"Gender Affirming" is journalistic misinformation
When reporters use that term, they're spinning you
In case you missed it …
PayPal announced it would take $2,500 of your money if it decided you were guilty of spreading “misinformation.” After mockery and outrage, the company backtracked, saying the policy was sent out “in error.”
The Florida Surgeon General advised against younger men getting the Covid vaccine. The mainstream press ignored it, and Twitter censored his press release before reversing course.
The WaPo’s fact-checker says Stacey Abrams is not a liar for saying she “won” her 2018 election for governor of Georgia, or for saying the election was “stolen from the people of Georgia.” It’s (D)ifferent for her, evidently.
Twitter locked Kanye West’s account after he sent an anti-Jewish Tweet, days after wearing a “White Lives Matter” shirt.
Dear Friends –
The first few times I read a news report referencing “gender-affirming care” for transgender teens, it didn’t register in my brain.
The phrase feels warm and fuzzy, like flowers blooming in a senior center or counselors helping someone past tough times. It’s a gentle and supportive notion, which is exactly why it’s now being used by activists and journalists alike.
NPR: A third of trans youth are at risk of losing gender-affirming care, study says
ABC News: Florida to ban gender-affirming care under Medicaid for transgender recipients
The Guardian: Arkansas cannot enforce ban on gender-affirming care for trans kids, court rules
Why, what hateful people would ever want to ban affirming care for children?
In reality “gender-affirming care” is a euphemism for medical procedures that are life altering and often irreversible. It includes mastectomies for young girls. Castration for boys. Drugs that can lead to sterilization. And precarious genital surgeries.
News outlets have many more descriptive words and phrases they can use for medical procedures designed to alter someone’s sex. Instead they’ve taken cues from Orwell, not to inform you, but to persuade you to think right.
The whitewashing is working, and gaining popularity.
The use of the phrase has especially taken off over the last year, as you can see by this Google Trends comparison of the number of people searching for “gender affirming care” versus “sex change operation” over the past five years.
So it’s really no surprise when activist-produced polls like this one show that youth access to sex change medical services is popular even in red states—45% in Texas and 54% in Florida—at least when the feel-good phrase is used. (Commissioned by by an LGBTQ group and picked up by mainstream press everywhere, this survey, unsurprisingly, didn’t ask respondents anything more specific than “gender-affirming medical care” or make an attempt to define that term.)
Even “fact checkers” get fooled by the doublespeak. When California became a sanctuary state for trans kids, this Houston CBS affiliate was baffled enough to falsely state that California’s new law isn’t about medical procedures because it "does not contain the word ‘surgery’ anywhere in its text.”
Still, reality can trump rhetoric.
Tennessee recently woke up to the “gender affirmation” when conservative commentator and author Matt Walsh exposed that Vanderbilt University Medical Center was chemically castrating and performing double mastectomies on minors. His video showing a hospital doctor explaining the big profits in transgender surgeries made that starkness even clearer.
When the realities of “gender-affirming care” were fully exposed, the university hospital suspended gender-altering surgeries, and the Tennessee governor pledged to stop the practice completely.
Words matter. So when you see journalists, pretending to be a truth-tellers, choose the language of activists, be aware of the game they’re playing.
Non binary children’s parents need to be introduced to Binary GOD! True child Care. “In God We Trust”
Lies about be far are ruining g a.generation of.kids.