In an article griping about President Trump’s plan to keep Medicaid from paying for transgender hormone injections, MSNBC repeated the debunked falsehood that lack of access to so-called “gender-affirming care” will cause people to die.
The “one big, beautiful bill,” which passed the House and is making its way through the Senate, would prevent taxpayer dollars from funding opposite-sex hormones for adults and minors. But MSNBC’s Katelyn Burns, a freelance columnist who proclaims the title “the first openly transgender Capitol Hill reporter in U.S. history,” took to dramatic fearmongering on Wednesday that this would kill trans-identifying individuals.
“For those who have already had bottom surgery and depend on hormone replacement therapy to produce the sex hormones they need to survive, the situation would literally be life or death, because no one can live without a dominant sex hormone,” Burns says.
The 2005 study Burns cites to back up his claim that the situation is “life or death” assesses the association of sex hormone levels with poor mobility in people aged 65-88. While the study’s introduction notes how “mobility limitations and fractures can lead to disability, institutionalization and death,” it has nothing to do with cross-sex hormone usage at all.
Johns Hopkins and Mayo Clinic‘s pages on “gender-affirming hormone therapy” give no indication that an individual will die if they stop taking opposite-sex hormones. Although there may be symptoms of withdrawal, people are not going to die because they stop taking hormones that alter their biological makeup.
What’s more, the ”one big, beautiful bill,” would not deny anyone access to “a dominant sex hormone” under Medicaid. Burns even says that “a post-op trans person … would be able to be prescribed the hormone associated with their birth sex” under the legislation. People who take opposite-sex hormones can still obtain taxpayer-funded hormones that align with their sex if necessary.
Burns also exaggerates that the bill would “make it illegal for a post-op trans person to access the hormone that affirms their gender.” But the bill awaiting passage in the Senate does not outlaw hormones, same-sex or otherwise. Rather, it would prevent taxpayer dollars from funding so-called “gender transition procedures” like administering puberty blockers or mutilating healthy body parts.
Burns also claims people who identify as transgender and are denied so-called “gender-affirming care” are at a higher risk of suicide. As Nathanael Blake, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, noted in these pages, those who identify as trans do have an elevated risk of suicide. However, “this is best explained by trans-identified individuals also having a much higher rate of mental health problems and trauma — and it doesn’t help to add to these underlying issues the lie that they were somehow born in the wrong body,” Blake noted.
In a report on treating pediatric gender dysphoria released just this month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services confirmed that “No independent association between gender dysphoria and suicidality has been found” and that “There is no evidence … pediatric medical transition reduces the incidence of suicide, which remains, fortunately, very low.” Yet Burns suggests Republicans are trying to “push trans people out of society.”
Despite all of this, Burns spends the first half of the article profiting off of readers’ empathy as he takes the audience through a misleading narrative.
Imagine going to the doctor and being told that the medication you’ve been taking for years is now illegal to prescribe to you. The doctor can give it to other people who are different from you — people experiencing depression, for example, or women going through menopause, or cancer patients — but it’s no longer allowed for people like you.
Imagine downplaying cancer treatment to the same level as choosing to take opposite-sex hormones that can cause lifelong health problems. Well, MSNBC just did.
The media and trans lobbyists have repeated these lies for years. Blake described last year how the “continued lack of evidence for ‘gender-affirming care’ is pushing gender ideologues to increasingly brazen lies as their position collapses.”
This is exactly what voters elected Trump to do: protect taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars from funding radical practices shown to be “neither scientific nor medical.”
Abigail Nichols is a correspondent for The Federalist. She was previously the opinion editor for the University of South Florida’s student newspaper, The Oracle. She is now working as the business manager at the University of North Florida’s student-run media outlet, Spinnaker Media, while obtaining a Master’s Degree in Social work.
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