Transition Isn’t Like Drinking You Absolute Morons
North Dakota Governor Doug Bergum made the absurd claim that being diagnosed by a doctor with gender dysphoria and accessing the sole evidence-based treatment for that condition is similar to drinking alcohol in a bar.
by Evan Urquhart
It’s only 8am Wednesday morning, but if you’re planning on drinking this weekend it might already be too late! After all, you’d first need to make an appointment to see your doctor, have them diagnose you with a condition where the only known treatment is alcohol, obtain a prescription for the beverage of your choosing, and have that prescription filled at your local pharmacy. This, as everyone knows, is how one goes about drinking alcohol, an activity that North Dakota governor and Republican presidential hopeful Doug Bergum claimed was similar to accessing gender-affirming care in a recent interview with NPR. No, we’re not kidding, this is really the line Bergum tried.
Here’s a screenshot of his answer to a question about why he supports restricting some medical treatments when they’re used to treat gender dysphoria, despite allowing them for youth at all other times:
screenshot from NPR
Of course, the NPR reporter didn’t ask why he supports restricting these treatments only for gender dysphoria, why he thinks it would be constitutional to do so, or push back on his claim that medically transitioning is like drinking in any way at all. In American journalism, journalists have come to accept the most absurd statements from politicians passively, serving as a conduit for their bullshit rather than a vital part of the process of informing voters about the issues involved.
Bergum’s ludicrous conflation of prescription medications with drinking alcohol is the sort of dishonest move conservatives love, because it carries the false implication that trans people undergo medical transition lightly. In reality, of course, parents and physicians are heavily involved in the process of deciding which youth need treatment for gender dysphoria, and what treatments they need. Obtaining a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and deciding on a course of treatment is a lengthy process for youth involving therapy and a comprehensive assessment of the young person’s individual needs, one and it requires parental consent in all 50 states. It’s not like drinking in the same way that obtaining a master’s degree in archeology isn’t like drinking or procuring 20 tons of aluminum isn’t like drinking.
What Bergum is really saying here is that because North Dakota restricts some things, therefore it can restrict all things. That’s a problem, though, because in the United States we have a concept of individual rights, and this restricts what the government can do. When it comes to healthcare, our courts have decided that the government can set safety standards based on mainstream consensus about the evidence, but states aren’t supposed to arbitrarily single out groups of people and ban them from safe, effective treatments based on prejudice. They’re certainly not supposed to do this while continuing to allow the same treatments to be used for other conditions in patients of the same age. That, of course, is what gender-affirming care bans have done.
Pat talking points which willfully misrepresent the issue are standard in the mainstream debate over gender-affirming care. Conservatives like them because it allows them to duck the substance of the issue and avoid all the pesky evidence, not the mention the constitutional rights of the people involved. Mainstream reporters often allow these misrepresentations to go unchallenged, either because they’re not well informed on the specifics of the issue or just because follow-up questions have become a lost art. This allows absolutely moronic assertions like Bergman’s comparing gender-affirming care to drinking to go unchallenged and contributes to a lack of understanding of the basics of the issues in the wider public. Accessing gender-affirming care is nothing like drinking. Comparing the two is not a reasonable answer to the question of why a politician supports banning this care.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story got its Dakotas and names confused. Doug Bergum is the governor of North Dakota. Whoops!