Dallas Morning News’ Board Attacks Trans Youth in Unscientific Editorial
Sherman High School won’t let trans boy Max Hightower play a romantic lead in their production of Oklahoma! For the Dallas Morning News, this become an opportunity to attack trans youth healthcare.
by Evan Urquhart
The Dallas Morning News editorial board released an editorial this morning arguing that a transgender boy should be allowed to play a male lead in a high school performance of Oklahoma, while pushing unfounded, unsourced claims about medical approaches to children with gender dysphoria.
Max Hightower of Sherman High School in North Texas made national headlines after school officials overruled Hightower’s casting as the male lead in the planned school production of Oklahoma! because Hightower is transgender. Dallas Morning news starts out strong by opposing this arbitrary imposition on a trans student. Then the editorial takes the swiftest nosedive into propaganda-fueled fantasyland you can possibly imagine. (Note: The DMN editorial is paywalled, but at a slim 470 words we were able to include all of the substance of it in our screenshots.)
screenshot from Dallas Morning News
Without sugarcoating it, the sentence, “There is troubling evidence that the rising popularity of what is called gender-affirming care regularly leads to bad outcomes,” is false. The lack of any such evidence is exactly the issue that has led to this publication and others to call out the current concern ove gender-affirming care as a moral panic. Medical evidence that bad outcomes, outcomes such as widespread or growing transition regret or serious medical complications from transition-related medical treatments would be very concerning. Nobody wants children to be treated with unsafe or ineffective treatments. The problem, however, is that critics of gender-affirming care don’t have any such evidence.
What critics have offered are questions, concerns, and critiques of the evidense base for this model. Such concerns, in a less politicized process, would normally generate further research questions, which would lead to more evidence being gathered. To the extent this process has begun, the evidence thus far largely supports the current model (it may even support further expanding access to this promising treatment).
The outcomes for youth diagnosed with gender dysphoria who are offered gender-affirming care is an empirical question. It can be answered with data from the real world, which can then be used to inform our opinions. This is the process that has gone drastically wrong because of anti-trans sentiments, sentiments leading members of the mainstream (such as the Dallas Morning News editorial board) to lose sight of the way medicine is normally practiced. Normally, promising new uses for known drugs start being offered to patients in larger numbers as evidence begins to show their efficacy for the patient’s condition, as has happened here. An ongoing research process is used to check for concerning outcomes and refine treatment models, which again is exactly what’s been happening in transgender medicine.
The Dallas Morning News editorial board has imagined nonexistent evidence into being because, well, presumably because they’re uncomfortable thinking of youth treatment for gender dysphoria in the same way they’d think about youth treatment for any other condition.
Refocusing back on the editorial, the reason Dallas Morning News gives for supporting Hightower’s casting as a male character in Oklahoma! is because there’s a long history of cross-gender casting in theater, and because actors should generally be allowed to play all kinds of roles.
screenshot from Dallas Morning News
This is all unobjectionable. Theater has a history of gender-bending, singling Hightower out for being transgender is absurd, this should have been a non-issue and Sherman High School completely stepped in it.
Dallas Morning News continues on in this vein for a while, defending the wholesomeness and popularity of Oklahoma! (a musical written in the 1950s that’s been a staple of high school performances for many decades), and using the example of a woman principal dressing up as Santa Claus for the holidays to highlight the absurdity of making policies requiring gender conformity. All of this is great, except for the subtle implication that what Hightower is doing is similar to a woman principal dressing as Santa, which hangs over this portion of the editorial like a fart the Dallas Morning News isn’t admitting to producing, while being the only ones in the room where the stinky is happening.
The stink grows pronounced near the end, when Dallas Morning News endorses the controversial, and entirely unproven, theory that more youth are transitioning because of overly rigid gender roles.
screenshot from Dallas Morning News
This passage is particularly bizarre because the trans boy in question isn’t playing sports but participating in musical theater. If the hypothesis is that transmasculine identitification is fueled by gender nonconformity, this would not seem to be a case that particularly supports it.
The editorial board hedges their endorsement of this quack theory with the words “critics say,” but they’re clearly fans of the notion that trans boys like Hightower identify as boys because they don’t conform to rigid sterotypes about girls and women. To say this is an unproven idea almost feels like an understatement—there’s just nothing to this. Once again we are dealing with a statement about the real world: If there was evidence that girls were mistakenly transitioning because they liked sports it would be very concerning. The belief that this is the case has led “critics” such as the ones the editorial board mentions to predict a massive increase in the percentage of regret-fueled detransition, as girls realized they’d made a terrible mistake and regretted the damage done to their bodies.
This simply hasn’t proven out. While detransition numbers are complicated because detrasition is a vague term and studies use a range of different definitions and time scales, one of the most consistent results has found that surgery regret is in the low single digits. A recent small study, which is broadly representative of the low levels of surgical regret found across studies and procedures, didn’t find a single patient, in a sample of over 200, who regretted their chest masculinization.
The Dallas Morning News editorial board is completely detached from the facts about trans identity and medical treatments for gender dysphoria, and is pushing quack theories and biases without any regard for the evidence. With friends like these, 17-year-old Max Hightower hardly needs enemies.