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Will Charlie Kirk Be the Next Rupert Murdoch?
As the original shapers of right-wing media fade into history, Kirk seemingly hopes to raise his own profile in the conservative movement by leaning into increasingly hardcore far-right positions.
Sep 24, 2023
Rupert Murdochannounced on September 21 that he will be stepping down as chairman of Fox Corp. and News Corp. after a 70-year career poisoning global media with right-wing lies and hate. Fox is now in the hands of Lachlan Murdoch, whose track record at the company indicates he is even more grimly ideological than his father, serving as the main force backing Tucker Carlson’s on-air white supremacy and pushing the network to support Donald Trump’s 2020 election lies despite their financial consequences.
While Rupert Murdoch repeatedly made clear in his announcement that he does not intend to take his thumb entirely off the scale of his outlets, the question of who will now rise to prominence in the right-wing media ecosystem lingers. In just the last few years, the movement’s founding fathers, including Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and Rush Limbaugh, have died or stepped away, leaving conservative media without a center of gravity. Lachlan Murdoch and other rising right-wing media figures are jockeying to lead the hate and misinformation machine into the next generation.
One of these figures is Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk.
Since first appearing on the scene in 2012, when he had just barely graduated from high school, Kirk has built TPUSA into a reported $80 million media empire. The organization hosts numerous shows and has millions of followers across multiple social media platforms. Kirk himself is a Salem Radio host whose nationally syndicated program is broadcast in Limbaugh’s old time slot.
Kirk has appeared at least 235 times on weekday Fox shows since 2018, though his last appearance was May 18, 2023, having since seemingly been blacklisted from the network.
TPUSA is purportedly an organization representing the next generation of conservative activists, with Kirk as their leading voice. But there is scant evidence that the group has a genuine connection with Gen Z, whose social and political attitudes are overwhelmingly liberal. An October 2021 internal presentation obtained by The Vergestated that only 15% of Turning Point’s Instagram audience is actually student-aged. As the organization’s own documentation states: “The content that is going out right now is completely missing our target audience.” (TPUSA told The Verge that “the presentations in question contain multiple inaccuracies and erroneous data.”)
As the original shapers of right-wing media fade into history, Kirk seemingly hopes to capture the attention of the next generation and raise his own profile in the conservative movement by leaning into increasingly hardcore far-right positions. On the very same day that Murdoch announced he was stepping down, Kirk took to his radio show and launched into a vile, racist attack on migrants on the southern border, declaring that a “foreign invasion” of “fighting-age young males who will end up raping many of your daughters.”
He also specifically invoked and validated the white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory.
“Obviously the Democrat Party supports this because of power,” Kirk declared. “They smear us and slander us when we bring up the great replacement. The Castro brothers themselves have said that was the reason.”
“You should be at fever-pitch anger,” he concluded.
Kirk is only reflecting the lasting influence of Tucker Carlson, who brought the great replacement conspiracy theory to mainstream conservative audiences with the full backing of Lachlan Murdoch, who is now the sole chair of his family’s global media empire.
But the Charlie Kirk of today would be unrecognizable to who he was yesterday. In his comprehensive history of the first 10 years of TPUSA, University of North Georgia rhetoric professor Matthew Boedy notes that as the organization has grown, Kirk has expressed increasingly extreme views, including on the topic of immigration.
In 2019, Kirk came under attack by the white nationalist “groyper” movement after he stated that “highly educated immigrants should get ‘a green card’ stapled to their U.S. college diplomas.” This kicked off the so-called “groyper wars” in which followers of neo-Nazi Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes repeatedly confronted Kirk with racist and antisemitic dog whistles while he was on a speaking tour. Kirk ultimately penned an apologia on American Greatness, the same far-right blog that had launched the initial criticism.
Just recently, Fuentes bragged that his followers had infiltrated Turning Point USA and his one-time target had now adopted his messaging.
“I think in 2023, Charlie Kirk, all these others, they sound way more like me, today, than they sound like themselves four years ago,” Fuentes said, before launching into an attack on Jewish people.
Kirk has also radicalized significantly against LGBTQ+ people.
In 2019, he posted a video of an exchange with an audience member labeled “CHARLIE KIRK TAKES DOWN ANTI-GAY EXTREMIST.” In the video, the audience member condemned Kirk for accepting gay people in the conservative movement. Kirk defended himself and gay conservatives, asking, “What does what they do in their private life concern you so much?” and adding that if you do not embrace and love all people as Jesus did, “then you, sir, are not a conservative.”
As Boedy points out, a TPUSA chapter guide from 2017 specifically instructs participants: “no talk about abortion, gay marriage, etc.”
Since then, Kirk has become one of the most extreme voices singling out LGBTQ+ people for violence across the right-wing media.
- In August, Kirk said that trans people who join fraternities and sororities should “be made fun of so much, bullied so much, crying so much, they would get themselves out.”
- Kirk has referred to trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney with an anti-trans slur on multiple occasions.
- Kirk called LGBTQ+ identification a “social contagion.”
- During 2023’s Pride Month, Kirk vowed to remember “all the gay flag stuff” at Starbucks after several stores caved to right-wing pressure to take down Pride decorations.
- On the first day of Pride Month, Kirk tweeted, “Pride is a sin.”
- Kirk has argued that “monogamous heterosexual marriage should be a prerequisite to adoption.”
- In 2022, Kirk warned that gay people “are not happy just having marriage. Instead, they now want to corrupt your children.”
But perhaps Kirk’s biggest transformation has been on the role of religion.
Boedy tracks this transformation masterfully. As TPUSA was getting off the ground, Kirk criticized the conservative movement of decades past for evangelizing too much, claimed to promote right-wing values “through a secular worldview,” and once told an audience that “he saw his job as the face of TPUSA as ‘no different than’ being a plumber or electrician, who likely don’t tell everyone they met about their religion.”
In 2021, Kirk launched the TPUSA Faith initiative, which he has used as a platform to increasingly lean into Christian nationalism. Since then, TPUSA Faith launched Freedom Life Church, a network of TPUSA-aligned congregations with the expressed goal “to change the trajectory of our nation by restoring America's biblical values.”
In 2022, he declared, “There is no separation of church and state.”
Kirk has also falsely claimed that the Founding Fathers based our system of government on the Book of Genesis, and speaks of the country as engaged in a “spiritual battle.”
The Murdochs and Fox News are also directly responsible for helping Kirk launch his career. As TPUSA was just getting off the ground, Kirk started becoming a semi-regular guest on Fox News as the youthful face of opposing the Obama presidency, often hosted by Neil Cavuto. Kirk has appeared at least 235 times on weekday Fox shows since 2018, though his last appearance was May 18, 2023, having since seemingly been blacklisted from the network.
Like the rest of us, Charlie Kirk is getting older, but high school and college students are staying the same age. Conservative media across the board face an uphill battle if they want to win over Gen Z. So far, Kirk’s strategic approach to inheriting the house that Rupert (and Rush) built has been to amplify the extremist fringes.
Jacina Hollins-Borges and Jack Wheatley contributed research to this piece.
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A 2024 GOP Victory Is an Existential Threat to Life on Earth
It’s important to examine what a second Trump or 2025 MAGA presidency would look like, what effect it would have on America and the world, and how it will impact average Americans.
Aug 03, 2023
Every day that goes by, even with Tuesday’s newest indictment, looks more and more like former President Donald Trump will be the GOP’s standard bearer in 2024. After all, his popularity stood at 44% when NY DA Alvin Bragg indicted him; it then rose to 49% when he was indicted in the documents crime; following his conviction for raping E. Jean Caroll it rose to 54% among Republicans.
But even if he’s not the candidate, Republican primary voters will demand a candidate with the same affection for Russian President Vladimir Putin and other dictators; the same disdain for racial, religious, and gender minorities; the same abusive attitude toward women and girls; the same faux embrace of Confederate and hillbilly values and hatred of city-dwellers and college graduates; the same cavalier attitude toward guns and fossil fuels.
There’s also the growing possibility that Trump or another MAGA Republican could win the White House. Yesterday, both the New York Times and CNN reported on polls showing that Trump and President Joe Biden are right now at a dead heat.
The prosecution of Trump (which almost certainly won’t be resolved before the election—and it’s not even remotely possible that appeals would be resolved by then—because of Garland’s dithering for two years) could backfire politically and make him into a popular martyr even with Republicans who disliked him before.
And even if Trump collapses in the polls as the result of the indictments, which is unlikely (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is under indictment for bribery and some pretty terrible stuff, and he just got re-elected), there are numerous other Republicans who would love to take his place.
And no matter who it is, if they are MAGA inclined, Trump has shown them where there are levers of power and corruption that are consequential in ways that they never dreamed of before him.
Biden, at 81, faces multiple possible personal scenarios that could pull him out of the race. No Labels and the Green Party’s candidates (presumably Joe Manchin and Cornell West) could pull enough votes from Biden to hand the election to Trump as Jill Stein did in three swing states in 2016 (she pulled more votes in each of those states than Trump’s margin of victory).
The prosecution of Trump (which almost certainly won’t be resolved before the election—and it’s not even remotely possible that appeals would be resolved by then—because of Garland’s dithering for two years) could backfire politically and make him into a popular martyr even with Republicans who disliked him before.
And don’t discount the impact Putin throwing millions of rubles into social media can have: His previous fleet of trolls overwhelming social media helped get Trump elected in 2016 and drove Brits to make the crazy decision to separate from the European Union.
So, it’s important to examine what a second Trump or 2025 MAGA presidency would look like, what effect it would have on America and the world, and how it will impact average Americans.
Forewarned, after all, is forearmed, and all these predictions are based on past behavior and public statements:
Women make up 51% of the American populace but they won’t be spared by a MAGA presidency.
MAGA voters celebrate Trump’s “proof of manhood” through his multiple sexual assaults, from his alleged rape of 13-year-old Katie Johnson (with Jeffrey Epstein) to the adult E. Jean Carroll and more than 20 others. He publicly bragged that he just “grabs them by the…” whenever he wants, and Republicans—including more than half of all white women voters—ran to the polls to mark his name on their ballots.
The MAGA base supports bans on abortion: The white nationalist part of that base is fervent about having more white babies (and middle class white women are the most likely to get abortions when they’re legal, according to these people).
Catholics and evangelicals even support bans on birth control, an issue that’s already been floated by Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court and in several state legislatures. Fully 195 Republican members of the House of Representatives voted against protecting birth control from state bans. And all of the Republicans on the Court are conservative Catholics (Neil Gorsuch attends his wife’s church, but was raised Catholic).
Additionally, MAGA Republicans support ending no-fault divorce and limiting alimony, putting women back under husband’s thumbs; lowering the marriage age for girls to as low as 12, as Republicans have already attempted in Idaho, Wyoming, Tennessee, Missouri, and Louisiana; and seizing and monitoring the health and doctor’s records of all childbearing-age women to catch early pregnancies so those women can be detained or surveilled “for their own good” (yes, it’s already happened).
The LGBTQ+ community will come under assault in ways not seen for decades.
Like in Germany in 1933, the trans community will be the first to come under assault, a process that’s already begun as red state after red state enacts laws banning gender-affirming healthcare. Drag queens are already criminalized in multiple states.
Gays and lesbians won’t be far behind; Republicans are already trying to outlaw gay marriage and adoption. Three-quarters of all House Republicans voted against a Democratic bill protecting gay marriage; all but one Republican on the House Appropriations Committee voted for a Republican bill that would allow states to ban gay and lesbian parents from adopting.
Stochastic terrorism against the LGBTQ+ community will explode, and, in a throwback to the 1980s (when former President Ronald Reagan refused to say the word “AIDS” for eight long years as tens of thousands, including close friends of mine, died) and before, rural law enforcement will often yawn when queer people are assaulted or even murdered.
Terror against racial and religious minorities will become routine.
When minority communities rise up in indignation and step out into the streets to demand protection from roving bands of street Nazis, armed vigilantes will threaten and even kill them with impunity.
The last time Trump was president and sanctioned a “very fine people on both sides” climate of hate and bigotry, incidents of lone-wolf terrorism exploded. Jews executed at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue; Blacks gunned down in a supermarket in Buffalo and executed at Mother Emmanuel church in Charleston; Hispanics slaughtered in El Paso. All of the killers cited or wrote what were essentially MAGA or MAGA-aligned propaganda instruments as part of their motivation.
When minority communities rise up in indignation and step out into the streets to demand protection from roving bands of street Nazis, armed vigilantes will threaten and even kill them with impunity. As I noted Tuesday, Kyle Rittenhouse is now lionized by Republicans and three states have passed into law provisions that hold people who kill protestors with their cars free from prosecution.
American support for democracy around the world will end and Putin will destroy Ukraine.
During his first four years, Trump did everything he could to ridicule and minimize our democratic allies and suck up to strongman dictators around the world.
He tried to blackmail Ukraine’s president and then withheld defensive weapons from that country when Volodymyr Zelenskyy refused to go along.
He told the world that he trusts Putin more than America’s intelligence services. After meeting privately with Putin, he demanded a list of all of America’s spies and their stations around the world; within months, the CIA reported that their assets were being murdered with an unprecedented speed and efficiency.
He or his son-in-law conveyed top-secret documents to the brutal murderer MBS in Saudi Arabia that enabled him to stage a coup and seize control of that nation, a gift for which the Trump family has already received at least $2.5 billion with more coming every day.
Trump has now said that he will end the Ukraine war “in 24 hours.” His strategy? As Mike Pence (who would know) said, “The only way you’d solve this war in a day is if you gave Vladimir Putin what he wanted.”
Putin’s allies, in fact, have told the press that his main strategy for seizing all of Ukraine is to wait for Trump to re-take the White House (and, of course, he’ll do everything he can to make that happen). And just last week, in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump came right out and said that he’d end all arms support to Ukraine on day one.
Seeing that America will no longer defend democracies, China will take Taiwan and North Korea may well attack South Korea. It could trigger a nuclear World War III, although instead of America being the “bulwark of freedom” as we were in the 1940s, that burden will fall to Europe, Japan, and Australia.
Reagan’s Republican War on Workers will resume and even pick up steam.
The Heritage Foundation already has a 900+ page plan to change the American government, stripping the DOJ, FBI, FCC, and the Fed of their independence while ending most union rights and effectively outlawing strikes.
Billionaires will receive more tax cuts, Social Security and Medicare will be fully privatized, and public schools will be replaced with vouchers for private, segregated, religious academies as has already happened under Republican administrations in Arizona and Florida.
The Environmental Protection Agency and other regulatory agencies that protect workers, consumers, and the environment will be gutted to the point of impotence in the face of corporate and billionaire assaults.
Efforts to mitigate the climate emergency will be rolled back, and fossil fuel extraction and use will explode.
If Trump or another MAGA Republican is elected, civilization-ending weather and the death of much of humanity is virtually assured.
The world just lived through the hottest month in human history; ocean waters off Florida are at the temperature Jacuzzi recommends for their hot tubs; the world’s oceans are dying and winter sea ice isn’t forming in Antarctica.
Right now we humans are adding heat to the atmosphere (because of higher levels of greenhouse gasses) at a rate identical to 345,600 Hiroshima bombs going off in our atmosphere every day: four nuclear bombs per second, every second, minute, and hour of every day.
In response, our planet is screaming at us.
Fossil fuel billionaires and their shills, however, are unconcerned as they continue to fund climate denial nonprofits and Republican politicians who claim it’s all a hoax. They apparently believe their vast wealth will insulate them from the most dire effects.
And they’re probably right: A third of poverty-stricken Bangladesh was underwater this year, as drought, floods, wildfires, heat domes, bomb cyclones, tornadoes, derechos, and typhoons ravaged America with unprecedented ferocity. Increasingly, those without the financial means to withstand weather disasters are killed or wiped out, losing their family homes and often their livelihoods.
Scientists tell us we may have as few as five years, and certainly not more than 20, to end our use of fossil fuels and fully transition to clean renewables. Even within the five-year window it’s technically feasible, but if Trump or another MAGA Republican is elected, civilization-ending weather and the death of much of humanity is virtually assured.
We must wake up America.
So, yeah, let’s take seriously the existential threat a MAGA president represents to our nation, the nations of the world, and all life on Earth. The stakes have literally never been higher.
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Court Ruling Gets Right What Corporate News Often Gets Wrong About Gender-Affirming Care
Anti-trans Republicans are citing various articles from centrist sources simply because they uncritically repeat their talking points.
Jun 24, 2023
A federal judge issued a temporary injunction this month that partially blocked enforcement of Florida’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors. In a 44-page opinion, Judge Robert Hinkle offered a lengthy rebuke of the arguments presented by the state of Florida to medically justify banning gender-affirming care—which happen to be many of the same arguments that corporate media have uncritically parroted.
In the ruling, Hinkle wrote:
In support of their position, the defendants have proffered a laundry list of purported justifications for the statute and rules. The purported justifications are largely pretextual and, in any event, do not call for a different result.
To bolster their legal case, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration hired consultants and expert witnesses from anti-trans organizations, including the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds), which has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, to make false and misleading claims about the science behind gender-affirming care. Right-wing media outlets regularly give such sources a platform to make those claims (e.g., Fox News 3/30/23; New York Post, 1/30/23; Federalist, 2/1/23), but centrist outlets, too, often credulously air such claims, laundering them for a mainstream audience.
Claim #1: The evidence for gender-affirming care is “low quality”
The state of Florida argued that bans on gender-affirming care are justified because the evidence for such treatments has been ranked “low quality” on the GRADE scale used to evaluate medical studies.
GRADE scores studies on a scale from “high quality” to “very low quality.” Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are typically the only studies that are given high quality ratings. But RCTs cannot always be conducted, including, in many cases, for gender-affirming treatments, because it is unethical to perform research that denies a control group the best proven treatment when there is a risk of serious harm.
This does not mean that doctors cannot confidently make recommendations based on “low-quality” evidence. Pediatricians firmly recommend not giving aspirin to children for fevers, even though its association with Reye’s syndrome is not based on randomized trials, because such experiments would be unethical. As the guidelines make clear:
A particular level of quality does not imply a particular strength of recommendation. Sometimes, low- or very low–quality evidence can lead to a strong recommendation.
Hinkle’s opinion dispenses with the state’s “low quality” argument, pointing out that it omits the important context about how often treatments with such evidence are commonly accepted:
It is commonplace for medical treatments to be provided even when supported only by research producing evidence classified as “low” or “very low” on this scale. The record includes unrebutted testimony that only about 13.5% of accepted medical treatments across all disciplines are supported by “high”-quality evidence on the GRADE scale.
The Economist didn’t see any need for such nuance, though. A lengthy article titled “The Evidence to Support Medicalised Gender Transitions in Adolescents Is Worryingly Weak” (4/5/23) justified its headline by citing “low-quality” evidence, absent any context about how common that is. For instance: “WPATH, for its part, did look at the psychological effects of blockers and hormones. It found scant, low-quality evidence.” And: “For both classes of drug, NICE assessed the quality of the papers it analyzed as ‘very low,’ its poorest rating.” The piece closed on the same note: “It is impossible to justify the current recommendations about gender-affirming care based on the existing data.”
Reuters (10/6/22) similarly published a “special report” about gender-affirming care for youth that emphasized the “uncertain ground” of “[going] the medical route,” with a subhead announcing that families “must make decisions about life-altering treatments that have little scientific evidence of their long-term safety and efficacy.”
The same kinds of misleading claims about quality of evidence have appeared in columns at the Washington Post (5/2/23) and Newsweek (2/22/22).
Claim #2: Puberty blockers “lock in” kids’ gender identities
The New York Times, which has become notorious for its bad coverage of trans issues, has at least twice (6/9/23, 11/14/22) uncritically presented the speculative claim that puberty blockers “lock in” kids on a pathway toward subsequent treatment with cross-sex hormones. Both articles cited a portion of a report by Dr. Hillary Cass, commissioned by the English National Health Service to review its gender-identity services:“The most difficult question is whether puberty blockers do indeed provide valuable time for children and young people to consider their options, or whether they effectively ‘lock in’ children and young people to a treatment pathway,” Dr. Hilary Cass, the pediatrician overseeing the independent review of the NHS gender service, wrote last year.
The Cass review provided no studies indicating that blockers “lock in” children toward a treatment pathway. Instead, it cited two small studies showing that nearly all participants who start blockers (96.5% and 98%) proceed to cross-sex hormones.
Hinkle’s ruling points out two problems with this claim that the Times doesn’t. First, this is correlation, not causation. Second, there’s a more plausible explanation, backed by research, that most kids proceed to cross-sex hormones because they had persistent transgender identities before starting blockers:
The defendants note that 98% or more of adolescents treated with GnRH agonists progress to cross-sex hormones. That is hardly an indictment of the treatment; it is instead consistent with the view that in 98% or more of the cases, the patient’s gender identity did not align with natal sex, this was accurately determined, and the patient was appropriately treated first with GnRH agonists and later with cross-sex hormones.
Other centrist outlets, such as NPR (10/26/22) and the Daily Beast (10/22/22), came to the same conclusion as Hinkle, that 98% of kids going on to cross-sex hormones suggests they were properly treated with blockers. As the Daily Beast wrote:
These results run contrary to one of the major political talking points against gender-affirming care for transgender youth: that kids, when given time and space, largely move past gender dysphoria. This false narrative has been used to justify bans for gender-affirming care, despite this study confirming past research about transgender youth who seek medical transitions for gender dysphoria.
The Times, however, went with a kinder and gentler version of the Heritage Foundation’s take on this phenomenon, as spelled out in the Daily Signal (6/17/22):
By encouraging minors to “pause” puberty, physicians and transgender activists are inevitably forcing those children to take cross-sex hormones and permanently mutilate their bodies, which only furthers gender dysphoria, hopelessness and suicidal thoughts, the very things they claim to be working against.
Claim #3: Europe is banning gender-affirming care
England, Sweden and Finland’s restrictions on gender-affirming care have become fodder for Republicans seeking to ban that care in states across the US. What they don’t mention is that care remains available under these countries’ national health systems in certain circumstances, and adolescents who can’t get gender-affirming care under the new guidelines can still freely obtain it from private clinics.Hinkle called out the fallacy of comparing Florida’s total ban on care to what is happening in Europe:
A heading in the defendants’ response to the current motions is typical: “Florida Joins the International Consensus.” The assertion is false. And no matter how many times the defendants say it, it will still be false. No country in Europe—or so far as shown by this record, anywhere in the world—entirely bans these treatments.
Freida Klotz writing for the Atlantic (4/28/23) doesn’t ignore this distinction entirely. She just buries it deep within a story headlined “A Teen Gender-Care Debate Is Spreading Across Europe.” The lead asserts a direct comparison between what is happening in certain European countries and in red states in the US:
As Republicans across the US intensify their efforts to legislate against transgender rights, they are finding aid and comfort in an unlikely place: Western Europe, where governments and medical authorities in at least five countries that once led the way on gender-affirming treatments for children and adolescents are now reversing course, arguing that the science undergirding these treatments is unproven, and their benefits unclear.
Four paragraphs into the article, we get a very brief mention in passing that Europe has not banned these treatments: “But doctors do not agree, particularly in Europe, where no treatments have been banned, but a genuine debate is unfurling in this field.”
Klotz waits until 2,500 words into the article to really spell out the critical distinction that doctors are not being criminalized in Europe, and can even prescribe these treatments against the guidelines:
Indeed, doctors in the Netherlands are still free to provide gender-affirming care as they see fit. The same is true of their colleagues in Finland, Sweden, France, Norway and the UK, where new official guidelines and recommendations are not binding. No legal prohibitions have been put in place in Europe, as they have been in more than a dozen US states, where physicians risk losing their medical license or facing criminal sanctions for prescribing certain forms of gender-affirming care.
Forbes (6/6/23) also buried this information at the end of a more than 1,400-word commentary about gender-affirming care restrictions in Europe. But to Forbes and the Atlantic‘s credit, at least they get to it eventually.
Jonathan Chait, on the other hand, didn’t even bother mentioning the distinction in his New York column (2/17/23) that cites European restrictions as a justification for corporate media’s endless coverage of the supposed “scientific debate” around gender-affirming care.
Claim #4: US medical associations can’t be trusted
Gender-affirming care for adolescents is endorsed by all major US medical associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American Medical Association, American Psychological Association and the Endocrine Society. Republicans have a ready-made explanation for this: These organizations have been captured by activists, and are following “wokeness” rather than science.To bolster their claims, they point to a small minority of anti-trans activist doctors who claim that their voices have been stifled within these organizations. Hinkle didn’t buy that argument:
It is fanciful to believe that all the many medical associations who have endorsed gender-affirming care, or who have spoken out or joined an amicus brief supporting the plaintiffs in this litigation, have so readily sold their patients down the river. The great weight of medical authority supports these treatments.
The Economist (7/28/22) buys it, though. An article headlined “Questioning America’s Approach to Transgender Healthcare” centered on a letter from the organization Genspect that called on the American Academy of Pediatrics to review its policies on gender-affirming care:
Genspect, an international group of clinicians and parents, wrote to the AAP calling for a “nonpartisan and systematic review of evidence,” saying: “Many of our children have received this care and are anything but thriving.”
“An international group of clinicians and parents” is a generous way of describing Genspect, making it seem like a broad coalition of experts questioning the AAP’s guidelines. The Economist leaves out the fact that the organization opposes medical transition for anyone under the age of 25, and supports conversion therapy.
Helen Lewis, in an “Ideas” piece for the Atlantic (5/4/23), argues similarly that US medical organizations have caved to pressure from activists rather than following evidence-based practices:
To skeptics, the American medical guidelines appear less evidence-based than consensus-based. A sharper way to put that would be that medical associations, under political pressure from activists, may have succumbed to well-intentioned groupthink.
Lewis cites a BMJ article (2/23/23) by Jennifer Block, headlined “Gender Dysphoria in Young People Is Rising—and So Is Professional Disagreement,” as “accurately describ[ing] the flimsiness of the current evidence” on which American medical organizations are basing their guidelines. That BMJ article opened with an anecdote giving the impression that gender-affirming care was a hotly debated topic at the AAP’s 2022 convention:
Last October the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) gathered inside the Anaheim Convention Center in California for its annual conference. Outside, several dozen people rallied to hear speakers including Abigail Martinez, a mother whose child began hormone treatment at age 16 and died by suicide at age 19. Supporters chanted the teen’s given name, Yaeli; counter protesters chanted, “Protect trans youth!” For viewers on a livestream, the feed was interrupted as the two groups fought for the camera.
Block failed to mention that for all of the theatrics, supporters of a resolution to reconsider the AAP’s stance on gender-affirming care could not even get the necessary co-sponsors to bring it to a vote.
The BMJ article is filled with a number of other misleading claims and references, including the mention of detransitioner Chloe Cole, saying she “had a double mastectomy at age 15 and spoke at the AAP rally.” It leaves out that Cole works with right-wing politicians to ban gender-affirming care.
It says a major NIH study on gender-affirming care “doesn’t include a concurrent no-treatment control group,” without mentioning that such a group would be unethical by World Medical Association standards. And it relies on the misleading claim of “low-quality” evidence, absent any context about how common this is with other treatments.
Block’s BMJ article has also been cited by ACPeds in a lawsuit against the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) over a rule prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity in federally funded health services. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey pointed to it in a letter to Kansas City police officers urging them to enforce his ban on gender-affirming treatments, and it was used by an expert witness for the state of Florida in defense of denying Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming treatments.
The Economist’s coverage was also cited in the ACPeds lawsuit, and the New York Times’ coverage of gender-affirming care has been routinely cited by Republicans seeking to roll back trans peoples’ rights to access gender-affirming treatments.
Block has deflected criticism by saying it’s “bad faith” not to discuss the issue just because Republicans have anti-trans motivations for banning gender-affirming care. Discussion, though, is not the problem; it’s that the coverage by these publications is highly misleading. Republicans are citing these articles from centrist sources, not because they discuss the issue, but because they uncritically repeat their talking points.
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