The Virginia Values Act: An Affront Against Women
4/7/23 by Margot Heffernan

In mid-March, Patricia Silva, an Alaska resident, recorded a video of a grown man
shaving in Planet Fitness women’s locker room in. The story went viral on x, and Silva has
been featured in multiple media venues since then. The man claimed to be “transitioning”
from male to female, an all-too-common justification for the presence of men in private
women’s spaces.

Soon after Silva exposed the Planet Fitness story, the company revoked her
membership for posting the video, while the “transitioning” man continues to use the
women’s locker room with the assistance of an employee escort.
Such stories have become all too common; full-bodied men larping as women,
demanding access to our spaces, our sports, our very identities.

What kind of a society upends itself this way - trading hard won women’s rights and
private spaces for the “civil rights” of an invented class of people manufactured by a medical-
industrial complex run amok. “Transgenderism,” after all, is an antiscientific doctrine that
claims sex change is possible and that gender exists on a spectrum instead of a binary. It is a
top-down ideology supported by a lucrative medical/pharmaceutical industry that largely
benefits delusional men. Contrary to what many believe, “transgender” people are not a
longstanding group of marginalized citizens: They are individuals who, for a variety of
reasons imagine that they are the opposite sex or exist somewhere on a fictitious “gender
spectrum.”

And make no mistake about it: Men who pose as women are an absolute threat to all
females.

The authoritarian “trans” movement has gained momentum by grafting itself to the
legitimate concerns of gay and lesbian people. The LGBTQ movement deliberately conflates
being gay with “transgenderism.” Many gays and lesbians are waking up to this lie by
divorcing themselves from the “transgender” fallacy.

“Transgender” rhetoric has been imbedded in countless corporate policies, framed as a
civil rights issue. Planet Fitness has a nondiscrimination policy, for example, that states that
all members and team members may use Planet Fitness locker room facilities and programs
based on their self-reported gender identity; these facilities include bathrooms, showers,
and all other facilities separated by sex.

What are the repercussions for Virginia women?

Profound and heinous; widespread. The farcical idea that one can change sex is not
only imbedded in corporate policies, but now codified into state law under the Virginia
Values Act. This Act, signed into law in 2020 by Democratic Governor Ralph Northam, and
pushed by a coterie of powerful trans activists and Democratic politicians, supplants the
material reality of sex with the nonsensical idea of “gender change.” Many Virginia women
are not aware that this Act effectively cedes their rights to men who think they are women.
Individuals can change “gender” on their birth certificate by claiming that they have had
“appropriate clinical treatment.” A doctor’s visit followed by the self-proclamation, “I am a
woman” will suffice.

This is by design, a deliberate dismantling of womanhood, construing gender as a
self-defined idea, a fluid space for men to fill.

Melodramatic? Over the top?

Hardly. Remember Will “Lia” Thomas, the male University of Pennsylvania
swimmer who not only swam on the women’s team, but was lauded for doing so, while the
elitist college administration forced female swimmers to accept this interloper? Or how
about the large, larping man, Artemis Langford, who was inducted into a Wyoming
Sorority? Although a lawsuit was brought by six sorority members in an attempt to oust the
6’2,” 260 pound Langford, Wyoming District Court Judge Alan Johnson rejected the suit
because the organization’s bylaws did not define what a woman is. The media continues to
celebrate such delusional men as a progressive new reality.

These injustices to women are happening everywhere, and laws like The Virginia
Values Act enhance the ability of men to “become” women: Men who masquerade as
women are fetishists, and now a protected category whose rights are imbedded in Virginia
statute.

Gender ideology, though, is a dangerous hoax, a new-fangled way to oppress, a boot
on the neck of women everywhere.

It isn’t the first time that Virginia turned its back on women. In 1917 thirty-three
long forgotten suffragettes were remanded to the Occoquan Workhouse, a prison in Northern
Virginia. They were beaten and tortured. Their crime? Picketing the White House for the
right to vote.

But history, it has a way of wending back. Women cast aside by a dismissive society
must educate themselves and their daughters; comprehend the meaning of laws that are cast
as progressive but are misogynistic at their very core. And just as our foremothers rejected
the anti-woman dictums of a century ago, we must not be bamboozled by the “trans” agenda
which insists that men have a civil right to be women.

Virginia women must speak truth, as modern suffragettes, ready to stand up all over
again.