Publicly funded National Public Radio continues to defy basic biology by muddling the facts of life.
On Tuesday, Kristen Schorsch took the emotional approach to the gender identity topic in “What happens when a Chicago hospital bows to federal pressure on trans care for teens."
He's 17 and lives in the Chicago suburbs. He loves theater and recently helped direct a play at his high school. He takes competitive AP courses and is working on his Eagle Scout project. And he's been on a journey for four years. Once a week, the transgender teen injects testosterone into his body. He's already frozen his eggs in case he wants to have his own biological children one day....
Yes, "he" has frozen his eggs. Schorsch hyped up the melodrama over the Trump administration’s funding pressure. America is so backwards the star of the story has to remain anonymous.
NPR is not identifying the teen by name -- or using his mother's last name -- because they are concerned he could be targeted for being transgender.
Reading the text of these stories is like stepping into Wonderland: A boy due for a mastectomy.
Another patient, a 16-year-old boy from Chicago, had a surgery date for a double mastectomy procedure -- until Lurie canceled it. NPR is not identifying him because he fears for his personal safety.
The teen felt betrayed by the cancellation, he said. He has been binding his chest for more than five years, but doing that causes rib and back pain.
There are two sexes, male and female, determined by whether their bodies are primed to produce sperm or eggs. It took NPR four reporters to pretend otherwise in the recent long investigation “How is sex determined? Scientists say it's complicated.”
From the text version of the report for the NPR podcast Short Wave:
Between the presidential executive order affecting passport policy, moving transgender inmates between prisons and regulating women's sports, appeals to "the biological reality of sex" are constant.
The truth is that biological sex, like a lot of scientific categories, is nuanced.
It's defined by multiple criteria – including chromosomal, chemical, and physical factors – that can, and do, change over a person's lifetime. And it's a reality that's definitely not limited to male and female.
The NPR report treats a person’s sexual identity is an unsolvable mystery, not an easily observed fact.
Medical experts often determine sex by observing internal genitalia like ovaries or external genitalia like penises and testes. They also look at secondary sexual characteristics. These don't usually develop until puberty and include traits like breasts or facial hair. A person's voice, height, fat distribution and muscle mass are other hormone-influenced characteristics that are often used to determine sex.
But these traits don't always fall on a strict binary.
There are tall women and short men, women with flatter chests and men without facial hair; people's appearances can vary widely.
NPR continued to muddle undeniable biological facts.
Why not define human sex by reproductive capacity?
This is, in part, what President Trump's recent executive order suggests: two distinct sexes -- one that produces large reproductive cells (i.e. eggs) and one that produces small reproductive cells (i.e. sperm). The issue is that all humans' reproductive capacity changes throughout their lifespan – children and menopausal adults, for example, cannot reproduce, but that doesn't mean their biological sex is invalid. Plus, there are rare cases of people born with both ovarian and testicular tissue.
In short, science has documented humans who produce eggs, sperm, both, or neither. There's a wide range of possibilities!
Are there really? Next up, the hyped-up condition “intersex.”
How common are intersex conditions?
A lot more common than you might think!
NPR pushed activist propaganda that "intersex conditions overall affect 1-2 in every 100 people. That would make being intersex about as common as having red hair – and more common than being an identical twin.” Using actual scientific definitions, that figure is about 100 times less.
NPR had to run a later clarification: “This story has been revised to clarify that while there are documented examples of people who produce sperm and viable eggs, there are no documented examples of people who produce both viable eggs and viable sperm.”
So much for scientific expertise at NPR.
