Ask a Crooked Question, Get the Answer You Paid For

Give me a survey, and I’ll give you any headline you want by Friday.

That isn’t cynicism; it’s arithmetic. Ask people whether they support “protecting children from irreversible procedures,” and you’ll get one number. Ask the same people whether they support “letting families and doctors decide a child’s medical care without government interference,” and you’ll get the opposite number — from the same people, on the same afternoon, about the same thing. Nobody lied. The question did the work.

Which brings us to what the Department of Health and Human Services put on its website in August, and what NPR finally dragged into daylight on September 30.

I’m writing this food-for-thought essay in response to the report titled “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?” If that title doesn’t tell you where the thing is headed, read it again. It surveyed 1,208 adults online and concluded that people who support gender-affirming care guidance are more likely to hold left-wing authoritarian views and more likely to say political violence can sometimes be justified.

Now watch the trick, because it’s done in plain sight.

The researchers built what they call a new measurement tool for “gender ideology.” And what did they build it out of? Guidance issued by the major medical and psychological associations. Read that twice. They took the published clinical recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, the American Psychological Association — the actual standard of care, the stuff your pediatrician is trained on — turned it into survey statements, and then scored agreement with it as “ideology.”

So the instrument is rigged at the root. If you agree with your doctor’s professional body, the scoring sheet has already filed you under ideologue, and the only question left is which flavor of dangerous you turn out to be. They didn’t discover that supporters of gender-affirming care hold a worldview. They DEFINED that worldview as what they were measuring, then expressed surprise at finding it.

That’s not research. That’s a mirror with a government letterhead.

And the authors know the ground is soft. Their own text says gender ideology “may function as an ideological accelerant.” May. Their own discussion concedes that “experimental research is needed to determine causality.” The lead author, Colin Wright of the Manhattan Institute, told NPR — with a straight face, I assume — that “‘may’ is doing important work in that sentence.”

He’s right about that, at least. “May” is doing all the work. “May” is carrying the entire load, because the study is cross-sectional, which is a ten-dollar way of saying it’s a photograph, not a film. It captures what 1,208 people clicked on one day. It cannot tell you what caused what, and it says so, quietly, in the part nobody reads.

What it also was not, as of NPR’s reporting: peer-reviewed. The underlying data? Not released. The funding? Not disclosed. Liliana Mason, a political psychologist at Johns Hopkins, put it about as plainly as academics ever do: “If I were to be a peer reviewer for this paper, I would recommend that it be rejected.”

That is the document your tax dollars posted on a federal health website.

I’ve been in this body for sixty-nine years

Let me declare my interest, since the report’s authors didn’t bother to declare theirs.

I have lived with gender dysphoria for sixty-nine years. Not studied it, not surveyed it, not modeled it on a laptop — lived in it, every day, since before most of the people writing about me now were born. I have spent twenty years reporting on this community. I have known, interviewed, partied with, argued with, cried with hundreds of transgender people.

In twenty years, I can count on no hands the number of people I’ve met who transitioned and regretted it. Not none in the world — I won’t claim that, and anyone who does is selling you something. But in my experience, across hundreds of people, it is vanishingly rare, and it is nothing like the epidemic you’d imagine from the coverage.

And authoritarians? Political violence? I’ve been in rooms with hundreds of us. I’ve seen people who are exhausted. People who are scared. People working two jobs to pay for electrolysis. People who have been disowned by their mothers and still send a card at Christmas. What I have not seen, in twenty years, is a single person whose transition radicalized them toward violence. The people I know aren’t trying to arm a movement. Most of them are trying to get through a shift at work and do their weekly food shopping without being analyzed, harassed, looked at with disdain, and being asked what’s in their pants.

So forgive me if I don’t take seriously 1,208 strangers clicking radio buttons for a few dollars.

This is the stupidity I’ve watched for decades: people whose ignorance on a subject somehow convinces them that their “common sense” outranks the facts. People with no expertise, no training, and — crucially — no actual contact with a single transgender person, who are nonetheless certain they’ve got us figured out. Certainty is cheap. It’s the easiest thing in the world to produce, and it costs nothing to manufacture, which is precisely why there’s so much of it going around.

As I wrote here back in 2022 in Divorce and The Right, my experience has been that people tend to fear in others that which they fear most in themselves and cannot admit. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about a report that scans the country for authoritarians and somehow finds them exclusively among the people agreeing with pediatricians.

How the sausage gets made

There’s a method here, and it isn’t confined to HHS. You can watch it most nights on cable.

I don’t mean the news hour. I mean the opinion shows — the ones that ought to be labeled Fox VIEWS, because views are what they are and news is what they aren’t. The method runs backward. You start with the opinion. Then you go shopping for fragments of fact you can shape into what you already decided on. What they never do—not once—is gather the facts first and then form an opinion; instead, they frame their preconceived opinion and sell it to a gullible audience: they tell them what to think. That would risk the facts saying something inconvenient.

Take transgender athletes, the reliable evergreen.

In December of 2024, NCAA President Charlie Baker testified before the Senate that of more than 500,000 college athletes in this country, he believed fewer than ten were transgender. Fewer than ten. Out of half a million. That is 0.002 percent — a rounding error, a statistical ghost. Yet, red states from coast to coast and through middle America raced to pass legislation. When the then-Governor of West Virginia, Jim Justice, was asked to name “one” trans athlete in his state, he couldn’t. It was a solution in search of a problem.

You would never guess it from the coverage. One athlete does well in one event, and it runs for a week. The denominator never appears, because the denominator kills the story. A segment that opened with “we’re devoting ten minutes tonight to roughly nine people” doesn’t get made.

Is there a real debate inside elite athletics about physiology, hormone therapy and competitive fairness? Yes — a genuine one, with credentialed people on both sides who disagree sharply, and an evidence base thin enough that anyone claiming certainty in either direction is going beyond what the research can bear. I’m not going to pretend I’ve settled it in a column, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who told you they had. But that hasn’t stopped President Trump from ranting about it for years, signing executive orders with all the fanfare his administration can muster.  In other words, political noise.

But notice that the policies never stop at elite athletics. They reach down into grade school. They reach into the junior high intramural team. They reach to the nine-year-old who would like, once in her life, to be picked for something — and whatever you believe about Olympic podiums, you cannot tell me with a straight face that a fifth-grade kickball roster is a question of competitive integrity. That’s not protecting women’s sport. That’s just taking something from a child who already has very little.

Think about what that child is actually being denied. Not a scholarship. Not a medal. A bus ride with teammates. An inside joke. A couple of hours where she isn’t the problem in the room. For a kid carrying gender dysphoria, that might be the only hour that week she isn’t alone with it. We’re legislating that away and calling it fairness.

Then there are the memes. You’ve seen them — the hulking bodybuilder with hairy legs in a sundress, the leering cartoon, the caption about getting access to little girls. Here’s what strikes me every time one crosses my feed: whoever made it has clearly never met one of those, or any real trans kids. The transgender girls and women I’ve known across two decades are, overwhelmingly, as slight and as unremarkable as any other women in the room. You’ve stood behind us in line at the grocery store and never once registered it. That’s not a secret — it’s just what happens when you actually know people instead of inventing them.

But inventing is easier. The invented version is always more convenient than the one that might sit down next to you and turn out to be a person.

What’s actually being defended

Strip the academic varnish off this report and look at what’s underneath. A government agency published a document — not peer-reviewed, data withheld, funding undisclosed — whose central instrument defines agreement with mainstream pediatric medicine as a form of ideology, and which gestures at a link between that ideology and political violence while conceding it has proven no such thing.

The report changes no law. It creates no rule. That isn’t its purpose. It’s for citing. Six months from now, a sentence from it will show up in a legislative hearing, stripped of every caveat, shorn of its “may,” with a federal logo above it. That’s the job it was built to do, and that’s the job it will do.

So ask the question they didn’t want asked. Not “do these people hold dangerous views?” Ask: who wrote the questions, who paid for them, and what answer they hoped to find before they started.

Because a survey is only ever as honest as the person writing it. And this one wasn’t.

I’ve had sixty-nine years to get used to people telling me what I am without ever asking. I’m not going to start believing them now, and you shouldn’t either.

Agree? Disagree? You’re entitled; tell me what you think below.