Among the defining characteristics of America’s unpopular political media landscape is its lack of perspective.
On Tuesday, CNN’s Jake Tapper hosted the ACLU’s Chase Strangio for a mostly friendly interview ahead of Wednesday’s oral arguments in a high-profile Supreme Court case in which Strangio was set to argue that Tennessee’s SB1 — which prevents minors from receiving puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries associated with transitioning — violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
During their conversation, Tapper sharply criticized President-elect Donald Trump over his rhetoric on related issues.
To Strangio, Tapper said, “You heard some of the more deranged things that Donald Trump said on the campaign trail about kids going off to school, and the school changes the gender of the kid, you know, at school that day. Parents don’t — I mean, just wild claims.”
He then proceeded to play a clip in which Trump said the following:
I will revoke Joe Biden’s cruel policies on so-called gender affirming care. I will
sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age. I will then ask Congress to permanently stop federal taxpayer dollars from being used to promote or pay for these procedures and pass a law prohibiting child sexual mutilation in all 50 states.
So, Trump would redirect taxpayer dollars being spent on promoting gender ideology and treatments and seek to prevent irreversible treatments from being performed on minors.
One need not agree with such policies to recognize that they are well within the mainstream.
Now, it is absolutely true that Trump has made some outrageous claims as Tapper alluded.
“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” mused Trump at a campaign rally this September. It was one of several times that Trump falsely suggested that schools were providing minors with such treatments.
But Tapper didn’t say that Trump’s erroneous claims were about sex-change treatments, he said they pertained to schools changing “the gender of the kid.”
And as it turns out, while what Trump described does not happen, what Tapper did does; Strangio’s own organization says as much!
The New York branch of the ACLU has an entire page dedicated to informing students that “your school must respect your gender identity and use your name and pronouns in most of the contexts you request,” “you have the right to use the bathroom and locker room/changing room that most closely aligns with your gender identity,” and that “your school cannot tell anyone how you identify without your permission.”
In other words: Schools in some states are not only able to socially transition children without their parents’ knowledge, much less permission, they’re legally required to. Still have doubts? Check out that right-wing rag known as The New York Times, which ran a story headlined “When Students Change Gender Identity, and Parents Don’t Know.”
As is the case with most of Trump’s pronouncements, his claims about gender ideology in the education system are needlessly hyperbolic to the point of being dishonest, but draw attention to a truth ignored by progressive elites.
Tapper wasn’t wrong to call out Trump’s lies, though he should have been more precise. Moreover, his characterization of Trump as being “wild” and even “deranged” is off-base, considering the fact that just moments before Tapper used those words to criticize the president-elect, Strangio said the following:
And these are young people who may have known since they were two years old exactly
who who they are, who suffered for six, seven years before they had any relief.
Two years old! It is Chase Strangio’s position that two-year-olds know enough to decide that they were born in the “wrong” body, and that’s why children just a few years older should be able to receive irreversible, life-altering medical treatments.
Think of the two-year-olds you’ve known, are they old enough to know anything, much less make such a monumental decision?
Making note of Trump’s excesses is no sign of journalistic bias, but being utterly incapable of recognizing his opponents’ excesses for what they are surely is.
If the Fourth Estate is to escape the next four years with more respect from the public than it earned over the last eight, it will need to wrestle with the fact that so much of what it has championed — and the ideology behind it — strikes most Americans outside of their bubble as, well, deranged.