STOP CALLING IT GENDER AFFIRMING CARE

National Review

 

Stop Calling It ‘Gender-Affirming Care’

By Noah Rothman

December 4, 2024 3:18 PM

 

The Supreme Court must be populated by a collection of robed monsters, because the institution seems “likely to uphold a ban on gender-affirming care.”

 

That’s how Axios framed its effort to read the tea leaves on Wednesday as the Court heard oral arguments in a case challenging a Tennessee law that bans the surgical or pharmaceutical treatments of minors struggling with gender dysphoria. “Medical authorities in the U.S. largely agree that treatments like puberty blockers and hormone therapy are safe,” Axios added. Nevertheless, the Court’s conservative justices — heartless, monastic jackboots that they are — seem inclined to uphold the law.

 

Axios wasn’t alone. CBS News, ABC News, the New York Times, the Associated Press, U.S. News, and scores more ostensibly neutral news outlets deployed the same construction. It has become best practice in the press to brandish this profane euphemism like the weapon it has become in an entirely ideological debate, one side of which refuses to acknowledge its own ideology.

 

The “gender-affirming” bit is meant to establish the legitimacy of a minor’s potentially fleeting but passion-fueled self-conception. Transgenderism in kids cannot be an ephemeral thing produced by a mercurial mind — it must be the fruition of a destiny conferred at birth. The “care” part is self-explanatory. What kind of ghoul would deny “care” to the deserving and needy?

 

It’s a rhetorical trick designed not to clarify the debate for readers but to muddy the waters. As such, the phrase represents nothing less than an abdication of the journalistic enterprise. It cannot account for the determinations made by the public health apparatus in such places as Sweden and the U.K., which now emphasize either “caution” when prescribing pharmaceutical hormonal treatments and even cosmetic mastectomies for children or outright prohibit those practices outside clinical trials.

 

At the very least, this phrase — one that is native to journalism and progressive activist organizations (a fine but real distinction) — should be retired if only because it implicitly rejects the legitimacy of the very live debate among medical professionals about the therapeutic value of transition treatments for minors. It is an in-group shibboleth — a “thought-terminating cliché” — that has no place in objective reporting. That is, if objectivity remains the goal.