The Harvey Milk Institute in San Francisco is hosting the \u201cThird Annual Midwest Gender Identity Summit,\u201d – discussing the “needs of transgender patients in healthcare,\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Just kidding. It’s the “Sanford Research Center”, in Sioux Falls. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sanford Health – the titan of rural healthcare, and one of the biggest employers in the upper midwest – is pushing the very “blue” trans agenda in the very red northern Great Plains<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both Sanford and the Transformation Project are representative of the larger forces that are working to bring the transgender movement to the deepest-red corners of the United States \u2014 a coordinated, well-funded campaign for which South Dakota has become something of a trial run. That campaign\u2019s influence has reached the Republican-dominated state legislature, where dozens of anti-gender-ideology bills have failed over the past decade. \u201cNo one thought South Dakota was a state where this could be stopped,\u201d Libby Skarin, the campaign director for the ACLU of South Dakota,\u00a0boasted<\/a>\u00a0in February. \u201cI think the fact that we have consistently stopped these bills has been a source of hope for folks, like if they can do it in South Dakota, we can do it in our state.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sanford, which\u00a0purports to be<\/a>\u00a0\u201cthe largest rural health system in the United States\u201d \u2014 it currently employs nearly seven times more South Dakotans than any other business in the state \u2014 has played a pivotal role in orchestrating those conservative failures. In 2021, a\u00a0National Review\u00a0investigation<\/a>\u00a0detailed the medical giant\u2019s links to the failure of House Bill 1217, which would have banned males from competing in women\u2019s sports. South Dakota governor Kristi Noem had sparked conservative outrage by vetoing the bill earlier that year \u2014 a move that dampened her status as a rising Republican star, even after she\u00a0hastened to reintroduce<\/a>\u00a0an analogous bill at the outset of the next legislative session.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The Diversity\/Equity\/Inclusion (DEI) agenda is being pushed into very red places by very blue big business – as a project to try to “convert” red parts of the country. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And in the case of Transgender ideology in South Dakota, it’s working:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite the overwhelmingly Republican composition of South Dakota politics, gender ideology has made inroads in almost every area of the state\u2019s governing institutions. Last month, for example, SDSU\u00a0drew conservative criticism<\/a>\u00a0for hosting a \u201ckid-friendly\u201d drag show, an event that multiple local lawmakers argued could be illegal under the state\u2019s prohibition on \u201cshow[s] or other presentation[s]\u201d deemed \u201charmful to minors.\u201d Elsewhere, the Noem-appointed head of the state\u2019s Department of Corrections signed a new \u201cManagement of Gender Dysphoria<\/a>\u201d policy specifying that state-prison inmates could request transfers to facilities that corresponded with their \u201cgender identity\u201d rather than sex \u2014 and be provided with sex-change drugs on the taxpayer dime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But no set of institutions in South Dakota has embraced gender ideology more than the state\u2019s Sanford-dominated business community, which sits well to the left of the state\u2019s political center of gravity. (In November 2020, Sanford\u00a0replaced<\/a>\u00a0its CEO of 24 years after he informed employees that he wouldn\u2019t be wearing a mask around the office, arguing that he had recently recovered from the Covid virus and therefore posed no threat of spreading it.) The state\u2019s Chamber of Commerce chapters, which are closely tied to Sanford, regularly lobby against social-conservative bills, including medical conscience rights, the prohibitions on sex changes for minors, birth-certificate gender changes, transgender locker room use, and bans on men in women\u2019s sports.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n\n
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