#Clark County Court

[destielmemenews]

"The Haitian Bridge Alliance made the move after inaction by the local prosecutor, said their attorney, Subodh Chandra of the Cleveland-based Chandra Law Firm."

"Trump and Vance, a U.S. senator from Ohio, are charged with disrupting public services, making false alarms, telecommunications harassment, aggravated menacing and complicity. The filing asks the Clark County Municipal Court to affirm that there is probable cause and issue arrest warrants against Trump and Vance."

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[petnews2day]

Clark the service dog proves to be a big help for Clinton County Courts | News, Sports, Jobs

New Post has been published on https://petn.ws/8IY8W

Clark the service dog proves to be a big help for Clinton County Courts | News, Sports, Jobs

LISA SCHROPP/THE EXPRESS Clark, the first full-time service dog in Clinton County’s Specialty Court Programs, demonstrates his best trick — giving a high five to his handler, Ed Hosler, deputy chief probation officer. LOCK HAVEN — National K-9 Veterans Day is a day to recognize the service of working dogs, whether it is in the […]

See full article at https://petn.ws/8IY8W #DogNews #ClarkTheServiceDogProvesToBeABigHelpForClintonCountyCourts, #LocalNews

[galleryyuhself]

Galleryyuhself - 2024 is just different.

extended video here-: https://youtu.be/-wQInf23DOo?si=zCKS4ovGInYoIZZZ

final sentancing here -: https://youtu.be/5ESFm-HXD0w?si=nKhPRnawlGBLhA7o

[gwmac]

The Murder of Jonathan Lewis: Echoes of Injustice and the Double Standard in Media

The Incident: A Detailed Account of a Senseless Tragedy On the afternoon of November 1, a seemingly mundane dispute tragically escalated in an alley near Rancho High School in Las Vegas. Jonathan Lewis, a 17-year-old student, was violently assaulted by a group of his peers, leading to a heartbreaking outcome. The Spark of the Conflict The confrontation began over a pair of stolen wireless…

[wilwheaton]

The two programs under which Haitians fleeing some of the worst political chaos and gang violence in the Western Hemisphere have been OK’d by the Biden administration to remain in the United States as protected refugees are perfectly legal, and if Vance thinks otherwise he should challenge the rulings in court, not by demagoguing it on the campaign trail. There’s considerable evidence that the 20,000 figure that Vance and other right-wingers have claimed is the number of Haitians who’ve moved to Springfield during the President Joe Biden years is a big exaggeration. And even local Republican politicians are calling out Vance’s lies, including a heartfelt essay by GOP Gov. Mike DeWine, who’s from the Springfield area. [...] Three days after the debate, Vance tweeted: “In Springfield, Ohio, there has been a massive rise in communicable diseases, rent prices, car insurance rates, and crime." [...] The claim about a massive rise in communicable disease in Springfield or surrounding Clark County is just a flat-out lie. To the contrary, county officials say 2023 was actually the lowest overall for contagious illnesses in eight years. Vance’s false claim hinges on a yearly rise in two specific diseases — tuberculosis and HIV injections — yet local officials note these numbers are so small they tend to fluctuate from year to year, and there’s no evidence Haitian Americans played any role.

Will Bunch: JD Vance’s new lies about immigrants are worse than ‘eating dogs and cats’

Lies on top of lies, wrapped up in lies.

Because he has no record of his own, and Trump’s record is indefensible.

And they have no plan to help anyone but themselves and a handful of oligarchs. And, of course, Russia. 

We are not going back. Check your voter registration every week between now and your state’s deadline. Make a plan to vote, and vote as early as you can.

The sooner we don’t ever have to hear these clowns again, the better. Let’s do this.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Adria R. Walker at The Guardian:

The Haitian Bridge Alliance, a non-profit organization that “provides migrants and immigrants with humanitarian, legal and social services”, filed criminal charges against Donald Trump and JD Vance over their inflammatory, racist remarks about Haitian immigrants. The rhetoric has led to threats of violence in Springfield, Ohio, including more than 30 bomb threats, forced evacuations of schools and government buildings and violence against Haitians in the city. The filing comes after both the Republican presidential candidate and his running mate made false statements about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, alleging that they were stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets. The charges include disrupting public services, making false alarms, two counts of telecommunications harassment, aggravated menacing, and complicity. Ohio law allows the public to file criminal charges in the same way a prosecutor would. In this case, the Haitian Bridge Alliance is asking the Clark county municipal court to affirm that there is probable cause that Trump and Vance committed the crimes, and to issue arrest warrants for them both. “Trump and Vance have knowingly spread a false and dangerous narrative by claiming that Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian community is criminally killing and eating neighbors’ dogs and cats, and killing and eating geese,” the affidavit reads. “They accused Springfield’s Haitians of bearing deadly disease. They repeated such lies during the presidential debate, at campaign rallies, during interviews on national television, and on social media.”

Trump continued perpetuating the statements even after they had been confirmed to be false, while Vance recently remarked that he was willing to “create stories” for political gain. They continued to repeat what the filing calls an “orchestrated … campaign of lies” that “spread a false narrative that Haitians in Springfield are a danger”.

Haitian Bridge Alliance files criminal charges against JD Vance and Donald Trump over their hatred-fueled and racist incitements against Haitians in Springfield, Ohio.

See Also:

HuffPost: Haitians Want Trump Arrested For 'Harmful Lies.' The Campaign Responded With Another Lie.

[coochiequeens]

Update on a crime the news media refuses to call femicide

TINLEY PARK, Ill. (CBS) -- A father has been charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of his three daughters and wife inside a home in Tinley Park on Sunday.

Maher Kassem, 63, was charged Tuesday with four counts of first-degree murder, according to the Cook County State's Attorney's Office. At his initial court appearance, prosecutors an argument led to Kassem using two guns to first shoot his wife and then, after stepping over her body, his three daughters. 

Maher KassemTINLEY PARK POLICE

The victims were identified as Majeda Kassem, 53; twins Halema Kassem, 25, and Hanan Kassem, 24; and Zahia Kassem, 25. 

Officials said Kassem shot his wife, Majeda, seven times, and each daughter was shot twice. The Kassems' 19-year-old son was in the home but was not physically injured. The women's bodies were found in the basement. 

Authorities also said Kassem was cooperative with police and admitted to the shooting. Kassem indicated the fight started over the family's finances. 

Prosecutors said the shooting took place after an argument on Sunday morning between the father and one of his daughters. That prompted his wife and two other daughters to get involved and urge him to calm down.

CBS 2 first reported Monday that there was a witness to the crime. That witness was identified in court as Maher Kassem's 19-year-old son.

Amid all the yelling, the son – who was sleeping at the time – woke up and went to see what was going on. He would later hear gunshots and first found his mother and two of his sisters fatally shot. He walked in moments before his father shot the third daughter.

Police said the father never turned the gun toward his son.

Left: Halema Kassem, Right: Zahia and HalemaPHOTOS SUPPLIED TO CBS

Around 11:20 a.m. Sunday, police responded to a report of the shooting in the 7400 block of West 173rd Street.

Village Manager Pat Carr said a male - who police later said was Kassem - made a 911 call saying someone was shot in the residence, and and police found his wife and four daughters dead at the scene. Police recovered two guns at the scene.

When police asked Kassem where his family was, prosecutors said, "the defendant pointed in the direction of the basement. The officer asked the defendant who else was there, and the defendant stated, 'They're gone.'"

Prosecutors said Kassem appeared to be disgruntled over how he was treated at home.

"The defendant was recorded volunteering things about having just retired, and that 'She treats me like a [expletive] dog," said Cook County Assistant State's Attorney Scott Clark. "'I worked 40 years.' and 'I worked all my life to give my family a better home and they treat me like [expletive].'"

Police said there had been no record of police interaction at the home.  

Meanwhile, hundreds of mourners gathered at the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview for a prayer in honor of the four women who were killed in what police called a senseless act of domestic violence, something they hope is addressed more in the community.

"It's about not only mental illness, but control and abuse so it's something that it's important," said Fida Zoubeidi, who attended the prayer service. "We need to keep our eyes open."

Funeral services for the women were held Tuesday night. Mourners gathered one by one for a vigil – hours after the mother and three adult sisters were buried.

Hanan Kassem had recently graduated from St. Xavier University with a master's degree in speech therapy.

"I would say that she lit up a room - you know, like you could talk to her about anything," said classmate Corinna Olsen.

Olsen wishes she could talk to her friend one more time. Instead, she and so many are puzzled with the circumstances of the quadruple murder.

"Very, very shocking," said Olsen. "You know, expect this to happen to someone that you know."

Off camera, the nephew of Maher Kassem said the family is torn – shocked at the crime his uncle is accused of committing against a family for which he seemed to care so deeply. 

The nephew added that the family does not know the man who prosecutors are portraying as having committed such a crime. He said prior to Sunday, his uncle really would have done anything for his family members.

Kassem will be due back in court on Feb. 16.

I'm going to take a guess that once he retired he expected to be waited upon like the "man of the house". Instead he was asked to pick up after himself. And instead of accepting that he's s grown man he complained about being treated like a dog. Just based on how a lot of couples divorce after one of them, usually the man, retires and becomes a pest around the house.

[beardedmrbean]

LAS VEGAS (KLAS) – On Monday, a Clark County juvenile justice judge declined to accept a plea agreement for several Las Vegas teens accused of murdering their high school classmate.   Damien Hernandez, Dontral Beaver, Gianni Robinson, and Treavion Randolph, all appeared in juvenile court.   The court declined to accept the plea because “the court wanted to ensure that any potential jurisdictional issues are addressed in the plea,” according to the Clark County District Attorney’s office. Those issues centered around sending the criminal case from the adult court system to the juvenile system.   On Aug. 1, all four former Rancho High School students accepted a plea deal with the district attorney’s office that allowed them to plead guilty as juveniles to voluntary manslaughter.   The four teens were part of nine students arrested last November accused of killing Jonathan Lewis, 17, outside of Rancho High School. They were formally charged with murder in January.

‘No justice for my son,’ Mother criticizes plea deal for teens

Lewis’ mother Mellisa Ready previously criticized the plea agreement, claiming she wasn’t notified of the deal.   “I would’ve disagreed with the deal entirely. They should be accountable as adults – they made an adult choice,” she said. “They knew that when they were stomping on my child’s head. That he was going to die as a result.”   The district attorney’s office defended the plea deal saying:   “While the District Attorney’s Office acknowledges the pain the victim’s mother is going through as she mourns the loss of her son, the negotiation was accurately conveyed to her last week, prior to the court proceeding. The conversation was witnessed by multiple DA personnel.”

[folktaylor]

listen im not ngl i’m feeling some type of way about conservative white straight republicans claiming caitlin clark and using IN GAME actions by other wnba players as an excuse to be racist pieces of shit. the connotation of that is going to create a huge issue where eventually, if you vocally defend CC or disagree with a call on the court, it’s going to be assumed you’re a conservative POS. on the flip side, acting like CC is heavens gift to women’s basketball will only fuel other players resentment and rightly so, because they’ve broken their backs and risked their safety to play in other counties because the W historically has been unable to pay them and a white girl being touted as the savior of women’s basketball is gross and dismissive on an entirely different level. while there’s undeniable truth that CC has made an entirely new audience tune in, i think it’s worth examining why that is. black women with incredible skill and talent have been playing in this league for years. why wasn’t that enough to get more of white america to tune in? i understand the players who are in their feels about this because once again, america PROVES that black women excelling and being top athletes is not enough. white america needs to see themselves. it’s a slippery slope - right now, the loudest folks defending CC esp on twitter are trumpers who will look for any reason to insult and bring down black women. claiming they’re all being racist to white people, comparing the black players to animals, and just using the most disgusting rhetoric. if this continues, CC is going to end up alienated because she’s going to be associated with conservative trumpers, which is to her major detriment considering how many OG fans of the league are POC, queer, or both. players won’t want to play with her. it’s enough as it is that the media is so focused on her. let these players play the game they’re all so very good at and let their play speak for itself. if the media used CC’s popularity to showcase talented black players, even just a little, the game would grow even more AND it just might help how she’s being treated.

[justalovelyblackgf]

If the whole Ross family were casted and starred in “Smallville”: A Thread

Disclaimer: These are MY opinions, inner thoughts, and head canons. Also, thank you all so much for the love and reblogs on my previous thread series “If I were to cast more black women in Smallville” ! 😘 This thread will also be a mix of canon and head canon. I had this idea because I like Pete Ross as a character and his friendship with Clark. ☺️ I’ve noticed in some episodes that Pete has mentioned his family such his parents and siblings. Pete and Clark have mentioned Pete’s brothers and Pete mentioned he had a sister. I recognize that the series has casted Bill Ross (Father) and Abigail Ross (Mother), but sadly not any of his siblings! I’ve always wanted to know what they would look like, their jobs, and personalities if they were recurring/guest roles on the series, so I made a fan cast of what could’ve been! The names and some background information for these characters also came from the Smallville Wiki. Pete’s sister’s name is originally Kathy, but I think Kate would be better suited if I hc her as his twin.

taglist: @afrowrites @tinyurlamd

i just thought of ya’ll because you’re both excellent writers and inspire me to get more smallville content out there especially for poc!😘

The Ross Family

1. Pete Ross - Sam Jones III

The youngest brother yet the older twin. He’s Clark Kent’s confident, witty, and loyal childhood best friend. Protective brother, respectful son and skillful athlete. He occasionally works for “The Torch” at Smallville High and helps to piece together the weirdness of Smallville with his friends. Pete’s the first person outside of Clark’s parents to know his secret.

2. Katherine “Kate” Ross - Tatyana Ali

The younger twin and the “baby girl” as Bill refers to her. Do NOT call her “Kathy” Kate will do. She’s also Clark Kent’s close childhood friend along with Chloe Sullivan and Lana Lang being her BFFs. She’s a bit more reserved than her twin, but she is amicable and empathetic towards her peers. An aspiring singer, straight A student, and avid shopper of the latest styles.

3. William “Bill” Ross- Dee Jay Jackson

The head of the Ross family. Once the owner of the Ross Creamed Corn Factory is now a well trusted lawyer in Smallville. (Formerly) married to Abigail and dotes on their 5 children. He can be stubborn, but he is loyal, understanding, and a natural leader.

4. Abigail Ross- Felecia M. Bell

The matriarch of the Ross family and former wife of Bill. She was born in Metropolis before getting her law degree in Kansas, marrying Bill, raising their 5 children, and becoming the county court judge in Smallville. Two things that she doesn’t play about: her family and serving justice for the people.

5. Mark Ross- Jaleel White

Bill and Abigail’s first born. A former football star and valedictorian of Smallville High, but he aims to follow in the footsteps of his parents by running his own law firm in Metropolis after he receives his degree at Harvard Law. He sometimes has to essentially play the “3rd parent” role to his younger siblings, but cares for his family nonetheless.

6. Michael “Mike” Ross- Ron Brown

The second son of the Ross family. Just like Mark and Bill, the best years of his life were playing for the Smallville High Crows. He received a full ride to play for KSU and study Political Science. The goal for the pro didn’t work out, he soon plans to run for office one day in Metropolis and give back to his community in Smallville. Sometimes he feels inadequate compared to his older brother, but is reassured he’s on the right path by his family.

7. Samuel “Sam” Ross - Nate Parker

The third born of the Ross Family. Another former athlete and alumni of Smallville High. He attended KSU to receive a BA in Criminal Justice to become a detective. He wants to resolve criminal issues and protect citizens in cities such as Metropolis, Smallville, and Gotham. He goes with the flow in some areas, but two things he takes seriously are his family and justice.

[offender42085]

Post 1037

After the Judge commented that she would make sure that the inmate would never see the light of day again, the inmate whose hands were shackled responded; “That’s great,” and gave the Judge a thumbs-up.

Talen Clark Barton, California inmate AX9898, born 1996, incarceration intake October 2015 at age 19, sentenced to 71 years to life, scheduled for parole consideration July 2039

Murder, False imprisonment

In October 2015, a Laytonville California teen described by a Mendocino County detective as “pure evil” following a brutal, hate-fueled rampage in which he stabbed to death two members of the family he was living with and nearly killed two others was sentenced Tuesday to 71 years to life in prison.

The crimes committed by Talen Barton were so heinous that Mendocino County Superior Court Judge Ann Moorman said she would be writing a letter to the state corrections department so she can comment at his parole hearing, should he ever be granted one decades from now.

“I’ll see to it you never see the light of day,” Moorman told Barton.

“That’s great,” said Barton, who was shackled but still able to give the judge a thumbs-up.

Barton has indicated on multiple occasions that he believes he deserves to be punished for what he did the night of July 19, 2015. But he has remained largely emotionless in court and during interviews with sheriff’s detectives and psychologists, according to a comprehensive probation report filed with the court.

Barton in September 2015 pleaded guilty to charges that include two counts of murder and two of attempted murder. He also pleaded guilty to imprisoning two teen girls in the Laytonville home after the attacks and preventing them from phoning 911 by cutting the phone lines, according to the probation report. He later used a cellphone to call 911 himself.

Barton smoked marijuana and offered the imprisoned girls cookies while he waited for deputies to arrive, according to the probation report. He also asked the surviving victims how it felt to die as they struggled to live, the probation report stated.

The plea agreement allowed Barton, who has told sheriff’s investigators and psychologists that he was suicidal the night of the stabbings but afraid of death, to avoid facing a potential death sentence.

He told a psychologist he wanted to kill people “to know what it was like to die,” according to the probation report.

The crimes were so atrocious, and Barton was so “self-satisfied” and unemotional, that one of the detectives interviewing him later wrote he felt he was encountering “pure evil” and hoped to never see Barton released from prison, according to the probation report.

“He is an absolute monster,” Detective Clint Wyant said in his investigative summary.

Psychological exams found that Barton suffered from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder from his early years living with drug-addicted parents and step-parents. Mental health examiners suspect he was exposed to methamphetamine while in his mother’s womb. Barton also alleged he was once sexually abused by one of his mother’s friends.

Barton frequently expressed self-loathing to psychiatric evaluators and sheriff’s investigators, according to the probation report. Scars on his forearms showed that he had burned himself with his marijuana joints. He said he’d initially planned to kill himself and take others with him because he believed in reincarnation and believed they’d all be together again, the probation report states.

But, despite his many emotional problems, psychiatric evaluations found Barton was not psychotic when he attacked his victims.

3s

[darkeagleruins]

Headline: Democrat Charged with Murdering Investigative Journalist Spins Wild Tale in Court, Claims He’s Being Framed by Realty Company. Very odd story Robert Telles is telling in his murder trial.

Backstory: the FBI had met with Stephen Paddock just before the Las Vegas shooting. A Las Vegas Review Journal investigative journalist and friend, Jeff German, had tracked down a video of that meeting between the FBI and CIA asset Stephen Paddock in a Pakistani Cafe. We had alerted German of the meeting but were unable to find if there was an actual video.

Days later, Robert Telles, in a disguise, stabbed German to death on his front porch.

Police say German was about to reveal a negative story on Telles.

We believe the same retired FBI Special Agent that met Paddock in Las Vegas, convinced Telles that he had to kill German because he was about to reveal the Democratic administrator of a Clark County office that handles unclaimed estates had been running scheme stealing unclaimed property.

[originalleftist]

The head of the Haitian nonprofit organization Haitian Bridge Alliance has filed criminal charges against Donald Trump and JD Vance for their inflammatory lies about Haitian immigrants.

https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-haitian-nonprofit-in-springfield-files-criminal-charges-against-donald-trump-jd-vance

"The leader of the nonprofit Haitian Bridge Alliance filed charges against former president Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, for the chaos that ensued from their uncorroborated statements about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets, according to the Cleveland law firm representing the agency.

RELATED: Residents of Springfield, Ohio, hunker down and pray for a political firestorm to blow over

The Chandra Law Firm says the nonprofit used a state statute allowing private citizens to "file an affidavit charging the offense committed." 

The following charges were filed: 

Disrupting public service — by causing widespread bomb and other threats that resulted in massive disruptions to the public services in Springfield, Ohio;

Making false alarms — by knowingly causing alarm in the Springfield community by continuing to repeat lies that state and local officials have said were false;

Committing telecommunications harassment — by spreading claims they know to be false during the presidential debate, campaign rallies, nationally televised interviews, and social media;

Committing aggravated menacing in violation — by knowingly making intimidating statements with the intent to abuse, threaten, or harass the recipients, including Trump’s threat to deport immigrants who are here legally to Venezuela, a land they have never known;

Committing aggravated menacing — by knowingly causing others to falsely believe that members of Springfield's Haitian community would cause serious physical harm to the person or property of others in Springfield; and

Violating the prohibition against complicity — by conspiring with one another and spreading vicious lies that caused innocent parties to be parties to their various crimes.

The charges were filed in Clark County Municipal Court. 

Through the filing, the nonprofit asks the court to affirm probable cause and to issue arrest warrants. 

The court must have a hearing before rejecting the affidavit as part of the legal process."

[lboogie1906]

Mark Clark (June 28, 1947 - December 4, 1969) was an activist and member of the Black Panther Party was killed along with Chicago BPP President Fred Hampton. He was born to Elder William Clark and Fannie Bradley Clark in Peoria. He became active in with NAACP. He was an activist fighting against discrimination in employment, housing, and education. He attended Illinois Central College.

He joined the Chicago chapter of BPP after reading its literature and ten-point program. He organized a Peoria chapter of the BPP where with the support of local Pastor Blaine Ramsey, he established a free breakfast program at Ward Chapel AME Church.

The Chicago Police stormed into Fred Hampton’s apartment, killing Clark and Hampton, and wounding Verlina Brewer, Ronald “Doc” Satchel, Blair Anderson, and Brenda Harris.

Cook County Coroner Andrew Toman held an inquest into the deaths of Clark and Hampton. He formed a six-person Coroner’s jury which included two African Americans, Dr. Theodore K. Lawless and attorney Julian B. Wilkins. The panel ruled the deaths of him and Hampton as justifiable homicide.

A $47.7 million lawsuit was filed on behalf of the survivors and the relatives of Clark and Hampton, stating that their civil rights were violated. Twenty-eight defendants were named in the lawsuit. Judge Joseph Sam Perry of the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois dismissed the suit against twenty-one defendants before jury deliberations. After jurors were deadlocked on the charges against the seven remaining defendants, Perry dismissed the lawsuit.

The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago stated that the government had withheld documents, obstructing the judicial process. The case was reinstated against twenty-four of the defendants and the Court of Appeals ordered a new trial. The SCOTUS heard the appeal and voted 5-3 in 1980 to return the case to the District Court for a new trial. The City of Chicago, Cook County, and the federal government agreed to a settlement in which each defendant would pay $616,333 to a group of nine plaintiffs, including the mothers of he and Hampton. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #blm

[justinspoliticalcorner]

AP, via The Guardian:

A Nevada state court judge dismissed a criminal indictment on Friday against six Republicans accused of submitting certificates to Congress falsely declaring Donald Trump the winner of the state’s 2020 presidential election, potentially killing the case with a ruling that state prosecutors chose the wrong venue to file the case. Nevada’s attorney general, Aaron Ford, stood in a Las Vegas courtroom a moment after the Clark county district court judge Mary Kay Holthus delivered her ruling, declaring that he would take the case directly to the state supreme court.

“The judge got it wrong and we’ll be appealing immediately,” Ford told reporters afterwards. He declined any additional comment. Defense attorneys bluntly declared the case dead, saying that to bring the case now to another grand jury in another venue such as Nevada’s capital, Carson City, would violate a three-year statute of limitations on filing charges that expired in December. “They’re done,” said Margaret McLetchie, attorney for the Clark county Republican party chairman, Jesse Law, one of the defendants in the case.

The judge called off the trial, which had been scheduled for next January, for defendants that included the state GOP chairman, Michael McDonald; national party committee member Jim DeGraffenreid; national and Douglas county committee member Shawn Meehan; and Eileen Rice, a party member from the Lake Tahoe area. Each was charged with offering a false instrument for filing and uttering a forged instrument, felonies that carry penalties of up to four or five years in prison.

Defense attorneys contended that Ford improperly brought the case in Las Vegas instead of Carson City or Reno, northern Nevada cities closer to where the alleged crime occurred. They also accused prosecutors of failing to present to the grand jury evidence that would have exonerated their clients, and said their clients had no intent to commit a crime. All but Meehan have been named by the state party as Nevada delegates to the 2024 Republican national convention next month in Milwaukee. Meehan’s defense attorney, Sigal Chattah, said her client “chose not to” seek the position. Chattah ran as a Republican in 2022 for state attorney general and lost to Ford, a Democrat, by just under 8% of the vote.

Nevada Judge Mary Kay Holthus dismissed the Nevada fake electors case because it was filed in the wrong jurisdiction.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Leor Sapir, Joseph Figliolia

Published: Nov 8, 2023

Fenway Community Health Center in Boston, the largest provider of transgender medicine in New England and one of the leading institutions of its kind in the United States, was named a defendant in a lawsuit filed last month. The plaintiff, a gay man who goes by the alias Shape Shifter, argues that by approving him for hormones and surgeries, Fenway Health subjected him to “gay conversion” practices, in violation of his civil rights. Carlan v. Fenway Community Health Center is the first lawsuit in the United States to argue that “gender-affirming care” can be a form of anti-gay discrimination.

The case underscores an important clinical reality: gender dysphoria has multiple developmental pathways, and many who experience it will turn out to be gay. Even the Endocrine Society concedes that many of the youth who outgrow their dysphoria by adolescence later identify as gay or bisexual. Decades of research confirm as much. Gender clinicians in the U.K. used to have a “dark joke . . . that there would be no gay people left at the rate [the Gender Identity Development Service] was going,” former BBC journalist Hannah Barnes reported. Rather than help young gay people to accept their bodies and their sexuality, what if “gender-affirming” clinicians are putting them on a pathway to irreversible harm?

Due partly to Shape’s lifelong difficulty in accepting himself as gay, his lawyers are not taking the usual approach to detransition litigation. Rather than state a straightforward claim of medical malpractice or fraud, they allege that Fenway Health has violated Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which bans discrimination “on the basis of sex” in health care. In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County that “discrimination because of . . . sex” includes discrimination based on homosexuality. Citing this and other precedents, Shape’s lawyers argue that federal law affords distinct protections to gay men and lesbians—upon which clinics that operate with a transgender bias are trampling.

Shape grew up in a Muslim country in Eastern Europe that he describes in an interview as “very traditional” and “homophobic.” His parents disapproved of his effeminate demeanor and interests as a child. They wouldn’t let him play with dolls, and his mother, he says, made him do stretches so that he would grow taller and appear more masculine.

At 11, Shape had his first of several sexual encounters with older men. “I was definitely groomed,” he recounts. Shape proceeded to develop a pattern of risky sexual behavior, according to his legal complaint. He told his medical team at Fenway Health about his childhood sexual experiences, calling them “consensual.” The Fenway providers never challenged him on this interpretation, he alleges. They never suggested that he might have experienced sexual trauma or, say, explored how these events might have shaped his feelings of dissociation. (The irony is that Fenway Health describes its model of care as “trauma-informed.”)

As with the social environment they inhabited, Shape’s parents were “deeply homophobic,” he says. When Shape came out to his parents as gay at 15, they took him to a therapist, hoping that he would be “fixed.” But when he graduated high school at that same age, he moved to Bulgaria for college, and in 2007, at 17, he came to the United States for a summer program at the University of North Carolina. He later moved to Massachusetts to pursue an MBA at Clark University and immigrated to the U.S.

Though he had known about cross-dressers and transsexuals as a child (he had taken interest in Dana International, the famous Israeli transsexual who won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1998), it was only at Clark that he was introduced to the idea that some people are transgender. Other students began asking him about his pronouns and telling him about “gender identity.” After getting to know a “non-binary” person and a transgender woman, Shape started to make sense of his life retrospectively. As a boy going through puberty, he had developed larger-than-average breasts and was curvier than the other boys. It was hard for him to be accepted in the gay community, he told me, because gay men tend to value masculinity. His discomfort with social expectations about how men are supposed to look and behave, his sexual attraction to other men, his ongoing psychological and emotional distress: these were all signs, he learned from online forums, that he must have been “born in the wrong body.”

Shape quickly developed self-hatred and a strong desire to escape his body. When he started cross-dressing and presenting socially as a woman, things changed. It had been hard for him to win acceptance as an effeminate gay man, but he encountered far less hostility presenting as a woman. A subtle but important shift in his thinking took place.

“People wouldn’t take me seriously when I was a man who presented socially as a woman,” he says. “I had to actually be a woman.” Shape became immersed in online transgender culture, which told him that sex is a social construct, and that hormones and surgeries can actually turn him into a woman. As a result, Shape developed highly unrealistic expectations about what hormones and surgeries could do for him. An example noted in his legal filing: he stopped using condoms because he wanted to get pregnant.

Julie Thompson, a physician assistant and Medical Director of the Trans Health Program at Fenway Health, made no effort to perform differential diagnosis on Shape, his legal filing alleges. Shape told Thompson about his childhood sexual encounters, his troubled history of risky sexual activity, and his struggles with social and familial rejection on account of his homosexuality. Allegedly, she wrote these difficulties off as byproducts of society not accepting him as a “trans woman”—an approach known as “transgender minority stress.” Shape’s ongoing mental-health problems, it was determined, were due to “internalized transphobia.”

As Shape’s filing puts it, the Fenway clinic operated with a strong “transgender bias.” Every problem or counter-indication that came up was explained away as part of the stress that transgender people experience in an unwelcoming society. The clinicians at Fenway Health apparently assumed that sexual orientation and gender identity are two distinct and independent phenomena.

Shape was put on estrogen at age 23. According to his filing, he was not given “any explanation of the numerous potential adverse side effects of estrogen or its potentially unknown effects.” As Shape kept taking estrogen, he became even more emotional, depressed, and unstable. Notably, he did not dislike his male genitals—a fact that should have attracted more scrutiny from his clinicians—but seemed more distressed over his high sex drive and desire for intercourse with men. Though he says he frequently told his providers that he hoped “sex reassignment surgery” would reduce his sex drive, this statement did not cause them to reconsider whether estrogen was appropriate.

As the Fenway team allegedly saw it, Shape’s deterioration was evidence that he hadn’t gone far enough in his transition. They recommended that he attend First Event, a Boston-based conference held annually since 1980, where transgender people can meet one another, share ideas, interact with vendors, and find medical providers who will agree to perform procedures on them. Marci Bowers, the genital surgeon who is president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, has attended the conference in the past. According to Shape, the point of going to First Event was to find a surgeon who would operate on him.

He did just that, and in 2014, at 24, Shape underwent facial feminization surgery and breast implantation. Less than a year later, a surgeon surgically castrated him and conducted what’s euphemistically called “bottom surgery.” It didn’t work. As a result, Shape had to undergo several additional surgeries, the last one borrowing tissue from his colon. Still, the problems persisted.

It took Shape a few years to realize that he had made a terrible mistake. The problem he had been trying to solve all his life was not “internalized transphobia” but failure to accept himself as an effeminate gay man. His legal filing states that he had what the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders called, at the time he made contact with the clinic, “ego-dystonic homosexuality.” Because they failed to detect this and other mental-health problems, the Fenway team, argue Shape’s lawyers, “outrageously, knowingly, recklessly, and callously” led him to believe that he was really a heterosexual woman whose problems could be solved by de-sexing himself as male.

Shape was promised “gender euphoria.” Instead, he told me that he now sees himself as “mutilated.” His treatments have left him with “osteoporosis and scoliosis” as well as “mental fog,” according to his legal filing. Shape is now “faced with the impossible choice of improving his cognitive state and suffering the psychological and physical effect of phantom penis, or taking estrogen and suffering mental fog and fatigue, but no phantom penis and low libido.” He has also endured fistulas as a complication of his genital surgery and “suffers from sexual dysfunction and is unable to enjoy sexual relations.” He experiences dangerous inflammation. And not getting the mental health therapy he needed very likely caused Shape’s mental health to deteriorate throughout the several years that he was a patient at Fenway Health.

Shape now wants to have his breast implants removed. But insurance does not cover the procedure because it is not technically “gender affirming.” And since he cannot afford the hefty price tag, Shape has no choice but to live with the implants.

Understandably, criticism of gender medicine has focused largely on its use in minors. Its use in adults, however, is not without controversy. In the past, when clinicians spoke of adult transgender medicine, they were referring mainly to adult men who sought to change their bodies in their forties. Many had already spent years in marriage and were fathers of children.

That is no longer the case. Though data are limited, the main patient demographic in adult transgender clinics today appear to be 18-24-year-olds. In Finland, for example, adult referrals rose approximately 750 percent between 2010 and 2018, with 70 percent of referrals being 18-22-year-olds.

Humans reach full cognitive maturity around age 25, which means that there is often little to distinguish a 20-year-old from a 17-year-old in terms of impulse control, emotional self-regulation, and the ability to set long-term goals and prioritize them over present desires. Citing “irrefutable evidence” that being under 25 means having “diminished capacity to comprehend the risk and consequences of [one’s] actions,” the progressive decarceration and racial-justice advocacy group The Sentencing Project argues that the idea that people are adults once they reach age 18 “is flawed.”

Shortly after its founding in 1971, Fenway Community Health Center was repurposed to support the unique needs of gay and lesbian residents of Boston. According to Katie Batza, a historian of the clinic, the hippies and antiwar activists who founded Fenway Health “quickly solidified its reputation as an important gay medical institution.” During the 1980s, the clinic helped tackle the AIDS epidemic. That it now maltreats gay men like Shape by converting them into trans women reflects a tectonic shift within the institution’s culture.

American medicine has always found itself balancing two competing tendencies: the paternalism of care by experts on one hand, and the relativism of nonjudgmental customer service on the other. What has happened over the course of Fenway Health’s five decades of existence is a gradual loss of that equilibrium. Fenway has long defined its mission in terms of responsiveness to the stated needs and desires of community members: the volunteers who ran the clinic and offered its services free of charge, Batza writes, “focused on providing care and building community among Fenway residents, caring less if a volunteer met outside standards of professional qualification, which were often set by the state or medical profession, that the clinic critiqued.”

In the 1990s, the clinic set up a dedicated transgender unit. At first, “things moved slowly,” recounts Marcy Gelman, a nurse practitioner who served as Fenway Health’s first dedicated provider for transgender patients, in a document published by the institute about the history of its program. She is now its associate director of clinical research. “Patients didn’t get hormones right away. We wanted to get to know them, and required them to see a therapist for several months . . . we wanted to be careful.” This process felt too restrictive for some patients, and “a few got really angry.” Fenway Health says its “commitment to ensure patient safety . . . led to some conflicts with patients and community members.”

In the 2000s, Fenway Health adopted a new model of care for its transgender-identified patients, which it called the “informed consent model.” This came in response to patients complaining about “needless gatekeeping” and concerns that the clinic’s “customer service training specific to transgender patients lagged behind the development of its clinical care.” Using funding from the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Foundation, Fenway Health made a number of new hires and expanded its program. It drew inspiration from another community health clinic, the Mazzoni Center in Philadelphia, which was smaller than Fenway but served four times as many patients. “One key to [the Mazzoni Center’s] success,” the Fenway document explains, “was the elimination of any requirement for counseling before hormones were provided.” Ruben Hopwood, a physician who joined the Fenway team in 2005, developed this model for Fenway; soon thereafter, the institution’s three-month counseling requirement gave way to “a single hormone readiness assessment visit.”

In 2012, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health published the seventh version of its Standards of Care. In the chapter on hormone therapy, WPATH recommended eligibility criteria for estrogen or testosterone, including “persistent, and well-documented gender dysphoria” and having ongoing “medical or mental health concerns . . . reasonably well-controlled.” However, WPATH also noted a newly emerging “informed consent model” and cited Fenway Health as one of three clinics that developed and practiced it.

The difference between the models, WPATH explained, was that SOC-7 put “greater emphasis on the important role that mental health professionals can play in alleviating gender dysphoria and facilitating changes in gender role and psychosocial adjustment. This may include a comprehensive mental health assessment and psychotherapy, when indicated.” By contrast, Fenway Health’s model emphasizes “obtaining informed consent as the threshold for the initiation of hormone therapy in a multidisciplinary, harm-reduction environment. Less emphasis is placed on the provision of mental-health care until the patient requests it, unless significant mental health concerns are identified that would need to be addressed before hormone prescription.” Despite the obvious differences, WPATH insisted the two models were “consistent” with each other.

Currently, Fenway Health offers hormones on the informed-consent model. “Criteria for accessing hormone therapy,” it states, “are informed by the WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health) guidelines.” In other words, Fenway Health defers to WPATH, which adopted its recommendations from Fenway Health.

Shape and his lawyers deny that Fenway’s informed consent process is “a safe and effective replacement for assessment, diagnosis, and treatment provided by an appropriately trained and licensed healthcare professional.” Fenway’s model, they argue, “relies heavily on patients’ self-diagnosis, which may be a result of confusion or a misunderstanding of medically defined terms.” It does not take into account a patient’s expectations from medical treatment, which, as in Shape’s case, can be highly unrealistic. It “does not inform patients about the risk of iatrogenic effects of affirmation.” Nor does it take into account a patient’s “medical decision-making capacity,” which may be impaired in the presence of “significant emotional distress” and “undue influence from persons in position of authority and trust.”

A key charge in Shape’s lawsuit is that Fenway Health is driven by “market expansion goals and political demands of transgender activists.” Approval for hormones and surgery, the clinic’s staff wrote in 2015, should be a “routine part of primary care service delivery, not a psychological or psychiatric condition in need of treatment.” A leading advocate for the no-gatekeeping model, which rests on the assumption that mismatch between one’s actual and perceived sex is a normal human variation and not a pathological condition, argues that adults and adolescents should be free to turn their bodies into “gendered art pieces.”

From Shape’s story, we can infer that Fenway Health, which could not be reached for comment, has yielded to a barely constrained medical consumerism. In 1997, the institute had eight transgender customers. By 2015, it had over 1,700. “The rapid and sustained growth of Fenway Health’s transgender health care, research, education, training, and advocacy,” the institute’s doctors proudly declare, “might be succinctly summarized by the mantra from the movie Field of Dreams: If you build it, they will come.”

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If you haven't met Shape Shifter, see the following interviews:

Literally "trans the gay away."