"PBS Newshour" featured a defense on transgender children and their parents’ support for various gender care treatments including puberty blockers while attacking legislation against them on Wednesday.
Host Amna Nawaz opened the segment noting that "at least 150 bills" filed by Republicans that "target" transgender Americans and restricts doctors from "offering transition related health care for minors even when their parents approve."
The show then featured several parents speaking highly of transitioning children as young as seven and ten with the help of their pediatricians.
"Our daughter is 10 years old," Beth Clawson said. "She started letting us know she was transgender really before she could even speak. She would do things like wear her sister‘s clothes, pretend that towels her long hair and when she was about three years old she started to withdraw and become depressed so we started doing some research."
"We talked to her pediatrician," Clawson added. "For us, gender-affirming care so far has been a social transition using the correct pronouns, letting Kiernan grow her hair long, letting her pick her clothes from the girls section."
Rori Picker Neiss commented, "When my son transitioned at the age of seven, it was not something that was particularly eventful. It involved him changing his name, changing his pronouns. Suddenly, when I went to Target instead of going to the girls section, I went to the boys section."
Despite their claims that the transition is mostly "social," the parents alluded to puberty blockers in the future.
"As soon as we started affirming her as a girl her mental health increased greatly. We do notice with the onset of puberty coming anytime now her distress rises greatly," Clawson said.
"As he gets older, what we are looking at is first puberty blockers, medication that would prevent puberty from happening in the natural course at its core really to buy us time," Reiss said, though she added, "What we don‘t want is to have unnecessary and sometimes invasive surgeries. We want to be able to push a pause button to make sure we are not making these decisions at young ages, at ages like 11, 12, 13."
In addition to supporting puberty blockers, the parents also criticized Republican efforts to combat transgender treatments.
"It has been really tough on us as a family. The idea that the state of Indiana wants to take away our rights as parents to make medical decisions for our kid with our doctors and — it is really painful," Nathaniel Clawson claimed.
The segment did not feature any defense of the transgender legislation proposed by Republicans. By contrast, fellow PBS host William Brangham interviewed researcher Erin Reed, who dismissed attacks against transitioning children.
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"The idea that transgender youth are being treated abusively by their parents, I think, it stands in stark reality to some of the clips that you had played earlier as well as the testimony that I have seen at these hearings," Reed said.
In addition, she called into question the claim that most children experiencing gender dysmorphia eventually grow out of it.
"And these are the kinds of things that we hear that just are not borne out by reality. These numbers are often based off of data that are decades-old from back in the '80s and '90s, whenever transgender people could not be in public, we could not exist in public safely," Reed said. "And so, yes, of course, rates of detransition were so much higher back then because we were not allowed to be ourselves. And the idea that we would treat these parents as abusers and take their kids away from them, it's heart-wrenching."
"There has been a sustained fear campaign waged against the transgender community and the LGBTQ community as a whole," Reed concluded.
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While gender activists have attacked new laws on transitioning, some mainstream media outlets have defended the practice and even lashed out against opponents. On Feb. 21, NPR profiled a 13-year-old who was put on puberty blockers and reportedly identified as "female and transgender."
"Florida bans gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Parents raise concerns," the headline read.
