The Anti-Care Playbook
The Washington Post goes the way many other media organizations have gone, following an increasingly familiar playbook to attempt to restrict trans healthcare.
by Riki Wilchins
The Washington Post has generally been fairly good on pediatric care coverage. But its Editorial Board (which has not a single trans member) has now followed the rest of what used to be the mainstream media in employing the Right’s by-now familiar playbook on trans kids care.
This public breast-beating was presumably occasioned by a single lawsuit : detransition activist Clementine Breen who has retained an anti-trans law firm to file a lawsuit against a number of California hospitals and doctors claiming her pediatric care was rushed.
The five steps of the anti-care playbook are now as follows
Engage in rampant concern trolling…
All attacks on trans kids’ medicine must be framed as concern for their welfare. This goes back to a panel at the Family Research Council 2017 Values Voter Summit when it was decided that the frontal assaults long used against homosexuals would backfire against children. Henceforth, all attacks on trans care had to be framed as caring about them — a phenomenon scholar Mikey Elsner has termed insidious concern.
2. …but really only care about the cisgender kids
The unstated assumption behind all anti-care concern trolling is that the only kids who really matter are cisgender. Thus, the entire focus is on preventing detransitions. In effect, this means that it’s okay if 100 trans kids go without their medical care, if that would save just one cisgender kid from making a mistake (these are about the odds, by the way).
Thus, neither the Washington Post nor many similar pieces which have run in outlets like the New York Times, the Atlantic, or the Wall Street Journal ever mentions just how many trans kids would be denied care, what the consequences for their lives would be, or just how incredibly low detransition rates actually are..
3. Have vastly different standards for pro-care vs. anti-care data
According to an exhaustive study of 300M medical records by Komodo Health, perhaps 1–2k trans kids get hormones and/or blockers yearly. But if a single cisgender detransitioner comes forward, the entire system of trans care is implicated and must be rethought from the ground up.
4. Have vastly different standards for trans care vs all other pediatric care.
Medical care of all sorts progresses through the slow accumulation of clinical practice and experience. Only a miniscule portion of the hundreds of thousands of medications and procedures that make up pediatric medicine are backed by the in-depth double-blind randomized control trials (RCT) with long-term follow-up that are the gold standard for medical science but can easily run well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
However, when it comes to pediatric gender care, the claim is that everything should be halted until we can carry out lots of these trials and evaluate them. If this were applied across the board, 90% of all pediatric care and for that matter all adult medical care would have to cease tomorrow.
Also, ignore the dozen or so careful medical studies we DO have that show that pediatric care works, including Dr. Jack Turban’s summary of a dozen studies here, Yale Law’s authoritative report here, and the National Institutes of Health own report here.
5. Ignore U.S. medical opinion and instead cite Europe
As with all such articles, the Washington Post Editorial Board conveniently acts as if the U.S. medical community does not exist, and therefore is forced to cite pronouncements coming out of the U.K.
Thus, strangely missing is any reference to the 27 domestic medical organizations including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the Endocrine Society, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, and 23 others, each of whom has examined the science and inconveniently found pediatric trans care to be safe, effective, and recommended.
The problem is, in the Eyeball Economy that now rules digital news, outlets can no longer afford to simply report facts. Journalism is now supported by subscribers, so engaging readers is the priority.
In practice, this unfortunately means catering to their prejudices when it comes to hot button issues like trans kids’ care, where the price of simply reporting the actual facts might cost subscriptions.
It’s not just that “Democracy Dies in Darkness”—as the Post’s new slogan puts it, when the rights of disfavored minorities are at issue it’s also fact-based journalism.
Riki Wilchins writes on trans theory and politics at: www.medium.com\@rikiwilchins. Her two last books are: BAD INK: How the NYTimes SOLD OUT Transgender Teens, and Healing the Broken Places: Transgender People Speak Out About Addiction & Recovery. She can be reached at TransTeensMatter@gmail.com.