Despite (or maybe because of) the fact that there is a borderline genocidal war on transgender healthcare around the world right now, 60 Minutes decided to air a segment on the current state of trans rights on Sunday. It did not go well.
The CBS segment starts off innocuously enough. In interviews, U.S. Professional Association for Transgender Health (USPATH) President Erica E. Anderson and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) President Dr. Lee Savio Beers condemned the legislative attacks on access to medically necessary care for trans youth. According to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), at least 35 bills have been put forward in 2021 to prevent trans youth from hormones, puberty blockers, and other care that affirms their sense of self.
Although Anderson is a transgender woman, there is just one interview with a trans patient in the piece. A 17-year-old trans boy gets exactly two sentences in praise of his affirming transition, which he’s been pursuing since he was 13: “My quality of life has improved drastically. I very much believe if I hadn’t done all of these things, there’s a high likelihood I would have tried to take my own life, and I might have succeeded.” Tellingly, he doesn’t even get a name.
Immediately after that, Stahl pivots to highlighting the stories of detransitioners, or those who pursued varying degrees of physical transition and now present as the gender they were assigned at birth.
One of those subjects is Grace Lidinsky-Smith, who 60 Minutes conveniently does not disclose is the president of the Gender Care Consumer Advocacy Network. While the organization claims ostensibly noble goals of empowering “recipients of gender transition-related care to become healthy and whole” in its mission statement, it also says that “surgeries have been marketed on social media like cigarette companies used to market tobacco to children” in a letter regarding recent bans on trans health care.
This is a false notion that plays into the popular notion of “social and peer contagion” when it comes to the “epidemic” of people identifying with transness. The prevailing argument is that more children than ever before are identifying as trans because of peer pressure, but the myth has been widely debunked.
In her 60 Minutes interview, Lidinsky-Smith shares experiences like those described in the GCCAN letter, claiming that she found solace in online trans positive communities as a severely depressed person in her early 20s. After witnessing people’s “wonderful transformative processes,” she started to consider that she might be trans and started to pursue transition, getting approved for hormones and even top surgery within months before realizing that the procedures were not for her.
As I watched the segment with my boyfriend, they sardonically remarked that they’d love to know what surgeon Lidinsky-Smith went to, as they’re currently on a year-long waiting list for a mere surgery consultation in New York City. This could be considered on the luckier side for trans people, too. Although there’s little data on wait times for trans surgeries in the U.S., the Washington Post reported in 2016 that one trans surgeon had a three-year-long waiting list. The situation is especially dire in the U.K., where wait times for NHS clinics can last up to “half a decade and change,” according to one Twitter user who wrote a thread on the subject.
All of this to say that Lidinsky-Smith’s ease of access to hormones, and especially surgery, is highly atypical. In the 60 Minutes segment, she went on to detail how she regretted her transition and stopped testosterone, offering a right-wing wet dream of a soundbite: “I can’t believe I transitioned and detransitioned, including hormones and surgery in the course of less than one year. It’s completely crazy.”
The rest of the segment devolves into much of the same “concern” about the supposed “social contagion” of young people pursuing transition. Although Stahl briefly mentions that detransitioners cite a variety of reasons for detransition, including employment discrimination and family pressure, the only narrative that the segment focuses on is that of regret. This is despite the fact that Stahl herself says that the vast majority of trans people are happy with the care they’ve received. Research regarding those who regret transition is limited, but a recent literature review found that only 1% of trans people regret getting gender affirming surgery.
But 60 Minutes was so devoted to ignoring the data suggesting that trans people who have been able to receive care are overwhelmingly happy with the experience that they interviewed more than 30 detransitioners who experienced regret. “How many of you feel like you were blindly affirmed?” Stahl asked 4 such interviewees. All raised their hands, each citing the influence of trans internet culture.
It is worth noting that almost every single interview subject in the piece is white, with the sole exception of Alphonso David, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, who is a Black cisgender man. That may seem like a tangential point to make in a segment that was such an unmitigated disaster, but it’s actually key to the larger issues with 60 Minutes’ reporting. While the respondents may have felt as though their access to care was “too easy,” this is disconnected from the reality of the vast majority of trans people, especially trans people of color and disabled trans people.
The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, which remains the largest-scale survey of the U.S. trans community to date, reported that Black trans people were more likely to be uninsured than any other demographic in the trans community, with 20% of respondents saying they lack health insurance. Around 18% of Native American respondents and 17% of Latinx respondents said the same.
Without insurance, transition-related healthcare — as with virtually all healthcare in America — is often prohibitively expensive. One estimate from Insider suggests that medical treatments for trans people can often add up to more than $100,000, a particularly difficult financial barrier to clear for communities that experience disproportionate levels of poverty. Even among those who did have insurance, the survey also found that over half of respondents (55%) were denied coverage for transition-related surgery, with 25% being denied coverage for hormone therapy.
While the stories of detransitioners are valid, elevating only the voices of those who regret their transition paints an incomplete — and biased — picture of the state of trans healthcare in America. It could have been worthwhile, for example, to hear from the 31% of USTS respondents who said they detransitioned because of harassment or discrimination or the 29% who cited difficulty in getting a job. It could have been worthwhile to hear from the families who are being forced to uproot themselves from states like Arkansas and Tennessee to protect their trans children. It could have been worthwhile to hear more than one sentence from one trans boy who affirms what the vast majority of trans people already know: Access to care saves lives.
What we got instead is yet another “fair and balanced” inquiry into trans health care that perpetuates narratives that have already been examined to death. While there are criticisms to be made of the myriad ways that the health care system fails trans people, the 60 Minutes segment will only be used to justify further gatekeeping trans people from the care they need to survive.
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