1. Abigail Shrier in City Journal:

At first, Ahmed (I have changed names in this essay to protect the identities of minor children) assumed there had been a mistake. He had dropped off a son, Syed, to the hospital, in a terrible state of distress. Now, the email he received from the mental health experts used a new name for that son and claimed he was Ahmed’s daughter. “They were trying to create a customer for their gender clinic . . . and they seemed to absolutely want to push us in that direction,” he said when I spoke to him again this May, recalling the horror of last October. “We had calls with counselors and therapists in the establishment, telling us how important it is for him to change his gender, because that’s the only way he’s going to be better out of this suicidal depressive state.”
Syed had been a “straight-A student” and—according to his parents and the family’s therapist—quite brilliant. He is also on the autism spectrum, a young man who neglects to make eye contact and must be given rules for how long to shake hands, shower, or brush his teeth. High school was a slog for him, as it often is for kids on the spectrum who find that the social demands of adolescence have risen beyond their capacity to meet them. “He tried to ask a few girls out. It didn’t work out and he got frustrated and angry, and that kind of thing. And so, those girl-boy things get kind of tough for autistic kids, those developmental issues. And that’s where puberty can be very, very hard with the hormones rushing and all this stuff.”
When lockdowns hit, the boy who was already struggling socially and befuddled by questions neurotypical teens take for granted (How do I show a girl I like her? How do I make the other kids include me?) began to spend all day and night on the Internet. “He’s an autistic kid, and so he kind of lost track of time. And he was staying up a lot. So he was staying up, just being on the Internet, Twitter, Tumblr, whatever. . . . And he was in his room, just, you know, sleeping one or two hours a day. And that can really be devastating. He was very confused. He was seeing things, visual hallucinations. And we didn’t know why.”
It is not definitively known why many neurodiverse adolescents identify as transgender, but more than one scientist has pointed out the high rates of coincidence. As several autism experts have explained to me, those on the spectrum tend to fixate, and when a contagious idea is introduced to them—such as the notion that they might be a “girl in a boy’s body”—they are particularly susceptible to it.

2. Sherif Girgis on the Supreme Court’s Options in the Next Abortion Case:

To rule for Mississippi (or remand), without abolishing Roe, the Court would have to devise a test that allows prohibitions starting sometime after conception but before 15 weeks (or tell the lower courts to do so, based on a new doctrine that Dobbs would provide). But not only will Dobbs be unable to cite text or history to support any test. Unlike Casey, it can’t cite precedent (or even repurpose precedent, as shown below). That’s because the Court’s precedents uniformly reject laws as sweeping as Mississippi’s. The latter bans abortions well before viability, which Casey forbids. Indeed, the question presented in Dobbs is “whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional,” and Casey answers that yes-or-no question with “yes”: “[A] State may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability.” Thus, to do anything but block Mississippi’s law, Dobbs must reverse Casey (as the cert petition asks it to do if needed). And if the Court does that while still keeping some right to abort, it will have to create a test for abortion laws from scratch, for the first time since Roe.

3. Muslim family killed in ‘premeditated’ hit and run in London, Ont., driver charged with murder, police say

4. Jennifer Lahl: Surrogacy Can be an Orphan Maker

We now can no longer deny that a gestational surrogate pregnancy is a much riskier pregnancy than a spontaneous pregnancy where the woman carries her own baby.
One important study pointed out that when comparing a woman’s pregnancy with her own children with her surrogate pregnancies these women have higher rates of hypertension, gestational diabetes, and placenta previa. These put both the mother and baby into a high-risk category.
I am often asked, “how many surrogates have died?” and my response, always the same, is a so very sad, “we just don’t know, and we have no way of knowing, because there is no tracking or monitoring.”
When this woman died, the cause of death recorded on her death certificate will likely be something tied to the pregnancy complication that took her life. It will not record anywhere that she was a surrogate.

5. Gerard Baker: America’s Covid Groupthink Functioned Like China’s Repression

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9. To liberate Auschwitz, David Dushman drove a Soviet tank through its barbed wire. Horrors awaited inside.

10. Why China Is Allowing Families to Have Three Children—and Why It Might Not Change Much

Experts predicted that the CCP’s May 31 announcement of the end of its two-child policy would likely have only muted effects on the country’s demography. Part of the challenge is that larger families are now incongruous with China’s culture. The one-child policy gave rise to a cultural expectation in China that parents would heavily invest their resources in their only child’s education and extracurricular opportunities.

11. Video: Christian lawyer in Pakistan: Christians can’t express their faith

12. Via Daily Signal: How Pro-Lifers in this Texas Town Beat Planned Parenthood

13. Michael New: Biden budget attacks bipartisan consensus against taxpayer funding of abortion

14. Washington State allows for free marijuana joints with Covid-19 vaccine.

15. William McGurn: More Latinos Bid ‘Adios’ to Democrats

16. What If We Take Gentleness to Work?

17. Mindy Belz: How the News Disrupts Our Belonging

The mind, (Thoreau) said, “can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things.” Then as now, we news consumers can fixate on matters that are shallow rather than deep, or deep but not relevant. We form opinions based on trivialities, rather than grounded in information that is both deep and relevant. We begin to report and read the news differently when habits of attention form around the eternal, not only the times at hand. As daily practice, the eternal Word of God and timeless reading in good books are better places to begin than the “top 10 ___” in our newsfeed.

18. After Pandemic Languishing, Reimagine Community Life

Parenting in America, especially this past year, can be a lonely gig. But it isn’t meant to be. … Instead of keeping up with the Joneses, what about settling in with them, living life with them, sharing bread with them—along with their joys and pains?

19. Rick Warren to retire as lead pastor of Saddleback Church

“Serving as your pastor, it’s been the greatest privilege in the world,” he said. “And regardless of whatever new roles God has for me, I’m never gonna stop loving you. I’m never gonna stop praying for you. I’m never gonna stop serving you.”

20. Babylon Bee: LEGO Unveils New Genderless Bricks With No Male/Female Connectors