No, New York Times, The Truth Is Not ‘Anti-Trans’ – Bobby Burack

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The New York Times published a piece this week accusing Donald Trump and Republicans of trying to win the election by stoking the flames of the culture war, particularly on the issue of transgenderism in America.

“Trump and Republicans bet big on anti-trans ads across the country,” the headline reads.

Times author Shane Goldmacher reports that Trump and other Republican candidates have spent more than $65 million on television ads since the beginning of August that focused on taxpayer-funded gender transitions in prisons, trans athletes, and gender-affirming surgeries.

“The flood of ads in races for the House, Senate and White House inflamed cultural divisions and cast Democrats as outside the mainstream. They are a sign that Republican strategists believe they have found a potent third leg for their messaging stool in 2024, along with the mainstays of inflation and immigration,” says Goldmacher.

The headline is catchy. We admit that. But it’s also willfully dishonest.

What exactly does “anti-trans” mean, anyway? 

Republicans have made three primary arguments against the transgenderism movement. Let’s take them, one by one.

“Gender-affirming surgeries”

“Gender-affirming surgeries” is a euphemism for sex-change operations, which often lead to genital mutilation.

A Heritage exposé in 2022 detailed the eerie and harmful effects of sex-change operations. Patients of such often suffer a type of pain that is unthinkable and ever-lasting.

Specifically, the doctors detailed how a male body regards a surgical vagina as a wound that never heals.

The article reports:

First, Dr. Chu acknowledges that [sex change surgery won’t actually “reassign” sex: “[A] body will regard the vagina as a wound; as a result, it will require regular, painful attention to maintain.”

Sex reassignment is quite literally impossible. Surgery can’t actually reassign sex, because sex isn’t “assigned” in the first place. As I point out in “When Harry Became Sally,” sex is a bodily reality—the reality of how an organism is organized with respect to sexual reproduction.

Second, Chu acknowledges the deep pain of gender dysphoria, the sense of distress or alienation one feels at one’s bodily sex:

Dysphoria feels like being unable to get warm, no matter how many layers you put on. It feels like hunger without appetite. It feels like getting on an airplane to fly home, only to realize mid-flight that this is it: You’re going to spend the rest of your life on an airplane. It feels like grieving. It feels like having nothing to grieve.

To call concerns over these procedures “anti-trans” is undeniably propagandistic. By that token, anorexia prevention is “anti-anorexic.” Rehab is “anti-overdose.”

Further, Trump has mostly warned about sex change procedures affecting minors without parental consent, such as banning minors’ access to puberty blockers.

If kids can’t buy a lotto ticket, they shouldn’t be able to make permanent decisions about which body parts they ought to chop off.

Gender transitions for prisoners 

“In the last three weeks, Mr. Trump’s campaign alone has spent more than $15.5 million on two television ads that resurface comments Ms. Harris made in 2019 describing her support for policies that ‘every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access’ to gender-affirming surgery,” the article states.

And?

The ads are accurate. Kamala Harris supports using taxpayer money to fund the gender transitions for prisoners.

Here is the clip the Times references:

“She wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison,” Trump said at their debate last month. 

That’s also true. 

Harris also expressed support in an American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire for gender-transition care for detained migrants, surprising even CNN:

Americans have a right to know on what their tax money is spent. That is the point of a democracy. It is not “anti-trans” to quote what one presidential candidate plans to do with our money.

Trans athletes

Believing that men should not play with women is not “anti-trans,” either. And most Americans agree.

National polling by Scott Rasmussen in August found that 72 percent of registered voters oppose transgender-identifying males competing in women’s sports, but that only 36 percent of voters are aware that Harris supports it.

“Republican strategists said the focus on transgender women and girls in sports had been particularly effective with a key group of voters the party has hemorrhaged support from in recent years: college-educated suburban women,” the Times bemoans.

Sure. 

College-educated suburban women were once girls in school. Many of them have daughters now. And the thought of their daughters having to share locker rooms, showers, and sporting competitions with biological males understandably haunts them.

Here are some of the ads Republicans are running regarding the issue, with which the New York Times took issue:

“It’s just wrong,” one mother says in a Republican ad in Wisconsin.

“It’s unfair and dangerous,” a grandfather says in a Republican ad in Ohio.

“Our girls’ sports are under attack,” another Montana mother says in an ad.

Again, all true.

Conclusion

Donald Trump supports making female sports female again, warning against surgeries that cause untreatable and chronic pain, and not wasting tax money on criminals who want to cosplay a different gender.

Kamala Harris and the Democrat Party, somehow, disagree on all three topics.

And voters ought to know that.

Transgenderism is one of the most consequential movements of this generation. According to data recently released by the Williams Institute at UCLA Law, 44 percent of transgender adults have reported suicidal ideation, and 21 percent reported recent non-suicidal self-injury.

Running ads about the effects of transgenderism is not cruel. What’s cruel is downplaying the inevitabilities of when female sports deteriorate and sex change procedures are normalized.

Trump is not running “anti-trans” ads ahead of the election. He’s telling the truth about where Kamala Harris stands on the issues.

The truth is not “anti-trans.”