By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, December 04, 2024
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.
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