The Shifting Tide, Part II

DIAG is a grassroots organization of liberals guiding our party back to reason and reality. Check us out at di-ag.org and show your support: JOIN US!

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis has done a public service with her article, “The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine. How the Left Ended Up Disbelieving the Science.” Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender is working to burst the misinformation bubble. Naming it is an important first step. In a sign of what seems to be a shifting tide in coverage of transgender topics, Lewis says that her own views have changed, that new information has made the case for state bans on pediatric gender medicine more convincing.

Lewis calls out advocacy groups and medical associations for perpetuating “zombie facts”—first, the notion that pediatric gender medicine is “evidence-based” and second, the myth that trans-identified youth are at high risk of suicide. She notes that even some prominent advocates and practitioners have retreated from these claims, but many liberals don’t know this, because they are stuck “in media bubbles in which well-meaning commentators make confident assertions for youth gender medicine…” Commentators?

Reporters have done at least as much to inflate the misinformation bubble. NPR, for example, has devoted copious airtime to arcane topics related to transgender identity. Search its website, though, and you won’t find any mention of the Cass Review, the UK’s rigorous evidence review, until eight months after its release. That first reference was dropped into a flattering exit interview with then-HHS assistant secretary Rachel Levine, a zealous promoter of medical transition for minors. NPR’s reporter disingenuously described the Cass Review as merely “urging caution” and asked if it undermined Levine’s assertion that there is “no argument among medical professionals about the value of gender-affirming care.” Levine offered an anodyne response. “There is always ongoing research to study any of our medical protocols.” Thus NPR left its listeners in the dark about the fact that the Cass Review had found youth gender medicine to be built on “shaky foundations,” with “remarkably weak” evidence for its mental health benefits. Nor did NPR report that because of the Cass findings, the UK had severely restricted the use of puberty blockers.

(To its credit, NPR member station WBUR in Boston did run a full hour interview with British pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass shortly after her report came out. The local station also aired segments with Hannah Barnes, the British reporter who exposed abuses at England’s Tavistock gender clinic.)

The Washington Post’s first mention of the Cass Review appears to be in a timely op-ed by Paul Garcia-Ryan, a detransitioner and psychotherapist. A regular reader of the Post’s news pages, though, might easily conclude that hormones and surgeries for young people are medically sound care that red state politicians want to ban. The newspaper published an FAQ for readers last December, the day before the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in US v. Skrmetti, the challenge to Tennessee’s law restricting the interventions. The FAQ—under the headline “Puberty blockers, hormones: what to know about gender care for minors”—was a litany of misinformation, starting with the first two sentences.

Doctors who treat transgender adolescents have long described the care as “lifesaving.” Trans young people have high rates of depression and suicidality, but with medical interventions such as puberty blockers and hormones, many go on to live happy, well-adjusted lives, doctors say.

Trans-identified young people are at no higher risk of suicide than others with the same co-morbidities such as anxiety and depression. As for the supposed “life-saving” nature of the interventions, multiple systematic evidence reviews have found no credible evidence that puberty blockers and hormones improve young people’s mental health. The Washington Post’s FAQ misleads readers about transition regret by citing an audit of patient discharge records commissioned for the Cass Review. That audit showed a negligible detransition rate at the point of discharge from the UK’s GIDS (Gender Identity Development Services) clinic. It tells us nothing about long-term regret or detransition rate. In a partisan swipe, the Post reporter blew off the Cass Review as a “British report that right-wing leaders have cited in statehouses and amicus briefs.”

Many mainstream reporters have been complicit in the suicide fear-mongering. Last September NBC, NPR, PBS, CNN, and Time Magazine trumpeted a study claiming that “anti-trans laws” have a “significant and causal impact on suicide risk among transgender and nonbinary young people across the United States.” Every researcher on the paper was a current or past employee of the Trevor Project, which bills itself as a crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ+ young people. That obvious conflict of interest should have been a huge red flag. The broadcasters who gave the Trevor Project a megaphone apparently never read past the press release or study abstract. DIAG delved deep into the paper’s data set and discovered highly problematic methodology. Based on a very small number of self-reports generated by convenience sampling, the researchers drew a very big conclusion—“anti-trans” laws cause young people to try to kill themselves. News outlets uncritically touted a research paper that is less science than politics, a paper that unconscionably used the false threat of suicide to scare readers about the effect of legislation.

Mainstream publications often frame pediatric gender medicine, together with the issues of males in female sport and spaces, as contested “trans rights” that liberals want to defend and conservatives want to deny. The original sin of reporters on the gender beat, though, was not political bias. It was lack of curiosity—the sine qua non of the profession. Reporters blindly took the word of “experts” who were introducing, as fact, radical new concepts about human nature and biology. Fifteen or 20 years ago, how many of us had even heard the word “transgender”? Suddenly there was a new category of human being. Newsrooms didn’t scratch their collective heads about the explosion of people identifying as trans. Advocates claimed more people were coming out of the closet because of greater social acceptance. Was there not a middle-aged editor in the newsroom who wondered, “Hang on a minute. In my lifetime, I’ve seen gays go from being criminally prosecuted to winning the legal right to same-sex marriage. Why have we not seen exponential growth in the numbers of male homosexuals?”

A science reporter looking into the matter would have quickly learned that the traditional profile of patients treated for gender identity disorder was male—either very young effeminate boys or middle-aged heterosexual men. Suddenly, adolescent girls were flocking to gender clinics. Writer Abigail Shrier picked up on this, followed her curiosity and exposed the social contagion underway in her revelatory book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Columnist Pamela Paul, then with The New York Times, opened readers’ eyes with her deeply reported op-ed, “Why Is the U.S. Still Pretending We Know Gender-Affirming Care Works?” Independent journalist Jesse Singal did yeoman’s work, plowing through dense data tables to debunk bogus, activist-driven research. The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis was also skeptical. Most reporters, though, either swallowed the activist talking points hook, line and sinker or went along with the prevailing orthodoxy, to spare themselves accusations of bigotry.

The major media organizations seemed to take their cues from the Trans Journalists Association style guide and adopted a whole new vocabulary. In this lexicon, a boy was a child “assigned male at birth,” as if doctors and midwives “assign” rather than record a baby’s sex. This “assigned male” might discover a different “gender identity” and emerge as a “trans child.” This child was no longer simply a boy who liked sparkly dresses and might grow up to be gay, a boy who might wish to be a girl. This was a special new kind of human being. Science writers accepted as fact the assertion that everyone has something called a “gender identity,” an entirely subjective sense of self, although there is no more proof for this concept than there is for the existence of an immortal soul. In the 21st century Newspeak, men who claimed to be women were “transgender women” or “trans women.” The term made it sound bigoted to keep a subset of “women” out of female sport or prisons.

In deference to the vanishingly small number of “trans men” who give birth, newspapers started writing about “pregnant people”—an off-putting term that erases women. News articles absurdly used female pronouns for trans-identified male felons in reports about rapes they had committed. People who preferred not to think of themselves as male or female began asserting a “non-binary” identity and the media dutifully described them as such, as if their personal preferences and tastes made them a distinct category of human. Media outlets granted these individuals their own bespoke grammar, referring to them with the plural they/them pronouns, which often confused the meaning of the writing.

The ideological language shaped the public’s understanding of youth gender medicine. “Gender affirming care” doesn’t let on that we’re talking about the disruption of healthy endocrine systems that can lead to infertility and sexual dysfunction. Reporters used the benign term “bottom surgery” to refer to castration and disfiguring, complication-plagued operations to fashion simulacra of genitals. Bilateral mastectomies became innocuous sounding “top surgery.”

It was not always standard operating procedure for journalists to blindly adopt the preferred terminology of activists. I worked in newsrooms for more than 40 years. We had heated arguments over whether to call armed groups “terrorists,” “militants,” “insurgents,” “guerrillas,” or “resistance fighters.” Periodic memos would go out, cautioning against the politically loaded terms “pro-choice” or “pro-life.” We were advised to use the more neutral “abortion rights advocates” and “anti-abortion activists.” We earnestly considered whether labeling think tanks “progressive” or “right-wing” might color audience perceptions of their scholars’ views. The debates about language made us consider the evidence favoring one term or another and forced us to consider the facts.

Then came the exceptional topic of trans. In the blink of an eye, ideologically captured newsrooms got on board with the vague, obfuscating language. Perhaps this was just part of the broader social justice ethos that began to pervade newsrooms. A new generation raised on identity politics saw their job not simply as figuring out what was going on and reporting it, but finding stories that would highlight the plight of “marginalized communities.” They pressured their elders into joining them on the right side of history. And in an age when yard signs proclaim “Kindness is everything,” no one dared offend the non-binary intern or colleague who had a trans kid.

Whatever the reason, the activist-approved glossary adopted by the mainstream news media has helped seal liberals in the “misinformation bubble” that Helen Lewis decries. In Part I of this series, we examined whether the tide has truly shifted in press coverage of youth gender medicine, as journalist Katie Herzog recently asserted. It has begun to turn, but there won’t be a real sea change until news reporters resume writing in plain, accurate English. They must also reckon with how they have abandoned the best traditions of their profession—curiosity, a devotion to objective truth and a willingness to correct the record.

DIAG is a grassroots organization of liberals guiding our party back to reason and reality. Check us out at di-ag.org and show your support: JOIN US!