PolitiFact is at it again. For the second day in a row, the website has condemned Senate Republicans’ Senate Leadership Fund for an attack ad against Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown. On Thursday, they twisted themselves into a rhetorical pretzel as they rated the PAC “false” for claiming Brown supports men being able to compete in women’s sports, and on Friday they did it again, claiming it is “mostly false” to say Brown supports puberty blockers and sex changes for children.
Once again, Seth Richardson was assigned the task of trying to debunk the ad. He writes, “The Senate Leadership Fund supplied a closed-caption transcript of the news segment, in which a reporter asked Brown about legislation from Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, that aimed to ban gender-affirming care for minors.”
After explaining that the bill would have made it a felony to “provide surgery or prescribe puberty blockers to anyone younger than 18," Richardson provides a quote from Brown, ‘“A child's health care decisions are between them, their parents, their families and their doctors,’ Brown said, according to an archived snippet of the interview. ‘Not politicians. I will never agree with anyone that wants to bring politics into the family situation with health care. Period.’”
Vance’s bill was never brought up for a vote, but Richardson proceeds to cite Brown spokesman Matt Keyes, “Sherrod cares about the health and well-being of all children. He does not believe the government has any role in a family's personal healthcare decisions."
So far, everything Richardson has written would justify a true rating, but things were about to get even stranger:
The Senate Leadership Fund also pointed us to a March 31, 2023, letter Brown and eight other Democratic senators signed that asked the Biden administration to use executive action on several policies to ensure LGBTQ+ people’s access to health care. The letter noted that several states had enacted legislation ‘to restrict access to gender affirming care for minors’ and asked President Joe Biden to allow Medicaid to cover expenses for patients traveling or moving to obtain gender-affirming care.
Richardson finally got around to attempting to debunk the claim, although it wasn’t very convincing, “Gender-affirming care is an individualized health care model that prioritizes encouraging and supporting a person’s gender identity — it is more than puberty blockers and surgery.”
That’s too cute. The aforementioned letter talks specifically about “health care,” not simply “using the name and pronouns that align with a child’s gender identity.” Media discourse on “gender affirming care” also revolves around hormone treatment, so Richardson is punishing Republicans for using the same definition that the liberal media uses just because they reject the premise that such “treatments” are good.
Richardson wraps up by trying to downplay the whole controversy, “Gender-affirming surgery is very rare among minors in the United States.”
In this case, “rare” means 5,747 times, including 224 in Ohio, from 2019 through 2023.
