Biden Admin’s Concern for Trans Youth Plays as Hypocrisy, at Least on FOX
The Biden Administration is funding needed research into potential risks of transgender medical treatments such as hormone therapy. How did FOX News twist that into a bad thing?
by Evan Urquhart
One of the things that trans people have long been advocating for is increased funding to study the long term effects of gender affirming treatments, including surgeries, hormone therapy, and puberty blockers. Although the treatments have known risks and side effects and all evidence shows they vastly improve quality of life for trans patients, they often aren’t well studied. This is because gender dysphoria is not a particularly common diagnosis, and exacerbated by the stigma that surrounds transgender people.
According to a Fox News Digital story by Patrick Hauf, the Biden Administration is funding nearly 30 studies into the effects of gender affirming treatments through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This is fantastic!
However, because FOX News is a propaganda outlet and not a real news source, this great news has been framed by the author as a bad thing, or at least, a sign of the Biden Admin’s hypocrisy. The heavy implication is that there’s a gotcha here, that the paucity of research into long term side effects of HRT has been in some way covered up, and that revealing it would be damaging to the overall picture vis a vis affirming healthcare.
To understand why that’s not the case, it’s necessary to first understand the way that evidence based medicine routinely functions. It’s not rare for a treatment that works on patients with a relatively rare condition, especially if the drug is a well known medicine with far more common applications, to become the standard treatment without a lot of research on the long term effects in those specific patients. This is especially true if the condition primarily occurs in a minority without much wealth or power, because research into such groups is woefully underfunded. That doesn’t mean the treatment doesn’t work or is particularly dangerous, especially if studies show it is effective. However, the risk always remains that there may be long term effects in the patient group that go unnoticed or undocumented, and patients are often frustrated by the lack of solid information or, potentially, treatments to mitigate the risks without losing the benefits.
Fox News Digital’s readers, however, will never learn of this. As usual, they are being failed by their failing media, who waste the words they could be spending helping their readers btter understand a topic on quoting a retired physician and anti-trans activist, Sue Greenwald, who claims, outrageously, that gender affirming care is “recreational.”
Yep, that’s really what they went with. Do better, Fox. Do better.