Ben Ryan Rages at Trans Women on Twitter
Instead of angrily asserting that he’s an industry pro any time a trans woman dares to question his venerated “Washington Post” piece, Benjamin Ryan might do better looking into the glut of research that doesn’t fit his confirmation bias.
Opinion, by Alyssa Steinsiek
Count your lucky stars, another cisgender man has come down from the mountain to deliver unto us the good gospel about transgender people and our healthcare. I have been downright parched for a cisgender man’s opinion on my community’s needs, so it’s a small miracle that Benjamin Ryan has, like many cis men are wont to do, appeared to give us the lay of the land.
Ryan’s nearly one thousand word piece in “The Washington Post,” where journalism now goes to die an ignoble death, is a meandering bore. You can take the article’s subtitle—“advocates for puberty blockers don’t have science on their side”—and scrub the rest of Ryan’s self-righteous, father knows best justifications without losing anything.
Here’s the core of Ryan’s argument: He says we don’t have good science that suggests puberty blockers are safe for transgender kids. This is comically easy to disprove. A quick Google search will turn up countless results suggesting that the risks are minimal, if they exist at all. By and large, puberty blockers are known to be a safe and effective treatment, and not just for transgender kids. Doctors have been prescribing puberty blockers to cisgender kids to combat precocious puberty since 1981, and the World Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care have long recommended blockers for dysphoric trans youth as part of typical gender-affirming care, which countless major medical associations and leading world health authorities support.
Ryan tips his hand early, lamenting children being “robbed of their fertility,” a common talking point for anti-transgender activists. Never mind that many trans youth won’t reach adulthood without some remedy for their dysphoria. Forget that, for many of us, natal fertility isn’t something we treasure for any number of reasons. In fact, loss of fertility is only a serious concern for a small subset of trans youth.
Later, he refers to trans youth as “trans-identifying kids,” a fresh new spin on a common transphobic slur for trans women, “trans-identified men.” I can’t say who Ben’s been spending his time with lately, but I can guess about the circles he runs in when he wants to talk shit about the transgenders, based on his choice of verbiage.
Ryan talks a lot about the American Psychological Association’s decision to depathologize homosexuality at a 1974 conference. He childishly suggests that “the science lined up neatly with the demands of gay rights activists,” and that this depathologizing paved the way for every major gay rights victory up to Obergefell v. Hodges. Ryan fails to mention—doesn’t know, perhaps—that the strongest proponent of depathologizing homosexuality was Dr. Robert Spitzer, who went on to champion conversion therapy to the detriment of countless gay children, ultimately recanting before his death. Ryan doesn’t talk about the AIDS epidemic that would ravage the gay community in the 1980s and ‘90s, or inaction from the state that led to countless deaths, or social stigma that made gay men pariah for a generation. He doesn’t even mention the backlash to the APA conference he holds up as evidence of so much scientific progress.
headlines from the New York Times archives
It’s clear that Benjamin doesn’t understand his own community’s past, much less the trans community, but his read on what’s happening now isn’t much more impressive. Throughout his article and across Twitter, Ryan obsessively lauds the Cass Review as “the gold standard,” a marvel that puts an end to any discussion about trans kids and their needs. Yet the Report has been thoroughly panned in many ways by many people. It discarded quite a lot of valuable data for highly suspect reasons, many of those involved in the review are known anti-trans activists, and the Report’s methodology appears to have been completely changed without notice.
Most damning, however, is an interview that Report author Hillary Cass gave in which she stated that there was no evidence to suggest puberty blockers had harmful effects, and that the National Health Services’ average prescribing age of 15 was “too late to have the intended benefits.”
Inexplicably, Ryan has spent the days following his article’s release vigorously defending it on Twitter… or at least, any time a trans woman dares to criticize him. He has repeatedly gone out of his way to respond harshly to any trans woman of sufficient social standing who speaks ill of his “work.”
Far be it from me to critique his behavior, being a lifelong professional hater myself, but… I don’t know, maybe make it a little less clear who you’ve got beef with?
screenshot from Twitter
I haven’t been a “pro reporter for 23 years,” but I think it’s pretty clear that Benjamin has some skin in this game. I couldn’t tell you why, exactly, but the aggression with which he beats back anybody who dares to point out his flawed reporting—and the obsessive nature of his coverage regarding trans youth—paints, to me, a picture of a man who already had an agenda before he put pen to paper.
Before you write your next article about trans kids, which I’m sure is coming, maybe do a little more research than reading the Cass Review. Your gut feelings are based on spotty knowledge about transgender medicine and the history of LGBTQ+ rights, Ben.
CORRECTION: Due to a copy/paste error, this story originally stated that Ryan’s opinion piece was nearly fifteen hundred words. A re-examination placed the word count at 997, or nearly one thousand.
UPDATE: Assigned refers to the Final Report of the Cass Review as the Cass Report or “the Report,” and the Cass Review on which the Report was based as the Cass review or “the Review.” We have changed the word Report to Review in one spot to reflect that it was the full Cass Review being referenced in that sentence.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer and video games nerd who cohosts a podcast about trans news!
