As Twitchy reported Monday, HBO’s John Oliver dedicated an entire episode of “Last Week Tonight” to transgender rights. Oliver focused on the “hope and joy” of gender-affirming care for minors and overlooked the medical issues, claiming that puberty blockers are reversible. One viewer tweeted that “there is nothing more beautiful in life” than having your gender affirmed by the medical community. Jesse Singal, who’s written extensively on “gender-affirming care” for minors, took issue with Oliver’s claim that puberty blockers are reversible, noting that Britain’s NHS deleted this claim from its website because no one actually knows the long-term effects.
Toward the end of the show, Oliver showed clips of Christopher Rufo talking with Megan Kelly in a sort of “gotcha” segment, but Rufo had nothing but thanks for Oliver for including him in the show:
Thank you, @iamjohnoliver, for highlighting my work. I always publicly announce my plan in advance, so these "gotcha" segments at the end are a nice confirmation that it worked. We are winning on CRT and radical gender theory—and there's nothing you can do to stop us. pic.twitter.com/MUZsy7b0c3
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 17, 2022
The Left's most powerful technique is to shame people for any behavior that deviates from their narrative. But that's not going to work anymore. Call us whatever you want, but there is nothing shameful about protecting our children from racialist abuse and sexual manipulation.
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 17, 2022
The most liberating thing you can do as a conservative is to stop caring about the approval of people who hate you. I've learned to see these media fights as accelerants to my campaigns, rather than personal judgements on me. They do not matter in my day-to-day life at all.
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 17, 2022
The reality is that Oliver is helping my campaign: he's playing my clips, framing me as a powerful force, and repeating my language, such as "radical gender theory," to an audience of millions. I'm happy to play the villain in his story—in fact, I purposely seed that narrative.
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 17, 2022
Conservatives must have the confidence that we are in the right: against racialist abuse; against radical gender surgeries for minors. Let the pundits and NPCs like John Oliver mindlessly defend whatever passes as elite wisdom. They will be judged harshly later.
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 17, 2022
New York Post columnist Rikki Schlott also took issue with Oliver’s entire argument. It’s a long thread, but stick with it:
As a journalist who has covered the medicalization of transgender children, I feel the need to respond to John Oliver’s segment on transgender rights from this past week. 🧵https://t.co/gd8NDFKbff
— Rikki Schlott (@RIKKISCHLOTT) October 19, 2022
Oliver strawmans his opponents by painting them as a bunch of conservatives who joke their pronouns are U/S/A. But there are many concerned onlookers, myself included, who respect the rights of transgender adults to live as they choose but worry about certain troubling trends.
— Rikki Schlott (@RIKKISCHLOTT) October 19, 2022
Many of Oliver's arguments hinge on the idea that “this barely happens, so it doesn’t really matter.” The contention that protecting women’s sports is a useless endeavor because few trans athletes compete today disregards the fact a precedent is being set when they do compete.
— Rikki Schlott (@RIKKISCHLOTT) October 19, 2022
In the UK (where the best data is available) youth referrals for gender care skyrocketed 1627% between 2010 and 2020. That means we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg with trans athletes. The questions we’re grappling with at a small scale now will be much more pressing soon.
— Rikki Schlott (@RIKKISCHLOTT) October 19, 2022
Oliver also goes on to attack @abigailshrier’s warnings about Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria via social contagion as “total horseshit” but fails to engage with the most fundamental aspect of her argument: biologically female adolescents are unprecedentedly identifying as trans.
— Rikki Schlott (@RIKKISCHLOTT) October 19, 2022
As social media use rose, so too did young girls identifying as boys–an indication that social contagion very well may be at play. The yellow portion of this chart shows adolescent females are behind the soaring number of trans youth in the UK: pic.twitter.com/2WwryMM6jF
— Rikki Schlott (@RIKKISCHLOTT) October 19, 2022
He asks: “To the extent that some young people are just exploring their gender identity, how exactly is that a bad thing? Who the fuck are they hurting?” The answer, when medical transition is introduced into the equation, is that these kids very well may be harming themselves.
— Rikki Schlott (@RIKKISCHLOTT) October 19, 2022
He says puberty blockers are a “reversible pause button.” But he clearly has not checked in back home in the UK, where the NHS is shuttering the Tavistock clinic after a report found “brain maturation may be disrupted by puberty blockers [impacting] complex risk-laden decisions”
— Rikki Schlott (@RIKKISCHLOTT) October 19, 2022
The NHS is developing a “fundamentally different service model” for treating trans youth due to “gaps in the evidence base regarding all aspects of gender care for children and young people, from epidemiology through to assessment, diagnosis, support, counseling and treatment.”
— Rikki Schlott (@RIKKISCHLOTT) October 19, 2022
He dodges the issue of top surgery by describing it as “pretty rare” without actually engaging with the fact that CHILDREN are removing their healthy breasts. @ChoooCole underwent that surgery at 15 years old. As she told me, “I was failed by the system. I literally lost organs.”
— Rikki Schlott (@RIKKISCHLOTT) October 19, 2022
Oliver also dismisses detransitioners like Chloe as a “small subset of individuals" without acknowledging they are a growing subset. Still, that doesn’t invalidate their stories. As we refine the science of medical transition, their cautionary tales could not be more important.
— Rikki Schlott (@RIKKISCHLOTT) October 19, 2022
As more detransitioners inevitably emerge, Oliver’s segment here will not age well. I share his desire to be sympathetic to the obvious struggles of transgender people. But conflating the medicalization of children with “transgender rights” is a fundamentally flawed argument.
— Rikki Schlott (@RIKKISCHLOTT) October 19, 2022
You can question the medical transition of transgender children without challenging transgender rights as a whole, as do medical professionals like @eanderh. Every society, including our own, concedes that children do not have unlimited rights and need to be protected.
— Rikki Schlott (@RIKKISCHLOTT) October 19, 2022
That’s why they can’t buy a pack of cigarettes, can’t crack open a bottle of beer, and can’t drive a car. We recognize that our youth must be protected and are incapable of making decisions with longterm implications—even getting a tattoo.
— Rikki Schlott (@RIKKISCHLOTT) October 19, 2022
Oliver wraps up saying “I could keep reading you stats and studies. I do love doing that.” If that’s the case, I recommend the studies which caused the UK, France, and Sweden to overhaul their treatment of trans kids, starting with NHS’s damning report: https://t.co/OaQyA2Wk5j
— Rikki Schlott (@RIKKISCHLOTT) October 19, 2022
Oliver knows there’s no risk of offending his liberal audience by going all-in on double mastectomies for 16-year-olds. After all, if we don’t alter these kids’ bodies chemically and surgically, they’re likely to commit suicide, so it’s vital to step in as soon as possible.
Can we simply stop treating court jesters like Stewart and Oliver as reliable sources. They have a progressive audience and make $ by stroking confirmation bias. Remarkable they both blast the effect of social media on politics but declare it has no effect on boys and girls.
— Slava Ukraini!!! (@noclockdude) October 19, 2022
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Related:
John Oliver is way too focused on ‘hope and joy’ for trans kids to care about the scientific and medical reality [videos] https://t.co/g926kVq7j0
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) October 17, 2022
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