Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts recently endorsed taking care away from transgender adults, saying in an episode of the PBD podcast that the organization is currently “running the numbers” on the supposed correlation between gender-affirming surgeries and violence. His proposed solution? “You outlaw it.”
“But where there continues to be disagreement is on what you do with adults. At Heritage, we believe that so-called transgender surgery is bad for anybody because of what you saw in Rhode Island yesterday,” Roberts said, referencing the Monday mass shooting that left three people dead, including the shooter, and three others critically injured, all of whom were related to the shooter. Police have described the attack as targeted and domestic in nature.
“There does seem to be a mounting body of evidence that suggests a correlation between that surgery at any age, mental health issues, and increasingly, although we’re running the numbers on this at Heritage, acts of violence,” Roberts added, falsely.
Buddy, I don’t like the culture of ragebait that the Internet has fomented either, but this isn’t that. This is an LGBTQ magazine reporting on an influential figure’s intentions to disenfranchise every trans person in the US.
The news in its ideal form exists to tell you about important things that are happening, not to balance itself to make you feel better about the world (and things generally are pretty terrible right now).
The examples of “Young Doctor Wants to Improve Healthcare” or “Environmentalist Wants to Protect Our Forests” are totally nebulous in what they want to achieve, ambiguous in how they plan to achieve it compared to an org that’s been systemically dismantling the US from the inside for over a year, and a type of story that gets reported on all the time when it’s actually consequential.
And nobody is going to do jack shit abut it, so why waste the time getting pissed about it? All this is for is to make it people angry for nothing.