US Right Wing Coverage of TERF Island (Part 1)

What does the National Review talk about, when they talk about the UK’s treatment of trans issues?

by Evan Urquhart

In the National Review, Wesley J. Smith has a short post on care for trans youth in the British health care system.

The piece… wait a minute. What? Did the National Review, an American right wing news and opinion website with delusions of grandeur (ie. they describe themselves as a “premier destination” in their promotional language), mention the socialist National Health Service of England without explaining what it is or even fully spelling out the acronym? Is there some other National Review outlet, one based in the United Kingdom? Have American conservatives become internationalists overnight, without us noticing?

The article itself is mostly quoting from a story in the Telegraph, an extremely anti-trans UK newspaper, reblogging their coverage of an NHS proposal to discourage young people from socially transitioning and refuse to offer medical assistance to trans youth who aren’t experiencing “severe distress.”

The familiarity the NR seems to expect its readership to have with the acronym for the UK’s health system, however, is a bit of a head-scratcher. My best guess is there’s been extensive coverage of TERF island in the US right wing press for ages. I could be wrong, however, as I only recently became an avid reader of the US right wing and far right media. It seems the question warrants a more extensive follow up, so watch this space. We’ll research how the UK is being covered in the right wing press, by what outlets, and how long these outlets have been covering it closely (if our suspicion holds and it turns out they are) and try to work out what that means for the US right wing media landscape and anti-trans propaganda.