Timeline: Reuters Report on Increase in Gender Dysphoria Diagnosed Youth
by Evan Urquhart
This is our timeline coverage of a lengthy October 6 report by Reuters on gender dysphoria in youth. The report’s findings were quickly taken up by right-wing media as fuel for the ongoing moral panic over youth transition. Assigned noticed this story soon after Reuters published it, on October 6. (We posted this tweet thread at the time with some analysis, including the prediction that the story would soon find traction in the extremist and right wing news ecosystem.)
Reuters is an international news agency that functions as a journalism utility, and this report is longform and difficult to summarize. It combines an attempt to quantify how many youth are being diagnosed and treated for gender dysphoria in the US, a profile of a single transfemme adolescent who is accessing treatment, some slightly misleading information about how experimental these treatments are, and a host of other information on the topic.
Reporters Chad Terhune, Robin Respaut, and Michelle Conlin used a novel methodology to estimate the prevalence of gender dysphoria diagnoses and treatments in the US. They found at least 121,882 US children between the ages of 6 and 17 have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria in the past five years, and 17,683 of these have recieved some form of treatment.
The timeline below is in reverse chronological order. jump to where the story starts
10/12/2022
Falun-Gong Fringe Website: The Epoch Times, an extreme right website owned by a Chinese religious sext, mentions the Reuters story in a story which casts the legal battles over affirming care for trans youth in martial terms.
10/8/2022
Heritage Funded Website: The Daily Signal provides its coverage of Reuters’ work. It’s reasonably accurate, all told, but includes multiple links to misleading information on a much less reliable right wing site.
Tucker Carlson’s Former Website: Daily Caller has an article that is mostly complaining about how expensive transgender surgeries are (hormones, in contrast, are fairly inexpensive and msee much wider use), but it references Reuters’ numbers and includes has a large embed of Reuters’ tweet announcing their report.
Possibly Fake Far Right News: A site called the Washington Standard, about which we could find very little independent information, but noticed returned search results describing false news sites, published a piece on the Reuters’ numbers under the headline 121,882 Children as Young as 6 Tracked for Transgender ‘Treatment’.
10/7/2022
Sinclair-Owned Local News Stations: A recap of Reuters’ reporting appears on websites for Sinclair-owned local TV stations, including a link to an entirely debunked statistic overstating the rate of desistance by a huge margin. The link leads to transgendertrend, a well-known anti-trans hate site. (Sinclair is a large telecommunications conglomerate known for placing conservative opinion onto its many local news networks.)
Right Wing Politics Site: The Washington Examiner, a right wing political news source based in Washington, DC, has an opinion piece with the headline “Your 4-year-old Child is Not Transgender.” This gutter journalism takes aim at Ryace, the transgender teen whose story is one of the primary lenses through which gender dysphoria is viewed in the Reuters’ piece. Reading Reuters’ reporting, it’s clear that Ryace’s story is one of the clearest cases of early onset gender dysphoria with no mental health complications imaginable, but the writer for the Examiner goes beyond misleading and into full dishonestly in her treatment of the material, maligning the family by claiming that they’ve forced Ryace to be a girl rather than, as told to Reuters, slowly coming to accept her girlhood after years of Ryace very clearly and consistently identifying herself that way.
Deep Red Blog: Right wing political blog RedState proceeds from the unwarranted assumption that the increase in gender dysphoria diagnoses found by Reuters was the result of the left “push[ing] transgender ideology on children,” and it only gets more overwrought from there.
Tucker Carlson’s Former Website: Extreme right website the Daily Caller, which until 2020 was closely associated with white nationalist FOX host Tucker Carlson, continues the practice of highlighting the smallest numbers in the Reuters’ piece, calling attention to the “dozens” of genital surgeries performed on US minors. Genital surgery for youth under the age of 18 are almost unheard of, although in some very rare cases 17 year olds have been allowed to access this treatment. Genital surgery is also among the best studied treatments for transgender people, with a history dating back to the 1930s, and numerous studies supporting it’s efficacy in improving outcomes for trans women.
Christian Post-Cable: FISM TV is a Christian “television” network that appears to be online only, so not actually on television. Their headline leads with the absolute least scary or impressive of all the numbers from Reuters, blaring that “hundreds” of children have undergone gender transition related surgery since 2019. (The US is a county of 330 million people.) The article itself veers off from the Reuters’ data and features a cameo by researcher Lisa Littman, whose study of parental attitudes which looked at the opinions of parents who frequented a transphobic website, and introduced a likely non-existent condition Littman (and the anti-trans website) have named Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.
Small Constellation of Hate Sites: The first example we turned up in the wild was a hate site, which seems to have reposted content from a hate blog, which in turn had grabbed it from an extremist news site.
10/6/2022
Reuters’ in depth investigation into youth gender dysphoria treatment goes live. Much like the AP, Reuters functions as a utility service providing reporting to other news outlets, which means that the report is hosted in other places, such as local newspapers, beyond Reuters’ own website.