We're Living in the Upside Down

How the Left media gaslights liberals

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On May 1, a UK newspaper published what I thought was a reasonable and sane piece responding to Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine’s assertion that there is medical consensus around gender-affirming care. It hit all the notes that any respectable newspaper reporting on trans kids should: It talked about the shift in policies in Sweden and Finland and rethinking of the affirmative model in France and the UK. It mentioned detransitioners. It noted Levine’s extortionist use of inflated suicide stats. Maybe it could have spent a little more time acknowledging that some children do seem to fare well after transition, even if we have no long-term evidence to evaluate that claim or understand the ultimate medical implications of physical transition. But all in all, I thought: This is a good model for how papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post should and could be writing about these issues. Don’t just reprint activist or government talking points; push back, investigate, seek alternative opinions and don’t assume dissent and opposition are rooted in hate.

I asked a couple of UK friends what kind of newspaper The Daily Mail was, as the only UK newspaper I’m familiar with is The Guardian, and their coverage is only a smidge less partisan and ideological than NYT’s and WashPost’s. They told me it was a conservative tabloid, not a trusted, nonpartisan, reputable news source.

Well, shite. How many of you liberals are having this experience, where the news sources you’ve previously reviled are the only sources reporting honestly on this issue? Where the politicians whose policies on other issues have appalled you in the past are creating the sanest policies on this issue? How many of you are living with me here, in the Upside Down?

It’s incredibly hard to explain to my liberal friends, and my fellow journalists, how wrong I think we have this story when the left and center media report it in a completely different way than the right media. I have seen that same right-wing media promote anti-science post-truths that I find shocking and dangerous, from climate change denial to Covid denial. But the left is doing the same thing with the science of gender-affirming care—denying the reality that there is no medical consensus, that the research supporting it is flimsy, that we don’t have any numbers on regret and that we’re ignoring important research that calls into question the affirmative model. The same folks who have a “science is real” sign in their front yards are likely to believe that trans kids will kill themselves if they don’t receive cross-sex hormones—because the media they consume hasn’t properly pushed back on that assertion. Instead, those media sources have promoted it.

I try to explain to people that the Biden administration’s information sheet on gender-affirming care is full of misinformation, and that Florida’s recommended approach to gender-affirming care is not anti-LGBTQ, as the media reports, but more like moderate Sweden’s. I tell them that if they want to learn about detransitioners, they have to tune into Tucker Carlson (with the exception of the 60 Minutes piece from last year, god bless them; also it turns out lots of Dems secretly like Tucker). But when I hear myself, I sound like a right-wing conspiracy theorist, defending what my friends have been told is legislation created by bigots to ensure their narrow, fundamentalist reign. How could I be saying such things?

Well, maybe because the ACLU, once so committed to free speech that they defended the KKK, is pushing censorship? Because Planned Parenthood, serving people with periods and uteruses, is among the largest purveyors of cross-sex hormones in the country? Because the Trevor Project publishes alarmist suicide stats based on low-quality data that are actually dangerous because suicide in fact can be socially contagious? Because The New York Times is impossibly one-sided and also gets the science wrong? They keep calling things anti-LGBT when they’re often pro-LGB, or pro-woman, or even pro-T because some trans people want to separate this ideology from their lived experiences, as people who changed bodies or identities for psychological relief.

It’s hard to stay rooted in reality, to not feel that I’m living in an episode of Black Mirror.

This weekend I was explaining to a Canadian friend how dangerous her country’s ban on conversion therapy is, because it may prevent exploratory therapy for kids with gender dysphoria­—while, for instance, France’s National Academy of Medicine is urging clinicians to “extend as much as possible the psychological support phase.” The opposite! Of course I’m against conversion therapy for sexuality. But when activists conflate exploratory therapy for GD with conversion therapy for gay kids, it makes it impossible for lefties to object, because we sound like bigots. It also obscures the reason such exploration is important: to understand the source of the gender dysphoria so one can determine the appropriate treatment for it.

Honestly, this strategy is brilliant. It tidily silences dissent and narrows the Overton window so much that the only way to free oneself ideologically is defenestration; that is, you must sever your ties with the left if you hold a heterodox opinion. The strategy has been so incredibly successful that the Biden administration is backing a system of care that several other allied countries are backing away from. So successful that journalists believe they must protect an ideology instead of report the truth. So successful that only one sliver of media can safely venture down this critical road, which contributes to our polarization and thus the widespread misconception that this is a left/right issue.

The success of the strategy relies on our collective silence on the left. It would be okay if the medical associations and government were lying to us and failing us, as long as we had the media to mitigate, to dig, to find out who was being helped and who was being hurt, to gather all the information and present it to us so we could make up our own minds. But they’re not doing that. I hope this will be the year, then, that those of us who’ve managed to access that information share it with the world. I hope this is the year we all speak up, and can go back to living in the Right Side Up.