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GOP's moral panic over trans Americans has no basis in reality

Given how much emphasis the GOP has put on this, it's worth asking: What is the scale of the issue we are talking about?

MSNBC

By Chris Hayes

Jan. 12, 2025

It felt impossible this election season to watch a single NFL game without seeing a barrage of ads about the “scourge” of trans people and their alleged domination of American culture thanks to Kamala Harris.

Republicans have now run multiple campaigns playing up fears of trans women playing sports and trans youth seeking medical care or simply seeking to use a public restroom in privacy and dignity.

Given how much emphasis has been put on this, I think it is worth asking: What is the scale of the issue we are talking about? And why are we talking about it?

The Republicans admit that they don't know how many children 

Well, Republicans certainly don’t have an answer to that first question. Take West Virginia's governor and soon-to-be-senator, Jim Justice. In 2021, he signed a statewide ban on trans students in school sports.

At the time, my colleague Stephanie Ruhle asked Justice if he could name one example of a transgender child trying to gain an unfair competitive advantage at a school in his state. “No, I can’t really tell you one,” Justice replied.

This Republican moral panic has given most Americans a wildly incorrect notion of the scale of the trans rights movement. In 2022, YouGov polled a thousand Americans and found they tend to vastly overestimate the size of minority groups, including the proportion of people who are transgender. Respondents to the poll guessed more than a fifth of the country was trans. The true estimate is just 0.6 %, according to YouGov.

Fox News says,

In a five-year span, thousands of minors had gender reassignment surgeries, puberty blockers or hormone treatments at a number of children's hospitals and medical facilities across the country, a medical watchdog is reporting via their new national database.

Do No Harm, a national advocacy group of medical professionals against "woke" hospital agendas, shared the database, called "Does My Hospital Transition Kids?", with Fox News Digital this week. In total, the group conservatively identified 5,747 minor patients who received sex-change surgery, and 13,994 received some sort of gender reassignment treatment between 2019 and 2023.

But do you know how many of those so called children who had "gender reassignment surgeries" we really trans children... 0. They were boy who identified as males but had enlarged male breasts! But that little detail doesn't fit in pogrom against us. MSNBC goes on to write,

You may have also heard that thousands of American children are being brainwashed and altered with puberty blockers. However, according to research that looked at more than 5 million health insurance claims by adolescents, “[T]here were less than 1,000 [youth] that accessed puberty blockers and less than 2,000 that ever had access to hormones.”

In other words, less than 0.1% of teenagers in the United States with private insurance are transgender and receive gender-related medicines.

An article on NPR reports,

"The total number of youth who had any diagnosis of gender dysphoria was less than 18,000," Hughes explains. "Among those folks, there were less than 1,000 [youth] that accessed puberty blockers and less than 2,000 that ever had access to hormones."

In other words, the study found that less than 0.1% of teenagers with private insurance in the U.S. are transgender and receive gender-related medicines.

A recent mental health survey from the CDC found a much higher percentage — 3% of high school students — self-identified as transgender. Not all transgender people seek a medical diagnosis or treatments related to their identity, notes Lindsey Dawson, director of LGBTQ health policy at the research organization KFF. "Much more common is to change hair grooming, style of clothing, using a different name," she says, pointing to KFF research.

Dawson, who was not involved with the research, said the study was notable for the large sample size. "It echoes past work that has found that gender-affirming medical care, including puberty blockers and hormone treatment, is relatively rare among all trans and nonbinary people, but especially so among adolescents," she says.

Do you believe the Journal of the American Medical Association?

Prevalence of Gender-Affirming Surgical Procedures Among Minors and Adults in the US

Dannie Dai, BS1; Brittany M. Charlton, ScD2; Elizabeth R. Boskey, PhD3; et al

June 27, 2024

Introduction

Gender-affirming health care aims to align an individual’s physical gender expression with their intrinsic gender identity. An example is breast reduction for cisgender males with gynecomastia. Recently, there have been increased legislative efforts restricting gender-affirming health care specifically for transgender and gender diverse (TGD) people.1 Proponents of these efforts express concerns that TGD minors may be too commonly using gender-affirming surgical procedures. Given stringent clinical standards for gender-affirming care,2,3 use of gender-affirming surgical procedures by TGD minors is expected to be low. However, there are limited national data; while 1 study provided national estimates, it did not capture minors under the age of 12 years and did not exclude procedures with clinical justifications outside of gender affirmation.4 Therefore, using a national dataset, we evaluated the extent to which TGD minors and adults received gender-affirming surgical procedures in 2019. Additionally, in line with a recent publication from bioethicists to acknowledge that gender-affirming care is used by people of all genders,5 we provide a novel characterization of the relative use of 1 gender-affirming surgery—breast reductions—by TGD and cisgender populations.

[...]

Discussion

In this cross-sectional study of a national insured population in 2019, there were no gender-affirming procedures conducted on TGD minors aged 12 years and younger, and procedures on TGD minors older than 12 were rare and almost entirely chest-related procedures. Additionally, when considering breast reductions among cisgender males and TGD people—a surgery that can be considered gender-affirming among both populations—most were performed on cisgender males. Thus, these findings suggest that concerns around high rates of gender-affirming surgery use, specifically among TGD minors, may be unwarranted. Low use by TGD people likely reflects adherence to stringent standards of gender-affirming care.2,3

This study is limited by the reliance on diagnostic and procedure codes in claims data to assume clinical justifications for surgery and the TGD or cisgender identity of patients. These methods may lead to potential misclassifications. Additionally, our findings are limited to insurance-covered use and not self-paid use.

The MSNBC article sums it up nicely...

The more Republicans obscure that truth, the more damage they do to a deeper truth: No matter their numbers, every transgender person is as worthy as anyone else of dignity and respect and equal rights under law.

But the Republicans don't a darn about us: it is all about power and control! All that counts for them is that they got control of Congress and the presidency with all their lies.  

 

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Updated 6:00PM

Updated 8:00PM

I was reading some of the comments about this article and all cultists are crying "Fake news"

• When will the left understand it is not a phobia when you disagree with someone's delusion?  Get them the mental health care they need and stop affirming their delusions.
• Democrats are truly showing their lunacy by fighting so hard for only .6% of the population. It's just their way to create division and contention in our society.  They should be ashamed.  Never... never... never vote democrat

And they still think that it is a choice to be LGBTQ+...

• We are born lgbtq. We aren't groomed. Anita Bryant tried that tactic in the 70s and it didn't stick, plus she got a pie in the face for her efforts. You can stop lying, you won.
• You were born to parents who raised you to make a wrong choice.
• We haven't won until you leave kids alone.

It is transphobia and homophobia pure and simple that Trump & Company are stirring up for political gain.