The Media Is Going To Talk To People You Don't Agree With

Activists take on "60 Minutes", and lose

“60 Minutes” did a widely discussed piece last week on “detransitioners”, people who thought they were trans and transitioned when they were young, only to transition back to their assigned sex at birth when they got older. The reasons these people are a news story include (1) a prominent detransitioner won a major lawsuit against the UK’s most important gender clinic (Bell v. Tavistock), which may remake the laws relating to trans youth in that nation; and (2) several detransitioners in the United States have publicly criticized trans-positive (“gender affirming”) medical providers for supposedly pushing them towards transitions and hormonal and surgical interventions without asking enough questions.

Many trans rights activists, who are quite active on the Internet, apparently wished it would have never become a story. It is becoming apparent that trans activists put enormous pressure on CBS to kill the story. And after it aired, they scrambled to trash the story, making a bunch of arguments that boiled down to “how could you possibly air something that people who don’t like trans people might find useful?”. To which the answer is, “because it is news”.

Liberals used to be both very smug and brutally accurate about this point. Reality, as Stephen Colbert once said, has a well-known liberal bias. Colbert’s point, lest we forget, was that conservatives were deserving of mockery when they complained that the news media was engaging in “liberal bias” merely by reporting facts that conservatives found to be uncomfortable. There are numerous examples of this- the science about global warming, for instance, is an excellent, representative example. News organizations can’t and shouldn’t refuse to report about global warming simply because the potential solutions generally coincide with liberals’ beliefs about the size and scope of government and make conservatives who are oppose big government, high taxes, and internationalism uncomfortable. Facts are facts.

Well, the stories of detransitioned people are facts. How we interpret them is up to us. But they are still facts. The most common talking point against the “60 Minutes” report is that detransitioners are only a tiny percentage of people who transitioned when they were young. We don’t actually know this, but it also doesn’t matter when it comes to what is news and what isn’t news. For instance, the vast majority of interactions between police and Black people do not result in any police violence, and only a tiny number of unarmed Black people are killed by police each year. Nonetheless, that is no reason not to cover the story. The issue of how big the problem is only matters when we are discussing possible solutions- e.g., whether you think defunding or abolishing the police is a good idea may depend in part on how big you think the problem is. But if a news organization simply refused to cover police shootings of unarmed Blacks because they are not that common, that organization would be correctly raked over the coals. Of course you have to cover it. It’s a news story.

The fact of the matter is, there are people who are vocally claiming that the healthcare system did great harm to them, by rushing them into hormone and even surgical treatments that left them permanently scarred and essentially caught between genders. If this is not true, trans activists need to meet this on the merits. If it is true, trans activists need to tell us whether any reforms need to be made and/or what we can do to achieve better results for the Keira Bells of the world.

And if, most likely, the story is that gender affirming care helps a lot of people and is a great improvement over what we did to trans kids in the past, but at the same time depends on a high degree of empathy, professionalism, and competence to ensure that the people receiving these treatments are sure about their transitions, then they need to get out and tell that story to the public, many of whom know very little about trans people and need to hear it.

The point is, the absolute worst thing to do is to try and shut off media access for detransitioners. And I have to say, this is an exceedingly common position for online trans activists. It can be seen with the near obsession the movement has on the subject of Jesse Singal, whose sin was to be a supporter of trans rights who nonetheless has done reporting on the detransition issue. And it can be seen most starkly in the response to sexologists’ work on the causes and typology of gender dysphoria, as described in Alice Dreger’s wonderful Galileo’s Middle Finger. This is a movement that is seemingly led by people who have only one response to anything they disagree with, which is to accuse the speaker of transphobia, harming trans people, and causing suicide, in the hope of suppressing the speech.

And the problem is, this doesn’t work. Journalists really dislike being told they can’t report on a story, or can’t talk to people, or can’t tell people’s stories. They push back. And not only do they push back, but being seen as the censors of speech can be enormously harmful to a movement. It makes it look like you have something to hide.

Trans activists have to convince people that they care about detransitioners. It’s not that hard to do- all you have to do is not be afraid of the issue and stress the importance of good medical care that effectively identifies trans kids. They have a case to make. But until they start making it, in public, and subject to criticism and debate, they will continue to harm their cause by looking like censorious bullies. Detransitioners aren’t going away, and they aren’t going to be silent.