She was critical of a contentious PwC report into the cost of a plebiscite on same-sex marriage for relying on dodgy figures, but conservative commentator Miranda Devine has been caught trying to pass off a discredited medical association’s claims about transgender people to make her latest argument against equality.
In March, Devine accused PwC of engaging in “advocacy masquerading as accountancy” in releasing a study claiming that a plebiscite would cost the Australian economy close to half a billion dollars, but she is more than happy to look to the expertise of others engaging in their own advocacy masquerading as medical expertise when it suits her agenda.
In this week’s attack on transgender people, Devine quoted the American College of Pediatricians as stating that “gender ideology harms children”:
“The three doctors who authored the statement, college president Michelle Cretella, paediatric endocrinologist Quentin Van Meter, and Paul McHugh, Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School, say that human sexuality is ‘binary by design with the obvious purpose being the reproduction and flourishing of our species’.”
The statement Devine is referring to was published in March and claims that there’s just a male sex and a female sex, and anyone who believes “that he or she is something they are not is, at best … confused”. It all sounds very legitimate until you look into who the American College of Pediatricians are: a group of somewhere between 60 and 200 socially conservative healthcare workers.
ACP has a name that sounds quite close to the actual peak body for paediatricians in the United States, the 60,000-member professional group the American Academy of Pediatrics. ACP was formed in opposition to the AAP and publishes false and discredited claims about LGBT people, including attempting to link homosexuality to paedophilia, and pushing ex-gay therapy.
As Think Progress noted last month, the claims ACP has made about transgender mental health is the complete opposite from what the much more reputable 36,000-member American Psychiatric Association says, which is that gender nonconformity is not considered a mental disorder.
“The fact such a self-evident truth could appear bold tells you what truly delusional times we live in,” Devine claimed. Well, Miranda, at least some of us are delusional …
Miranda would know more about delusion than just about anyone I know, so she is qualified to speak on it.
My wife buys that terrible Sunday Tele rag, for some of the inserts, and I have had occasion to try to get through the first few paragraphs of her diatribes, with rare success beyond about 4 sentences. It’s enlightening to see what the right are railing against, often enough against something diametrically opposed to what they were railing against two weeks ago. It’s an interesting insight into tangential thinking and non-sequiturs piled one on top of the other, cognitive dissonance in spades.
But it’s a poor imitation of journalism, even opinion writing.
ROTFL I have to say, you are *very* polite Josh.
But given the tragic state of the Oz libels laws, that’s probably inevitable.
Plus, since I don’t want to get Crikey into awkward moments with Miranda in the courthouse. Let’s agree to just laugh out loud. (With extreme prejudice.)
I used to buy the Weekend Australian and looked forward to it. Then it became wall to wall RWNJs. I even contacted the editor regarding bias and he asked me to send a contrary view and he would print it. I didn’t bother.
I also contacted Miranda the Devine once over her blather about CC being like a religion. We had a reasonable dialogue till I reminded her about transubstantiation .
Miranda Devine (“MD”) doesn’t let details get in the way of her agenda. MD is all about driving MD’s agenda as hard & as frequently as possible .
That the “American College of Pediatricians” is a non-mainstream group with views that are not held by the majority of US paediatricians doesn’t bother MD a jot.
When thousands of Australians marched in 2002/2003 to protest Howard’s decision to send Australian troops to Iraq, MD wrote in the SMH that those of us who marched “no longer knew right from wrong”. It seems that MD & her buddy Howard got it disastrously wrong & have unleashed a veritable Hydra in the form of ISIL. Yet not a word of regret or mea culpa from MD.
It is as if she has repressed the memory of her vociferous support for the Iraq invasion and is now shedding crocodile tears about the plight of Christians in the Middle East (see page 2 http://www.campion.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Lent-Brag-2016.pdf).
MD is a waste of space;