PolitiFact writers Grace Abels and Loreben Tuquero took after Sen. J.D. Vance on Tuesday, with a subhead claiming he "misrepresents Minnesota law on kids seeking "gender-affirming care." The fact-defying term appears 18 times in the PolitiFact copy (include the subhead and a caption).
Their "Truth-o-Meter" ruling was "False." But it's not as False as claiming breast and genital amputations and hormone-blockers and the like are "gender-affirming."
This was the bulletin-board Vance quote. as he mocked what Minnesota Democrats called the "Trans Refuge Act."
"I think it’s pretty weird to try to take children away from their parents if the parents don’t want to consent to sex changes," Vance said Aug. 7 at a campaign event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. "That’s something that Tim Walz did."
PolitiFact conceded, yes, "Walz has taken action to support access to gender-affirming care in Minnesota. But Vance’s claim mischaracterizes the reach of the Walz-approved law on parental custody."
The writers go on an elaborate argument into the law's language about competing child-custody claims. They summarized at the end:
Having jurisdiction over a custody case doesn’t mean the state takes custody of a child. It also does not mean a court definitely will rule against a parent who objects to the child seeking gender-affirming care. Courts award custody based on evidence presented about what is in a child’s best interests.
When it comes to conservatives and Republicans, they will dive into the legal mumbo-jumbo to throw their "False" flag. The clip Vance was talking about the weird ideological tics of Democrats, not giving a law-school lecture. =He was making a quick rhetorical point about how the Democrats shouldn't throw around the word "weird" like they're pushing intentional harm to children's bodies because someone's confused about their gender.
PolitiFact offered Team Vance a rebuttal:
When PolitiFact contacted Vance’s team for comment, spokesperson Luke Schroeder said, "The letter of this law is clear: a parent who dissents from their child receiving so-called 'gender-affirming care' can lose custody."
When the bill passed last year, local critics were pointing out what they found by reading the legal lingo: talk of creating "temporary emergency jurisdiction" -- for the express purposes of providing "transition" surgeries and therapies, potentially against the wishes of parents of minors. Opposition to the trans agenda is equated with "abuse" and "abandonment."
This language from the HF 146 Trans Refuge Act applies to parents both inside and outside of Minnesota. https://t.co/7gBt2FRsCS
— Bill Glahn (@billglahn) March 26, 2023
So their hope is the state of Minnesota takes custody of the child just for the temporary purpose of a permanent "sex change."
Abels, the LGBTQ-issues "fact checker," is funded by the Gill Foundation, a radical LGBTQ philanthropy. Last October, she worried out loud about "incarcerated trans people" being denied the "gender-affirming" stuff.
Last May, Tuquero defended Minnesota Democrats when they took expressly anti-pedophile language out of an "anti-discrimination" bill.