The Media Research Center’s Clay Waters spent a May 10 post being angry that others don’t hate transgender people as much as he does:
Here’s the latest in an occasional series on how Parents magazine, a popular and ostensibly harmless outlet providing child-caring tips, smuggles in ultra-left-wing views inside the diaper bags, views that are harmful to the very children Parents is supposed to be helping. The latest offensive entry, “Medical Experts Continue to Support Gender-Affirming Care for Trans Youth — It can change and save lives,” was written by Wendy Wisner and posted Wednesday. Read it before it gets flushed down the memory hole as well!
[…]There’s bias by omission here, ignoring the recent pullback on “gender-affirming care” in Europe and especially policy changes in the United Kingdom driven by the comprehensive 2024 Cass Report from the National Health Service:
In fact, the Cass Report was not terribly “comprehensive”; one review of the report found that it “misinterprets and misrepresents its own data,” “does not follow established standards for evaluating evidence and evidence quality” and “levies unsupported assertions about gender identity, gender dysphoria, standard practices, and the safety of gender-affirming medical treatments, and repeats claims that have been disproved by sound evidence.” Still, Waters continued to rant that the Academy of American Pediatrics questioned the Cass report:
Never forget that the supposed academic health experts at AAP are in fact Democratic hacks, and the group’s institutional credibility has been on the decline since it recommended masking up toddlers; and contradicting its previous strong call to re-open schools after President Trump called for the same thing in a stunning display of cowardice surely spurred by the powerful left-wing teachers union leadership.
Waters offered no evidence that the AAP’s criticism of the Cass report was driven by “Democratic hacks.” Instead, he whined that “Parents continued to boost the dangerous misnomer ‘gender-affirming care.'” Yes, Waters is declaring that certain words are “dangerous.”
Tim Graham — who loves to complain that non-right-wing media won’t use right-wing terminology — similarly groused about use of “gender-affirming care” in a June 8 post:
One easy test of whether a media outlet is truly “fact-based” is the claims and lingo of transgender advocates. That goes double for “independent fact-checkers.” If you call hormone blockers or amputation surgeries “gender-affirming care,” then you are using the fact-mangling rhetoric of activists, not caring for facts. These types of “care” are clearly denying the actual and factual gender. It’s like using the term “life-saving abortion.”
On June 2, PolitiFact writer Grace Abels — “a staff writer focused on LGBTQ issues” — provided one of their explainer articles headlined:
Yes, House budget bill eliminates federal Medicaid dollars for trans adults’ gender-affirming care
Why is a “fact checker” using this Orwellian term? The lefties are upset that the Trump administration is not going to allow taxpayer-funded transgender procedures through Medicaid.
[…]Not counting the headline, Abels used this “gender-affirming” term 18 times (not including the headline). It might get exhausting to quote them all. Nowhere in this article is a conservative counterpoint.
Graham didn’t explain why his right-wing brand of transphobia must be injected into the article. The rest of Graham’s post is a personal attack on Abels, whining that one post critical of J.D. Vance “used the ‘gender-affirming’ lingo 18 times” and huffing that her alleged “goal is to assist the LGBTQ activists, and who cares if conservatives are considered?” Does Graham ever consider the views of non-conservatives in his posts except to launch partisan attacks on them? Not really — his goal is to assist his fellow transphobes and homophobes.
Neither Waters nor Graham offered anything but partisan and transphobic arguments against the “gender-affirming care” term.