The Washington Post exposes conservative doctors as being, yes, conservative
Hudson Crozier
The American College of Pediatricians, a conservative medical advocacy group, experienced a data breach last month that released troves of documents to the public, including financial statements, communications between members, meeting minutes, and more.
The Washington Post pounced on the opportunity to review the documents and published an article today explaining their contents.
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The 52-paragraph report put together by three journalists shows — drum roll, please — the doctors in the organization are, in fact, conservative.
That has never been a secret. The ACP discloses its positions on morally-charged medical issues such as transgenderism and same-sex parenting on its website. The site also contains every one of its pro-life legal briefs to federal courts.
What the documents “exposed,” according to the Washington Post, is that its members are also conservative in private, as shown by their conversations with one another and prayers before and after meetings.
That, of course, is the entire problem for the Washington Post, which used the information it gathered to try to paint them as irrational.
“For years, the group has presented statistics and talking points to state legislators, public school officials and the American public as settled science while internal documents emphasize how religion and morality influence its positions,” the Washington Post warns. The reporters note that these positions are “rejected by the medical establishment.”
The sources used in the article to represent this “establishment” and bash the ACP, however, have ideological motivations as much as any human beings.
“They’re part of a coordinated, politically motivated anti-science ecosystem,” a doctor from the Baylor College of Medicine told the Washington Post.
What he didn’t mention is that his institution, like many others in the U.S., provides sex change procedures to children based on guidelines from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. WPATH is a political advocacy group that includes “justice and equality” for trans-identifying people among its goals and frequently speaks and condemns what it deems “anti-trans legislation.”
The Washington Post also interviewed the chief executive of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who lamented that people who are exposed to the ACP might end up “confused” about who is “presenting evidence-based science.”
The AAP has been criticized by pediatricians as a hostile opponent to evidence-based science when it comes to treating children with gender dysphoria. One wrote that its research rejecting the idea of social contagion among children who identify as transgender was so methodologically sloppy that it “likely couldn’t have survived a reasonable peer-review process.”
Each time, the AAP doubles down, using appeals to emotion to rebuke those who “fail to accept” transgender youth “for who they are.”
Like these organizations, liberal journalists seek to advance the idea that gender is not an immutable, biological reality, but a philosophical idea that precedes the physical realities of science. Any restriction against medically transitioning children, then, will offend their moral sensibility that a gender-dysphoric child ought to be “affirmed.” The mere fact that the Washington Post’s coverage is littered with the phrase “gender-affirming care” is proof of this.
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The Washington Post’s reporting serves as a case study on the liberal media’s lack of self-awareness in covering medical issues. Journalists openly side with the experts they like based on shared liberalism, use their terminology, ignore the data that contradict their narratives, and portray their opponents as the only ones starting from a personal worldview instead of “science.” It’s amusing but also unfortunate because it leaves the public uninformed.
Hudson Crozier is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.