What I love about this, though, is that the little nails will become an outline of where the water was. It will trace the shape, show someone later what was there once upon a time. It will be a testament to how much this guy wanted to capture the amazing things he saw and experienced, and though it will never truly keep it, it will hold a memory, something that in itself is beautiful and worthy of experience. We cannot describe the indescribable, but we can trace its outline, give some idea of what we experienced.
Oy. This weekend, Bill Maher invited white Santa stan Megyn Kelly on for a friendly chat about literally every single ant in her pant, and in a classic case of “Who could have foreseen that?” she ranted about exactly the things that Republican candidates for office are making way too many TV ads about right now.
Yes, it’s time for another episode of “What Is Megyn Kelly Being A Transphobic Asshole About Today?”
Transcript:
KELLY: Almost equally important [as fascist Joe Biden fascistly forgiving student loans], maybe as important is the — what we’re doing to our children with this trans insanity. I mean this is almost my single issue. We are chopping off the healthy body parts of young children without … [disbelieving noises from crowd] Oh, 100 percent we are doing that.
MAHER: Well, we are definitely doing that.
KELLY: Without any inquisition into what’s happening.
MAHER: Because that’s what it is. So I don’t know what the ooh-ing is about.
KELLY: I don’t — I don’t either. Pay attention, I’m about to give you a truth bomb: Kids who are suffering from bullying or who have been sexually assaulted or who are going through normal puberty and feel uncomfortable in their bodies will say to their parents, “I’m not sure, maybe I’m gender confused.” They will send them into a psychiatrist or psychologist who are told by our organizations — the American Psychiatry Association and all the others that run their licensing — “You must affirm.” Affirm is the only standard. And so the child gets told, “You’re right, you are secretly a boy or vice versa.” And the child is put on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones which sterilize the child and deprive the child of any chance of sexual pleasure for the rest of his or her life. We’re talking about nine-, 10-, 11-year-olds, who cannot give informed consent. Then they have body parts chopped off by a medical establishment and by parents who mean well but believe in these doctors and they shouldn’t. And when they inevitably get past the awkwardness of puberty or what-have-you and they want to turn around and detransition, those who love-bombed them on Reddit saying “come on in, the water’s fine,” abandon them, they are depressed. They have changed their bodies forever in a way that is irreversible. And we are all sitting back and saying, “It’s a remote issue,” as Kamala Harris said. It’s not remote. It’s the issue of our times both with respect to children and women’s rights.
MAHER: Well, let’s back up a little on that …
Yes. Let’s.
Let’s back up on allllll of it.
This clip went viral when some right wing polemicist named Eric Abbenante posted it to Twitter as a gotcha for the libs, commenting, “Liberals are more disgusted at hearing the truth, than they are at adults chopping off body parts of children.”
Except yes and no.
Let’s take a look:
We are chopping off the healthy body parts of young children
When surgeries happen that remove non-gangrenous body parts, the surgeons removing said body parts are, indeed, adults. We will give that one to Meggin and Eric, although counterpoint.
We will further give them that very many people are not disgusted to hear that children’s body parts have been chopped off even when those body parts are healthy, if doctors are performing circumcisions or nose jobs or boob implants or breast tissue reduction. Ironically it might be true that liberals are more disgusted than conservatives on the first three, but since our Brave Heroes didn’t say anything about the level of conservative disgust, we’ll count this another one in favor of Magaan and Eric’s outrage at insufficient outrage.
That said, to the extent that there are any surgeries on children at all, Yr Wonkette has literally never heard of any that target children’s down there parts, while chest surgeries are limited to children 16 and up, are performed rarely, and are the same surgeries given to cis children far more often. For trans kids, these rare surgeries are only performed when careful consideration by doctors determines that the benefits outweigh the risks. For cis kids, it’s plastic surgery anyone can access — even bullied or sexual assaulted kids, yet Kelly doesn’t mention that.
Next up?
Kids who are suffering from bullying or who have been sexually assaulted or who are going through normal puberty and feel uncomfortable in their bodies
Hahahahahahaha. We kid ourselves so hard at Wonkette.
[Kids] will say to their parents, “I’m not sure, maybe I’m gender confused.”
Of course you’re gender confused. Hundreds of millions of Americans are confused. Fortunately, you can take college courses for that.
Affirm is the only standard. And so the child gets told, “You’re right, you are secretly a boy or vice versa.”
Wait, what? Assuming that “affirm is the only standard” (it isn’t, but go with us here) and the child says that they’re confused, the affirming position is, “Okay, I believe you that you’re confused. Let’s talk.” What Kelly is describing is the exact opposite of affirming care. As Yr Wonkette has explainered previously:
The gender affirmation [anti-trans writer Pamela Paul complains about] isn’t doctors telling patients that they’re trans regardless of their actual experience. […] What has come to be known as the gender affirmation model is when doctors tell a client that they can do whatever and that’s actually fine. Staff affirm us as we are, and they affirm us as we grow and change. What it is is a patient-centered approach.
Affirmation was developed as a conscious alternative to the “doctor knows best” model that hurt so many and which trans people themselvesfought to change. You can even see those changes in successive versions of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH)’s eight “standards of care” statements since 1979.
We will chalk this one up as a “no.”
And the child is put on puberty blockers and cross sex hormones which sterilize the child …
Uh, no? Puberty blockers aren’t used because “affirmation.” Rather they are used when clinically significant distress is deemed by an expert to be likely caused by gender dysphoria and can be expected to be likely relieved by hormone therapy. As the World Professional Association for Transgender Health Standards of Care version 8 (SOC-8) states, an assessment is required before any and every medical intervention, as well as monitoring ongoing treatments to ensure they continue to be useful or necessary. Also, too, puberty blockers’ effects are reversible and do not cause sterility. “Cross sex hormones” can sometimes cause sterility, but most frequently do not.
So a definite “no,” here as well.
[Puberty blockers and cross sex hormones] deprive the child of any chance of sexual pleasure for the rest of his or her life.
Oh dear. No chance of sexual pleasure?
How is it possible that trans people are sexually deranged hedonists who willingly mutilate ourselves for an extra gender-reveal party with a side of spontaneous orgasms and also, too, never experience sexual pleasure in our long lives?
Having watched numerous documentaries involving horny sauna sexcapades, mattress saleswomen desperate for increased commissions, and/or breasts escaping lycra tops during improbable elevator accidents, Yr Wonkette is prepared to conclude that some quantity of sexual pleasure is, indeed, being experienced by your local trans person.
And while we here at Wonkette did not ever expect our personal experience mouthing metoidioplastic wang to be relevant to national politics, it is also possible for this author to attest that this sexual pleasure is restricted neither to AMAB folks nor to Pre-Op/Non-Op persons. This is something even Morganna LeKelly could know if she just googled “hot trans guy blowjob” and paid a fair price for her Shiri Allwood + Austin Spears porn. (Might as well spend some of those NBC severance bucks on something ethical.)
To sum up, none of this looks bad for liberals or good for conservatives.
And while we here at Wonkette did not ever expect our personal experience mouthing metoidioplastic wang to be relevant to national politics, it is also possible for this author to attest that this sexual pleasure is restricted neither to AMAB folks nor to Pre-Op/Non-Op persons.
I really would love to try a cultivar of Red Delicious from before WW2, because apparently all the things we hate about it were introduced by selective breeding from the 1950s onwards. But I never heard of any of the original breeds surviving anywhere.
Born in 1900 in Hartford, Estelle Trebert grew up a pretty normal kid. She was very smart but a terrible student, which led to her skipping two grades earlier in her schooling but then being held back in high school because she missed so class so often one year. She was raised Catholic but it didn’t stick and in fact, like a lot of Catholics, she realized her parents should have divorced but didn’t because of their faith, which didn’t seem very convincing to her. She wanted to go to a music college, but her parents couldn’t afford it, so she worked at a bank to put herself through. She actually was good enough and independent enough that in in 1922, she moved to Paris to pursue a singing career. Two things here. First, her parents were completely outraged. This was not what a good Catholic girl did. She was 22! She should be married with babies!!! Second, she already demonstrated a strong sense of independence and control over her own life.
Trebert’s French experience didn’t quite work out, though evidently it wasn’t because she lacked talent. Rather, she contracted tuberculosis, which meant she couldn’t really sing like she could before. She did manage to beat it. She embraced the art expat scene in France, both in Paris and Nice, and evidently was engaged to a playwright for a time. Then her parents got sick and she came home and they died shortly after. After that, she worked a bit in New York and Chicago but eventually came back home to Hartford, where she married Richard Griswold in 1927. He was no local boy really himself, having fought in World War I and worked in New York in advertising. They moved to New York, where he continued his advertising career and she got work singing on NBC Radio.
In 1935, the Griswolds moved to Washington. Estelle initially still sang, but decided to give that up and instead went to George Washington University to study medicine and while I don’t think she ever officially became a doctor, she did start teaching some at the university. Her emphasis on women’s health and her general beliefs in humanitarian approaches to the world would serve her well. Now, Richard Griswold was working for the State Department during World War II in the Office of Political Affairs, which was probably a good place for an ad man. He spent quite a bit of the war in Europe. Estelle wanted to join him as soon as possible, but that wasn’t until 1945, when the war ended. She immediately went to Europe and determined to do something about the refugee crisis overwhelming the continent that year. So she tried to get a job with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency. She didn’t get that job, so she did just what you might think she would do–she figured out who was really in charge of the agency, went to meet them, and told them to hire her. They did so too.
It was at this time that Griswold became particularly concerned about issues of birth control. Now, this was the era in which people in rich countries blamed the problems of the poor on overpopulation, which really wasn’t the issue and which had all sorts of eugenic connotations. Griswold was not immune from this. She came to believe that part of the cause for the poverty of these refugees was too many children. That wasn’t exactly incorrect, but also sort of missed the point. In any case, she saw some very real starvation and many horrible things in Europe, as she worked to find nations to resettle various nationalities of refugees.
Now, we can criticize the overpopulation thing, and we should. But Griswold also believed that the solution was women controlling their own bodies, which is an absolute good and the best answer if you believe that is an issue. She became a passionate fighter in the second half of her life for reproductive rights, birth control, and sex education, not only in the U.S., but globally. The Griswolds returned to the U.S. in 1950 and Estelle became involved in Planned Parenthood. They moved to New Haven and she worked with the infertility and the martial counseling program at Yale. She was a good person for all of this. She, Griswold was herself infertile and she hated that. They actually lived across the street from New Haven Planned Parenthood and got to know the workers there.
Now, Connecticut still had a Comstock Law on the books, having banned contraception in 1879. Now it was the mid-50s. Feminists wanted to end this. I mean, come on, we were in the postwar period with Victorian laws still controlling women’s lives. You know who had pushed this law through the legislature actually? P.T. Barnum! He was a state legislator at the time. So they asked Griswold to become their executive director and launch a legal challenge. She was reluctant. This was a lot. But then her husband was diagnosed with emphysema (ah, the 50s) and he couldn’t work much. She now had to support them and so the money pushed her to do it.
It was a whole group of people involved in what became Griswold v. Connecticut. Griswold, of course, but also an anonymous married couple who had given birth to three children who all had died of the same genetic condition shortly after birth. Then there was C. Lee Buxton, a Yale doctor, and civil rights lawyers Fowler Harper and Catherine Roraback. Others too of course. They opened a health clinic in 1961 to pass out birth control. Hired good doctors, covered all their bases. The cops came almost right away. Griswold and her friends had picked out very specific women to treat too. It was all a test case of course, so they laid the groundwork they best they could. It wound its way through the courts and when the Supreme Court overthrew the old law inGriswold v. Connecticut by a 7-2 vote in 1965, it seemed almost inevitable. Of course the nation would continue to move in a way toward rationality, privacy, and personal freedom. Incidentally, it was Potter Stewart and Hugo Black who dissented, based on the idea that the Constitution does not in fact guarantee privacy anywhere in its text, which is true but irrelevant if we want to live in a modern society. William O. Douglas wrote the majority opinion.
Griswold stepped down as director of the Planned Parenthood clinic as soon as the decision was announced. There were long standing personal tensions between her and the rest of the organization, at least in part stemming from her asking them if she and her husband could move into the carriage house connected to its offices so he wouldn’t have to walk up stairs due to his emphysema and probably other reasons too. Richard died in 1966. She stayed in New Haven, eventually spending winters in Fort Myers, where she died in 1981. She was 81 years old.
At the time of her death, it would seem impossible to overturn Griswold. Today? Well, as Scott replied when I told him was writing this post, Sam Alito probably has a portrait of P.T. Barnum on his wall.
Estelle Griswold is buried in Wethersfield Cemetery, Wethersfield, Connecticut.
If you would like this series to visit other heroes of the fight for birth control, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Charles Knowlton is in Ashfield, Massachusetts and Katharine McCormick is in Chicago. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.
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