Liberal Journalist Admits Gender Ideology Built on Manipulative Lies

This is a day Daily Citizen did not think would ever come.

The Atlantic, an increasingly liberal magazine, and one of its leading staff writers, Helen Lewis, have now admitted in print that one of the main schemes for getting parents to go along with gender medicalizing their children was a manipulative lie all along.

What took them so long?

This new piece details how the “Would you rather have a living ‘daughter’ or a dead son?” manipulation uttered by countless health professionals has always been bunk, bluntly explaining, “There is a huge problem with this emotive formulation: It isn’t true.” They use the Biden administration’s solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, as evidence of this baseless manipulation. Prelogar wrongly told the Supreme Court last year in oral arguments that if Tennessee’s law protecting kids from “gender affirming care” stood, it would “increase the risk of suicide, and I think critically, make it much harder to live.” She was wrong.

The Atlantic also detailed how ACLU attorney, Chase Strangio, a transgender-identified attorney who is actually female, in the same oral arguments before the United States Supreme Court “conceded that there is no evidence to support the idea that medical transition reduces adolescent suicide rates.” Helen Lewis, the Atlantic journalist who authored this new piece, documents how Strangio was forced to admit, when questioned by Justice Alito, “There is no evidence in some – in the studies that this treatment reduces completed suicide.” Strangio added, “And the reason for this is that completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare, and we’re talking about a very small population of individuals with studies that don’t necessarily have completed suicides within them.”

The Atlantic explains dramatically with refreshing honesty,

So yes, the “Affirm your kid’s gender experimentation or they will take their life!” line has always been a manufactured manipulation to scare parents into acquiescing to gender ideology. It has always been a vile lie and now a major left-leaning magazine read by elites has admitted the fact.

The magazine then adds insult to injury by demonstrating how liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayer employed this already debunked lie in her dissent to the recent Skrmetti case which affirmed Tennessee’s (and all other states’) right to project their children from gender medicine experimentation.

Sotomayer wrongly claimed “access to care can be a question of life or death” because “if left untreaded, gender dysphoria can lead to … suicidality.” Lewis, the Atlantic journalist, corrects the dissenting liberal justice: “Claiming that this is true of medical transition specifically – the type of care being debated in the Skrmetti case – is not supported by current research.” She adds Sotomayer made use of “zombie facts” which are “popular soundbites that persist in public debate, even when they have been repeatedly discredited.”

“These zombie facts have been flatly contradicted not just by conservatives but also by prominent advocates and practitioners of the treatment,” the Atlantic contends, “at least when they’re speaking candidly.”

Then this bomb was dropped: “Many liberals are unaware of this however, because they are stuck in media bubbles in which well-meaning commentators make confident assertions for youth gender medicine – claims from which its elite advocates have long since retreated.”

This admission by the typically left-leaning Atlantic should serve as the death knell to the terribly manipulative claim that parents should submit to transgender ideology if they want their children to live. It is not true now and it never was true. Regardless of how many seemingly knowledgeable people confidently say it is.

A recent review of 14 longitudinal clinical research studies on the efficacy of pediatric gender medicine against depression and suicidality published in the academic journal Acta Paediatrica backs this fact: “The research in this field has been systematically reviewed, and there has been a consensus across the reviews that the certainty of the evidence is low.” This research concludes, “Even notwithstanding the issues of study quality and certainty of evidence, the present review highlighted the inconsistent results among the longitudinal clinical research studies.” The title of the article itself admits “longitudinal studies have not consistently shown improvements in depression or suicidality.”

An earlier systematic analysis of 20 published studies concluded that due to substantial limitations and weaknesses in the research, “We could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide” being reduced by medical interventions.

No parent should ever be bullied into submitting to gender medicalizing their child for fear of suicidal risk by any medical or mental health professional. Professionals who try to manipulate parents in this way are relying on zombie facts.

Image from Shutterstock.