The Washington Post is deep in the tank for the leftist transgender movement, employing all the politically correct terminology. On Friday under the “Health and Science” category they posted a story titled “Meet the gender-affirmation surgeon whose waiting list is three years long.” On Thursday, there was a longer article titled “Truth and transgender at age 70; A couple's journey through gender-affirmation surgery.”
“Gender affirmation”? Why would a journalist use a term so distant from the plain English? A sex change operation may seem “affirming” to the surgery customer, but it is a gender denial, and a gender denigration, not an affirmation.
Post reporter Amy Ellis Nutt penned both articles, designed to push the “truth” and “science” that transgender activists push. The “gender affirmation surgeon” was himself a “trans woman” taking the name “Marci Bowers.” In a video, Bowers evangelized:
BOWERS: When you pass someone in the street, it’s almost never do you ever, you know, actually truly know what the status of their genitalia is. So we make assumptions about one another every day. We don’t have to show birth documentation, or you know, we don’t have to pull our pants down to use public facilities. We use gender expression for how we act, and grow our hair, and what we wear and things like that, to tell people what our gender identity is...but when you’re in the private moment, and you’re sitting there after you’ve taken a shower, and you get out and look in the mirror, it’s, you know, it’s, it just is very grounding to know there’s congruence between your gender identity and your genitalia.
Amy Nutt wrote the Friday article like a commercial:
Marci Bowers’s voice is throaty and whiskey-smooth. She tends to speak sotto voce and exudes a quiet confidence.
As an obstetrician, she delivered more than 2,200 babies. As a 58-year-old surgeon, she has performed 1,500 “gender affirmation” operations — and counting.
It’s the latter she understands most intimately. In 1997, Bowers underwent the procedure after a lifetime of knowing she was truly female. Three years later, she moved to the old mining town of Trinidad, Colo., to train under a pioneering doctor and establish herself as the first transgender woman to master that same surgery....
Out of the office, Bowers teaches and lectures and, as a member of the faculty at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, is helping to establish the country’s first medical education program for transgender surgeons. She remains one of just a handful of physicians worldwide who does surgical reversal of the genital mutilation suffered by African women. She does so without charge.
Gender-affirmation surgeries, however, are the mainstay of Bowers’s professional life. Of the 140 to 150 she performs in a typical year, the large majority are male-to-female procedures. (The opposite remains more difficult and more expensive, with less satisfying results, Bowers said.) Her patients come from across the United States and occasionally from overseas. Seniors are no longer rare as patients.
The Post indicted "society's misconceptions" on gender, and "society" was allowed no rebuttal.
The conversation eventually segued into society’s misconceptions of transgender issues.
“Assigning gender identity on the basis of genitalia makes about as much sense as assigning it on the basis of height,” Bowers said. “Biologically, we’re much closer to each other because everyone starts out with a primordial female anatomy, so everything a male has, a female has, and vice versa. It’s just a matter of how the cards are shuffled.”
That's where the earlier article about "gender affirmation" at 70 came in, a longer piece (2,589 words) with the same promotional lingo. Nutt began:
For months, Bill Rohr kept three clocks running on his iPad. One counted down the days to his retirement as a surgeon: Dec. 31, 2015. Another counted up the days since he and his wife, Linda, married: June 15, 1968.
The third clock, the most recent addition and the one that most occupied Rohr's thoughts, showed the days until his Feb. 17, 2016, surgery at Mills-Peninsula Medical Center south of San Francisco.
At age 70, Bill would become Kate.
It was an operation he'd long ago dismissed as unattainable - but one Linda said he deserved to have. She'd traveled the arc of his life, supportive even after his bombshell confession.
Yet before leaving for the hospital that February morning, Linda had to make sure.
"You still want to do this?" she asked.
"Absolutely," her spouse answered.
A short time later, a smiling, even ebullient patient lay propped up in bed, awaiting the final pre-op questions. The name on the medical file passed among the staff already read Kathryn Rohr. Kate for short.
"And your goal today?" a nurse asked.
"Turning an outie into an innie," Kate answered, laughing.
Nutt even quoted the Old Testament to promote this story of denying what God "assigned" at birth:
To a bright child with a gift for engineering and logic, this mystery of mistaken gender had been something to puzzle over but never question out loud. It certainly couldn't be shared - not with his parents or his brothers or his friends. Even if they accepted it, what could anyone really do?
So he endured, through a childhood that was confusing and a puberty that was torture. He felt hormones "ravage" his body, turning him unmistakably male...
At the same time, he knew that if his secret was ever unearthed, it would cost him everything he cherished. There was no map to happiness in this world. How could he know the woman whose love he most feared losing would be the person who would save him?
Life is a "chasing after the wind," Ecclesiastes says. "Time and chance happen to us all."
In this kind of sensitive profile, the Post would never imagine allowing anyone to disagree with this movement or this surgery as an amputation. The Post sees its role as explaining how the world is getting more loving and understanding and progressive in its "gender management" programs. Old assumptions are being somehow debunked, that bad parenting or other environmental factors cause gender confusion. An "overwhelming" crowd of scientists have a new consensus that just happens to fit nicely with leftist cultural politics:
Today, an overwhelming number of doctors and scientists dismiss the idea that environment, or behavioral conditioning, causes a person to be transgender. Most agree that sexual anatomy, sexual orientation and gender identity are the result of three distinct developmental processes in the fetal brain. Yet only recently have researchers begun to tease out how that brain is masculinized or feminized. Hormones, it appears, play an essential role.
"As one patient once told me, sexual orientation is who you go to bed with, gender identity is who you go to bed as," said Norman Spack, a pediatric endocrinologist and co-founder of the Gender Management Service at Boston Children's Hospital....
When Boston Children's Hospital began its Gender Management Service in 2007, its clinic was the only one of its kind in the country. Today, there are more than 40 such clinics nationwide.
Medicare now covers hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery for transgender people, and 15 states as well as the District of Columbia forbid insurance exclusions that discriminate on the basis of gender identity. While North Carolina recently blocked anti-discrimination protections for transgender people, 18 states and more than 200 cities and counties have laws prohibiting the abrogation of rights based on gender identity.
Cultural conservatives are described as the forces of "discrimination" and the "abrogation of rights." And no one gets to disagree in the paper that promotes stories like "Transgender at Five"...and now Transgender at 70.
