More gaslighting from the NYT

It's not getting any better over there.

Today’s New York Times has a long opinion piece by Megan K. Stack, “a contributing Opinion writer”. She interviewed a Missouri State Senator, Mike Moon, who has introduced a bill, the Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act, that would ban for minors “Any medical or surgical service, including, but not limited to, physician's services, inpatient and outpatient hospital services, or prescribed drugs, related to gender transition that seeks to: a. Alter or remove physical or anatomical characteristics or features that are typical for the individual's biological sex; or b. Instill or create physiological or anatomical characteristics that resemble a sex different from the individual's biological sex”. (Many more details are in the full text of the bill, linked above.)

Ms. Stack makes the usual transifier move of mischaracterizing these sterilizing drugs and mutilating surgeries as “gender affirming care”, which could not be further from the truth. True “gender affirming care” would let the male kid in the story dress however he likes and play with whatever toys he likes, rather than mutilating him to make him look like a member of the sex that our society says should like the things that he happens to like.

Alas, Senator Moon comes off as a complete idiot in this piece, and that is largely his own doing, notwithstanding the no doubt extensive efforts of Ms. Stack to make him look that way. Ms. Stack reports that

Then he began to question me: If he, Mr. Moon, wanted to arrange a penis operation for his son or have the breasts cut off his daughter, should he be allowed?

“Where is that happening?” I asked. “Where are these cases?”

Mr. Moon hedged.

It then becomes clear that Senator Moon has no idea how to answer this very reasonable question.

If you’re going to introduce a bill to stop medical procedures that harm minors, you really ought to have some idea of what the level of that harm currently is.

So you here you go, Senator Moon. It so happens that this has been researched by Reuters (and not, of course, by the New York Times), and I provide those numbers here for you. (I have also sent these numbers to him by means of his Missouri Senate contact page, linked above.)

The Komodo analysis of insurance claims found 56 genital surgeries among patients ages 13 to 17 with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2019 to 2021. Among teens, “top surgery” to remove breasts is more common. In the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to Komodo’s data analysis of insurance claims. This tally does not include procedures that were paid for out of pocket.

At least 14,726 minors started hormone treatment with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2017 through 2021, according to the Komodo analysis.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-data