It used to be that if you wanted someone to publish an over-the-top, flattering portrayal of your life’s work, you had to pay for it. Unless it’s your obituary, you had one choice, which was to hire an ad agency to create some marketing materials or get a publicist to send some emails or something like that. I’m not sure how the process works exactly.
But anyway, none of that is true anymore. Now, if you’re looking for unfettered, fawning adulation on the cheap, there is another option. You can always wait for a Left-wing digital media outlet to write a hit piece about you. Years ago, when the slightest hint of nonconformity got people fired, these hit pieces were effective. Now they read more like press releases from the person being targeted. This has been true for a while, but yesterday, the trend officially hit its apex at something called “HuffPost,” formerly known as The Huffington Post.
Without charging me a dime, HuffPost has just published probably the most complimentary profile anyone has ever written about me. That’s not a high bar to get over, granted, given that there has never been a complimentary profile written about me. But still, this one is pretty great. That was not their intent, as far as I can tell. They obviously spent a lot of time on this thing. They interviewed a bunch of people to put together this lengthy diatribe in an apparent attempt to make me seem mean and bad and scary. But in the end, they produced an article that essentially accuses me of single-handedly shutting down “gender-affirming care” in Tennessee while chasing trans activists out of the state altogether. They were trying to embarrass me, but in the process made me out to be some sort of superhero.
To be clear, I don’t deserve nearly as much credit as they give me, but I appreciate the thought. And of course, it’s the thought that counts. And it’s worth talking about this article in some detail because it reveals something significant, which is that the Left knows it’s losing on this issue. Even the writers at HuffPost and the few people who still read HuffPost understand that very well. This is probably the best confirmation on this point that we’ve seen, and I’ll show you why.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
The piece I’m talking about is entitled “This State Tried To Pass Anti-Trans Laws For Years. Then A Right-Wing Media Star Got Involved.” The sub-headline reads, “The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh has set his sights on banning gender-affirming care for trans youth — and an attack on Vanderbilt’s transgender health clinic shows he’s succeeding.”
All I have to say to that is, damn right and amen. Now, the writer of this profile is a former Buzzfeed reporter who goes by the name “Lil Kalish” and uses they/them pronouns, so you know you’re in for something good. You also know, of course, that Lil Kalish, they/them, is going into this investigation with all of the conclusions already drawn. There isn’t even any pretense of objectivity. That’s journalism for you. Lil Kalish begins by describing an interview with “Riley,” who’s supposedly a health care worker at Vanderbilt and who also uses they/them pronouns, apparently. The article makes clear that “Riley” is a pseudonym. So, right away, we have a hit piece written by an author with a fake name talking to someone with a fake name, and both of them have third-person pronouns. Already, the credibility is off the charts.
According to Riley, one day in September, the idyllic serenity of the Vanderbilt gender clinic was shattered when I posted my investigation into Vanderbilt on Twitter. As Riley put it, people at the clinic:
…whispered about the social media posts by right-wing blogger Matt Walsh, which had gone viral the day before for claiming that doctors at Vanderbilt’s transgender health clinic ‘castrate’ and ‘sterilize’ children.
I need to pause for a second to note one of the many ironies of this piece, which is that it accuses me of spreading disinformation while constantly getting basic facts wrong. Throughout the piece, I’m called a “right-wing blogger,” even though I haven’t blogged in roughly ten years. It’s a small detail, admittedly, but it stands out in a piece that’s supposed to be accusing me of spreading disinformation. Our friend Lil Kalish dedicated a 5,000 word hit piece to me, but apparently never even bothered to Google me beforehand. Which, you would think, would be the first step.
But to Lil Kalish’s credit, the article does offer a somewhat accurate portrayal of what I wrote on social media. Here’s the HuffPost summary:
Walsh posted a video of one Vanderbilt doctor ― Dr. Shayne Taylor, who founded the clinic in 2018 ― discussing how gender-affirming surgeries, like double mastectomies and genital surgeries, could bring in ‘a lot of money’ for the medical center.
And indeed, that’s exactly what I posted, because it’s true. The article goes on to correctly characterize some of my other tweets:
In another video Walsh posted, a different doctor cautions that employees who don’t want to treat transgender patients on the grounds of religious objections ‘probably shouldn’t work at Vanderbilt.’ At the end of the thread, Walsh wrote that the clinic’s peer support group, Trans Buddy Program, was in fact a ‘gang of trans activists’ acting as ‘surveillance in order to force compliance.’
What’s the problem with any of this? you might ask. Eventually, Lil Kalish gets around to making something of a point:
Puberty blockers, which stop the body from making sex hormones, help slow unwanted secondary sex characteristics. They do not, as Walsh suggested, ‘sterilize’ or ‘castrate’ children, though the medication could pose some risks to fertility if they are administered too early in puberty.
This is what’s called a self-refuting sentence. Lil Kalish begins by saying it’s wrong to suggest that puberty blockers castrate kids and then proceeds to admit that these drugs castrate kids.
You should know that the definition of “chemical castration,” according to the Webster dictionary, is the use of a drug to block the production of sex hormones. So HuffPost is claiming that puberty blockers don’t castrate, they only block the production of sex hormones. Which is to say that they don’t block the production of sex hormones, they only block the production of sex hormones. Just as, you might argue, that object over there isn’t a square, it’s only a geometric shape with four equal straight sides and four right angles. If it feels like you’re having a stroke while you listen to this line of logic, that makes two of us.
As for sterility, the data have been clear on this for a long time. Here’s a direct quote from the peer-reviewed journal of Translational Andrology and Urology, from back in 2019:
Transgender individuals who undergo gender-affirming medical or surgical therapies are at risk for infertility. Suppression of puberty .. in the pediatric transgender patient can pause the maturation of germ cells, and thus, affect fertility potential.
By the way, not that facts matter here, but in my tweet thread, I wasn’t only talking about puberty blockers. I was mainly talking about cross-sex hormones, which also have a well-documented sterilizing effect on children. Vanderbilt admitted to giving those to children as young as 13:
But they must have forgot to delete a video from Vanderbilt Psychiatry’s Youtube channel back in 2020 which admits explicitly that they will give and have given irreversible hormone drugs to children as young as 13. pic.twitter.com/Qn48zWoJ1N
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) September 20, 2022
To be clear, the drugs they’re talking about don’t simply reduce fertility. In many cases, they eliminate it entirely and permanently. It is simply an indisputable fact that cross sex hormones — which Vanderbilt did give to gender confused children, and which are given to gender confused children all over the country — can and very often do sterilize. This is not my theory or my assumption, it is a fact. That’s why many hospitals engaging in this so-called “gender-affirming care” tell patients to store their eggs and sperm. UCSF, for example, advises that its gender doctors will:
…oversee services for people with testicles, including sperm storage and specialized techniques to produce and retrieve sperm in those with a history of hormone use.
So HuffPost caught me saying something true, which they’re pretending is false. But let’s just move on because it gets even worse. Lil Kalish also takes issue with my reporting that Vanderbilt was performing double mastectomies on minors.
[Vanderbilt] performed fewer than a dozen top surgeries, or double mastectomies, each year for transmasculine patients in their late teens, according to Riley. Such surgeries require patients to undergo months of therapy beforehand, and a study published this summer showed that top surgery patients had little to no regrets decades after the operation. Both Riley and a [Vanderbilt] executive, C. Wright Pinson, said that the hospital never performed ‘genital procedures’ on minors.
There are at least three significant problems with this paragraph. The first is that it uses the term “late teens,” which is obviously ambiguous. A 19-year-old adult woman is in her “late teens.” Someone who’s 17-years-old could also be considered to be in their “late teens.” A 16-year-old might qualify as “late teens,” if by “late teens” you just mean someone on the back half of their teenage years. They’re relying on this ambiguity because, in fact, Vanderbilt did perform double mastectomies on patients under the age of 18. They’ve admitted that. This is why they suspended so-called “gender-affirming surgeries” for patients under the age of 18 after my reporting. It’s kind of hard to suspend something you weren’t doing in the first place.
Another problem with that paragraph is that it implies Vanderbilt didn’t act unethically because they only performed “fewer than a dozen top surgeries” each year for teenagers. So they only mutilated a few kids. What’s the big deal? Imagine being one of the young girls who no longer has her breasts because of these charlatans and then reading that paragraph. Enraging does not begin to describe it. In fact, if you are a person with a brain and a soul, you will hear that they mutilated a dozen kids a year and be shocked by how high that number is. A dozen a year? A dozen girls a year had their body parts removed for no valid medical reason? That is shocking and horrifying, to those of us with a conscience, anyway. You notice how they’ve moved the goal posts. They went from saying “We don’t mutilate kids at all, don’t be ridiculous,” to “We only mutilate kids every once in a while, don’t overreact.” That’s a very different argument, isn’t it?
The third issue here is the study they cite. They claim that “a study published this summer showed that top surgery patients had little to no regrets decades after the operation.” If you have common sense you will already find this claim highly dubious, given that almost all surgeries have regret rates at least over zero. The idea that nobody ever regrets a cosmetic double mastectomy is simply ludicrous on its face. That’s why I did what HuffPost hopes you won’t do and I clicked the link HuffPost provided. It took me to a report that I’ve actually already debunked on this show, and it begins with this:
Question: What is the rate of regret and satisfaction with [the] decision after 2 years or more following gender-affirming mastectomy?
They’re clearly not tracking results from “decades” after the surgery, at least not in every case. Two years suffices, apparently. And then I looked at the response rate:
A total of 235 patients were deemed eligible for the study, and 139 responded.
Right there, you have a useless study. If nearly half of the patients don’t respond — maybe because they’re dead, depressed or unhappy — then you have no business citing the very small number of people who responded — fewer than 140 in this case — as evidence of anything. We see this kind of statistical manipulation constantly in this field. This is yet another instance of it. We should also note that the median age at the time of surgery for those who did respond was 27. So this was not a study that focused on minors who had top surgery. In other words, it’s a totally irrelevant study because it is not even attempting to measure the thing that we’re actually talking about.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILY WIRE APP
Finally, a number of respondents actually did report high levels of dissatisfaction, but their answers were thrown out because the researchers judged the answers to be contradictory or confusing. This is just a brief list of the problems with this absolutely ridiculous and scientifically illegitimate study, which HuffPost is citing uncritically and without acknowledging any of its myriad limitations.
I could go on here. The rest of the piece is an extended attack on Vanderbilt, believe it or not, for daring to comply with the Tennessee attorney general’s investigation into this barbarism. They also suggest it’s improper for Tennessee officials to act on my concerns, even though this is precisely how democracy is supposed to work: Citizens bring an issue to the attention of their government, and the government responds.
The upshot is that this writer repeatedly insists that I misinformed the public about Vanderbilt’s trans program and about “gender affirming care” generally. But there is no explanation as to what part I was wrong about, or how exactly I was wrong. What little this writer does say is clearly wrong or misleading. This is what passes for a fact check. This is how a “hit piece” works in the year 2023.
As gratifying as it was for me to read this, there’s a bigger point to be made here. Ultimately the article is a lamentation over a battle that the Left knows it has lost. The child gender transition racket has suffered one defeat after another in state legislatures, and then the courts followed. Most importantly, it has lost completely on a cultural level.
Look at the comments on this HuffPost hit piece. The most popular comments — on this extremely Left-wing website — all support my point of view. As of today, the top comment on the article reads:
Why is this being made into a Left-Right issue by the media, it’s NOT. I’m liberal, everyone I know is liberal, NO ONE I know supports trans treatments for children.
The next highest-rated comment reads:
They keep telling us that no surgical procedures are being done on minors, yet here it seems to be occurring.
Right below that, is this comment:
I just can’t understand how any adult would be ok with this in their children..
The public sees “gender-affirming” butchery for what it is, and once they’ve seen it, the genie can’t go back in the bottle. The voices of sanity are winning. They’re winning with laws against child castration, which are being passed all over the country. They’re winning in the courts, especially after the ruling from the Sixth Circuit just a few weeks ago, upholding the ban on “gender-affirming” butchery in Tennessee. And now, with this desperate, overwritten and incoherent hit piece, the Left has admitted their defeat as clearly as they possibly can.