Lisa Selin Davis: Liberal Media Refuses to Tell Full Truth About Transgender Kids

The other night, I was at dinner with friends: brilliant, talented people who love to converse about a wide range of topics. But every time I brought up gender issues, the table got quiet. They looked at their plates, or at each other. At one point, I mentioned that puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones in adolescents—the pathway of “gender-affirming care”—are likely to cause sterility. My friend said: “I don’t want to know.” 

And perhaps that’s how we on the Left got here. 

I know that part of their refusal to even look at me is the way I deliver this information in person: I get worked up. I get defiant. I cannot summon an even-handed or curious tone. Part of it, though, is likely their sense that my statements are rooted not in science or concern about children’s welfare, but in bigotry. They believe this is a political issue, not a health care issue. That’s because they’ve been poorly educated by the left and center-left media about children who feel extreme distress about their birth sex — the condition known as “gender dysphoria” — and how we should help and support them. 

My personal awakening began in 2018, when I was researching my book “Tomboy”, and I asked several clinicians how they could tell a trans boy from a girl who simply looks and acts more like a stereotypical boy.

Surprisingly, the experts couldn’t give me a straight answer. They replied vaguely about understanding the whole child, and how much distress they were in.

But last year, I discovered that research does offer some illumination. According to 11 studies, the vast majority of children with gender dysphoria will overcome their angst by the end of puberty — if they don’t socially transition to adopt a different gender identity. A majority, in fact, will turn out to be gay. 

In other words, gender dysphoria can be related to sexuality — the opposite of what many kids are taught in school, that gender and sexuality are separate. 

Years before, someone had told me that youth transgender medicine amounted to “pharmaceutical companies performing experiments on gay kids.” I mostly dismissed it as conspiratorial, but I began to see that this might be part of the unexamined story.

And if I had missed this key point in several years of reporting on gender issues, I wondered, what else had I missed? I began to investigate. 

It does seem from the little decent research we have that some gender dysphoric children are helped by medical intervention — surgeries and hormones that help them appear as the opposite sex, or neither sex, enabling them to feel comfortable and happy with who they are. I knew their stories well from my years of reporting and from the media outlets that relentlessly repeated the dogma that these interventions were medically necessary and life-saving. 

But the science doesn’t support those statements, and neither do many of the experiences of young people and their families that I’ve heard in the last year-and-a-half once I was ready and willing to listen to what the mainstream media deliberately ignores.

Last year, I spoke to a mother of a “feminine” son who thought he was gay. She told me how online communities convinced him he was really a girl and should transition. 

“People communicating with my son were saying basically, ‘This is the promised land,’” she told me.

Sometimes these misdiagnosed kids are told — by clinicians — that they’ll kill themselves if they don’t transition, despite the flimsy evidence for such claims. One adolescent was on a feeding tube because of anorexia when the attending psychologist told him this. 

Parents told me of being investigated by Child Protective Services for not properly affirming their children. One of those children, Yaeli Martinez, was removed from her mother’s California home at age 16, given hormones, and three years later committed suicide. 

Other parents spoke of being pressured to affirm and psychologically or medically transition their children by doctors, therapists, and school personnel. “This has caused so much strife and tension in my family and in my life,” a parent told me this spring. “I walk a tightrope every day. I feel like I’m being asked to live in a lie.”

An adolescent girl with a history of eating disorders and depression seized on the idea of being transgender when she got to college and felt disconnected from the other girls. Within months, she’d gone on testosterone and had her breasts removed in 2016. “I never even made eye contact with my surgeon,” she told me last month. It took her six years to realize she’d made a mistake, her singing voice ruined, her body forever altered. 

She’s joined the growing ranks of detransitioners, many of whom belong to a new cohort of teen girls with complex mental health problems, often influenced by social media. Such kids were not studied in the original research suggesting adolescent sex changes can be psychologically beneficial. It’s a cohort the Left-leaning media denies exists, just as they downplay detransition and overstate the surety of benefits of gender-affirming care.

Though there were two important stories on detranstioners, in 2017 and 2018, along with my own op-ed in The New York Times in 2017 about confusing gender nonconformity with transgender identity, the media seemed to retreat from proper exploration of this complex following the backlash to those pieces. 

For the past year-and-a-half, I’ve pitched stories to The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, USA Today, Time and many others about detransitioners and how the science of gender-affirming care actually doesn’t support claims that it’s life-saving — despite assertions by major medical associations. I’ve pointed out that around the world, in countries with better healthcare systems and no profit motive, medical interventions for trans children are being slowed down or doled out only under strict circumstances, because of concern about going too far, too fast.

I managed to publish a few dissenting pieces in mainstream media, but most people in the media plugged their ears. They, too, didn’t want to know. As a result, the media have helped make gender affirming care a political issue instead of a healthcare issue. They have failed and misinformed their readers. They’ve actually done them an injustice. 

Finally, last month, The New York Times admitted the story was more complicated than they’d let on, publishing a piece about the potentially damaging effects of puberty blockers, admitting that this field is full of unknowns, instead of the certainty it previously espoused. Reuters, too, has begun to report more honestly, and Politico followed suit in one piece. These are baby steps, but I’m grateful for them. 

Even so, there’s so much more territory to cover. As a journalist, this has been the most dispiriting vocational experience I’ve ever had. Yet along the way, I met hundreds of amazing people. Those speaking up, or wishing they could, are a diverse group from all over the world, of different religious and political and regional backgrounds, different cultures. There are many gay, lesbian and trans people among them. What they have in common is an appreciation for scientific knowledge, a deep humanity, and an endless well of love for their children. 

I think those on the Left who already know something is wrong will eventually feel safer dissenting and questioning, despite their own media misinforming them. For those of you still saying, “I don’t want to know” — even if you can’t listen to me, please take your blinders off and unplug your ears. There is so much to see and hear. 

Lisa Selin Davis is the author of “Tomboy” and the Substack newsletter BROADVIEW.

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