One of the leading organisations fighting against women’s reproductive rights and trans people’s existence is the American College of Pediatricians, a right-wing evangelical lobby group that pretends to represent the medical establishment. The organisation has accidentally leaked over 10,000 documents, many of them damning evidence of its hateful, unscientific bullshit – hateful, unscientific bullshit that’s been at the heart of media coverage of abortion and trans healthcare on both sides of the Atlantic by journalists too incompetent, compromised or malevolent to look beyond the press releases.
The records show how the College, which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describes as a hate group, managed to introduce fringe beliefs into the mainstream simply by being, as the founder of Fox News once put it, “the loudest voice in the room.”
It’ll be some time before full details emerge but what we’ve seen so far confirms what was already apparent: the ACP is a hate group pushing pseudoscience such as “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria”, an entirely made-up term from a debunked study of anti-trans activists by an anti-trans activist; its goal, as Wired puts it, is to “lend a veneer of medical science to evangelical beliefs on parenting, sex, procreation, and gender… returning America to a time when the laws and social mores around family squared neatly with evangelical Christian beliefs.”
As ever, the influence extends across the Atlantic. Don’t hold your breath for an exposé in the UK press, let alone a mea culpa.