Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at the divergence between New York Magazine’s cover on so-called gender-affirming care for children and newly unearthed “expert” concerns on the issue, provide context to a recent viral HuffPost article, and cover more media misses.
New York Magazine Turns Its Cover over to Trans Activism
New York Magazine’s latest cover story offers the “moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies” — just days after we learned, courtesy of newly released internal documents, that members of the world’s leading transgender medical organization have privately expressed concerns about the considerable risks involved in prescribing hormone treatments and sex-reassignment surgeries to minors.
Andrea Long Chu, who identifies as a transgender woman, writes more than 7,000 words on the “Freedom of Sex.”
“I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity to do a piece on trans kids ever since I joined the magazine,” Chu said in a news release from the magazine. “The current political moment has gotten so toxic and hostile that I knew it was time. It’s clearer than ever to me that the media has a huge role in either legitimizing trans kids or throwing them under the bus, and I know which side I’m on.”
Chu writes that so-called gender-affirming care, for both children and adults, should be a right, rather than a treatment protocol for gender dysphoria as we’ve been told.
“The idea that trans people fundamentally suffer from a mental illness has long been used by psychiatrists to decide who ‘qualifies’ for transition-related care and who does not. By insisting on the medical validity of the diagnosis, progressives have reduced the question of justice to a question of who has the appropriate disease. In so doing, they have given the anti-trans movement a powerful tool for systematically pathologizing trans kids,” Chu writes.
Still, Chu goes on to lament that the New York Times “consistently refuses to treat transition-related care the way it would any other health-care matter.”
Children, Chu writes, are “full members of society who would like to change their sex,” and it “does not matter where this desire comes from.”
“We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history,” the writer adds.
Chu seems to conceive of puberty as something one can simply opt in or out of, like choosing what to wear. Barring children from delaying or blocking puberty altogether infringes on their right to be free from biological constraints.
“But if children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they are definitely too young to consent to puberty,” she writes.
The essay goes to to cite gender-affirming care as part of a larger history of sex-affirming care, including “breast reconstruction following cancer, vasodilators for erectile dysfunction, antiandrogens for hair loss and hirsutism.”
“The real question is which sex can be affirmed — and why. It so happens, for instance, that GnRH agonists like those used in fertility treatments are also used to delay puberty in trans kids. This means your average Alabama Republican now ostensibly believes it should be a felony to give a child the same hormone blockers his mother may have used to conceive him,” Chu writes, but goes on to acknowledge that a politician “may rightly protest that the same drug is being used for very different purposes.”
Chu’s thesis comes down to this:
Sex is real. So is global warming. To believe in their reality is an indispensable precondition for making normative claims about them, as we know from climate activism. But the belief that we have a moral duty to accept reality just because it is real is, I think, a fine definition of nihilism. What trans kids are saying is this: The right to change sex that has been enjoyed for decades by their parents, friends, teachers, coaches, doctors, and representatives, especially if those people are white and affluent — this right belongs to them, too. We should understand this right as flowing not from a revanchist allegiance to an existing social order on the perpetual verge of collapse but from a broader ideal of biological justice, from which there also flows the right to abortion, the right to nutritious food and clean water, and, crucially, the right to health care.
The freedom Chu writes about culminates in an argument that anyone should be able to change their sex or gender and transgender girls should be allowed to play sports “regardless of their sex status” — if they excel “this means only that some girls are better at sports than others.”
“For now, parents must learn to treat their kids as what they are: human beings capable of freedom,” Chu adds. We have to accept that children “have a right to the hazards of their own free will.”
While progressive writers like Chu may be in full support of the medicalization of gender-dysphoric children, the professionals who are intimately involved in providing “gender-affirming care” have serious reservations.
Chu’s essay was published days after nonprofit Environmental Progress obtained internal documents from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) in which its experts privately acknowledged that young patients often lack proper understanding about the severity of the life-altering medical decisions they’re making and the possible consequences involved, including sterility, derailed sexual development, and general regret.
This despite the group publicly advocating in its Standards of Care 8 for those with diagnosed “gender incongruence” to have access to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries, as long as patients can demonstrate “the emotional and cognitive maturity required to provide informed consent/assent for the treatment.”
The newly released documents show that WPATH president Marci Bowers acknowledged during a January 2022 board meeting that the effects of puberty blockers on fertility and the “onset of orgasmic response” are not fully known. Boys who experience early puberty blocking can have “problematic surgical outcomes” and extreme difficulty climaxing, she said.
Other WPATH members have said the current transgender-treatment protocol might be correlated with advanced disease, such as cancer. One doctor reported treating a 16-year-old patient who developed large liver tumors after being prescribed norethindrone acetate, which can serve as a puberty-blocker substitute, to suppress menstruation for several years and testosterone for one year.
WPATH member Dianne Berg, a child psychologist and co-author of the child chapter of Standards of Care 8, acknowledged children lack the ability to “understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them.”
And WPATH member Dr. Daniel Metzger warned it can be difficult to obtain informed consent from minors “who haven’t even had biology in high school yet,” the documents show.
Many young patients don’t understand that medical interventions can cause irreversible physical changes. He explained some patients don’t realize they can’t receive hormone therapy only to have a lower voice, without also growing facial hair.
“It’s hard to kind of pick and choose the effects that you want,” Metzger said. “That’s something that kids wouldn’t normally understand because they haven’t had biology yet, but I think a lot of adults as well are hoping to be able to get X without getting Y, and that’s not always possible.”
Headline Fail of the Week
HuffPost misrepresented comments from Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, but that didn’t stop the headline from quickly spreading across social media: “Mark Robinson’s Bizarre Ramble: I Absolutely Want To Go Back To The America Where Women Couldn’t Vote.”
While Robinson indeed has a history of making incendiary remarks, in this case he was — albeit indelicately — trying to credit the GOP for women’s suffrage.
Media Misses