Lies in the headline

They what?!

Arkansas banned health care for a group of people? How can that be?

That’s how – by wording it deceptively. Arkansas didn’t ban health care for trans teenagers, it banned “gender affirming” care, i.e. puberty blockers and amputations. The NBC headline is honest, the Washington Post one is fuzzy, the Insider one is just a lie, like the ACLU tweet.

From the NBC story:

The Arkansas Senate passed a bill Monday that would ban access to gender-affirming care for transgender minors, including reversible puberty blockers and hormones.

But puberty blockers are not entirely reversible.

It’s interesting how much obfuscation and lying appears to be necessary for this fad to keep going.

“I really worry about the fact that we’re just a few votes away from some of the most sweeping and damaging and potentially genocidal laws from ever being passed, and we barely have a mention of it in the bigger national conversation of what’s going on in this particular moment in U.S. history,” [Chase] Strangio said.

Lots of us worry that we’re telling so many teenage kids that it’s lifesaving and fabulous to try to be the opposite sex by taking puberty blockers and maybe having bits of yourself cut off. Maybe that’s actually more “genocidal” than not doing it. Lesbians are becoming horribly scarce.

Strangio said the consequences of all of the bills are the same: People are going to lose health care. “I don’t think I ever imagined a world where we would start ripping health care away from people, essentially forcing them to detransition by government coercion,” Strangio said.

But it isn’t health care. Cutting off people’s breasts or penises not for medical reasons but because of a socially-generated idea in the head is not health care.

It may be that the law, under these circumstances, is too brutal. I don’t know. But this rush to convince everyone that change of sex via hormones and surgery is the best thing ever is way too brutal.

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