot of this stuff actually traces back to. I will get to that. So the order that Trump signed is called Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports. It gives federal agencies wide latitude to ensure entities that receive federal funding abide by Title IX in alignment with the Trump administration's view, which interprets sex as the gender someone was assigned at birth. No, AP, they are not assigned at birth.

[00:15:14] As I mentioned yesterday, at conception, the genetic code is written and you will never be anything other than what that code is at the moment of conception. It's science. All right. I hope you had a happy holiday season. But tell me if something like this happened at your house. Your family and friends are gathered around. Maybe y'all are in the living room. You're laughing, swapping stories, reminiscing.

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[00:16:34] So this is a post over on Twitter from a fella. He apparently has a podcast, the polyorphans or polyphorans or something, whatever. But he goes by the name of the heretical liberal. I believe he's Canadian. He is of the left. And he's very, very angry at Democrats. After Donald Trump's photo op yesterday at the White House.

[00:17:03] Have you seen any video or photos of this? Trump is sitting there at the desk and he makes some comments about this executive order that he's signing. And he is surrounded by girls and women. And some are dressed in, you know, athletic uniforms and such. I mean, there's probably, I don't know, 50, 75, 100. And the place was packed.

[00:17:31] And he had all these people around him, all these, you know, young female athletes and such all around him as he signed this bill. And he was like, when he sat down to sign, he's like talking to a couple of the little girls and not in like a hair sniffy sort of way, not creepy at all. It was like, like a, like a grandfather talking to his granddaughter. And he's like, oh, do you want to watch me sign this? I'm going to make it a, I'm going to make it a good signature and all this. And a very humanizing thing.

[00:17:57] But also that image of him as sort of a, as he promised, remember, and everybody on the left mocked him when he said he would be a defender of women. And everyone's like, oh, yeah, defender of women. Yeah, he's the guy to do that. And yet there he is. And why this guy, the heretical liberal, is so upset is because this is now no longer an issue for the left. That's what he's mad about. Listen to what he says.

[00:18:27] It's hard to overstate the extent of the political malpractice the Democrats committed when they allowed the GOP to be the moral voice of reason. On this issue. Men playing women's sports. Just look at the optics, he says. You have women and girls of all ages streaming into the White House to advocate for their right to fair play.

[00:18:52] And the Democrats have put themselves in the position of opposition to that. All so that cross-dressing men have the right to wave their junk in these young girls' faces. This failure of politics, ethics, and messaging will be studied for decades to come in political science departments. He says Democrats are reeling and they have absolutely no answer to this.

[00:19:19] They've completely ceded the moral high ground to Donald bleeping Trump. He didn't say bleeping. I inserted the bleeping. And then he has some photos and he's like, just look at the optics of this and whatever. And he's exactly right. He's exactly right.

[00:19:44] White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt said that the order, quote, upholds the promise of Title IX and will require immediate action, including enforcement actions against schools and athletic associations that deny women single-sex sports and single-sex locker rooms.

[00:20:06] Within the House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt said that the Democrats, they're going to have a lot of money and support of the Democrats. Mayor Jennifer Roberts, who pushed our state into responding with the HB2 law that the Democrats then weaponized against Republicans for electoral purposes.

[00:20:35] Right. And I said at the time. That all of these member coalition groups inside the Democrat tent, you will get tossed under the bus in a heartbeat if the Democrat Party needs to do so in order to attract another voting block in the coalition.

[00:20:55] And in this case, it was women. In this case, it was women. Trump found during the campaign that the topic resonated beyond the usual party lines. More than half the voters surveyed by the Associated Press's vote cast said support for transgender rights in government and society has gone too far.

[00:21:20] See, here's the thing. This isn't about rights. If you want to say it's about rights, then at the very least, you have to acknowledge the reality that there is a conflict of rights. There's a conflict that you have women and girls that do not want to share private spaces with biological males. They have a right to privacy in those locker rooms.

[00:21:50] And under Title IX, that they're supposed to have their own sports. And the reason Title IX came about was to protect girls and women's sports. And when you decide to rewrite the definition of what sex is to include gender identity, which is what happened. And you've now ripped apart the entire point of Title IX.

[00:22:19] So if you're going to say this is about my right to play on whatever team I want to, because that's what we're talking about. Because the only people that can confirm or not whether you are what you say you are is you. And so you can just say whatever you want to say and then be able to gain access to a women's locker room where you change and shower and suit up before the games.

[00:22:45] And if those girls don't like it and they complain about it, they have been subjected to all forms of harassment and torment, not just by classmates, but by woke activist educators and administrators and athletic ministers. And they're tired of it. And they've pushed back. It's taken five years. But here we are. Here's a great idea.

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[00:24:21] Or check out all there is to offer at cabinsofashville.com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. Talking about this executive order that Trump signed. The order authorizes the Education Department to penalize schools that allow transgender athletes to compete, citing noncompliance with Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in schools. Any school found in violation could potentially be ineligible for federal funding.

[00:24:51] And so that's, you know, again, you take the federal money, you got to abide by the federal rules, and enforcing Trump's order will be a priority of the Department, or sorry, the Office for Civil Rights. In a call this week, the acting director told staff they would need to align their investigations with Trump's priorities, according to people who were on the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

[00:25:18] Associated Press reports already since Trump took office, the department has opened an inquiry into Denver's public schools over an all-gender bathroom that replaced a girl's bathroom, but left another one exclusive to boys. What are you doing, Denver? Are you high? Well, actually, yeah, probably.

[00:25:43] Trump also issued a warning to the International Olympic Committee ahead of the 2028 Summer Olympics in L.A. He said that he had empowered Secretary of State Marco Rubio to make it clear to the IOC that America categorically rejects transgender lunacy. That's a quote. We want them to change everything having to do with the Olympics and having to do with this absolutely ridiculous subject. End quote.

[00:26:05] The IOC has essentially passed the buck on trans participation, deferring to the international federations for each of the sports. But that could change. There's a new there's a former track star named Sebastian Coe, now the leader of world athletics. He is among the candidates up for election in March to lead the IOC. See, Coe has been a strong proponent of limiting participation in female sports to cisgender women.

[00:26:35] Cisgender is not a thing, OK? It's not a thing. Stop using this term. Cisgender. They're just women. They're just men. Then the attempt to create these different categories is an attempt to control the discussion. And I won't. I'm not going to stand for it. I'm not going to participate in that.

[00:27:04] The order is the latest, according to the AP, the latest of a series of moves by the Trump administration targeting transgender people. Not true, Associated Press. It's targeting policies. Sex policies. It's saying sex means biological sex, as was initially intended when the people who wrote the law, Title IX, intended. That's what they meant.

[00:27:31] When they said you can't discriminate based on sex, they were not talking about gender identity. Nobody was talking about gender identity until like two minutes ago. I grew up at a time, not that long ago, when we used to make fun of the Soviet Union. For trying to put women, or I should say trying to put men into women's competitions so they could win more gold medals at the Olympics. It was a running joke.

[00:28:01] Previous orders they talk about, you know, have tried to, you know, previous orders have defunded any kind of gender affirming care. Like the vocabulary abuse here, the language abuse, linguistic abuse in this AP article is just, it is, every single term on the bingo card gets played here. They say pushback on some of the administration's initiatives has already begun in court.

[00:28:31] Transgender people have already sued. There's a bunch of lawsuits coming. There could be similar questions for this order. For example, can the president demand that the NCAA change its policies? Well, they don't have to because they already play, it's all co-ed at the NCAA level, right? Like all the basketball teams that are playing in the March Madness tournaments and stuff, aren't they all, they're all co-ed, right?

[00:28:55] NCAA president Charlie Baker said its board of governors was reviewing the order and will, quote, take necessary steps to align NCAA policy in the coming days, subject to further guidance from the administration. Baker, who said last year that he was aware of fewer than 10 active NCAA athletes who identified as transgender. There's only 10 in the NCAA. And amazingly, they are all related to Cynthia Nixon.

[00:29:24] That's Cynthia Nixon is the former star of Sex and the City, the redheaded one who was screaming at a Democrat Socialist of America rally. And she was saying, like, her kid's trans, her niece is trans, their best friend is trans. And she's, like, listing all of these family and friends that are all trans. They all, like, how is it possible that you know so many transgender people just in your immediate family?

[00:29:53] Like, how is that possible? Just statistically, it is not possible if it was just a naturally occurring thing. Something else is going on there. Let me get Tom on real quick. Hey, Tom, welcome to the show. I have about a minute. Hey, how can you have a meaningful conversation about transgender rights when there's no such thing as a transgender? The term is absurd and meaningless. There is gender dysphoria.

[00:30:19] People are suffering from this condition, right? Their brain is telling them that they are not the gender they are. So that is a real thing. So if you're trying to describe a person who is suffering from the gender dysphoria, like, that's how I interpret that term. But I call them trans mental. Right. Well, that's so that's being antagonistic. And I would say, like, unnecessarily so. Right.

[00:30:49] Because it shuts down. It shuts down any kind of discussion. And then and it gets you labeled with all sorts of slurs. Not that I don't get those labels, too. But like it doesn't it doesn't promote a meaningful conversation. You know. Well, as I said, there is no such thing as a logical conversation about transgenderism. No, no. Well, I disagree. There is. I feel like I've been having it. There is a lot. I mean, because it's gender dysphoria.

[00:31:16] You're forced to because of this because of the radio station and and the people out here who are mentally off. Why? Wait, I'm forced to have the conversation. You know, I just say there's guys and there's girls. You come in one way, you go out that way. There's no argument. No, well, I agree. That's the science. But no one's forcing me to have the conversation in the way that I'm having it. So just for the record.

[00:31:45] All right. That'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them, too. And tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to the Pete Calendar show dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening. And don't break anything while I'm gone.