Democrat Andy Beshear insists he’s always opposed medically transitioning kids, but his record is more complicated.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look into claims made during the race for Kentucky governor, point out the absurdity of a New Republic article on climate change and sex, and cover more media misses.
Does Kentucky’s Democrat Governor Support Gender-Transition Surgery for Minors?
Last week, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear insisted he has never supported gender-reassignment surgery for minors.
“My position on this has always been clear,” Beshear told the Associated Press. “I have never supported gender-reassignment surgery for minors, and they don’t happen in Kentucky.”
His new strong position on the matter comes as he is running for reelection in November against the state’s Republican attorney general, Daniel Cameron.
He reiterates this claim in a new ad that the campaign released last week.
“I’ve never supported gender-reassignment surgery for kids and those procedures don’t happen here in Kentucky. When I took office, I vowed to support parents because as parents we know what’s best for our kids, not politicians in Frankfort or Washington,” the governor said in the ad.
Beshear campaign spokesperson Alex Floyd also told the Lexington Herald-Leader that the governor “has always opposed gender-reassignment surgeries for minors — which do not happen in Kentucky.”
But Beshear’s Republican critics have been quick to note that the governor’s record on the subject is more complicated than he’d have voters believe.
Beshear vetoed Senate Bill 150 during the state’s most recent legislative session back in March. That bill included a ban on gender-reassignment surgery for minors.
The governor wrote in his veto message that the ban was “too much government interference in personal healthcare issues and rips away the freedom from parents to make personal family decisions.”
He did not specifically voice any opposition to the surgeries at the time and even wrote in his veto that “improving access to gender affirming care is an important means of improving health outcomes for the transgender population.”
“Senate Bill 150 will cause an increase in suicide among Kentucky’s youth,” the governor wrote at the time.
The state legislature was able to override the governor’s veto, but a federal judge later blocked the bill’s ban on the use of hormones and puberty blockers for minors.
Meanwhile in 2022, he also vetoed a separate bill to ban biological males from playing in girls’ sports. In his veto, Beshear argued the state already had available guidance to address potential athletic advantages in cases where biological males played girls sports. However, this guidance includes a requirement that minors who have gone through puberty have gender-reassignment surgery.
“Andy Beshear supports sex-change surgeries for kids because he vetoed the bill banning them in March,” Sean Southard, a spokesman for the Republican Party of Kentucky and a Cameron campaign surrogate, told National Review in a statement. “Now, in the heat of a campaign, Andy Beshear is misleading voters about his true beliefs. It’s a shame, and Kentuckians are smart enough to see through Andy Beshear’s lies.”
Kentucky Values, a group affiliated with the Republican Governors Association (RGA), has sought to push back against Beshear’s attempts to rewrite history; the group released an ad on Friday that highlights Beshear’s past positions on the issue.
But the ad was quickly removed from YouTube over the weekend for violating the website’s hate-speech rules.
RGA national press secretary Courtney Alexander called the ad’s removal “another example of big tech covering for Democrats and silencing the truth.”
The ad blasts Beshear for his involvement in advancing the “radical transgender agenda” which is “bombarding our children everywhere we turn.”
.@AndyBeshearKY’s radical agenda is wildly out of touch with Kentucky values.
He supports allowing young children to undergo permanent gender-changing surgery, and even supports allowing chemical castration on kids. pic.twitter.com/gemHhAmOI6— The RGA (@GOPGovs) July 28, 2023
The governor’s actions on the issue are “sick but true,” the ad says.
“Beshear supports allowing young children to undergo permanent gender-changing surgery. Beshear even vetoed a bill to ban doctors from performing sex-change surgery — even chemical castration on underage kids. It’s sick, but true,” the video adds.
While it was not clear what part of the hate-speech policy the video had allegedly violated, the site’s policy reads: “We consider content hate speech when it incites hatred or violence against groups based on protected attributes such as age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation, or veteran status.”
“This policy also includes common forms of online hate such as dehumanizing members of these groups; characterizing them as inherently inferior or ill; promoting hateful ideology like Nazism; promoting conspiracy theories about these groups; or denying that well-documented violent events took place, like a school shooting,” the policy adds.
On Monday, the video was reposted. Alexander said RGA will “continue to ensure Kentuckians know just how wildly out of touch Andy Beshear is with Kentucky values.”
Nonetheless, the Beshear campaign quickly used the video’s brief censorship in an appeal for donations. The campaign sent out a screenshot of the message on the video about YouTube’s hate-speech policy and wrote, “National Republicans are telling such heinous lies about Andy and their latest attack ad was pulled off of Youtube for violating hate speech rules. This is what Andy is up against, and we need your help to fight back.”
Beshear also recently made headlines for bragging about homicide numbers that underreported the number of murders in the state’s most populous city from 2021 to 2022.
Beshear relied on a report from the Kentucky State Police (KSP) that undercounted the number of homicides in Jefferson County by 100. The report relied on data from Louisville Metro Police Department.
KSP’s report on 2022, which was released this month, said there had been 64 homicides reported in Jefferson County, though LMPD reported there had been 164. Rather than homicides decreasing in Kentucky from 647 in 2021 to 431 last year, this means homicides actually decreased to 531.
Thus, homicides in the state dropped by 17.9 percent rather than the 33.4 percent that had been touted by the governor.
LMPD insisted it had sent the correct figure to KSP, while KSP claimed to have received the wrong figure from the police department.
Headline Fail of the Week
Writer Julia Sonenshein introduced an interesting twist on the “don’t have kids because of climate change” genre in an article for the New Republic titled, “What Climate Change Is Doing to Our Sex Lives.”
“How will our hotter world affect our intimacy?” a subheading asks.
Sonenshein gets right into it in the first paragraph: “When the fires from Canada blanketed New York City in smoke last month, my partner and I tried to have sex in the early evening. But the terrible air quality outside made us shallow-breathed and racked by coughing fits in the orange light. Our lungs have been the subject of much neurosis for the last three years in a pandemic deeply intertwined with climate change, and when we finally caught the virus eight months before the smoke came, we each developed a cough that wouldn’t leave us.”
She goes on to write about “alarming evidence that climate change both directly and indirectly impacts our sexual health, including due to increased gender-based violence or disruptions in sexual or reproductive services because of extreme weather.”
“There also exists a body of writing on the logistics of climate change and sex: It’s getting hotter, so sex might become a more uncomfortable, sweatier affair. But a thornier question, perhaps, is to ask how intimacy is changing in the face of impending doom. How is desire affected when the world as we know it seems to be ending in front of our eyes?” she writes.
Media Misses
• PolitiFact offered an explainer of the use of the term “chestfeeding” in response to CDC guidance that explained how transgender parents can “chestfeed” their infants.” Politifact came to the CDC’s defense, arguing that critics of the advice, including medical professionals, had “misrepresented what chestfeeding is, how the term is used and raised fears over medications involved in induced lactation.” The “fact-checker” said the term is more inclusive to transgender men who may want to feed their infants despite having their breasts removed and went on to cite a study that suggested mammary tissue in transgender women who have taken hormones can be “as well organized for milk production as someone who was assigned female at birth.”
Yet a number of medical professionals have argued that lactation-inducing drugs could be dangerous for infants when passed along in milk.
• Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart sought to create distance between Hillary Clinton’s email scandal and former president Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents by suggesting during an appearance on PBS Newshour that “a lot of” the emails found on Clinton’s private server “had to do with cooking recipes and appointments. None had to do with nuclear secrets and secrets about our allies. And you just can’t — there’s no parallel. There is no symmetry. There is no similarity at all.”
This despite the State Department finding more than 2,000 emails containing classified information on Clinton’s server in 2016, along with 30,000 emails that were deleted before their investigation.
• Congressman Greg Casar, a Democrat from Texas, brought social-media users along on his courageous nine-hour-long thirst strike — which was complete, for some reason, with an oximeter and cold towels. The strike was undertaken in an effort to push for federal heat safety protections.
Yesterday was incredible. I was honored to be joined at my thirst strike by workers in Texas and across the nation—and by lots of colleagues pushing for federal heat safety protections.
9 hours without water or food, but I’m more energized than ever to get this done. pic.twitter.com/92XIU0pYEA
— Greg Casar (@GregCasar) July 26, 2023