“I’m afraid I’m going to be murdered” isn’t something you hear a 10-year-old say every day. However, that’s the message a child named Violet delivered during a shocking CNN segment featuring multiple transgender children and their parents.
“[I’m worried that] one day I’m going to be walking down the street, and someone is going to come up and like shoot me or something,” Violet said somberly in the opening exchange.
“That’s a really scary thing to be worrying about at 10 years old,” the CNN reporter replied, affirming this bizarre paranoia as if it were justified.
It is not.
While the debate over the medical transitioning of gender-confused minors, currently before the Supreme Court, is intense, often heated, and sometimes toxic, no one is randomly murdering 10-year-olds who identify as transgender. The other children on the CNN panel similarly indicated that they falsely fear their “lives” and “existence” are at stake throughout the shocking six-minute segment. This is just an extension of the false narrative, routinely propagated by so-called LGBT activists, that transgender people are frequently murdered for their identity when, in fact, their murder rates are below average.
However, it’s not hard to see where these children got these false impressions. Throughout the segment, the parents expressed similarly apocalyptic sentiments and affirmed their children’s expressions of paranoia. One woman said her child, who is about to turn 18 years old and has been an activist since age 9, has “spent a majority of his life … defending his existence.” (In reality, no one thinks these children should cease to exist.)
So, whether they realize it or not, these parents are psychologically harming their children. It is obviously not good for children to be in an extended state of panic and fear, particularly when that fear isn’t justified by reality, and they are clearly being robbed of their ability to have normal childhoods and exploited for partisan, ideological purposes.
Yet not once does CNN reporter Lucy Kafanov push back even gently on these assertions or scrutinize this narrative in any way. So, it’s fair to say CNN just participated in and promoted the psychological harm of three children.
Now, it is true that these children’s ability to access gender transition treatments is currently up for debate. Roughly half the states have passed restrictions on minors accessing these treatments, which are not Food and Drug Administration-approved for this purpose, and Republicans are considering pursuing a federal ban as well.
However, there’s a good reason for that. As the United Kingdom’s extensive review found, there is no solid evidence supporting giving minors these radical treatments, and they can have drastic consequences, including permanent sexual dysfunction and lifelong infertility, that no 10-year-old can truly understand and consent to.
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Instead of discussing this with the parents so dedicated to transitioning their children, Kafanov simply nodded along to more absurd suggestions, such as the notion that lawmakers should just “listen” to 10-year-olds about complicated debates over medical ethics and science and that a biologically male 10-year-old’s belief that he is really a girl is a “fact,” not an “opinion.”
Of course, the perspective of those directly affected by restrictions on these medical treatments is an important part of this story. However, it’s not good journalism to affirm delusional fears, to broadcast absurd statements uncritically, and, with no other perspective offered, to platform parents who are clearly unintentionally harming their children.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
