Will the Fox News Focus on Younger Trans Kids Backfire?
Trans children often know their gender at a very young age. Fox News is trying to hold the idea up as ridiculous, but this comes at a risk.
by Evan Urquhart
If there’s one thing that’s clear about conservative rhetoric around trans people it’s that there’s no right age to be trans. Adults who transition are fakes and worse, deviants to be either mocked or shunned. Adolescents who come out are victims of a social contagion, in need of conversion therapy to save them from living as their authentic selves. Ah, but what about kiddos who understand their gender difference from earliest childhood, who clearly and persistently articulate it to their families years before any medical intervention would be on the radar? If you guessed that’s not acceptable for the propagandists at Fox either, congratulations, you win.
screenshot from Fox News
That’s right, the news of the day is that some DEI training materials from Kaiser Permanente leaked, and they include the information that many trans people know and articulate their gender identity from quite a young age. This insider info came from an anonymous employee, who got in contact with… wait this can’t be right… it says here the employee didn’t leak this training video to the reporters of Fox News but to the notorious stochastic terror account Libs of TikTok.
screenshot from Fox News
This is the state of conservative media. Fox News rewarming days old Libs of TikTok posts to keep the moral panic raging, stoking hatred and fear towards trans people and trans youth.
However, it does not seem at all clear that the message here will be helpful to the right’s goals. Young children do not need and are not candidates for medical interventions relating to being trans. A statement from Kaiser Permanente to this effect makes that clear. So what’s left of the story is just that trans children often make themselves known to their families at a young age. Such children are the most mainstream friendly, most wholesome, most innocent members of the transgender community. When they reach puberty they are by far the most clear-cut example of youth who experts agree will be helped by gender-affirming care to prevent the irreversible effects of the wrong sex hormones damaging their social and emotional lives.
If there’s a group of trans people we want highlighted by Fox News, it’s definitely these kids! (Of course, if there’s a group of trans people we DON’T want highlighted by a social media account which has been linked to bomb threats over and over again, it is also these kids.)
Conservatives exist in a bubble, and as such they often grow overconfident that the public at large shares their extreme views. That’s how you get stories like this one, which highlight the most sympathetic group of trans people imaginable and act as if there’s something horrifying there. In a moment when anti-trans propaganda feels crushing, the one hope many members of the community have is that the far right will overreach and ordinary people will recoil and reject the politics of fear and disgust aimed at their fellow citizens. With stories like this one, Fox News is helping keep that hope alive.
