(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) For 17 years, Tami Fitzgerald has been been working to preserve family-oriented values in her home state of North Carolina.
As executive director of the NC Values Coalition, she is focused on fighting issues like the transgender takeover of women’s sports, gender-transition surgeries for children and indoctrination in the classroom.
Fitzgerald said that some of the culture-war issues her organization currently champions have been around for as long as she has been advocating for the preservation of Christian-centered morals to prevail in public policy.
“These are kind of like the Holy Grail of the Left, these statutes, and I have not researched how long North Carolina’s has been on the books, but longer than I’ve been doing what I’m doing,” she told Headline USA in a recent interview.
Since the start of the Biden administration, however, they have picked up considerable steam.
“What really started out as an ideology has now become an industry, so that doctors are making massive amounts of money off of this unsubstantiated ‘medical care,'” she said while discussing concerns over transgender surgeries for children.
“If you look at the science behind it, there really is none,” she added. “… The science proves that it’s more harmful than it does good.”
In fact, she said, a study had shown that those who undergo transgender surgery were 40 times more likely to commit suicide than before the surgery.
“There’s no evidence whatsoever that transitioning clears up the underlying mental condition of the patient,” she said. “So doctors are doing these surgeries purely for money with no ethics and no science behind it.”
Nationwide, several prominent medical institutions including the Boston Children’s Hospital; the Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville; and the University of California, San Francisco have been exposed for their advocacy.
Yet, even in regions where they remain wildly unpopular, woke institutions are quietly trying to cash in.
In North Carolina, where more than half of the public supports legislation that would ban trans surgeries for kids and teens, according to NC Values’s polling, Fitzgerald said four major medical centers were embracing the practice: Duke University, the University of North Carolina, Eastern Carolina University and the Greensboro-based Cone Health.
Additionally, private practices have flourished in blue-run cities like Charlotte, where clinics like the Cosmetic Concierge not only operate on teenage patients, but even post their nude photographs online.
.@hopesheriemd operates a clinic in North Carolina which offers double mastectomies to 15-year-olds.
She then posts these minors’ naked breasts on her website to boast about the operation and recruit more healthy kids to give double mastectomies to. pic.twitter.com/RY4dZnntdE
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) January 22, 2023
“What people also don’t realize: In North Carolina, we have the most liberal statute in the country on medical treatment for minors,” Fitzgerald said.
That includes within the schools, where counselors are able to claim “mental health” as a reason for promoting treatment on a range of pernicious issues without any parental consent or notification—even for children as young as 5.
The current statute “allows a child to go into the school health clinic and say ‘I’m struggling with my gender,’ and they deem it a mental-health issue, and then the child can consent to all kinds of treatment … and so, that just throws them completely to the wolves,” Fitzgerald said.
Nonetheless, she said NC Values was optimistic about passing several upcoming bills in a legislature where only a single Democrat vote is needed to override the veto of Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper.
Still, keeping all the Republican lawmakers in lockstep may be another challenge of its own.
The immense popular support that the legislation has—along with legislation the coalition supports for a parental bill of rights in schools, a ban on transgenders in school sports and a heartbeat bill that would limit abortions—is one thing that NC Values has going for it.
The organization already has seen tremendous support in its efforts to fight school indoctrination at the grassroots level.
Last year, it created what it called the Mama Bear Manual to help guide parents through the process of fighting for tranparency in their local school systems, and saw tremendous response from three workshops it conducted.
Just because a parent sends their child to public school doesn’t mean they lose their fundamental right to know and have a say in what their child is being taught.
Register here to attend one of our upcoming free Mama Bear workshops! https://t.co/qWRmIUCkDf
— 🧭 NC Values (@NCValues) March 13, 2022
It had help from strong allies like North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a Republican who has made opposition to the woke curriculum a signature priority as he eyes a potential run for governor next year.
NC Values also has partnered with groups like Pavement Education Project, which is focused on removing obscene content from school libraries.
As far as preserving women’s sports for women, it has gotten support from high-profile coaches like Barbara Ehardt, who led four different NCAA Division 1 women’s basketball teams before winning a seat in the Idaho state legislature.
With the issue of banning transgender athletes enjoying roughly 80% popular support in North Carolina, Fizgerald marveled that lawmakers had been dragging their feet on it for so long.
“Why do we have to wait to pass legislation until someone’s daughter gets hurt?” she asked.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.
