No, Washington Post, you can’t memory-hole your support for trans insanity
Every so often a punchy meme recirculates on X, and it reads: “Start thinking of an excuse why you supported sterilizing children.”
The meme’s background is a pink and blue transgender banner, and its terse message reminds those who supported so-called “gender-affirming care” that the ugly truth will one day be so undeniable as to be inexcusable, even for the most die-hard believers. By the looks of it, some prominent media outlets are slyly starting to memory-hole that enthusiastic support as the ghastly reality of child sterilization and other serious long-term repercussions via this “care” surfaces more widely.
None other than The Washington Post now appears to be backpedaling.
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In an Editorial Board column published Sunday, the prominent newspaper’s editors are furrowing their brows as ultra-concerned arbiters of truth and supposed defenders against democracy dying in darkness. They are admitting that the state of Tennessee — at the center of U.S. v. Skrmetti at the Supreme Court on Dec 4 — has legitimate worries about puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones, and it has legal room to prohibit them for minors, as approximately half the US states have done.
Robust science, not red-state laws, should settle this hot-button dispute, these elite editors opine.
Along with the many unknowns of these risky interventions, they further noted how doctors like Johanna Olson-Kennedy delayed releasing results of federally-funded research on puberty blockers because her findings, as she told The New York Times, might be politically “weaponized.” The WaPo editors additionally observe that “some patients who transitioned later experience regret and suffer the fate the treatments were supposed to avoid: a body that doesn’t match their gender identity.”
Dear Washington Post editorial board, if you’re genuinely trying to break free from the clutches of transgenderism, let me help you out here with a fresh, heaping helping of unwavering clarity.
No human has ever “transitioned” their sex — nobody ever will, not even those who experience body dysmorphia, and there is no such thing as a “gender identity.” All of it is a lie.
No scientific evidence exists for an amorphous “gender” inside a person apart from their sex — no brain imaging scan, no blood test, no genetic marker, nothing. It’s an entirely fictitious construct, one that psychologically dissociates us. Nor is a “body that doesn’t match their gender identity” a thing. There aren’t two parts to be matched. Your words here are predicated on the notion of a false, split self, not a whole human person. This is basic reality and basic science. It’s not complicated.
While I have a hunch that your editorial board op-ed wouldn’t have seen the light of day had Vice President Kamala Harris eked out a win on Nov. 5, since you now appear to be pivoting with all this nuance, let’s take a trip down memory lane, shall we?
Remember this heavily slanted article from January 2018 that was, for all intents and purposes, a cheery advertisement for pediatric gender clinics? Among the many troubling assertions in it, some of the most alarming were from Dr. Stephen Rosenthal of the University of California, San Francisco. His claims went unchallenged (except for brief, tepid criticism from Erica Anderson, a man who claims to be a woman, no less) when he said that puberty blockers pose a “theoretical” harm to bone development, and how youth patients in the clinic must "determine their gender" by age 14. What does that even mean? Also uncritically reported was how UCSF gender clinicians "anticipate a future in which trans women will be able to carry their own babies to term, thanks to medical breakthroughs such as uterine transplantation."
For the record, editors, "trans women" are men and they cannot and will never give birth, and anyone who attempts transplanting a uterus in a male body is committing a medical atrocity.
As one who has reported extensively on these issues and co-produced several seasons of a documentary podcast, if you’re serious about delving into the truth, here are a few pointers.
Come clean and admit that your coverage of these issues was one-sided and painfully biased. Ask tough questions of the activist doctors you relied upon and scrutinize their activities in many hotly contested cases nationwide. I recommend starting with Rosenthal and Olson-Kennedy. Those two involve themselves in legal matters of all kinds from contentious child custody disputes to lawsuits against states like Alabama that are trying to safeguard children. Talk to Ted Hudacko, whose son, as a minor, underwent a surgical procedure to implant a puberty-blocking device in his arm at the pediatric gender clinic Rosenthal co-founded, in clear violation of a court order.
You might also explain to Katherine Cave why you dismissed her. Cave, as you may recall, detailed in The Public Discourse how she got nowhere with you in 2017 when she alerted you to the enormous depth of this scandal. We know you were at least aware of it then; some of us were reporting on these subjects when almost no one else was.
Consider apologizing to the American College of Pediatricians for your hit piece that you published in June of last year, and for this similarly dishonest 2020 article characterizing the radical feminist Women’s Liberation Front as “right-wing” (they are not).
You should self-reflect that you were part of an insular information ecosystem that declined to review watershed works like Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, and tuned out radical feminists like Kara Dansky who has labored tirelessly for years, pointing out the dangers of gender medicalization in her books The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls: and The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls. You might also engage other thoughtful left-wing voices, like Lisa Selin Davis, who has tried for years to cover these issues fairly in mainstream outlets.
You should also contact Jennifer Bilek, whose astonishing investigative work tracing the money trail behind the trans industry connected the dots for so many who were struggling to discern what was driving this behemoth. While you’re at it, speak with Dr. Michael Laidlaw, an endocrinologist who has been FOIA-ing the NIH and other government entities, uncovering appalling anecdotes — such as Olson-Kennedy lowering the age for the cross-sex hormone cohort inclusion criteria from 13 to 8 in the same study she withheld.
If you want to be courageous and cutting-edge, reach out to the extremely brave women at Reduxx and inquire about the group of seedy academics who write sadistic pornography, and whose online forum their journalists infiltrated. Some of those castration-enthusiast men have shaped transgender health guidelines for years.
Be forewarned, it’s a dark abyss.
If you start doing good journalism along these lines, maybe you will earn back the public trust. Until then, it seems you’d rather have us believe that you want to see scientific integrity and more caution with these experimental medical practices and that you have never thought otherwise.
For many of us in these brutal trenches, that won’t fly given how you’ve carried water for this reprobate movement, only occasionally allowing a few words of criticism to appear in your pages. This is called a “limited hangout,” right? It has been beyond infuriating to watch you refuse to do your job as thousands of children were irreversibly sterilized and maimed and countless families were fractured.
Amid these changing cultural, scientific, and political winds I’d advise that you ‘fess up, Washington Post. Remember, confession is good for the soul, and I’ll remind you that screenshots and Wayback Machine are forever.
Some of us have kept the receipts on your derelict reporting.
Brandon Showalter has a bachelor's degree from Bridgewater College in Virginia and a master's degree from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Listen to Showalter's Generation Indoctrination podcast at The Christian Post and edifi app Send news tips to: brandon.showalter@christianpost.com Follow on Facebook: BrandonMarkShowalter Follow on Twitter: @BrandonMShow
