Daily Femail: Catholic Political Advocacy Organization Spreads Ads That Don't Make Sense
A Catholic advocacy group spreads anti-trans ads using misleading data.
by Mira Lazine
Daily Femail is Assigned Media’s newest column, offering real opinions delivered with a satirical tone to address last week’s biggest news stories. Written by Mira Lazine, the column aims to humorously mock right-wing tabloids while also providing quality reporting every Tuesday.
It’s time for everyone’s favorite topic - religiously backed transphobia! The largest conservative Catholic advocacy group in the United States, CatholicVote, has a new set of political ads targeting Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. But these aren’t just any ads - these are ads that throw trans people under the PopeMobile for the sake of opposing Harris!
The anti-trans ads are positioned in four swing states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan. These states will be crucial for deciding the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
The ads all claim that Harris is spending “taxpayer money” to fund “experimental surgeries” on transgender youth. They all follow the same format - starting off by citing alleged Medicaid data that they claim shows “[A number between 18 and 97] underage girls had their breasts completely removed.” The bracketed figures are the only divergence between the different ads, with 97 for PA, 86 for WI, 35 in MI, and 18 in NC, each representing the number of transmasculine top surgeries CatholicVote claims were performed in each state.
“[14 in PA; 12 in WI; 3 in NV; 7 in MI] underage girls underwent hysterectomies. Sex change operations attempting to make young boys into girls. Penis amputations. Sound weird? Disgusting? It is. And you’re paying for it. Kamala Harris supports these taxpayer-funded sex-change operations. A vote for Harris: a vote for medical experiments on kids.”
Of course, the only disgusting thing here is that someone would call medically necessary surgeries “experimental” and try to pathologize trans youth for existing.
The messaging on these ads is quite inconsistent. Catholic Herald, one of the leading Catholic news sites, quotes the New York Post in saying that these surgeries are only conducted “as long as the kids’ parents and doctors approve of it.”
Additionally, CatholicVote President Brian Burch openly contradicts the data said within the ad by stating something that is demonstrably false.
“Thousands of trans surgeries are happening – on kids – across the country,” Burch said in a statement. Double mastectomies on young girls. Hysterectomies. Amputation of boys’ genitalia. Full skin grafts to forehead, chin, underarms, genitals, hands, and feet. The Biden-Harris administration is using your tax dollars today to pay for them. And Kamala Harris wants to expand these medical experiments on kids.”
Daily Femail would like to bring readers’ attention to the fact that Burch is claiming there are thousands of surgeries, while his own ads suggest there are fewer than 500 conducted. Daily Femail also is unaware of any gender affirming surgeries that involve the hands or the feet, but would love to learn about them. Perhaps Burch discovered a new surgery that has been unknown even to even the trans community!
As for the data itself, it is unclear where CatholicVote retrieved this from or what parameters they used to sort through the data. On their website, they claim that the Pennsylvania data is from 2019-2023. However, the exact numbers do not match any prior reports of data from gender affirming surgeries, suggesting… well, who knows? It’s CatholicVote, not a news organization. While the numbers are reasonably plausible (unlike the claim that thousands of surgeries are being conducted), CatholicVote could have made them up out of whole cloth, for all we know at the Daily Femail.
There is simply no way to know unless they choose to reveal their data analysis practices, something unlikely for a political campaign agency.
Assuming it wasn’t made up out of whole cloth, these data itself are relatively innocuous. These are incredibly small numbers of minors receiving such gender affirming surgeries, and since we know all such surgeries are done on minors who have hit puberty (and are 16 or 17), it is safe to assume that all or most of these surgeries were conducted after years of guidance and consultation with medical professionals. Of course, with such scanty information, it is possible some of these surgeries were done for separate medical reasons. Breast cancer can manifest in minors, which would lead to mastectomies, and there are several causes for hysterectomies that are completely independent from gender affirming care.
But, all of this is irrelevant, because we already do have reliable data on how many gender affirming surgeries were done for minors in 2019 across the entire United States. This data is, fortunately, not funded by a conservative Catholic advocacy organization and has actually passed through a peer review process.
LGBTQ Nation detailed a study that was conducted on insurance data for all minors in 2019, a sample of over 22 million. What they found is not shocking. For starters, only 85 minors across the entire United States received any form of gender affirming surgery. The vast majority of this sample, 96.4%, had received any type of gender affirming chest surgery, including mastectomies and breast enhancement surgeries. Almost all of these minors were between ages 15 and 17.
There is more shocking data within this study that contextualizes the need to clearly segregate data into cisgender and transgender participants. The authors found that 146 cisgender boys received breast reduction surgery, due to conditions like gynecomastia, which causes breast development. Only 4 transgender individuals received a similar type of surgery. Assigned Media has previously taken a closer look at these data.
These results contextualize what CatholicVote found, and help to show that there is something suspicious about their data, even for how incredibly innocuous it is. Still, even if we imagine that their data was correct, out of millions of transgender people in the United States, this would represent an incredibly small number of minors receiving gender affirming surgeries.
But that isn’t the only thing that they’ve gotten wrong - as they are also trying to say that the Biden-Harris administration explicitly supports such surgeries. However, Daily Femail has reporting that directly contradicts this. Back in July, a spokesperson for the administration said to The 19th of gender affirming surgeries: “These are deeply personal decisions, and we believe these surgeries should be limited to adults. We continue to support gender-affirming care for minors, which represents a continuum of care, and respect the role of parents, families, and doctors in these decisions.”
The real scandal is not that these are taxpayer funded surgeries, but that the administration is not completely behind all forms of transgender care. You’d think conservatives would rejoice at this, but perhaps scoring political points is all that matters. This is how one can be truly consistent.
These ads teach us a lesson that surely has never been taught before - do not blindly believe what political ads say. Their whole point is to get people to vote one way or the other, meaning they have an explicit agenda. More often than not, they get things wrong - which they should be openly ashamed of. But conservatism isn’t about promoting the truth to its followers. It’s about attacking marginalized groups for the sake of the comfort of those in power. Isn’t this ethical?
Mira Lazine is a freelance journalist covering transgender issues, politics, and science. She can be found on Twitter, Mastodon, and BlueSky, @MiraLazine