HuffPo did an investigative report about the paid experts who travel around the country helping wingnut states defend anti-trans laws, such as bans on gender-affirming care, so-called “bathrooms bills” and trans participation in youth sports. Y’all will be shocked to learn the “experts” are greedy, unqualified, bible-humping assholes who don’t give a shit about the laws’ impact on real people’s lives! An excerpt:
Most…practice medicine in a field related to gender-affirming care — such as psychiatry or endocrinology — but have treated only a handful of adolescent patients for gender dysphoria, if that, and haven’t published relevant research. Several belong to openly anti-trans groups and have urged state legislatures to pass the very laws they get paid to defend.
Some of the most prominent witnesses were recruited by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal powerhouse whose mission is to realize a country governed by far-right Christian values. And many share ADF’s extreme antipathy toward LGBTQ+ people.
“They’re hired guns,” said Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, a lawyer for the LGBTQ+ rights group Lambda Legal who has faced Hruz and his cohorts in several cases. “These are not real experts. They’re manufactured as experts by the opponents of transgender rights.”
Still, for a rate of hundreds of dollars an hour, they can lend a sheen of scientific rigor to school bathroom restrictions and bans on gender-affirming care.
And they are increasingly having an impact. On Aug. 25, a Missouri judge temporarily upheld the state’s four-year ban on most gender-affirming treatments for minors, writing, “The science and medical evidence is conflicting and unclear.”
When a trans kid’s mom shared her fears about the heightened risk of suicide for adolescents who are denied gender-affirming care, one of the profiled “experts” told her to read Pope John Paul II’s opinions on the topic and said, “Some children are born into this world to suffer and die.”
That sick motherfucker’s name is Dr. Paul Hruz. According to HuffPo, he is a pediatric endocrinologist and has testified in 12 cases. Sarah Huckabee-Sanders’ state government in Arkansas has paid that man more than $41K.
Thinking about people like Hruz makes me stabby, so I’m gonna abruptly change the subject to dogs, okay?
The heroic police dog who nabbed the fugitive murderer in Pennsylvania earlier this week is a four-year-old Belgian Malinois named Yoda. Here is that good boy:
Thanks, Yoda!
Open thread.